As I mentioned in my opening remarks, we had hoped to see some language in the bill that would address the issue that I brought up, which is what we feel to be the unnecessarily burdensome process for credit unions to grow beyond their provincial borders and to operate at the national level.
The Department of Finance is well aware of our concerns in this area, and so is OSFI. We have been very candid with them, and we will continue to be. They have, to their credit, been open to this idea.
It's not necessarily a legislative fix, although there are some technical pieces of legislation or components of legislation that I think could address some of the components that make that process so very difficult, but it's more of a cultural resource allocation question within OSFI, perhaps, and also the treatment of capital.
Without getting too much into the weeds, credit unions are co-operatives. They're financial institutions that are organized along co-operative lines, as opposed to the large, shareholder-owned, primarily for profit, publicly traded financial institutions that can go out and raise capital, in the billions of dollars, in capital markets at the drop of a hat.
The way that credit unions raise capital is largely through retained earnings—their profits year over year—which is pretty much by definition a much slower, more difficult and time-consuming way to raise capital.
There are ways that OSFI can change the way it looks at things like that to make it easier. Again, they're open to it, and we hope to continue that conversation for the duration of this Parliament and beyond.