Finance committee  From the consolidated revenue fund, so from the government itself.

Finance committee  Yes. Money was set aside in the budget.

Finance committee  I would simply say that the bill addresses the creation of the financial literacy leader. That is entirely in keeping with the task force's first recommendation. As you pointed out, there are numerous other recommendations, but they don't require any changes to the legislative fr

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I'm afraid this isn't an area that I'm very familiar with. The federal government's involvement in this is through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and the responsible minister is the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development. We can undertake to seek that i

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Again, all I can do is undertake to look into the matter and to either report back to the committee or have the responsible officials report back to the committee.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  To come back to your initial remarks, I would say you are quite right about the financial sector and the trend towards credit union mergers. In Quebec, the mergers are more or less done. But we are seeing more and more of them in other provinces, and credit unions are becoming bi

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I haven't made a study of the differences in fees across credit unions and banks. There may be people in the room who will have done so. I would say two things. First of all, every financial institution has a different business model. Some of them emphasize different things—cust

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I'd be glad to. A credit union or a caisse populaire is a cooperative financial institution. It is owned and governed by its members, and it provides a range of financial services. A typical credit union provides a subset of the financial services that a large bank would, so de

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Again, for existing credit unions that are governed under provincial regulation, I wouldn't be able to tell you, although there are representatives from the credit union system here, what restrictions they face. In the federal scheme, the business powers of a federal credit union

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  All of the deposit-taking institutions in Canada, whether they're federally or provincially regulated, participate in deposit insurance schemes. In the case of banks and other federally regulated deposit-taking institutions, it's the Government of Canada that is the ultimate guar

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Just to clarify something I said, we have created a legislative framework for federal credit unions. There is as yet no federal credit union. We have yet to bring into force all of the regulations that are required. As I mentioned just last week, they were prepublished for commen

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Yes, indeed. Budget 2010 introduced the notion of federal credit unions, which are cooperatives. The legislation has been passed by Parliament. The step that's necessary, as you mentioned, is regulation. I'm happy to report that on July 6 these regulations were prepublished for c

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Indeed. So the comment period is 30 days, and then we'll look over the comments and plan to move expeditiously to bring forward the final version.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  For the moment, at least, there are not an enormous number of cooperatives in the financial sector that are under federal jurisdiction. Having said that, the minister is interested in this, of course.

Finance committee  I'd be glad to. I'll just collect my thoughts.... Actually, perhaps I should pass this one to my more expert colleagues. Would that be okay?