Thank you, Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses for joining us today.
I think it's very important to hold meetings on cooperatives because, this week, Canadians have an opportunity to learn about cooperatives and their success stories. We have heard a lot of testimony highlighting the successes and the strength of cooperatives in communities across Canada.
I would like to ask a question about some of the comments we've received on a number of days regarding government programming and the challenges that co-ops sometimes face in accessing the government programming.
I was going through some examples yesterday. There seems to be fair treatment between businesses and co-ops. For example, both co-ops and businesses benefit from the lower business tax rates that are now in effect, and from accelerated capital depreciation, particularly if they're in the manufacturing industry. The preferred dividend tax rates apply to businesses as they apply to co-ops. So there didn't seem to be any disconnect there.
But there was a comment here from the Ag Energy Co-operative. Rose Marie, you made a comment about modifying existing programs that appear arbitrarily closed to co-ops due to a lack of understanding or a narrow scope by custodians.
We've had a number of co-ops make, I'll say, general comments, but not really specific examples. I understand it's difficult, because if you discuss a particular project, it just may not have ranked high enough. I can tell you from programs in my riding that oftentimes there's a certain amount of money available and the demand usually exceeds the money available by a factor of seven to 10 times. So if there's $1 million available, you get demands for somewhere between $7 million and $10 million worth of projects, and you simply can't approve them all.
I'm wondering if you could perhaps provide us with some concrete examples, with or without naming particular projects, of what you perceive to be roadblocks. I would think that government programming would not set out to exclude co-ops. I would think it would be open to any business enterprise, that they would be evaluated in a comparable manner and then ranked, and then funded where possible.