We're happy to be here. We are involved not just in housing, so it is good to be here to bring a message about the broader co-op movement. I work at the Canadian Co-operative Association as the government affairs and public policy adviser. It's good to be here with one of our colleagues and one of our member organizations, the Co-operative Housing Federation of Canada.
We have a wide variety of members--40 members--who belong to the Canadian Co-operative Association. They include credit unions, insurance companies, retail co-ops, as well as provincial associations that represent a wide variety of grassroots co-ops across Canada. For over a century, our organization has been working to promote, develop, and unite Canadian cooperatives. This year actually marks the 100th anniversary of our organization. We started as an organization called the Co-operative Union of Canada, and it's amazing that we've been around as an organization for 100 years, but that's how long co-ops have been around this country as well.
We are going to be holding our annual congress here in Ottawa in June. I want to extend an invitation to everybody on this committee, and you will be receiving an invitation.
Along with our francophone counterpart, le Conseil Canadien de la Coopération et de la Mutualité, we form a network of 8,800 cooperatives that has assets of over $275 billion and employs 155,000 people. There are 17 million cooperative memberships in Canada, and along with Norway, internationally, we are the country with the largest number of co-op memberships per capita in the world. We alone as an organization represent nine million members of cooperatives and credit unions.
We're very pleased to be here to talk about and provide input into your study on the federal contribution to reducing poverty in Canada. Throughout our history, cooperatives have been closely linked to the battle against poverty. The first modern cooperative in the world was started in 1844 by textile workers in Rochdale, England. They were dealing with poverty of that time, and co-ops can still deal with poverty today. The retail co-op that those Rochdale pioneers formed was based on the principle of one member, one vote. It has grown into the modern co-op movement that we have today, which has one billion members around the world and collectively employs more people than all the multinationals put together.
Here in Canada cooperatives were originally formed by farmers, fishermen and other working people who saw them as a way of improving their economic situation. It was in the 1930s, to which the economic crisis that we are having today is a throwback, that the co-op movement actually grew. In Atlantic Canada, Moses Coady and the Antigonish movement started a wave of new co-ops and credit unions to fight poverty. In western Canada, Canada's first cooperative oil refinery was formed in 1935. It produced 500 barrels of oil a day and today is still part of the co-op system and produces 90,000 barrels per day. It is owned by a co-op.
Across Canada, a wave of credit unions were created as a response to the Great Depression and the failure of the banks of that time. Today we believe that co-ops are an essential tool to fight poverty. We think we are the only business organization in this country to have passed a resolution calling for an anti-poverty strategy. At our annual meeting in 2007, by a unanimous vote of our members, the Canadian Co-operative Association affirmed its support for the development of a national anti-poverty strategy to be carried out in conjunction with the provincial and territorial governments. Our resolution called for a national anti-poverty strategy that would commit governments to set timetables and targets for poverty reduction, to coordinate a number of different policies and mechanisms to reach that goal, and to include the co-op model as an important tool that needs to be encouraged and fostered.
Since that time, we've challenged other business organizations to pass similar resolutions of support, but it is really good to be here today to remind you—and this is an opportune time when you are doing this study—that we urge you to move into having an anti-poverty strategy for the federal government and to work with other organizations.
In addition to our work in Canada, the Canadian Co-operative Association is also active in building co-ops and credit unions to fight poverty around the world. We do that in 20 countries. Our international work is funded by CIDA, and we appreciate the federal government's involvement in that.
For a rich country like Canada, even in a period of deep recession, there's no excuse for tolerating high levels of poverty, which are bound to increase these days. As always, poverty levels for certain groups in our society are very worrisome. The groups are aboriginal people, recent immigrants, visible minorities, people with disabilities, and women, particularly single parents. Rural communities and inner city areas and now the doughnut ring around urban cities are also hard hit.
We believe now is the time to act, and there are three reasons for that. First of all, with this recession, levels of poverty could grow rapidly if nothing more is done. New groups, people losing their jobs due to downsizing and restructuring, are particularly vulnerable to becoming poor and staying there. Many people with strong attachments to the labour force never thought they would find themselves out of work and unable to find a new job.
Second, there is a momentum in Canada to deal with poverty. When we began to examine the need for a strategy back in 2005, there were only two provinces in this country, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, that had an anti-poverty strategy. Today Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia have also developed anti-poverty plans, and Prince Edward Island is contemplating bringing one in. The five provinces that do have anti-poverty plans represent two-thirds of Canada's population.
As a non-partisan organization, we are happy to see that the fight against poverty is an issue that transcends party politics and that two of these provinces have Conservative governments and three have Liberal governments.
What can be done right now in the short term? We believe having the federal government developing a strategy and setting targets, goals, and timetables will help focus this issue. We also believe that better coordination between the federal governments and the agencies that are working on different aspects of anti-poverty activities and the coordination of these federal initiatives with provincial governments will result in major gains. The federal activities that are going on involve social transfers, unemployment insurance, funding for social housing, skills training, and economic development plans. There's a lot of activity actually going on that is currently being funded by the federal government. The problem is that it isn't all being coordinated with people coming together, talking to each other, and developing a plan. So in many ways, it's not more money but better planning, as some of my colleagues have talked about.
We believe that the social safety net, including the child tax benefit and other income programs, needs to be improved. We also know we need social housing and we also need child care. Just to let you know, there are 500 child care co-ops in this country and there is potential for more.
What we want to add today is a new message. That message is that we think there should be an additional and new focus on self-help and community economic development in the fight against poverty. While we believe in a strong government safety net, we also believe in the philosophy of self-help and mutual aid. We believe that given the right tools and the right ideas, people can build their own organizations to help themselves out of poverty through the creation of community services and business and economic activity in their communities, and the co-op model is a proven way to do that. It can fill the gap between what government can do and what the private sector does.
We're a perfect organization to be here right now because five years ago we did a study on the use of co-ops in low-income communities. We were funded by the federal government through the voluntary sector initiative to do a study on how the co-op model could be more helpful in low-income communities. We developed a policy framework, which may even be sitting around on shelves, called Building Assets in Low-income Communities through Co-operatives: A Policy Framework. That was a two-year study. It involved a lot of stakeholders. We looked at co-ops in 10 low-income communities. We did a lot of consultations. This report is available, and I can make it available to members of the committee.
What we know is that co-ops have many advantages in fighting poverty. We have many examples--I guess I'm being cut off--and I could definitely fill you in more on that. We have a written report, which will be translated and coming out to you.
But the biggest thing we need to say is that there will be a need for some investment in co-op development to be able to help groups of people to develop their own co-ops. They can't do that all on their own, so we have some ways that you could provide the resources to help people develop their own co-ops.
I'm open to answering more questions. I'm sorry I went on a little too long, but I'll gladly talk more.
Thank you.