Dear Friends,<\/p>\n
In my role as the Liberal Advocate for Co-operatives, I am committed to reaching out to the co-op community. In keeping with this ongoing engagement, I gratefully accepted an invitation to speak at two regional conferences organized by the Ontario Co-operative Association (On Co-op); the Niagara Co-op Conference in St. Catharines (March 4th) and the GTA Co-op Connections Event in Toronto (March 7th).<\/p>\n
On Co-op is the umbrella group for Ontario\u2019s English-speaking co-operatives and credit unions. Its membership consists of over 60 co-operatives, federations and sector stakeholders. While exchanging with co-operators, I\u2019ve heard of the challenges facing start-up co-operatives, especially with regard to obtaining capital. This is an area where I will continue to push for better understanding of the co-operative model and a more open approach to allowing co-operatives to benefit from existing and future programs.<\/p>\n
On March 2nd, I attended the 86th Annual General Meeting of Federated Co-operative Limited (FCL) which took place in Saskatoon. FCL is a multi-faceted organization based on the principles of co-operation and owned by approximately 235 retail co-ops located throughout Western Canada. These co-operatives are \u201cmember-owners\u201d of FCL who in turn provides central wholesaling, manufacturing, marketing and administrative services to its member-owners. FCL is the largest enterprise in Saskatchewan and the 45th in Canada. Last year its sales reached $10.8 billion.<\/p>\n
I thank On Co-op for inviting me to their regional conferences as well as FCL for the opportunity to attend its AGM.<\/p>\n
As always I will keep you posted on my various co-op related activities.<\/p>\n
Mauril<\/p>\n
Honourable Mauril B\u00e9langer, M.P. for Ottawa\u2014Vanier
\nLiberal Advocate for Co-operatives<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Friends, In my role as the Liberal Advocate for Co-operatives, I am committed to reaching out to the co-op community. In keeping with this ongoing engagement, I gratefully accepted an invitation to speak at two regional conferences organized by the Ontario Co-operative Association (On Co-op); the Niagara Co-op Conference in St. Catharines (March 4th) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":235295,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238142"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238376,"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238142\/revisions\/238376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}