Let me start at the end of the question.
One of the models we should be looking at very carefully is the one in Italy, where cooperatives are taxed at a different rate. They're taxed at a different rate in recognition that the objective of the business is not to maximize return to shareholders, but to meet community and member need.
They also, then, have a different expectation. The expectation is that a percentage of the surplus or the profit they produce in a year will go into a cooperative development fund. There is also an expectation that a percentage of their surplus or profit each year will go into reinvestment in the cooperative.
Cooperatives in many ways are no different from investor-owned companies, except with regard to where the return or that surplus is going. If you think about it, you can have the situation—we very often do have the situation—where you have an investor-owned company that is not reinvesting in its company; it is simply sucking the money out, paying it to shareholders, and allowing the company to collapse and wither and die.
You had that, for example, in the case of the coal mines and the steel mills in Sydney, Nova Scotia, where Hawker Siddeley just sucked money out for years and years. You had mines and steel mills that were inoperable, really, and the government moved to take them over.
So the problem of where the surplus goes, whether it gets reinvested in a way that's sustainable, is the same for all business. The advantage of cooperatives is that because the business is locally owned, people have a greater tendency to look at it and ask the question, “What do we need to do?”
That's part of the essential question for our Centre of Excellence in Accounting and Reporting for Co-operatives. It's to have cooperatives develop a systematic way of saying “What is it that we need to invest in the co-op to have it viable for our community for the future?” That's an important question.
In terms of outside investment, where I think we have many co-op members, people like me, who would like to invest in cooperatives.... We have the UFA, for example. If I lived in Alberta—and I'm not sure exactly what the conditions would be—I could become a member of UFA and I could buy UFA preferred shares. But I don't live in Alberta. If I did that, I'm not sure whether they would be eligible to be part of an RRSP investment. I wouldn't likely be able to take my RRSP and invest it in UFA preferred shares. I would get a tax break for investing it in something else, but not in the co-op in which I had an interest.
Those are the kinds of issues that need to be looked at, and there's no question in my mind....
Securities legislation is another example. Bryan will remember that Co-op Atlantic used to offer preferred shares for sale. It got out of the business of doing that. It got out of the business because they didn't want to raise $100 million; they wanted to raise $1 million. To raise $1 million, they had to spend $100,000 in preparing a prospectus, the same as if they were Enron. Well, this doesn't make any sense. This is just not appropriate. This is not appropriate regulation and it's not useful, and what it meant was that they got out.