Thank you, Glen.
Members of the committee, I'm honoured to be here today to represent FCL and its member owners, who together make up the Co-operative Retailing System. For more than 85 years, the CRS has been a key player in the economic growth of western Canada. Our cooperative federation provides goods and services across a wide range of business lines, including retail, commercial, and bulk fuels; food stores; home centres; crop protection products and seed and feed for agriculture; pharmacies; and wines and spirits in the province of Alberta.
We are deeply committed to ensuring that communities across western Canada grow and prosper. We believe strongly that investment for the long term will ensure that people living in those communities have an opportunity to participate in, and contribute to, their own success.
Investment in the economy of the west, in local communities, and in people is at the core of who we are as a company and as a cooperative.
FCL itself is the largest non-financial cooperative in Canada. In the most recent Financial Post 500 survey, it ranks as the 51st largest company by revenue in the country, comparable to companies such as General Motors of Canada and Encana, and larger than the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. We like saying that. In our last fiscal year we had top-line sales of $8.3 billion and realized a net profit of $835 million. Most of that profit was returned to our 235 member owners. The 2011 patronage allocation was just the latest installment in the more than $2.2 billion that FCL has returned to our member-owners over the past five years.
But let's look deeper into the numbers and into the individuals and communities that are affected by them.
FCL itself has approximately 3,000 employees across the region; our retail member-owners employ another 16,000 people. These 19,000 employees represented a payroll of approximately $800 million in 2011. This is an enormous investment in the more than 500 communities across the west where the CRS has a presence. We are determined to continue to invest in communities, large and small, across the region.
While others disinvest from rural and smaller communities, our cooperative has chosen to reinvest in many of those communities through the jobs we provide and the facilities we build. Over the past five years we have invested almost $4 billion in capital projects, including almost $3 billion in our petroleum manufacturing and distribution system alone.
Earlier I mentioned that FCL had paid out $2.2 billion in patronage allocation to our member retails over the past five years. The redistribution of earnings, however, does not stop there. Each year local retail co-ops distribute their earnings to individual members by paying out cash allocations as well as by investing in members' equity accounts.
Over the past five years, western Canadian co-op members have received more than $1.1 billion in cash back from their local co-ops. This represents a significant reinvestment in people and communities across the west and in the western Canadian economy as a whole. But the story doesn't stop there.
A portion of members' allocations are deposited in members' equity accounts, to be redeemed when those members retire or move away from their co-op's trading area. As of today, individual co-op members across the west hold more than $1.5 billion in equity accounts, an amount that continues to grow year after year, even as those equity investments are redeemed. That represents significant and growing future income for individuals and potential reinvestment across the region.
The moneys that are redistributed by FCL and our member retails stay in western Canadian communities and are, in turn, reinvested in all manner of community and individual development. This includes the development of new cooperative ventures, if that is where people choose to put their financial and human resources.
That is the essence of the cooperative model: people at the community level choose to develop themselves and their communities in the ways they see fit. We at FCL and our member-owners believe that we have always made, and will continue to make, these investments in people and their communities.
To use a poker analogy, we believe that the CRS and our individual member-owners have already paid our table stake in the growth of western Canadian communities. That includes our continued investments into the cooperative model that has proven its worth as an efficient and sustainable model for community and business development. Indeed, we believe that the CRS is invested well past table stakes; put simply, we believe that we're "all in". We invite you, as parliamentary leaders, to consider carefully ways that governments at all levels can design and implement appropriate policies, regulations, programs, services, and yes, even fiscal resources, when appropriate, to ensure that cooperatives can continue to thrive and contribute to this great nation.
Thank you for your attention, and we welcome your questions.