Co-operatives Are At a Pivotal Point
By Kenzie Love
When the United Nations General Assembly declared 2012 as the International Year of Co-operatives, it seemed to herald a bright future for the movement. With the theme of “Co-operative Enterprises Build a Better World”, the International Year of Co-operatives had three main objectives: increasing awareness; promoting growth; and establishing appropriate policies.
As CWCF Executive Director Hazel Corcoran notes, it was a heady time. There were large summits held that year, the international Blueprint for a Co-operative Decade was unveiled, and numerous smaller scale events took place.
“It was quite exciting,” she says. “It was something that I felt really brought to some degree the co-op movement together across Alberta, across Canada, internationally in various countries, and kind of gave a platform for better promotion, because the co-op model is so poorly understood”.
Unfortunately, this increased understanding didn’t resonate with the federal government at the time, which in stark opposition to the aim of establishing appropriate policies, closed down the Co-operatives Secretariat and changed the RRSP rules for worker co-ops to make it harder for startups to use them. These moves came as a shock to Corcoran and others in the Canadian co-op movement.
“It was unbelievable,” she says. “So we tried to lobby to get them to change, and it did nothing, so that was super disappointing.”
Although the government’s actions were a blow to the co-op movement, CWCF and other organizations have continued to lobby for co-op friendly policies and achieved some recent successes, such as a commitment to give worker co-op conversions the same status under the Income Tax Act as Employee Ownership Trusts. Corcoran believes, however, that the co-op movement is at a pivotal moment both at home and abroad. She points to the insularity that has emerged in some sectors as a growing threat.
“I feel that there’s been a significant lack of cooperation in the co-operative movement,” she says. “And it’s very disappointing, and very sad.”
There is some hope on the horizon with the second International Year of Co-operatives, taking place in 2025, which the UN recently declared. Corcoran hopes that this designation will inspire co-ops of all stripes within Canada to come together around their shared values.
“My dream for 2025 is that the co-operative organizations will come together and truly cooperate,” she says.
So what would such cooperation look like? Corcoran dreams about the prospect of a meeting of the estates general, a French concept, which would bring together representatives from all of Canada’s co-op sectors to plan for the future.
“It’s like a summit, but one in which people deliberation about how weshould go forward,” she says. “It’s like a strategic planning session for a whole sector.”
Were such a gathering to take place, Corcoran believes the movement would find there is still cause for hope given the co-operative model’s great potential. But she worries what might happen if this opportunity is squandered.
“I feel like the Co-op movement is at this sort of inflection point,” she says. “Where it’s either going to take off and capture the imagination of the population,” and people will be starting co-ops of all types: worker, renewable energy, healthcare. Or it’s going to see its apex organizations continually weaken because the big members have been voting with their feet and walking out in some cases or not joining, it’s an existential crisis.”