Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
On Tuesday, I think it was, I listened to the presenters from Imagine Canada. It was hard to believe that we've gone through nine years of dealing with this bill. The presenter was telling us that there are 160,000 charities in Canada, or some huge amount anyway, and a lot of them don't even know that this legislation exists at this point. It would seem to me that at some point somebody should have been put in the position of notifying them by mail, or in some way, that legislation like this was going to come.
A lot of the non-profits, as you probably know, are really small. There's a statement here by Imagine Canada to the effect that probably half of them have no employees at all, so what we're doing here, more than likely, is choking them with compliance costs. We've seen that with election financing laws across the country. We all know that. We're dealing with a totally different reality than we were when I started in this business 23 years ago. It's totally different. We're passing on what we've done to ourselves to the charities and the non-profits, from what I can see.
Another issue, in addition to the compliance costs, is the whole area of the directors' and officers' liability. As you know with the insurance market, some years you can get insurance at a reasonable cost, and some years you can't. It can jump from $5,000 to $20,000 in one year. There are big deductibles of $5,000. Financial statements are the worst part of it. They require these little guys to produce financial statements. At the end of the day, a lot of them just walk away in frustration. They're not covered. A lot of these non-profits, I believe, can't find directors, because anybody who understands the law knows there's an exposure here.
With that in mind, I asked them whether there was a possibility that we could bring in some sort of limitation of liability to reduce the exposure and reduce their insurance costs overall. At that point, they said, well, tune in on Thursday, because the legal team will be here. And here you are.
I'm very pleased to hear that you're looking at Saskatchewan's system. I'd like you to explain to us how that is going to help the non-profits reduce their overall costs and whether we could go even further. In my mind, I don't like to see non-profits tied up in any kind of legal environment.
I don't know which one of you wants to answer the question, but it's an open forum.