Thank you very much. My name is John Anderson. I'm director of government affairs and public policy for the Canadian Co-operative Association. I have with me John Julian, who is the director for international communications for our organization, as we also do a lot of international development work.
The year 2009 marks the Canadian Co-operative Association's 100th birthday. Co-operatives have been an important part of our economy for more than a century and today are more relevant than ever. The co-operative sector in Canada has over 8,800 co-operatives and over 17 million memberships, and it is one of the largest in the world on a per capita basis. It has about $275 billion in assets and employs some 150,000 people.
Our CCA is one of the two national organizations. There is also the Conseil canadien de la coopération et de la mutualité, our francophone sister organization. Together we have 17 million memberships. Our organization represents 9 million co-operative memberships.
What I would like to do today in the short time I have is really concentrate on a couple of issues. Those are ones that we think are related to the economic crisis in the following way, in the sense that we, first of all, believe that there are two kinds of stimulus measures that are needed to ensure prosperity in a sustainable future, which is the question that you ask. The first kind is tied to the need to improve our social safety net. We're not going to deal with those, although we think those are very important, simply because we only have three recommendations that we can put forward. But we are certainly in favour of such issues as a national anti-poverty strategy.
The second kind of measures are those dealing with establishing and enhancing programs designed to create and maintain jobs at the local community level. We're going to concentrate on those.
As well, we think that we cannot turn the Canadian world economy around by concentrating solely on our own economy. As citizens of one of the world's richest countries, we have a duty and an obligation to help those in developing countries. That's why one of our recommendations touches on international development.
The first of our recommendations is to help create more jobs at the community level by establishing a co-operative investment strategy. We're very pleased that the government renewed our co-operative development initiative, which is a program designed to help new and emerging co-operatives as well as innovative co-operative projects. That is now managed by the co-operative sector, but we also think more has to be done.
One of the problems that co-operatives have because they're differently organized is that they do not have the same access to traditional sources of investment capital. That's why what we're proposing is a co-operative investment strategy, consisting of a co-operative investment plan, which is a tax credit for members and employees of agricultural and employee-owned co-operatives. This is based on a program that has existed in Quebec since 1985 and still exists at the provincial level. In French, it's called a régime d’investissement coopératif, and it has been a very successful program in Quebec.
What's important about this ask is that it is not simply an ask for government funds. This is a partnership between co-operative members and the government in the sense that the government benefits from the investment of co-operative members and their employees in co-operatives, which helps create jobs.
As well, we are calling for a co-operative development fund, which would be a repayable loan fund rather than a source of grant funding and which also would involve credit union and co-operative involvement in the fund.
Our second ask is around expanding the community adjustment fund. We think this is an excellent program, but it's not enough. We're saying it should be doubled to $2 billion over the two years. We also think there should be a dedicated part of it that would touch on co-operatives and social enterprises.
Thirdly, very quickly, we're calling on government to increase our international aid spending and promote a greater role for civil society. We're asking the federal government to increase our international development aid spending by an average of 15% a year for the next 10 years in order to reach the internationally agreed upon target for aid spending of 0.7% of gross national income. We also want Canada to continue its leadership role in promoting a greater role for civil society, including co-operatives, in the delivery of development assistance.
I'm going to stop there, and I'll be happy to answer questions.