First off, as you know, the Rural and Co-operatives Secretariat was the idea of the Conservative Party a few years back. Since then, the secretariat has been working with cooperatives, who see the organization as the gateway to the federal government. The fact that all the secretariat's resources have been cut significantly has repercussions. In particular, the statistics we used to rely on in order to understand the big picture and the state of Canada's cooperative movement will virtually disappear.
As I understand it, some of the statistical information compiled in 2010 is on hand, yet we cannot even access it because there isn't anyone who can work on it and convert it to an appropriate format. For us, that information is vital because it represents the only statistical data that exists in Canada that can tell us how big the country's cooperative movement is. That's all we have. So, of course, it has to be accessible. What's more, the federal government spent a lot of money on developing an entire data processing system for this specific purpose. We consider it vital that this data live on.