The Conservatives were elected in 2006 with overwhelming support from rural Canada, where co-operatives are strong, but a national co-op leader says they may not have understood the sector.
Bill Dobson, president of the Canadian Co-operative Association and a former president of Alberta’s Wild Rose Agricultural Producers, said many Conservative MPs had a learning curve about the role and reality of co-ops.
“In all honesty, when the Conservative party was elected as a government, they weren’t so keen on co-operatives,” said Dobson, a farmer from Paradise Valley, Alta.
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“They saw them as conflicting with their free enterprise values.”
Dobson said co-op leaders have spent time preaching the gospel of co-operatives as key economic drivers in ridings across Canada.
“It has taken time for education,” he said. “But now I think there is a broad consensus across parties that co-operatives are an important sector to support.”
Last year, the House of Commons created a special committee on co-ops chaired by Alberta Conservative MP Blake Richards, which recommended co-op friendly policies.
It also recommended that responsibility for co-op policy be moved from Agriculture Canada to Industry Canada in recognition of the fact that co-ops have moved from mainly rural and farm-connected to include urban.
The government acted on the recommendation.
It followed years of increasing marginalization of co-operative issues within Agriculture Canada. The Co-ops Secretariat was cut, and last year a $4 million annual Co-operative Development Initiative budget was eliminated.
When challenged in the House of Commons about the cut, agriculture minister Gerry Ritz was dismissive.
He said it was simply an indication that the co-operative sector is strong enough to exist without government subsidies.
“With some 9,000 co-ops, 18 million members and some net worth of $350 billion or $360 billion, I think co-ops have a great foundation to continue this work on their own.”
In a later interview, he said the sector was using money to fund local histories and promotional material that they could well afford to pay for themselves.
Co-op leaders welcomed the move from Agriculture Canada to Industry Canada as a recognition that the movement has become a broad economic force.
