Finance committee  I'd be happy to. Obviously it allows us to borrow directly from the central...at quite reasonable rates. In the past, the Government of Canada guaranteed when we issued structured notes in international markets. But it does at least simplify the way we work. If today we wanted to

Finance committee  The objective will be to create a private sector fund in the order of $400 million to $500 million. We would be the lead investor with $75 million, in the hope of raising additional capital. There's just one point I want to add to John's presentation. All the companies we're tal

Finance committee  We are very pleased. We have congratulated our treasurer.

Finance committee  I would have to look at the statistics for each region in order to give you an exact answer. I know that the main regions facing difficulties are, broadly speaking, the Atlantic regions, rural Quebec and Southern Ontario, that is to say the Windsor region, while western Canada is

Finance committee  What concerns us is the state of the Canadian economy. Yes, the commercial paper situation is a factor, but there is also the issue of the U.S. market as a whole. Will the demand for Canadian products remain stable? There are a number of economic concerns. I do not think that we

Finance committee  Firstly...

Finance committee  To answer the first part of your question, we customize repayments in every industry. I told you earlier that our loans are very specific to the needs of the company. If necessary, if you work in a business that goes through cycles, like construction for example, we will tailor y

Finance committee  Quite candidly, no. There are the usual sectors you would know would be under some level of difficulty—the tourism sector and the manufacturing sector are under some difficulty—so clearly those sectors are under some pressure.

Finance committee  We do.

Finance committee  I'd hate to comment on whether or not we get a lot more because of the asset-backed commercial paper, but the way we work--and it's been the same for a long time--is we price for risk on a project-by-project basis, so we will evaluate each project one-on-one and we will price it

Finance committee  I don't think we've noticed something that would be as dramatic as what you've just said.

Finance committee  As I said at the end of my presentation, the delinquency rates or level of impaired loans in our portfolio have not deteriorated thus far. That is the good news, it is even very very good news. It really is better than we would have expected. Here is what happens. We examine eac

Finance committee  We complement other financial institutions, and from where we stand there's really been no change. We have clients coming our way who in recent months may have come because other institutions were somewhat more risk averse, but there's no pattern.

Finance committee  That's correct.

Finance committee  Around 35% of our portfolio is in the manufacturing sector and around 12% is in tourism. Obviously, these are sectors that are under pressure at the moment. However, as I said earlier, delinquency rates have not deteriorated. By that I mean that the number of clients who are not