I was interested to learn this morning from CBC News that the combined assets of the O’Leary and Evangeline credit unions, which voted last night to merge, will be $100 million.

This got me wondering what the combined assets of all Prince Edward Island credit unions is, and how this compares to the provincial debt.

With some assistance from the communications office of Atlantic Credit Unions here in Charlottetown I was able to find the first figure: there are $784 million in assets under management in PEI credit unions (that’s a pretty-amazing $5600 for every person on the Island).

A quick call to a helpful official in the PEI Dept. of Finance guided me to the latest Public Accounts where I learned the second: depending on how you slice it, this is either $1,695 million or $865 million, depending on whether you express the figure as “what we owe” (the first) or “what we owe minus what we own.”

Interesting.