Main street isn’t what it once was. Locally-owned businesses have found it impossible to compete with international giants like Walmart. But one sector is still healthy: co-operatives.
According to a recent article in Farmtario, co-ops are an integral part of the lives of 10 million Canadians and 57 per cent of Canadians expressed a deep connection to co-op values.
Co-ops have always been a part of my life. When I was a kid the Lucknow District Co-op operated a store on main street selling feed for animals and seed and fertilizer for planting crops. Later, the operation moved to a larger location in a brand new store just south of town.
When I first got into the newspaper business in Blyth, one of our major advertisers was the Belgrave Co-op, which later amalgamated with Midwest Co-operative Services Inc.
Later, when I had trouble borrowing money for our company, I switched to the Clinton Community Credit Union, which later joined the Libro Credit Union, part of a chain spread across southwestern Ontario.
So too, many of us buy insurance from mutual insurance companies, some local, some wider in scope.
Originally, Bell Telephone wasn’t interested in many rural areas. Instead, local co-operative telephone companies were set up to provide service to rural customers. Eventually many sold out to Bell. Others, like Tuckersmith Communications at Kippen, grew larger and it now provides internet and digital television to a wide area, including our concession in North Huron.
Some co-ops have closed down but others have grown. Hensall District Co-op is a huge company now, selling supplies to farmers, buying their crops, processing white beans and shipping them overseas. This big co-op has purchased privately-owned mills in Londesboro and Westfield, in my area.
Farmtario tells the importance of co-ops: “We can reinforce our economic sovereignty and meet pressing needs, whether it’s for housing, food security, health and social care, energy, financial services or many other priorities, by investing in the co-operative model.”
The United Nations has declared that 2025 is Year of International Co-operatives. The government of the United Kingdom has committed to doubling the size of the co-operative sector, because it works.
Although it’s not a typical co-operative, this magazine is published by a community-owned organization. Forty years ago this month, our sister publication The Citizen published its first issue.
I had just survived an unfortunate (and costly) sideline in a touring theatre when I was approached that summer by Sheila Richards of Brussels. The old Brussels Post in her town had been amalgamated with the Huron Expositor in Seaforth and had been reduced to one page in the Expositor. Meanwhile the Blyth Standard, which was my first publication, had been reduced to one page in the Clinton News-Record. What could we do to have our own newspaper again, she wondered.
As I say, I was flat broke, but I suggested that if we sold shares in a community-owned newspaper to serve both villages, we could again publish a newspaper. Sheila sold shares in Brussels and I sold shares in Blyth and we started a paper that’s still surviving.
We were a strange entity then in a land of large chains. Yet four decades later we are now the biggest newspaper in Huron County with the largest staff. By the early 1990s, Signal-Star Publishing offered to sell us The Rural Voice at a bargain price because they didn’t really want it.
We’re still here and thriving, proof of the value of local community ownership. ◊