Sure. I'd be happy to.
We're very cooperative on this side. We like to share.
Ms. Kelderman, earlier on you were talking about your ATM that was down there. The credit union that I've belonged to since I was about 12 actually came up with the first debit card. You could use it in ten different locations in the city of St. Catharines, primarily around the GM plant, because they were auto workers' credit unions at the time. You could actually go and use what eventually became the debit card. They actually had one of those going back some 28 years ago, or almost 30 now, I think.
When we look at cooperatives, it seems that across the country credit unions are successful, and they are fairly plentiful across the country. But if we look at Ontario, especially when we start to look at large urban areas, we see fewer co-ops beyond the financial pieces. We see it in the insurance business. We certainly see it in the credit union business. We don't necessarily see it in other businesses.
We certainly won't find any trees in Mr. Butt's Mississauga area for forestry, and you won't find them in my end, Ms. Folkins; certainly I have a woodlot, but we don't have someone like you in terms in being able to have a cooperative. I live in the Niagara Peninsula, and we don't actually have any of those.
If you take an area like the Hamilton-Niagara area, which used to be a heavy manufacturing area, do you see opportunities for co-ops? We talked this morning about industrial co-ops in other places across the world, in the Basque region in northern Italy, for instance, where there might be opportunities for cooperatives to actually do things in very urban settings, where we see private enterprise as the primary player versus co-ops, which tend to be, in certain parts of this country, more rural players. Do you see any opportunities to come into places like Niagara, where jobs have been lost in the tens of thousands, and for co-ops to play a major role beyond the credit union, mutual fund, mutual insurance piece?