Sure.
There are three or four questions embedded in that.
First of all, our survey, by the way, has been borne out by PricewaterhouseCoopers and by Grant Thornton. They have done surveys of SMEs in Canada and have come up with largely the same result, that, by and large, about 90% of small businesses in this country report that funding issues—access to credit—were not constraints, were not limitations on their ability to do their business plans.
In terms of our own survey, it was done by Strategic Counsel and is statistically valid. It was a survey of SMEs. The sample size was 200 small businesses, and it had the usual measure of accuracy, accurate within 19 times out of 20, and all that kind of stuff. But it has been borne out by other studies as well.
In terms of what you're hearing from your constituents in Guelph—where I live, by the way—what we find is that if we look at the whole financing marketplace, banks are about a quarter of it. We hear all the time, “I can't get credit here.” When we probe and look, there are a range of providers out there who over the last year have either exited the market or have cranked back their funding activities considerably. There is a very well-known U.S.-based company that actually has on its website that it is no longer writing business in Canada.
There are other examples of foreign entities that have what you might call opportunistic lending: they got into Canada when the going was good, and then when they had problems in their home country, they literally left their customers high and dry.
It comes down, basically, to a question of banks being open for business and lending to creditworthy customers, and they will stand by their customers. But the question here is that you have a situation where, if you have a good customer, a good client, and they're running into problems, our banks are saying two things. They're saying, please, for heaven's sake, come and talk to us. The worst thing a business can do is go silent and the bank doesn't know what the situation is. We're inviting our customers to come forward and talk to us. If you have a problem, let's see if we can work it out. There's a whole bunch of tools in the toolkit here to restructure debt and restructure your payments. What the bank is going to look for is whether there is some strength in your balance sheet, whether there is some resiliency there, whether you know what your problems are and do you have a plan to get through them. They want to help you. It's trite to say, but we succeed when our customers succeed. Nobody wants to say, “Goodbye, you're out the door.”
That said, sure, we are in a recession. There are real problems out there. There are companies whose business model, quite frankly, has now collapsed and is not going to work. They are over their head in debt. If a customer is drowning in debt, giving them more debt is like throwing them an anchor rather than a life preserver. Those are hard stories and they do exist. There's no question about that. The question is, can we help that company get to the next stage where they have to go?
I am not saying, sir, that every customer is creditworthy. What I am saying is, if a customer is having problems, come and talk to your bank.