Three recommendations were in the budget bill. One was a tax credit similar to what's happening in Quebec for cooperatives. The second was support for the capital fund, and the third was the renewal of the cooperative development initiative.
We know that the cooperative development initiative got cut. I may say that it was a very successful program in many ways. What I'm hearing a lot is that the large, established cooperatives don't need support. But the focus of this particular initiative was on small, emerging cooperatives. If you look at the last program, which started in November 2009 and will continue to March 2013, it was a $16 million program that created 181 co-ops. It created 1,158 new jobs, and we estimated it cost about $9,715 per job. So that's a pretty cheap way of creating employment in Canada. Certainly, in all parts of this country, that particular program was very successful.
I would say that of all of our three “asks”, not one of them has been responded to at this point.