Industry committee  I'll ask my colleague Rob to deal with this.

Industry committee  Just to add to that, there's always a concern when you're dealing with a regulator. They may not be too sensitive to that size differential, despite the fact that they have some latitude. That's our basic concern. We want to make sure that there's some signal that they should tak

Industry committee  Certainly. We would be supportive of it going ahead, I think, for some of the reasons we outlined in our opening remarks. Maybe just to underline a couple of other points, we would also support the idea that this is taking us a step forward in terms of harmonizing with some of

Industry committee  That is a good question. Unfortunately, I don't have that information here, but we could provide the answer later by sending it to the clerk.

Industry committee  I'm going to ask my colleague Rob to answer you.

Industry committee  I would like to add a comment.

Industry committee  Thank you. Even following the change in legislation being proposed here, we will most likely keep our office open, but in a more informal way. Currently this imposes a regulatory burden because we have to meet certain criteria. People who work on this have to qualify. There has

Industry committee  We've come down. When I started at CUCC about four years ago, we had 450 credit unions or thereabouts; now we're down to 315. It's a very consistent trend. Even a few years ago we were at close to, I think, 1,000. There may be 20-odd mergers a year, speaking roughly. I'd just li

Industry committee  I think that's a fair statement. The information sharing happens now, but it's under a cloud of uncertainty. There is no legal clarity about what is permissible. This change would, I think, remove a concern that we have around the current situation. We welcome this change.

Industry committee  I don't know if there's too much to add, other than that is correct. We have seen instances, especially, again, in smaller regions, as Rob was pointing out, where there may be criminal activities within a very small regional area. You can't talk to the person next door even thoug

Industry committee  I will repeat what we said before. We support the bill as such, but we would also like to see some minor changes. We have mechanisms to improve the situation or lessen the burden for our small credit unions, even if the burden is much too heavy for them. At the central, we work

Industry committee  Just briefly, we recognize that this is a major issue as the population ages, and that's part of the reason we're very supportive of this measure. In our day-to-day interactions, we do see instances where these kinds of situations arise, so it's in the interests of our members to

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I also thank the committee for the opportunity to share with you our thoughts on Bill S-4. Before addressing our views on this bill, I would like to begin by making a few preliminary remarks regarding the role of my organization, Credit Union Central of Ca

Finance committee  Right. Thank you for the question. Right now I'd say our major challenges relate to staffing, just having the personnel devoted to this IGA implementation, and updating databases to capture the indicia that you mentioned. Probably a lot of the credit unions have most of that, bu

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. Unfortunately, we have not conducted such an assessment. However, I can briefly repeat what I said earlier. In our case, the costs are mostly related to staffing and database updates. Additional costs will arise later on because, every year, we have