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Special Committee on Cooperatives committee There are not very many in Canada. In the U.S. there are more. It's more common there, for some reason. Here, I don't know if I can think of other examples.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee Definitely.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee Plus, the Community Futures aren't in the cities. You can't go to Community Futures if you're in Calgary, as I am.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee The biggest impediment has been capital. We've been involved in a few cases of attempted buyouts of sawmills by the workers and find that the legislative environment is actually reasonable. I would say that some 20 or more years ago it wasn't, but that's one area where we have done quite a bit of work with government.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee I would like to respond. One of the things that goes on as well is that certain provinces—Quebec being by far the strongest, but Manitoba as well and Nova Scotia—are actually doing quite a bit to support co-op development. So if you see the co-op emerging sectors doing well, a very big percentage of the new co-ops are in the provinces where the province has been doing something.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee Are you talking about starting up a new cooperative?
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee Okay. Well, I would say just a couple of things. The vast majority of the worker co-ops in Canada are not unionized. But where there's a conversion to an existing entity, most of the time, whatever it was before, it is later. So if it was a unionized entity before, typically it stays unionized, though every now and then either the union or the co-op says, “we don't need you”, and they part ways.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee Thank you very much.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee Yes, we have a lot of literature. In fact, we've been involved in a research project that addresses your prior question because it was focused on official language minority communities and using business succession in those communities. But we also have access to other things going on in Europe through our international collaboration.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee Thank you. Unfortunately, there's been one recent change that has hurt the capacity of worker co-ops to capitalize themselves through member investment. The measures regarding self-directed RSPs in the 2011 budget have rendered co-op shares ineligible for RSPs for members who hold more than 10% of any class of shares issued by the cooperative.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee Thank you very much for inviting us to appear before the Special Committee on Co-ops to represent the worker cooperative movement. Thank you for inviting us to appear before this committee. And that's the last French I'll speak. My name is Hazel Corcoran, and I am executive director of the Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Special Committee on Cooperatives committee I'll start. We will both present, though.
July 27th, 2012Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Finance committee Basically, what we are proposing is a plan that will enable that reflection to happen. First of all, the Canadian cooperative sector is substantial in size. Something like a third of the Canadian population are members of a cooperative. They have over $300 billion in assets, 150,000 employees.
February 15th, 2011Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran
Finance committee Absolutely, yes.
February 15th, 2011Committee meeting
Hazel Corcoran