In a rural and poor Quebec, on a French-speaking island in the middle of an English-speaking sea, a collaborative experiment was launched a little over 25 years ago that already has more than 11,000 organizations and 220,000 jobs, in addition to billing more than 27 billion euros.
Jordi Valls Olivé, in his book on the social and solidarity economy (SSE) in Quebec, tells us that Patrick Duguay, general manager of the Coopérative de développement régional Outaouais-Laurentides, refers to the birth of the first cooperatives in Quebec as instruments of solidarity and mutual aid in credit and agricultural production activities and how these became large cooperative groups: Desjardins in the financial sector and the Coop Fédérée in the agricultural sector as maximum representatives of the so-called old social economy. And that Duguay also refers to the close link between the historical development of cooperativism and by extension of the entire SSE with the Quebec fact and the need to preserve the identity of the French-speaking island in an English-speaking sea.
