Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I wish to begin by thanking you and the committee members for inviting Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada to appear before your committee as you are undertaking a study of the economic situation of Canada’s minority linguistic communities.
Before I address the study before us, I wanted to bring to your attention the fact that a new era will soon begin for Canada's cooperative movement with the launch of Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada, or CMC, on April 1. For the first time, cooperatives and mutual enterprises in every sector and every region of Canada will be represented by a single national bilingual organization.
CMC will assume responsibility for the Canada-based work of its two founding organizations, the Canadian Co-operative Association, or CCA, and the Conseil canadien de la coopération et de la mutualité, the CCCM. The CMC brings together the francophone activities of the CCCM and the anglophone activities of the CCA to form one single national association. A single voice, a common table: this is the cooperative way.
Over the past 125 years, the cooperative formula has been an indispensable tool in the economic development of francophones and Acadians. It allowed them to work and live in their mother tongue, while introducing measures to respect cultural diversity, and ways of doing things that strengthened the use of their language in all sectors of endeavour.
It also allowed them to preserve and support the dynamic nature of Acadian and francophone communities outside of Quebec. It allowed them to get organized in daily life, and to live in the area that they chose. This dynamic is the cornerstone of the survival and lasting development of francophone and Acadian communities in Canada.
How does the cooperative model play out in assisting the economic situation of Canada’s minority linguistic communities?
Linguistic minority communities often face the challenge of accessing tools and resources that are often not available in their regions. Individuals may have to travel great distances to receive services in their language of choice. This is where we see the benefits of promoting the use of the cooperative model to help the economic situation in minority regions.
Cooperatives bring together individuals with common goals, often when there is a lack of service to meet their collective needs. Language is one of the common elements that can bring people together, even in minority situations, in order to receive the services that they might not have available.
The cooperative model was used by many official language minority communities to sustain their culture, for instance, through cooperative radio in the Maritimes, through a theatre cooperative in Calgary, an Acadian crafts cooperative in Chéticamp, or a francophone publishing cooperative in Regina.
However, cooperatives are not present only in the cultural arena. They are the backbone of the economy in many communities. What would these communities be without the many credit unions, fishers' cooperatives, agricultural and forestry cooperatives? Imagine Embrun without the Embrun Coop, Caraquet without the Caraquet Cooperative, or Saint Boniface without its credit union. Even the annual general meetings of these organizations literally become meeting places for the community. The cooperatives also provide a francophone environment, for instance through housing cooperatives, and we can educate our children in their native language in cooperative daycares such as the one in Chelsea, not far from here.
Finally, these cooperatives are the future of economic life in French in many communities. Indeed, the issue of finding a new generation to take over in business is an open door to the loss of economic assets for official language minority communities. If the executives of a business give it over to someone from outside the community, or worse yet, close it down, there is a far greater danger that the services will no longer be offered in the language of the community than if the community itself takes over the business in the form of a cooperative. A cooperative business will be an asset that it will keep forever, and one that it will benefit from.
Co-ops have been critical in providing a high level of innovation and services in areas that this government has highlighted as important. This innovation helps improve productivity in a way that specifically meets the needs of communities, including linguistic minority communities. This includes co-ops for food production, health care, child care, seniors' housing, and transportation, as well as grocery stores, funeral homes, and energy production. Co-ops for new agricultural products and domestic food distribution are one of the fastest growing co-op start-ups. The cooperative model of ownership is flexible, responsive, and adaptable enough to respond to many concerns of local communities.
History has shown that in Canada language communities in minority situations have used the cooperative formula for a very long time to give themselves economic and social development tools, and to give themselves services that are at the very heart of the challenges of maintaining and consolidating their community.
The presence of cooperatives in these communities in all sectors of activity bears witness to that most eloquently. The cooperative reflex is deeply rooted in the way of life of the citizens of these communities, who needed to consolidate, to meet and to forge their own development. The cooperatives have molded the history of our country and have been a feature of its identity.
That is why we believe that the cooperative movement is an important partner and supports the federal government in its mandate to promote the development of official language minority communities. The very nature of a cooperative project is implicitly linked to local mobilization and joint action. We think that this groundwork demands some concrete support from the federal government.
How can the cooperative movement support the development of official language minority communities?
The cooperative movement is a powerful tool in leveraging opportunities for minority groups, such as minority linguistic communities across the country. Co-ops have a well-established member network that can help in outreach and development.
We have 200 professionals who work with new and emerging co-ops on a daily basis from coast to coast to coast, and we have 9,000 co-ops and mutuals in Canada with $370 billion in assets and more than $50 billion in annual revenues. Co-ops exist in all economic sectors, including health care, social, renewable energy, finance, home care, and retail, to name but a few. Cooperatives and mutuals pay out over $1.2 billion in patronage dividends and donations every year.
There are large enterprises and small ones; there are enterprises in all sectors that often compete with each other on the market; in them there are anglophones and francophones and people from all cultures; people from minority communities and majority communities; all are brought together by cooperation.
We believe that the future of Canadian society goes hand in hand with this capacity to use everyone's potential to meet the common needs of our communities. That is why large cooperatives such as the Co-operators, Agropur or UFA are in favour of and support the small cooperative organizations that work with official language minority communities.
The CMC is happy to support the efforts of the Standing Committee on Official Languages, which is conducting this study at this time. We dearly hope that your work will mean that the cooperative movement will finally be considered as an indispensable economic actor in maintaining and developing official language minority communities.
Thank you.