Thank you very much.
Good afternoon.
We're not a cooperative. The Excellence in Manufacturing Consortium is a membership organization and the consortium is a registered, federally chartered, not-for-profit organization. We're not a cooperative, so I'm still trying to figure out how we got invited here to respond to this, but I'll tell you our little story.
Certainly our business is cooperative in nature. We have endorsed the formation of a true cooperative, a purchasing cooperative, the first one in Canada, but I'll just give a little bit of history to maybe understand who we are.
While I was working with a college system up in Owen Sound, Ontario, which is two-and-a-half hours north of Toronto, we had a lot of opportunity to have the manufacturers working together in that community. One of the reasons we focused on manufacturing was that manufacturing has got the biggest advantage to create wealth in any community—in any small community, in a province, or in the country. So I focused on that activity, working with the manufacturers, and got to know them all very well.
About that time, in the mid-1980s, we had a plant close, a 500-person facility, and that was devastating for a community of 19,000 people. So we got together with all the plant managers and said, okay, what can we do here to offset this? Now we're not going to have another 500-person facility located in rural Ontario—that was true then and it's certainly true today—so we asked if we could work together and continue to help each other out and share each other's resources. We did the math, and we said if we did this for three years, and each one of us grew by 5% over three years, we'd replace that 500-person facility. That was eighteen manufacturers, three of them fairly large in size.
That, then, led into a lot of really interesting activity. We call it sharing and stealing with pride, in an informal way, but it's really about having the manufacturers share their resources, share their ideas, share their problem-solving. And we facilitate that. We get manufacturers together. We've got 55 geographically regional consortiums across Ontario and the east coast, where we pull manufacturers together on a regular basis and get them working together. When you drive down any street in an industrial area and you see buildings with hundreds of people in them, problems have been solved, and they're staying in their own buildings and staying quiet. What we do is draw them out of the buildings and get them working together and again helping each other out.
So we've grown through the years, again, to now have 55 regional consortiums across eastern Canada. We have recently launched a manufacturing portal, if you will, an online manufacturing portal, which will take us right across Canada and help manufacturers through the age of online learning.
In Alberta they call what we do in Ontario and the east coast “clustering”, and that is getting together, helping each other out. The other thing that has happened just recently is that, through the Province of Alberta and Productivity Alberta, a branch of the government out there, we have been invited to take our activity to Alberta, to create that ability for communities—small communities in particular—to draw their manufacturers out and help them work together and get better at what they're doing, be more competitive and keep jobs in Canada.
One thing we have done as a membership organization in Ontario, because Ontario has unregulated energy rules—Alberta and Ontario are the only two provinces that have unregulated opportunities—is that we formed a purchasing group, if you will, not a co-op, where we've grouped together manufacturers to buy electricity and natural gas. The power of that has been phenomenal. I've got some results here, if you want to see them, where we've got medium sized manufacturers who, by working together and by our doing the due diligence on finding a third party to manage this, are easily saving $100,000 a year just by having the power of working together in a co-op type of fashion.
From the very beginning, going back more than 15 years, we were always involved with purchasing people from the buildings in the various communities we were in, and they always wanted us to get together and try to save money buying this and that—a very complicated arrangement. We listened to this for a lot of years, then last year we didn't incorporate, but we licensed our name to a co-op, a not-for-profit cooperative. We're in the EMC Purchasing Co-operative. It's owned by the members. It just launched a year ago and it's just nicely getting going. It is the only one of its kind in Canada—for manufacturing, that is. It's the only one of it's kind in Canada, and in the United States there's only one small one that is struggling along.
There's been great uptake on this purchasing cooperative, which may be of interest to you folks. Again, by working together.... I'll give you a very simple example of the power of that group. The example is one of our members, a little manufacturer, an assembler really. We went into his building and asked, what do you spend your money on, where's your biggest cost, other than payroll and that kind of stuff? He went around and he looked at all of the little pieces and said, I don't spend a lot of money anywhere. I spend a little bit here, a little bit here, a little bit here, a little bit here. We asked, what's the biggest cheque you write each year? He said, I assemble these little things and I ship them. I spend $500,000 a year on couriers. The lights came on, and we got some of our other members together, who formed a committee and went out and got all of the couriers in Canada together, and as we sit here now, some four months later, that young fellow and his business is now saving 45%. So he's paying about $200,000 less in shipping than he was before, and that's the power of cooperatives.
I could go on for about 45 minutes on what EMC is about, but substantially it's a membership organization working together—