Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members. My name is Denyse Guy, and I am the executive director of the Canadian Co-operative Association, which is referred to as CCA. I wish to begin by thanking you for inviting CCA to participate in these historic committee hearings into the

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I have six main, key areas: secure a partnership with the cooperatives sector and Industry Canada; transfer data and statistics on cooperatives that have been collected by the rural and cooperatives secretariat; re-establish a permanent federal government interdepartmental cooper

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Thank you very much for the question. I will make sure that you all get the briefs. One of the challenges in the application forms for various programs that are government sponsored is that they're more easily accessible for business corporations or sole proprietorships or partn

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I think the first place is education and creating more awareness about the cooperative model because there are differences in how we're regulated at a provincial or national level. There's a lack of awareness in and around that. There's also a lack of awareness in the governance

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I would hope so. We're certainly going to be giving a submission on the 2013 budget. We did a budget submission for 2012. We had our three legacy wishes. Obviously, we did not get support for those, but we're hoping to strengthen our partnership with the government. We are hoping

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  We had initial meetings early in June, which were very positive, so yes.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Yes, I think it would be a wonderful opportunity for committee members to attend the summit. Also, there's a pre-summit to which leading economists from around the world are coming. I think it would be a wonderful opportunity.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Three recommendations were in the budget bill. One was a tax credit similar to what's happening in Quebec for cooperatives. The second was support for the capital fund, and the third was the renewal of the cooperative development initiative. We know that the cooperative develop

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  The cooperative development initiative is very significant in infrastructure, not only in supporting emerging cooperatives but also in small amounts of money that went to all the francophone and anglophone provincial associations to provide staffing, in terms of expertise to be p

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Do you mean with Mr. Ritz? No, we have yet to have that meeting.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  Certainly efforts were made.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  We did have a meeting with a senior policy advisor.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  It was a very positive meeting.

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  I think it's going to be a lot more difficult for cooperatives to get the right type of the services they need. It's a very specialized service, working to understanding the provincial acts plus working with the group dynamics of setting up a cooperative, and it takes time. One o

Special Committee on Cooperatives committee  We certainly want to be able to access that research. Taxpayers paid for it, and there's a lot of information that's really important for us as a sector that we still haven't been able to access. From my understanding, the co-op secretariat did a review of the federal act. We hav