Thank you.
On the first question, around the grants and capacity-building, one of the things we've observed in financing co-ops is this imbalance, if you will, between some of the senior leaders within the co-ops tending to have more of a focus on the cooperative values and principles as opposed to having some of the core business acumen that's needed to develop or make an enterprise viable.
The grants that I referenced that may come from the federal government would be to provide the training and the technical assistance needed to ensure that the right skill sets are developed, trained, and identified within the credit unions and cooperative sector so that they can recruit the right sort of management to develop and make these enterprises viable, both at the management level and the governance level. It's important, with the structure of the co-op, that the governing body or the board of directors also understand the limitations as well as the opportunities that govern co-ops, in terms of the act and so on, for them to be able to take decisions to be able to take advantage of the market opportunities.
The federal grants that I referenced are really to provide technical assistance and training, to balance the management skills and acumen that's needed to make an enterprise viable, rather than simply just focusing on cooperative development information and technical assistance.
On the other issue, the co-op housing and the expiring subsidies, we have a few co-ops in Winnipeg that are section 95 co-ops that are going to be having to deal with infrastructure maintenance issues. The 30- and 35-year maturity dates on these CMHC mortgages is making it a challenge for these co-ops to come to a credit union like ours, for example, to, number one, pay off that penalty to be able to refinance, and then take equity out to be able to do the upgrades and capital requirements. I think the hope here is that if those penalties could be eliminated to give those social housing co-ops more capacity to take on debt to deal with the capital requirements, the capital upgrades, rather than adding those penalties in there...or to your point, to find some way of determining what is a reasonable, affordable, and viable debt level that they would need to take on that may incorporate some level of penalties.
We've already had preliminary discussions that having to deal with the entire penalties associated with those CMHC early renewals would make it prohibitive for them to take on the level of debt they need to deal with their capital improvement requirements.