Will Credit Unions Go the Way of the Wheat Pools?

How fitting that the only remaining symbol of the venerable Saskatchewan Wheat Pool are the letters SWP, used for shares traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The company is now formally called Viterra after having purchased Agricore United. So all the institutions reflecting the desire of western Canadian farmers to change the balance of economic power in farming, the Alberta Wheat Pool, the Manitoba Pool Exchange, United Grain Growers (all combined in Agricore United), and the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, have now disappeared. I have no doubt that Viterra will be good at its job. It’s just that it is now doing a different job than the old farmer owned cooperatives did. Encouraging cooperation among farmers is no longer their mission, increasing return on investment for shareholders is.

The shift in name reflects a shift in values and that shift in values took place a long time ago. It took place over ten years ago when Saskatchewan Wheat Pool changed from a cooperative organization owned by its farmer-members to a competitive enterprise owned by its shareholders.

Values exist within institutions because they direct human behaviour; they help to organize and direct our resources. Institutions need to educate about and review their values on a regular basis for at least two reasons. Activities evolve over time and can become disconnected from values. In this case our activities need to be revised. Cultures also evolve over time and values are always understood in relation to culture. When values become disconnected from culture, the values need to be re-interpreted. Institutions that fail to educate about values can have members who are not committed to them. Institutions that fail to review their values can have practices that don’t make any sense.

When the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool transformed itself from a farmer owned cooperative to a shareholder owned agribusiness, the rationale was one of financial necessity – the business environment had changed, the Pool needed capital and the best way to get it was from the equity markets. However, the debate was carefully managed and many dissenters felt they weren’t given a full opportunity to make an alternative case. Another way to think about that event was to say that there was already a disconnect within the organization between values and practice. The reorganization was a realignment based on a different set of values.

Education is one of the seven values adhered to by cooperatives, as defined by the International Cooperative Association. The seven values together are:

Voluntary and open membership.
Democratic member control.
Member economic participation.
Autonomy and independence.
Education, training, and information.
Cooperation among cooperatives.
Concern for community.

So here’s a question for farmers and former members of the various cooperative organizations that died in order to make Viterra possible. When did the education and review of cooperative principles stop happening?

We have lots of other cooperative organizations in our society. Maybe the best examples are the credit unions that emerged in the same period of Canadian history as the wheat pools.

The first Canadian credit union was organized in 1900. Now almost 1 in 6 Canadians belong to one and they join 136 million people in 91 countries who do the same. In a recent survey a majority of Canadians reported that they received better service from credit unions than any of the banks. Forty years ago it would have been impossible to imagine the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool no longer being a cooperative. Could the same thing happen to the credit union movement?

Remembering With A Purpose

Did you forget where you put your keys last night? Do you sometimes forget the name of your best friend? Forgetfulness is common, especially as we get older. But some things we think are important to remember and others we want to forget. When we have painful or traumatic experiences there seem to be two common approaches to them. One voice says we should forget them in order to put them behind us - get on with our lives. Another voice counsels us to remember the pain because if we submerge them beneath the waves of our conscious mind our lives will be directed by hidden forces and we will never be truly free.

The moral economy is also influenced by memory. In 18th century England when bread shortages were created by new marketing schemes, rural women demanded that bread be sold according to the just price established by royal statute. The law in question had been created 150 years earlier to be used during times of famine. For the first time, people were experiencing a famine created not by nature but by the market system. The women remembered the law and insisted that it be enforced. Justice in commercial relationships and care for the community were key elements in their identity. By remembering the law and acting on their memory, they were refusing to be diminished and insisting that these values be carried forward into the future.

In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created the conditions for the truth of life under apartheid to be told. By validating the truth of the experience of ordinary people, the Commission made sure that the experience could never be denied. South Africans would always have to remember who they have been and where they came from. Across Canada every December 6th, there are spontaneous memorials to the 14 young women who were gunned down at Montreal’s L’Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. They were all engineering students and their crime was being female. Canadians remember because it is important not to forget that society is still so patriarchal that being female can get you killed. We will never be free of this hatred if we allow ourselves to forget. So, we remember with a purpose.

Soon it will be August the 6th. This year it will be 62 years since we (the western allied powers, including Canada) dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and three days later a second one on Nagasaki. Over 200,000 people died as a result of those two bombs. We remember those events, but for what purpose, to what effect? Remembering the atomic bomb means remembering our capacity to do the most unspeakable things to each other. In order to be free we have to remember what horrors we are capable of. We remember so that it will never happen again. We cannot truly commit to change our behaviour unless we confess what our behaviour has been. We want to remember ourselves as compassionate, caring and just. We want to think of ourselves as good. We can only be just in the future if we make a point of remembering with clarity, our willingness to be the opposite.

Readers who want to read more on memory from a theological point of view could turn to Miroslav Volf's The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, Eerdmans 2006.

Decimation & Indifference Threaten Creation

Should we care that industrial production and globalized trade are doing to our marine life what it has done to our land and agricultural life? It is and I think we should.

Decimation was the practice and indifference was the attitude we used to eliminate the bison from the western Canadian prairie. Then we applied industrial principles to the cod fishery on the Grand Banks with the same attitudes and results.

The common Friday dinner of fish and chips used to be made with cod and halibut. Now it’s mostly made of Pollock. More than 3 million tons of Alaska Pollock is caught annually in the North Pacific, mostly in the Bering Sea. Half of it is caught by the American fishing fleet using factory freezer trawlers. In addition to fish and chips you’ll also find Pollock in fish sticks, imitation crab meat, Chinese fish balls and many other fish formulations. If you choose the fish option at Dairy Queen, Arby’s, Burger King or McDonalds, you’ll probably end up eating Pollock.

Since Pollock can grow to over 3 ft. in length and weigh over 20 kilos, you might wonder how it can be transformed in to so many different shapes and flavours. The reason is because most Pollock is made into Surimi, a Japanese-style fish slurry. The fish is cleaned, rinsed to remove the smell and then pulverized into a gelatinous paste. It is then mixed with additives like starch, egg white, salt, vegetable oil, sorbitol and soy protein. Different seasonings are added depending on where in the world it will be eaten. In order to prevent it from spoiling in cold storage, sugar is added (up to 15%) which can make it a problem for diabetics. According to the US Department of Agriculture, fish surimi contains 15% protein, 6.85% carbohydrate, almost no fat and 76% water.

Some people think we are being clever by finding new uses for fish species we ignored previously. On the other hand, the need for new uses has been created by a callous disregard for the consequences of current fishing practice.

Our search for new species is called “fishing down the food web” because we are taking the food from the mouths of larger fish and mammals. This is causing all kinds of marine behaviour we have never seen before. Dolphins have been observed attacking seals for the first time. Killer whales have been feeding on otters.

Fishing down the food web means we are also taking the immature members of those same larger species, thus doubling the fatal consequences. Dr. David Pauly of the Fisheries Centre at UBC likens this practice to “eating our seed corn”. He argues that if we continue with the logic of feeding farther and farther down the food web, eventually we will be forced to figure out how to take plankton and turn it into plankton surimi so we can make imitation varieties of all the fish species we used to have, but have no longer.

We are all part of the web of life – you, me, the salmon, cod, whales and kelp. We are all dependent on each other for oxygen, nutrients, food and life. If we continue our practice of decimation and indifference, eventually we will do to ourselves what we have done to the rest of Creation.

The Challenge of Sustainability

Have you noticed an increased use of the term “sustainable development” recently? Maybe it’s the increased environmental awareness that causes people to fall back on this term in an uncritical way. In the same way I have also noticed an increased use of the term “sustainable prosperity”. Who could be opposed to sustainable prosperity? Don’t we all want our prosperity to be sustainable?

One way to think critically about these concepts is to ask the question: sustainable for whom? For example, sustainable development of the forest industry may not lead to forests that can sustain all the animals that now live there. Similarly, sustainable prosperity for cities may not lead to sustainable rural populations.

In the 1970s, ethicists working for the churches recognized that environmental health also required an increase in social justice. At that time they began to speak of the need for just, participatory and sustainable communities and societies.

In the 1987 Brundtland Commission Report on Environment and Development, the authors called for a global set of ethical principles to guide the transition to sustainable development. People hoped that the nations gathered for the Rio Conference on the Environment in 1992 would pass such a document but not enough nations would agree. In 1994, the Canadian Internationalist Maurice Strong teamed up with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to renew this effort and three years later the Earth Charter was released. It has since been endorsed by over 2,000 organizations representing millions of people and is thought to represent an international consensus.

The third of the Charter’s 16 principles calls us to “build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable and peaceful.” Over the last 20 years there has been a definite shift in international circles away from the language of sustainable development and toward the language of sustainable communities. In this context, sustainability becomes a moral imperative to remove the barriers to justice and a fair distribution of resources, so everyone can be empowered to protect the other communities of creation with whom we share this planet. Another term for this is ecojustice.

One of the ways sustainability is understood by the Earth Charter is in terms of sufficiency. One of the sub-principles calls on all of us to “adopt lifestyles that emphasize the quality of life and material sufficiency in a finite world”. Over the last 30 years, anthropologists have begun to use the term “moral economy” to describe the principles used by rural and farm groups to justify their rebellions against widespread economic change. These rural groups do not rise up in response to just any change. They rise up against changes that threaten their very livelihood. They rise up against forces that challenge their ability to even exist. The principle of sufficiency requires us to recognize that sometimes my desire for more threatens your ability to get anything at all.

The future of rural Canada does not depend on a strategy of sustainable development or sustainable prosperity. It depends on the whole of Canada pursuing a strategy to create sustainable communities. That means a strategy that recognizes the link between social justice and environmental integrity, and claims sufficiency as a necessary goal for everyone.

Economic Lessons My Father Taught Me

My father died last month. He was 91. During his 50 years in business, he tried to teach me some lessons about life and money. This is what I learned.

1) When you make an agreement, write it down. I came from a family of five children. Every Saturday allowance would be dispensed like cups of navy grog - five cents for the youngest, twenty-five cents for the oldest and gradations in between. These dispensations were recorded in a ledger with deductions for misbehaviour. Disputes about who received what were resolved by reference to the ledger. As we grew older, allowance stopped and loans began. Each transaction was private but each was accompanied by a promissory note. When you make an agreement, write it down.
2) Cut your cloth according to your needs. As an orphan, my father could not afford to go into debt. He only bought what he needed and what he could afford. He didn’t drive when he could cycle and he didn’t cycle when he could walk. He was always well dressed but if you looked closely, his clothes were always well mended. It was from him that I learned how to darn socks. He had learned the difference between wants and needs. “Don’t cut your cloth according to your wants”, he would say, “cut it according to your needs”.
3) Don’t forget where you come from. My father befriended a man who lived alone in a rooming house in Hamilton. What little family he had, he was alienated from. My father picked him up hitchhiking and brought him by the house where he was paid to do some gardening. We called him Popeye because he spent most of the time on the verandah, smoking a borrowed pipe and telling stories about the war. This went on for years. One day, after we had driven him home, I asked my father why we did this. He said, “There was a time when I had no family to speak of and I lived in a boarding house too. Don’t forget where you come from, that could be you.”
4) Pick up the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves. My father was an inveterate recycler. He saved newspapers and rolled them into fireplace logs. He never discarded anything if he could avoid it. He took special pleasure in his early morning raids on the local lovers’ lane where he could collect bottles and cans to be returned for cash. It was inconceivable to him that one would pass by a penny on the street and not pick it up. “Pick up the pennies”, was his motto, “and the dollars will take care of themselves”.
5) Every budget, no matter how small, has room for the common good. Every week my father attended church and made his financial contribution. This was in addition to other charities he supported regularly. We received our allowance on Saturday but on Sunday we were expected to donate a portion to the church. These days we are all encouraged to set up an RRSP and “pay yourself first”. This was not my father’s view. His view was that first of all, we need each other in order to survive. Therefore, investment in community is a necessary expense and every budget, no matter how small, has room for the common good.