Thanksgiving in co-op week

(October 06) - We have a lot to be thankful for in Guelph, and I’m not talking about electoral politics. As we approach Thanksgiving Day next Monday, we also approach National Co-op Week. It is very appropriate that the two events coincide this year.

Almost everyone in Guelph is touched by a co-operative at some point in their lives. There are almost thirty operating in town. Four provide childcare. Seven provide housing. Five are credit unions.

The Canadian Emu Co-operative has its head office in Guelph, as do the Ontario Lamb Producers, Co-operators’ Insurance, Gay Lea Foods, Planet Bean, Ag Energy Co-op, the Guelph Community Car Co-op, Organic Meadows Co-op and UPI Energy. Both the Ontario Co-operative Association and the Ontario Workers’ Co-operative Federation are headquartered in Guelph.

You can live, bank, borrow a car, gas it up, insure it, go for a coffee, and buy almost everything you need to eat - all without leaving the co-op sector. If you are fortunate enough to belong to one, you can wake up and have breakfast and at the end of the day go home to sleep in a co-op.

There are about 1300 co-ops in Ontario, and a lot more across the country and around the world. The International Co-operative Alliance says that more than 800 million people belong to co-ops. That’s a lot of economic activity generated by organizations owned and operated by their members.

There is a growing movement to think globally and spend locally. It is driven by a need to empower individuals and integrate them with their communities. Co-operatives are a very big part of this, because they are, for the most part, local organizations. When they need to provide products that can’t be found locally they rely on fair trade suppliers. Things like coffee beans, bananas, and clothes can be bought from farmer and worker co-ops all over the world. Supporting them strengthens local economies and global trade.

Next weekend, when you sit down for a Thanksgiving meal, do it right. Bake a turkey from a local farm, serve it with root vegetables that were organically grown in southern Ontario, follow with a pie baked with local fruit and some good Gay Lea ice cream. If you are so inclined, you can wash it down with a pint of beer from an Ontario microbrewery or a glass of fine Niagara wine. Cap it off with a mug of fair trade coffee. When you feed your family you'll feed your community.

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A microphone can be a dangerous thing to get close to. Many politicians have discovered this to their dismay when mistakenly thinking one was shut off when it wasn’t.

Several years ago, Tiger Woods hooked a drive straight into the Pacific Ocean during a tournament at Pebble Beach. He spontaneously turned the CBS air blue with language commonly used by hackers on golf courses everywhere. It’s not a big deal.

A University of Guelph football player recently got stung, but not by the word so much as by the mike. The sporting fields are not a place to show off the depth and breadth of your vocabulary. He could have said “fornicate Western” but there’s no sense wasting your breath with three syllables when one will do.

Even at the university level you don’t need to do well in a spelling bee to be selected for the football team. If oratorical skills put points on the board, they’d scout the Scrabble clubs for quarterbacks and appoint librarians as hockey coaches.

Suspending a player for using macho language in a high testosterone sport seems a bit off-side to me.