I think there are a number of ways. The one that is an obvious good starting point would be capital formation. Cooperatives need capital in order to survive and to do well. But in a cooperative business, the capital is not rewarded in the same way. It is not “capital take all”, in terms of the profits or the output of the business.
The profit from the business—if I can call it that—is distributed to the workers, to consumers, and in the community, and it's invested in the cooperative. What we lack is an appropriate investment strategy, and I think the federal government could play a very strong role in creating that, in fostering the creation of cooperative development funds, for example.
If I take a typical registered retirement savings plan, it's very difficult to invest in cooperatives within it because they don't often qualify. I think there's been a recent change in the regulations that makes it even more difficult, especially with regard to start-ups of new cooperatives, where you can't have eligibility for an investment—even through a CEDIF—if it is more than a certain percentage of the capital share of the cooperative. So starting a worker cooperative becomes more difficult under those arrangements.
Cooperative capital can be a very attractive investment for people. For me, for example, I would very much like to have all of my retirement savings plan available for investment in housing cooperatives, in day care cooperatives, in worker-owned cooperatives, as opposed to having it go out and end up funding an investment in the arms industry to build land mines to blow people up somewhere. If I had my druthers, I would rather have all of my investment capacity devoted to building society, and yet it's very hard to do that.
The returns, interestingly enough, if you go back.... Cooperatives aren't a natural place for people to look for high returns. You're not going to get a 20% return. You're not going to get 16% or 15%, but you can get a reasonable rate of return. When I look back over the last decade or decade and a half, one of the things that's clear is that if I had a modest rate of return from a cooperative investment fund, I would be better off than I would have been in the mutual funds market. I would have made more money in the long run.
Cooperatives have to compete against that lure of windfall profits. They have to compete against that. What government needs to do is to create the incentives for people to put their money in stable, sound, cooperative investment funds that will produce returns for the whole community, and not just for some investors far off somewhere. I think that's very doable.