[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]
Wednesday, November 27, 1996
.1538 
[English]
The Chairman: I call the meeting to order, please. Welcome, everybody.
The natural resources committee is continuing its study of rural development. We will be hearing today from the Canadian Co-operative Association. We have as witnesses Lynden Hillier and Ms MacKinnon.
Welcome. Perhaps you'd like to begin with an opening statement, around ten minutes or so, and then we'll turn it over to our committee members for questions. Please proceed.
Mr. Lynden Hillier (Executive Director, Canadian Co-operative Association): I apologize for Mr. Turner, our board president, not being able to attend today due to some last-minutes changes. I am the executive director of the Canadian Co-operative Association, appearing in his place.
On behalf of the Canadian Co-operative Association I would like to thank you for the opportunity today to participate in this round table on rural economic development. My colleague Mary Pat MacKinnon, director of government affairs with our organization, will be assisting me with this.
We're pleased that your committee has undertaken an issue of such importance to our communities across Canada. I speak as someone who was born and raised in a small rural community in southern Saskatchewan. I ended up working in this city, but I still have many family members who continue to reside in rural areas, and I am very well aware of the issues that rural communities in this country face.
The Canadian Co-operative Association is the national trade association representing cooperatives and credit unions doing business predominantly in the English language across Canada. We exist to promote and support cooperative development both here in Canada and also, with the assistance of the Canadian International Development Agency, in several developing countries.
Providing our members with a forum for advancing bottom-line business issues, we also convey member perspectives on broader social and economic issues. This is in keeping with the cooperative philosophy of balancing and integrating economic and social concerns.
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[Translation]
We have a really good working relationship with our French colleagues from the Conseil canadien de la coopération. We have numerous opportunities to work together on various projects. Our two organizations represent 10,000 cooperative organizations in Canada. These organizations have more than $120 billion in assets.
We have more than 14 million members and 133 000 employees. Sixty six thousand people are involved as board member of cooperative organizations. Our members are the organizations themselves. We have 37 members in Canada.
Our members are involved in the following fields: financial services, consumer cooperatives, food and agriculture cooperatives, forestry, technology, workers' co-ops, health co-ops, daycare centers and numerous other types of co-ops.
In Canada, cooperative organizations are active in both rural and urban areas. We are very active in rural areas.
[English]
You may recall that in June, Michel Paulin, the executive director of L'alliance des caisses populaires d'Ontario Ltée, appeared before this committee on behalf of the Credit Union Central of Canada and reflected the views of financial cooperatives with respect to capital issues and rural development. CCA member organizations come from a range of sectors that have particular interest in rural economic development.
Cooperatives are active contributors to the economic development of their communities. The profits made by cooperatives and credit unions are returned to their communities through patronage allocations to members, based on the use they make of the cooperative organization.
There are many examples of innovative projects undertaken by cooperatives. For example, the Alberta Honey Producers Co-operative Ltd. has marketed honey for its member producers since 1940. In 1994 the cooperative developed a value-added operation to process and market producers' wax. Western Wax Works, a subsidiary of the Alberta Honey Producers Co-operative, is the only wax processing facility in Canada. The Alberta Honey Producers Co-operative has revenues of $12 million and employs some 40 people.
In Nova Scotia, Chéticamp Coop Ltd., a consumers' cooperative, recently acquired a local funeral home that was for sale. The cooperative retained the local employees and continues to provide funeral services for the community. The important difference is that the funeral home is now owned and supervised by the members of Chéticamp Coop.
Some credit unions have formed or are in the process of forming joint ventures with government agencies such as the Business Development Bank of Canada, the Export Development Corporation and the Community Futures development corporations. Provincial credit union centrals have taken the first steps in the formation of a strategic alliance with the Business Development Bank of Canada in order to offer financial services to small businesses engaged in retail, wholesale, manufacturing, processing and services. Many of the businesses that will benefit from the alliance are located in rural communities throughout Canada.
Ensuring the economic viabilities of communities can only be done in partnership with the main stakeholders - people who live and work there. Cooperative and credit union members come from the community and have a stake in its viability. Cooperatives have neither the option nor the desire to relocate offshore to realize cost savings and cheaper production.
Many OECD countries, including Canada, have become increasingly interested in alternative service delivery. The impact of changes in service delivery can be much greater in small communities that are reliant on these services. With deep cutbacks impacting on government departments, several are turning to fee for service and cost recovery mechanisms to continue to provide these services. For example, Agriculture Canada anticipates being able to almost double the amount of revenues it generates through charges to industry for services provided, to a total of about $87 million in 1997-98. Ultimately these costs are passed back to primary producers, and some of these charges will make Canadian exporters less competitive.
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For example, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency cost recovery policy is causing great concern in the agriculture community. Producers accepted the principle of some cost recovery, predicated on the development of a more efficient system. The Pest Management Regulatory Agency set its budget and determined its services and targets for cost recovery with little accommodations of the needs of agriculture.
Business and agriculture impact tests suggest that the first year of cost recovery could cost farmers up to $30 million. Further, there could be a loss of between 21% and 29% of current crop protection products. There has been little commitment to work with industry to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and establish performance monitoring systems. The government must work with the sector to develop cost recovery mechanisms, otherwise the impact could be detrimental not only to the agriculture sector but to economic development. Needless to say, the impact on rural Canada will be negative.
The cooperative model offers unique opportunities for the delivery of public services - a model that is directly accountable to its users while at the same time being affordable and accessible. The Canadian Co-operative Association, le Conseil canadien de la coopération, and the Institute of Public Administration of Canada have developed a research and demonstration project to document and advance the cooperative model for delivery of public services. The proposal is currently before Treasury Board, the Co-operatives Secretariat of Agriculture Canada, and several provincial governments. Through this project we hope to demonstrate that the cooperative model can be an effective alternative to privatization, with community control and accountability.
CCA urges the committee to recommend a strategic plan for the economic development of rural communities that includes cooperative strategies for rural economic and social development. CCA has developed and distributed a discussion paper on the economy to all member organizations, with a view to developing a common sector position. We believe that the cooperative sector has a unique perspective on the issue of economic development, and CCA members are working towards developing that vision.
CCA has a representative on the national community access program. We are fully supportive of the work that has been done to ensure that rural communities have access to new technology through SchoolNet and other access programs.
I gave some examples earlier of innovative cooperative models of development. Another is the new-generation cooperatives that have emerged in the northern United States over the past couple of years and are springing up in the west and in Ontario. The major focus of these new cooperatives is value-added agricultural processing, and in building a new industry base, these cooperatives have also created viable domestic markets for their goods and services.
In Saskatchewan, the CCA region council is meeting in early February to discuss cooperative opportunities for economic development. The CCA region office in Atlantic Canada, which is called the Regional Co-operative Development Centre, has recently held a dialogue on ways and means to spark community economic development through cooperative approaches.
The British Columbia region council of CCA recently released a paper called Solutions 2000, a report that focuses on cooperative initiatives for jobs, the economy, and community in British Columbia. Without strong and vibrant communities, the cooperative and credit union sector in Canada cannot thrive.
In closing, let me take this opportunity to express our appreciation for the commitment shown by this government to introduce a new Canada Cooperative Associations Act, the act governing federally regulated cooperatives in Canada. The new act will provide the necessary tools and legislative framework for the continued growth of the cooperative sector, which will strengthen the economies of many rural communities in this country.
Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Thank you very much.
[Translation]
Mr. Deshaies.
Mr. Deshaies (Abitibi): I am somewhat familiar with the cooperative movement since, for a while, I myself was director general of a co-op. You spoke of finding an alternative to the privatization of public services. Would you elaborate on that and outline an example or a model of this kind of privatization?
.1550
[English]
Mr. Hillier: Yes, one of the examples I became aware of last January is an example in Montreal. There is an ambulance cooperative there that is structured as a worker-owned cooperative. This ambulance cooperative is providing a very high level of ambulance service to several communities in the Montreal area. In fact, the ambulance cooperative from Montreal has been working recently in Hamilton with a group of people there who are interested in trying to continue to provide a high level of ambulance service in Hamilton through setting up a cooperative owned by the ambulance drivers themselves. That is one example that I could provide to you.
[Translation]
Mr. Deshaies: The ambulance service in Quebec is composed of a number of groups that got together with that goal in mind. In general, with respect to cooperative movements, people feel that they can do the work at a lower cost. The aim is not really to do the work at a lower cost but to do it in a way that will be more rewarding for people.
Is the project you mentioned intended to offer a better quality of service at a lower cost?
[English]
Mr. Hillier: No. I think it's both. Obviously these are driven by maintaining some of the jobs. I think that's the starting point for them, but one of the points we advocate is that the cooperative model also be responsive to the community. Through a membership structure and a structure for a board of directors, it can also be accountable to the community and to the users of the service.
I know that with an ambulance drivers' cooperative you have to take that a fair bit further to get to the actual users of the service, but if we move from ambulance services to community health care services as another example, you can visualize a community system structured as a cooperative where the patients of a health centre actually are the members and do participate in running that health care centre.
It does provide a model that is responsive and accountable to the community and to the users of the service. And through that mechanism, it can provide a better level of service because it involves health education and more of a proactive approach to health rather than a reactive approach. We would make that same argument for other areas like child care services and so on.
Mr. Deshaies: I have another short question. You spoke about the formation of a new cooperative in the U.S.A., where they have value-added agricultural processing. Can you comment on that too?
Mr. Hillier: This is something that has become quite prominent throughout Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and that area, where producers will make a significant equity contribution to a value-added processing facility in the community. That equity contribution by the producers will provide them with the right to deliver a certain amount of their production on an annual basis, so it guarantees a market for the producer but it also establishes a value-added processing facility in a rural community, providing jobs and providing a higher food level value for the basic raw materials that are produced in the community.
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There are a number of examples of this in the north-central United States, and there have been several seminars held in Saskatchewan, Ontario and Manitoba to look in particular at whether this model might be applicable there also.
Mr. Deshaies: It's a model where they have a contract between a rural area and a small city or a bigger city where the production from this rural activity is sold directly to wholesalers or the stores.
Mr. Hillier: The model involves processing and marketing as well, so the marketing arrangements would be made for markets that may be domestic or international. I think most of them are domestic at this particular point.
Ms Mary Pat MacKinnon (Director, Policy, Canadian Co-operative Association): If I may add to that, the difference with this model of a new generation of cooperative is the concept of delivery rights. A group of individual producers come together to form this new cooperative and they purchase through their equity. It's like a reciprocal relationship. They put the equity in, but they have the right and the responsibility to deliver a certain amount of produce to that cooperative, which then has value added to it whether it's, say, the manufacture of fruit into preserves and jams... The new concept there is this concept of delivery rights, which is a little different from how a normal agricultural cooperative works.
Mr. Deshaies: Isn't it a problem to fix the price?
Ms MacKinnon: No. The delivery right means they must deliver x amount of product to the cooperative. It guarantees that they'll have the amount they need to process in order to provide the goods to the markets they're developing.
Mr. Deshaies: Thanks.
The Chairman: Mr. Chatters.
Mr. Chatters (Athabasca): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Your presentation is certainly an interesting overview of the cooperative movement and of the value of the cooperative movement. I have no hesitation in endorsing the value of the cooperative movement. As a person in agriculture, I have long been a part of many co-ops and I know the worth of them.
But we're here to talk about how we might encourage rural economic development, and I've yet to figure out just how your presentation fits in with that objective.
You did talk about user pay and used the Pest Management Regulatory Agency as an example of the problems of downloading the cost recovery. I'm not sure if you're proposing that it - or that kind of service - be downloaded to a local cooperative rather than delivered through a national agency. I'm curious as to just what you're proposing. Could you maybe clarify just what you expect from the federal government in encouraging rural economic development?
Mr. Hillier: On the pest management regulatory body, we're reflecting a view from our agriculture members. They are not opposed to fee for service, but they do want to be more involved in what the services are and what the shared costs are going to be. I just want to make that clear.
Mr. Chatters: But how does that relate to the cooperative movement? You're not proposing that this service be provided through a local cooperative, are you?
Mr. Hillier: No. We're talking about the individual producer members of the cooperative in that particular case. The fee goes down to the members and becomes a competitive kind of element for people who are producing in the rural communities across Canada. We're just saying -
Mr. Chatters: So essentially you're making a pitch for continued government cost recovery for that service.
Mr. Hillier: We have no problem with it, but we want more participation in it, and the cooperatives are prepared to participate in it on behalf of their member producers.
Mr. Chatters: Okay, I understand that.
In your presentation you're proposing that the federal government, through the cooperative movement, I presume, might participate in rural economic development.
Mr. Hillier: Right.
Mr. Chatters: I don't yet understand how.
Mr. Hillier: In the presentation we've tried to give you an idea of the scope of cooperative business activity in Canada and an idea of the scope some of the innovative areas that cooperatives are involved with, such as looking at alternatives to public service delivery in health care and those kinds of things...the new generation of cooperatives. We've tried to scope out for you some examples of innovative areas there.
.1600
What we are asking you in this committee to do is to include a cooperative strategy in your proposals on rural economic development in Canada, because cooperative and credit union organizations are very much involved in many rural communities across this country. In many cases they are the only financial institution or retail outlet in the community. They can't leave the community just because their profits are down and go elsewhere to improve them because they exist in the community to serve those members and their own members at the community level. We want to ensure that in the directions that are ultimately presented for rural development by this committee there is a strategic direction for the role of cooperatives in rural development in Canada.
Mr. Chatters: When you talk about ``cooperative principles'', you mean the principle of the users of the service owning their own delivery system. That's the principle you're speaking of.
Mr. Hillier: The users of the service owning and being involved in the cooperative. In the case of agricultural production, yes, that's delivery. In other cases it's consumption of financial services or consumer goods. We've used other situations here, of delivery of health care services and so on. Yes, a model where the users at the community level own and are involved in the business.
Mr. Chatters: The other thing is your reference to the new-age cooperatives in the U.S. for value-added agricultural products. I discussed this as we travelled across the country with the committee. Of course in Canada the problem with value-added agricultural products is that no one can access the raw material. I'm referring to the raw grain product. If you're going to make puffed wheat or Cheerios or whatever you're going to make, you cannot access that raw material to turn it into a value-added product without paying the costs of the Canadian Wheat Board and elevation charges, which are substantial. That is quite a different situation from the one companies have in the United States, and one of the primary reasons we don't have a pasta industry in this country.
I would like to hear your thoughts on how you might advocate the value-added industry in Canada becoming a viable industry in the Canadian Wheat Board context.
Mr. Hillier: I think there has been a fairly large consultation on the Canadian Wheat Board and I think there are some proposals there to allow some flexibility in that. But as a basic model for marketing the output of agricultural producers in Canada our members generally feel there is a role for the Canadian Wheat Board, although some of the models of flexibility that are being looked at there probably provide some options for value-added processing around that.
Mr. Chatters: You mean the option of somehow being able to access that raw material without paying those costs through the Canadian Wheat Board for local value-added production?
Ms MacKinnon: Our members are involved with the Canadian Wheat Board. The three prairie pools, the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, Manitoba Pool Elevators, and the Alberta Wheat Pool, have made their position on the Canadian Wheat Board known quite clearly. They are in support of the Canadian Wheat Board. They are open to some changes that would improve the efficiency of that, but the single-desk marketing they are in favour of.
On the new-generation cooperatives you're referring to, new-generation cooperatives do and can touch on a broad range of produce completely unrelated to grain-based produce. In fact, many of them are more involved with such things as livestock and fruit and vegetable produce, not the selling and marketing of grain and barley.
.1605
Mr. Chatters: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman: Mr. Reed.
Mr. Reed (Halton - Peel): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Just to set the record straight, I don't want to raise any controversy, but the Wheat Board itself is a cooperative. As far as the pasta industry in Canada is concerned, within about five miles of my place is one of the fastest growing pasta companies in Canada. Italpasta is cranking the stuff out there by the truckload.
Mr. Chatters: I don't think the Wheat Board is really what we're talking about in the sense that it is not a true cooperative. But we can argue this at another time.
Mr. Reed: It is listed here as a cooperative.
Mr. Chatters: Yes.
Mr. Reed: I have one question. It has to do with paragraph 4 on page 3. The last sentence in paragraph 4 raises my curiosity. It says: ``Co-operatives have neither the option nor the desire to relocate offshore to realize cost savings and cheaper production.''
We all know the cooperative movement is international. It is the worldwide idea in place. One would wonder, in the context of the global marketplace we are increasingly in, why a cooperative would not want to participate in this marketplace in order to realize cost savings in cheaper production, which are acknowledged here in this line.
Mr. Hillier: Cooperatives are heavily involved in importing and in exporting. But what we mean in this particular sentence is that the local credit unions or cooperatives in Saskatchewan or rural Ontario don't close their doors and move elsewhere to do business just because the profits aren't in their community. They are set up by people in the community to provide services there and they do this, whether it is consumer goods or exporting what is produced for agriculture. But they don't close their doors and move into another country.
Mr. Reed: I understand this. I think of an organization like United Cooperatives of Ontario. It has become a large umbrella bureaucracy, if you like. I suppose the approach you're taking here is the very local approach. But so far as the cooperative movement itself is concerned, it would seem only logical to me an organization like United Cooperatives would actively seek international trade, for example, to realize cost savings and so on.
Mr. Hillier: In fact they do.
Mr. Reed: Okay.
Mr. Hillier: United Cooperatives is now part of GROWMARK Inc. It is involved with Federated Co-operatives Ltd. in Saskatoon and Co-op Atlantic in Moncton, New Brunswick. They're involved in something called Interprovincial Cooperatives, which produce their co-op label product. They work as a group to produce some of this in Canada. Some of it is also imported from the United States or other countries. Similarly, the grain pools have Ex-Can Grain Pool Ltd., which exports their commodity to many countries.
So they are very involved in those areas. But they don't close the local shop to do this. The local shop stays in rural Canada and provides a service in rural Canada.
Mr. Reed: Understood. Obviously the sentence is really designed to express the local flavour of cooperatives.
Mr. Hillier: Yes.
Mr. Reed: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman: Mrs. Cowling.
Mrs. Cowling (Dauphin - Swan River): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I come from a small community of about 900 people and was active on our local co-op board as a director. I remember at one point where the cooperative movement in that small town serviced not only the grocery store, but it was where you could go to buy an automobile, gas and parts. It was actually a service to that whole community.
.1610
My question is with respect to the cooperative movement. What type of population base are you now serving? In my small community now, the only thing left from the cooperative movement is the grocery store. What's happened to that movement and what population base do you actually serve? Is it small communities or larger communities now?
Mr. Hillier: Cooperatives are serving mainly the smaller and mid-sized communities in Canada. There's also an urban presence. The Mouvement des caisses Desjardins in Quebec has a very prominent position in the urban and rural communities. VanCity Credit Union in Vancouver is obviously a large urban cooperative. But the cooperative sector is serving mostly small and medium-sized communities.
Mrs. Cowling: There was an International Federation of Agricultural Producers meeting in Quebec City some years ago, and at that particular meeting there was a strong sense coming from many of the participants at the international level that we should be moving back to a cooperative movement. Do you see that happening?
Mr. Hillier: Yes, part of the discussion in the presentation here is this whole area of cooperatives as an alternative delivery mechanism for public services. We think there's a really big opportunity there.
Everyone in this room knows that governments are pulling back. You can't afford to be as involved as governments have been previously. As governments pull back, you rely more on communities to do more for themselves, and the cooperative model is a self-help model. It's people forming their own businesses to provide services in the community. So it seems there's a very natural kind of fit for the cooperative model in terms of that particular area.
Maybe the subject doesn't belong here, but I attended the release of the report from the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples last week. Today we have an Inuit member on the board of our organization from the Baffin Island area. He did a presentation on his organization, Arctic Co-operatives, in the Northwest Territories.
Arctic Co-operatives is the largest private sector employer in the Northwest Territories and it provides services to 35 communities throughout that area. So I think in some areas like that, and in areas related to restructuring of public services and so on, there is a need for a self-help model like the cooperative model to really move forward in those changing areas.
Mrs. Cowling: This committee is looking for some solutions for the renewal of rural Canada. We are finding through the study we're doing that there are a lot of individuals with a lot of skills in rural Canada. I'm wondering what the cooperative movement is doing to help with the entrepreneurship aspect to develop those skills? Are you involved in that?
Ms MacKinnon: We are involved in that through both the national organization, CCA, as well as through the regional organizations. In the last couple of years there have been a couple of pilot projects in both the east and the west involving youth entrepreneurship in partnership with Human Resources Development Canada.
In Saskatchewan there was a project that looked at taking young people who had finished their education, post-secondary education in some instances, and working with them to create youth worker co-ops. It was a hands-on project. It was managed through the Saskatchewan office of the Canadian Co-operative Association with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, with some funding from HRDC.
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That actually took young people and said let's look and see how you can grow your own kind of businesses. A very similar kind of project, under a different umbrella but still HRDC, was done through Atlantic Canada, two different projects, Youth Services Canada, which you may have heard about. One was more on entrepreneurship and the other was more on community involvement in giving youth a sense of purpose and how they could work in their communities to better both themselves and their communities.
The whole area of youth entrepreneurship is something that the cooperative sector is very interested in. I might add, in addition to those kinds of projects, there are many cooperative organizations across the country that are involved with both the provincial or local governments around things like Stay-in-School or Choices Canada, where they go into the high schools and work with the high schools around such things as financial awareness. They help the high school students set up an actual credit union - this is out of Winnipeg - where the local credit union is partnered with this high school to teach the young people about financial management skills.
Co-op Atlantic has a unique program where they take youth into their co-op stores on weekends to teach them about what the realities of the workplace are.
So I think it's an area of particular interest and an area where we're going to continue to work in partnership with government on looking at some innovative models that can then be replicated in other places.
We also have a brand-new agreement with HRDC around international business education, whereby through our international development program at CCA we're going to be taking Canadian youth who have post-secondary education completed at either college or university and placing them in our overseas cooperative or credit union projects for an eight-month placement. Then they will come back to Canada and we will work with them to place them into a cooperative or credit union organization in Canada.
So that's a recent example, and it's an exciting new initiative that reaches out to that global community that Mr. Reed was referring to, that we need to be reaching out globally as well.
Mrs. Cowling: How many of those young people are actually going back to their grassroots and to the communities they came from, for instance, a community the size of mine, of 900 people?
Ms MacKinnon: I'd say that actually the cooperative sector is more successful than many other sectors at doing that, because we are in those rural communities and we're working very hard to keep them there. There are 900 communities in Canada that have either a credit union, a caisse populaire or retail co-op, and that's the only either financial institution or retail outlet there.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mrs. Cowling.
Go ahead, Mr. Deshaies.
[Translation]
Mr. Deshaies: You said that, particularly in Northern Canada, and especially among native people...
[English]
Shall I repeat it? Do you understand?
Mr. Hillier: I missed it, sorry.
Mr. Deshaies: Okay, I will try in English.
You said during your exposé that many autochtone communities had small co-op activities, especially for services, and sometimes work cooperatives, because sometimes they need help to build these cooperatives and support to continue. What part does your organization take in developing this kind of activity, and what is the government's part in helping?
Mr. Hillier: Interestingly, in northern Canada the cooperatives are not asking for a lot of help from us. They're doing it themselves through their own organization. Arctic Co-operatives, the group I'm referring to, had sales of more than $78 million last year. So they have developed a central wholesale cooperative organization there that can provide just about all the support that -
Mr. Deshaies: Sometimes they are subsidized for that?
Mr. Hillier: Yes, there has been. The Government of Canada provided some capital 15 years ago for the NWT Cooperative Development Fund, around $1 million or something like that. That$1 million was lent out for cooperative development activity in a revolving loan fund kind of concept. Today that fund is worth $19 million. So yes, some seed capital was used to start that, but it's grown substantially, and it's a self-sufficient operation there today.
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We work together with Arctic Co-ops on appropriate legislation for cooperatives and on getting support for human resource development, because that's a big need. We have some development funds ourselves that we provide for that, but also we work with them to talk to various government organizations to see what kind of support is available there.
There are many benefits to that kind of thing. Many of the people who work for the cooperative sector in northern Canada have gone on to work for the Government of the Northwest Territories, some are members of the legislature and those types of things. It's been a really profitable investment in human resources.
Mr. Deshaies: Thanks.
The Chairman: I just have a couple of brief questions.
I'm intrigued and I tend to agree with you about the comment that the cooperative model is one that can probably be used in rural development. I want to try to translate that into some potential specific examples, one of them being tourism, which we've heard about in our travels.
One of the issues that's been raised is that much of the tourism help, particularly on the federal side, though I think it's probably true in Ontario at least, is often targeted at too large an entity to have the value in rural Canada that we would like to see it have. It's one thing to partner with Air Canada, CP Hotels or whoever; it's quite another to partner with the smaller type of operator we're used to seeing.
In terms of marketing on the tourism side in a given region or sub-region, do you have experience in the cooperative movement of that particular type of organization coming together?
Mr. Hillier: Yes, there are a few examples. I'll start with the larger and move to the smaller.
We have a couple of travel agencies. One is a workers' cooperative that operates out of Burlington, Ontario; it's called Canadian Travel Co-op. And Calgary Cooperative Association has a travel agency. So there's involvement in tourism from that particular angle.
The more interesting one is the smaller one. We've just made an investment in a small tourism idea in some francophone communities in southern Saskatchewan. These francophone communities in Saskatchewan are promoting what they have to offer French-speaking tourists from abroad or French-speaking tourists from other parts of Canada.
We've made an investment in some business activities they have to promote their tourism activities - a tourism convention in Montreal and that sort of thing. They are working together at the local level to establish facilities and promote their facilities on a national-international scale.
So there are a couple of initiatives in that area.
The Chairman: In that Saskatchewan example, how many members would there be? Do you have any idea?
Mr. Hillier: It's very small. I don't know if there are any connoisseurs of Saskatchewan here, but it's in the area of Willow Bunch, Lafleche and Gravelbourg. In that whole area the membership of the cooperatives would probably be about 1,500 or 2,000 people.
The Chairman: And the businesses themselves can be members of the cooperatives, I take it. For instance, if the tourism operators in my riding of Parry Sound - Muskoka want to form a cooperative for marketing purposes, there's no problem doing that, under your seven guidelines.
Mr. Hillier: No, that can be done.
The Chairman: Another area we looked at as well is the whole issue of business services in rural Canada. There's a concern that for economic reasons the legal profession, the accounting profession and other professions have to be located in large centres such as Calgary, Montreal or Toronto, as opposed to being able to work out in some of the fields.
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Would it make any sense for these types of professionals to come together and form a cooperative where they're servicing specifically rural clients and building themselves a large enough market so they can be successful?
Mr. Hillier: Obviously I'd have to get into that a little bit more, but the idea would be worth taking a look at.
By way of responding a little bit further to this area you're pursuing, we've been very involved with the Canadian Business Networks Coalition within the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which you're familiar with. That's a three-year pilot project to look at small and medium-sized enterprises working together to grow their competitiveness.
We've been involved in that from the point of view of actually promoting some of the very types of initiatives you're raising here, which is to have some small businesses look at forming a cooperative to share services, marketing or whatever the case is. We would be very interested in taking a look at some ideas like that, if there were some people who wanted to get into that.
The Chairman: Okay.
Thank you very much. I appreciate your taking the time to provide testimony.
I would ask the members to just hold on for about three minutes after the witnesses leave. There's something I need to discuss with them.
Thank you. We very much appreciate your testimony.
Mr. Hillier: I appreciate your time.
The Chairman: If the members would agree, I'd like to go in camera. Thank you.
[Proceedings continue in camera]