Franco-Albertans participated wholeheartedly in the
cooperative movement which swept across Canada following the
Great Depression1. In 1939, encouraged by Archbishop Hugh
MacDonald, of the Archdiocese of Edmonton, who saw the great
poverty in his rural parishes, the Franco-Albertan clergy took
up the banner and began to promote cooperative banking (in the
form of credit unions) and cooperative stores. The same year,
the cooperative movement was high on the agenda at the annual
meeting of the Association canadienne-française de l’Alberta
(ACFA).
In 1935, the first Franco-Albertan group to establish a
credit union was the Saint-Famille Parish of Calgary. By 1939,
two rural communities, St. Lina and St. Paul had followed the
example, opening credit unions of their own. By 1946, of the 143
credit unions in Alberta, 23 were held by French-Canadians.
A few consumer cooperatives were also established, as well as
producer and farming cooperatives, but the francophones did not
limit themselves linguistically, in the matters of eggs or
cream, for instance. All in all, between 1939 and 1946, there
were 38 cooperative institutions run by Franco-Albertans from a
population of 31,000. 7,000 of these people were members of the
cooperatives. A good number of the financial institutions remain
to this day, in Beaumont, St. Paul, Bonnyville, and Edmonton, to
name but a few, although the names have changed somewhat and
some have been amalgamated following provincial legislation into
larger units. As for the cooperative stores, the few which
remain have associated themselves with the large Cooperative
chain across the Prairies, which include the Falher
establishment, as well as the St. Paul Co-op, one of the most
important of the stores across the Prairies.
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