A More Equitable Economy Exists Right Next Door



Sidewalks bustle with people walking in and out of homes, offices, bank, pharmacy, workout studio and coffee shop at Montreal’s Technopole Angus, a development that already sports 56 business with 2500 employees and will eventually encompass a million-square-feet of real estate.



Leonard Cohen’s gravelly voice rings through the taproom at La Barberie Brewery, located near Quebec City’s business district. Its Belgian-style saisons and blackberry blanc beers are enjoyed throughout the province. A few blocks away, an 18th-century monastery inside Quebec City’s historic walls has recently opened its doors as a hotel and spa.

Welcome to everyday life in Quebec, Canada’s second largest province with 8.2 million people. Yet these scenes of economic activity are different in a notable way from similar ones occurring throughout North America. Each enterprise involves a cooperative or non-profit organization, which together make up 8-10 percent of the province’s GDP.  More than 7,000 of these “social economy” enterprises ring up $17 billion in annual sales and hold $40 billion in assets (Canadian dollars). They account for about 215,000 jobs across Quebec.

Quebec’s social economy (also translated as “solidarity economy”) extends far beyond the province’s two major cities and includes manufacturing, agricultural cooperatives, daycare centers, homecare services, affordable housing, social service initiatives, food coops, ecotourism, arts programs, public markets, media and funeral homes. The capital that fuels all this economic activity comes from union pension funds, non-profit loan funds, credit unions, government investment and philanthropy.

















What We Can Learn from Quebec’s Social Economy


Recognize the Social Economy When You See It


Look Widely for Inspiration & Ideas


Seek Solidarity


Tap the Power of Government


Partner with Unions


Partner with Faith Organizations


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  1. Carl

    Just to add a small additional example, there’s a co-op brewpub in Austin, Texas called Black Star. We’ve visited many times and, other than the no-tipping rule, it’s indistinguishable from the other establishments in town. You can buy shares in the co-op and that entitles you to attend the board meetings and vote.

    1. Josh E

      My friends in Montreal told me that they went through a deep recession back in the 80/90s when all the (English-speaking) inherited money moved to Toronto. It sounds like that might have created more space for what came next.

      Also, Austin has a large-ish food co-op (Wheatsville) founded when I was a kid in the 70s and still doing well. And after Uber/Lyft left, someone put together the ATX Taxi Coop which has as many drivers as Yellow Cab now.

    1. Katharine

      Yes to both parts of that! I’m glad I read this after the youth unemployment article, which was disheartening; we need to see the evidence of things that work as well as of what is not working.

    2. lyman alpha blob

      Yes thank you to the author for this ray of sunshine.

      Just don’t talk about it too loudly though – we wouldn’t want the neoliberal Trudeau finding out all this socialism is going on right under his nez.

  2. divadab

    Canada’s single-payer medical system, “Medicare”, was first implemented by the provincial government of Saskatchewan under the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a farmers’ cooperative party led by the great Tommy Douglas . The doctors went on strike for almost a month, and the insurance industry was universally opposed, but the program was so popular that it succeeded and formed the model for a later federal implementation across the country.

    It was not a simple process and there was much political opposition – but the cooperative movement was very strong among farmers in the prairies who remembered well the depression and the misery it wreaked on rural populations.

  3. Patrick Donnelly

    Does Canada still mine asbestos?

    It is exported to China and then spreads acroiss the world.


    1. JEHR

      “The story of asbestos is a cautionary, disturbing and timely tale. The recent announcement that Canada will enact a comprehensive ban by 2018 is a decision that will save lives and prevent painful diseases caused by exposure to this deadly substance.”

      It took far too long to ban this product. We are still dealing with asbestos found in older buildings.

    2. justanotherprogressive

      I do want to remind you that Yves Smith labeled this post as a “more equitable economy”, not a perfect economy?

    1. diptherio

      The Cooperative Economy website is the best place I know of to keep up with goings on in Rojava.

    2. DJG

      Spring Texan and diptherio: If you can read Italian, you might want the graphic travel / political memoir entitled Kobane Calling by Zerocalcare. It goes into much detail about the historical reasons for the coops and also into women’s roles in Rojava.

  4. Denis Drew


    A unionized company is the marketing equivalent of a co-op. Both ownership’s and labor’s interest act equally in setting the consumers’ price.

    1. diptherio

      Uh….not really. There are union shops, there are worker-owned and managed co-ops, and there are also union co-ops which are worker-owned co-ops in which the owners/workers are also union members. In a union shop, there’s still an adversarial relationship between the ownership and the workers (more for me, less for thee), where in a worker co-op, that relationship doesn’t exist, since the workers and owners are one and the same.

      1. Denis Drew

        Aha! The typical concept (everybody does it) of seeing the conflict (if you will) between owner and labor. The more correct concept is owner/labor v. consumer.

        Sort of: consumer/(owner + labor).

        Both work together (as long as labor is in a position — or as much as labor is in a position) to squeeze the consumer for as much as possible before the buyer goes somewhere else.

        This “emphasis” if you will leads to more accurate intuitive pictures: if co-ops work like the post illustrates, then, we can more naturally accept how well unions work for everybody — while being a lot easier to arrange (unless you are a typical American and have forgotten about unions).

        This “emphasis” tends to remind that labor is sort of bought and sold on margin: e.g., Walmart labor costs are 7% so doubling wages could only add 7% to prices — not much lost business for much higher pay (of course if low end wages are raised across the board either by collective bargaining or minimum wage then that extra pay will likely be spent at lower end wage businesses possibly leading to even higher sales — as the seminal Card and Krueger min wage study showed).

        Basically, this co-op equivalence just takes thinking in a tad bit more depth.

  5. JEHR

    This is a great article: We could learn a lot from Quebec regarding lower University tuition, protests by the people, affordable child care, etc.

  6. Expat

    It’s too un-American. America is all about guns, death, poverty and inequality. Those are the founding principles of our great nation. Those are the things that make America great. Take those away and you have prosperity, health, and happiness. For shame!

  7. A1

    All this is paid for by transfer payments from the west. Remove this transfer and Quebec would look quite a bit different.

  8. diptherio

    “Tapping the Power of Government” is a two-edged sword. Consider this from late 2015:





    The thing with politics is that things can change over(election)night. When the resources are flowing in from the gov’t, it seems great, but then a dependence develops and when, inevitably, there is a political shift and the gov’t largesses dries up, our organizations face a situation of being underfunded and without systems for independent financing.

  9. diptherio

    If you’re interested in worker co-ops, solidarity economics, etc., I would like to humbly suggest that you follow the Grassroots Economic Organizing site, which has been covering this beat exclusively since the early 90s.


  10. Susan the other

    We have bad investment rules/regs here controlling what retirement funds can invest their money in – I mean, we let unregulated PE companies take retirement fund money and invest it without adequate explanation or responsibility to the funds, etc… yet, as mentioned above, Quebec’s social economy allows trade union pension funds to reinvest some 65% of that money back into the local economy of small and medium business operations. It has been a serious mistake in this country (US) to disallow that kind of investment. Or equally bad, to allow the shysters and banksters to slurp up pension money promising impossible 8% returns and use it to “invest” so disastrously here in any number of lost causes or outright frauds.

  11. TedHunter

    Thanks for an article showing (yet again) the way to go. It came right on time. After having to read that in the Zombie-world Kuchner will fix it all, I had almost started to doubt the existence of gravity.

  12. Altandmain

    Living here in Canada, there is the good and bad. Within Canada, Quebec is one of the most equal places to live.


    Granted, this situation is not as bad as the US, but it is a problem.

    Job quality is in decline:

    Our tax system favors the rich too.

    Unfortunately things are slowly following the US, not going to the opposite way.

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