Thank you, Chair.
I want to thank all the panel members for coming out today.
I just want to talk a little bit about some of the finance stuff and what is available to co-ops as well as to small business. If you look at the dividends, your membership dividends are handled no differently, on a tax basis, than any other corporation's. You have low tax rates, which is the same as small business. So really, there's not any difference there.
Other co-ops have had an opportunity to invest in equipment for their organizations, in terms of manufacturing and production, and they also get accelerated depreciation. There are a lot of things that are very similar to other businesses.
In terms of start-ups, certainly there might be some funding available to smaller organizations or to co-ops for training, for example. There are a number of those things one could say are available to co-ops, are available to small business, and are available to large business. To that point, I think we can say that there is some opportunity for co-ops and not exclusively for small business or for large business.
Those are a couple of points I wanted to make there.
In terms of Mountain Equipment Co-op, I was looking at your $9-million patronage payment. Did that go out to individual members? How does that work? Or is it just on a redemption of your memberships once they're surrendered? How do you do that?