Thank you.
I can speak only of the island right now, but I can tell you from the experience of our most recent start-up, which is a farmers' market—which are becoming popular today because of the local produce and the healthier eating—it was a little difficult getting it going, because the forms for registration are not online, and the department looking after the registration is basically one person, and when she took holidays for three weeks she was not available to assist us or for us to ask questions of her. We've moved that now into our office so that we now have the forms and we have the regulations they would need so they can move ahead and get started up a lot faster. That's just one instance.
The smaller cooperatives don't have the resources of credit unions or co-op stores, yet they perform a very valid function. I'm talking about the seniors cooperatives that have maybe 15 to 20 residents. I'm talking about cooperative funeral homes that provide an essential service to people who don't have that high an income, and these funerals are generally 30% to 40% less expensive than in a privately owned funeral home. Cooperatives like that do not have the resources to manage themselves. They do not have an understanding of governance, of board duties, or of what due diligence they have to perform. They don't have an understanding that they should have directors' and officers' liability insurance.
What we're trying to do through the council now is provide that to them, to go out and instruct them in their responsibility as directors, to give them guidance in how to set up a board and do governance, and to show them how to do their filing so that from one year to the next the resolutions they pass are there for them, because we had an incident recently where they couldn't find some of the older resolutions.
I've only been in this position since February, but what I've understood very quickly is that there is a dividing line. There are the large successful cooperatives that are doing very well, but there are so many other small ones, every bit as essential, especially in a rural community. But the smaller ones don't have the resources, so they need something like our council to provide that to them, yet we don't have the resources.
It was the cooperative development initiative funding that allowed us to proceed with this. With it being discontinued, it's going to put us in a very difficult position, and we're scrambling to try to come to terms with that.