Employee Ownership Trusts with Jon Shell | E108

welcome to the financial planning for Canadian business owners podcast you will hear about industry insights with award-winning financial planner and entrepreneur Jason Pereira through the interviews with different experts with their stories and advice you will learn how you can navigate the challenges of being an entrepreneur plan for success and make the most of your business and life and now your host Jason Pereira hello and welcome to another show of John shell managing director and partner at Social Capital Partners John has been an advocate for employee ownership

trusts in Canada for a while and this is a reason to change tax law I brought him on the show that talked about what employee ownership trusts are how they can benefit employees and how Canada's first ticket the can on this fell a little bit short and with that here's my neighbor John John thanks for team time today no problem nice to talk to you my pleasure so John tell us a little bit about what it is you do so there's a couple of Partners is a non-profit based in Toronto I've been around for about 20 years we focus on uh trying to find new Financial techniques that allow for more people to take advantage of ownership and good jobs in the economy so there are a lot of folks in the Canada who

have not had the same type of luck that bill and I have who you know Bill started SCP at 20 years ago and and so that luck is is just very unevenly distributed so so SCP focuses on finding ways to you know break down barriers and find opportunities for people who can't get a good job or who don't have access to ownership to be able to access those things excellent so let's dive into the topic at hand for today so I'm going to add is employee ownership trust so tell us about what an employee ownership trust is and where the concept came about so employee ownership trust is kind of a blanket term for a structure that exists in the tax act of other countries namely

the US and the UK and the objective of these structures are to help owners who are looking to sell their businesses instead of selling to a financial buyer or a competitor find a way to sell to their employees as a group and the initial version of this which was it's actually really interesting stories it dates back to the 70s in the U.S where a lawyer out of California by the name of Louis Kelso decided that he was worried that capitalism had a limited time frame he was seeing a lot of inequality in California and thought you know if you know and at the time it was kind of the 50s and 60s and so there's the height of

the Cold War and he was thinking where you know capitalism is going to lose unless we can allocate more benefits to the economy to more people and so he started designing you know just on his own this new vehicle that allowed some of his clients who were owners of businesses to sell their companies to their employees through this trust allowing the company to continue to operate the same way it always operated so there's no one person one vote it was not that structure it was designed for kind of continuance of management and design so that employees didn't have to pay for their shares because his you know his entire objective was how do we find a way for people who don't have access to ownership in this economy to have access and so what that structure

did is it allowed a new trust created to borrow money mostly from the owner themselves the owner would lend a bunch of money to the trust and then the trust would buy the shares from the owner and you know the upshot of all that is that the company would owe the owner of the price of the company it would pay it over time and once it paid out the owner that those shares that company would now belong to the employees and the way you set it up every employee accumulated shares over time so it's great for retention and then when employees left the company they could cash in their shares company would buy them out and he was able to convince a very power powerful senator in the U.S Congress

back then to put this idea into their retirement act in 1974 and it became what's now known as the Employee Stock ownership plan in the U.S that's grown to now it has you know 6 500 odd companies with 14 million American workers sharing in 1.7 trillion dollars in employee assets so a phenomenal a success story from a public policy point of view innocent all these great benefits for workers for communities and probably going on longer than you want to on this uh Jason so I'll you know I'll keep going keep going and some of these companies have been phenomenally successful I mean at Publix is a grocery

chain in the Southeastern us and bunch of Canadians will know it for their travels to Florida that is a 200 000 employee company that is over 80 percent employee owned they've had grocery clerks retire and then get cashed out for like a million dollars for their shares WinCo Foods similar grocery chains in in the midwest has produced something like four point seven billion dollars for its employees over the last 40 years amsted Industries has produced 2600 Frontline millionaires out of kind of Engineers and shop workers at an industrial company and you know Cliff bar Taylor Guitars so really successful companies in the UK uh seeing this

success but their foot in in the door here in 2014 when they established what they call the employee ownership trust and that's a slightly different structure than the one that was Kelso designed but it allocates profit sharing every year to all of its employees and all that but it allows the same thing it allows an owner to sell their company to all of their employees at no cost to their employees using leverage and there are now you know last year there were 332 companies in the UK that sold their employees this year covering a little over 30 000 workers so anyway very successful public policy results in those two countries okay so let's talk about these things in the context text

of the Alternatives right so I think the alternative everybody's familiar with they're most familiar with is the concept of an employee share ownership plan can you talk to me how this differs from an employee sure ownership plan and when you mean the employee stop option plan yeah so yeah so stock option plans are just in the form of it right you have shares versus restricted stock whatever it is yes yeah no great great so in Canada if you say hey we want to do an Esau they're like great stop option plan we already do that what's what are you talking about and so that's why we've used the term uot here in Canada stock option plans I think people are generally very familiar with they come in a number of different forms you know rsus and dsus and a lot of public companies and that's where an employee

will get access to shares a certain price and then they're able to execute on those shares later on after that there's a growth of the companies they get to participate in the growth of the of the shares of the company so they bring they tend to be used for a minority of the company so it's usually like five or ten percent company is in a stock option plan some companies goes a little bit higher than that but you rarely see it above 20 of the company those Shares are often used as a sort of a bonus right so so executives are often those that participate most in stock option plans so you won't see a grocery clerk at loblowns with access to stock options so it's usually used as a retention tool for more senior

Executives so it has a great application I think you know where it's most broadly applicable is in the startup community so stock options are often used and can take a much a larger chunk of a startup off in the tech company to reward all of its uh new employees often in exchange for taking the lower salary but that's that's how stock options are commonly used in this case uh you are mostly selling a majority or all of your um shares to the trust which is very different from a stock option plan it happens immediately right so this isn't something that happens over time and employees all employees have access add to this so this is more of a broad-based

program designed specifically for succession where stock option plan is designed for more reward and retention a eot is designed for succession fair enough does that make sense Jason that does make sense no you're absolutely right and that's exactly how I would frame it so one other option that exists in Canada many people are not familiar with is the ability to create a co-op to purchase yeah yes you tell me how this differs in regards totally cool I must agree we have no you know we think co-ops are terrific they're about 500 or so co-ops in Canada employing about 6 000 people the challenge with co-ops when applied to a succession context for a larger company is a co-ops or a demo a

form of democratic ownership most of the time where all employees of that company uh get the right to vote on regular decision making ongoing decision making can they use structure around that but that's mostly how they're organized as a result they tend to be used in smaller companies so that's why what I said 500 companies 6000 employees it's averaging 12. they tend to be smaller sorry smaller companies and so if you think about a 200 person manufacturing plant that's been run hierarchically for 60 years got a bunch of structures in place that work the owner of that company who is now going to be paid out of company profits over a long time is risking a lot if they sell to their employees is going to have a lot of concern about the risk of selling to a co-op when that

company has not been run that way before but it's a perfectly effective and useful a form of employee ownership but you usually applied to smaller firms effectively Athenian democracy right yeah I mean I think you know so there's the famous one is in Spain I'm blanking on the name now but there's this massive Spanish company you know I usually have this name at the tip of my time but anyway it doesn't matter it's like hundreds of thousands of employees and they have a structure that works around the Athenian democracy problem so they've kind of structured that away but it's really complicated but if you want to set up a worker Co-op and do it in a way that has more traditional governance and committees Etc it becomes a bit burdensome so it's not it also you know

you have to pay for it so in a lot of these bigger companies where the the you know in a coffee shop People can maybe afford what those shares would cost but if you're talking about an industrial company or a flexible distributor or something like that which common form of employee ownership or in the US and UK your employees not gonna be able to afford that one share to buy the company sure so yeah so yes and the company question is moon dragon the largest Co-op uh in the world yes laundry now I might oh my God no no Jason I'm going to call it moon dragon from now on that is excellent that's one O is a short of a moon yeah yeah I believe my daughter is reading a book called moon dragon so maybe it's really a a subversive Co-op

based in the best country so they very well okay so talk to me about the incentive for the owner to want to sell their business to an employee ownership plan right because that's one of the first questions I mean yeah okay great you know if there's a try us that can basically take out a bunch of money and do a leverage buyout internally great it solves a succession issue but beyond that like what incentive is there and we don't just focus on Canada what incentives have been put in place around the world to help encourage these things well they don't so you know I think they don't exist in Canada yes um the proposed eot has no incentives around it and that's are very few so let's talk about that for a second because I left that out of the the USM

UK story so in the UK there was a structure that solved that problem Jason before right so so there was a structure that allowed you to have to you know use the leverage buyout on behalf of employees but nobody ever used it and the reason was if you're an owner looking to sell your company and you don't want to sell the private Equity or you don't want to sell to a competitor and you do want to sell to your employees you take on a couple of big risks right you know one is I am not going to get paid right away so the time value of money issue for them is a challenge I mean we paid over 70 years what happens with inflation rate Etc I drove at that time I'm not gonna be paid for all the second is you're now relying

on that company to perform over that period of time in order to be able to pay you out right at the time before 2014 before they introduced the tax incentive that set of risks was too much for owners to choose to do it and so they they reluctantly those who really cared about this stuff would sell to a third party just because it was you know too much fun they would have all their money tied up in these things any entrepreneur Knows by the time you get to sell these companies you often have nothing other than the company is your main asset so what they did in 2014 is they uh decided to waive the capital gains tax for owners that sold at least a majority so at least 51 of their company to their employees through this

trust and that followed on the US where they have a very similar program you know it was good incentive and it was enough for now about five to ten percent of UK companies sell to their employees through an eot every year up from zero right so that is a that is a substantial and useful amount of the economy that is now being diverted to a broader share ownership in the UK in the US it's a smaller percentage more like one to two percent of American transactions because their structures a bit more complicated so but the incentive was required in the U.S even after 1974 when they created this there wasn't a lot of individual

owners of privately held companies who used it until the mid 80s when they introduced a similar tax incentive so it's pretty clear from those two countries that some sort of incentive is required I mean we know from the UK with certainty that some sort of incentive is required in order for people to use these trusts and the reason why you know in the UK was a coalition government that brought this into place in the U.S there's other tax advantages outside of the one I just mentioned brought into place by Republicans and Democrats the reason why this has been so popular from a public policy perspective is the outcomes are so good and they've been very well studied so we know that you know employer companies tend to be more resilient in recessions they lay off fewer people they default on their debt more often they grow faster all of the

things that you would want to be true and they pay more um the benefits are better everything that you want to be true about the the companies that are powering the economy are true about employee-owned companies and so because of that outcome the governments in the US and the UK have been willing to invest in incentives to create more of them the um I mean it's interesting you know besides the fact that it works which is the number one reason you should do something the simple fact is from a public policy standpoint like yeah I can get the negatives of wait a sec we're letting business owners basically cash out and not paying tax on on these you know windfall gains I get that being negative but given where it's going right and

we're talking about look every business has it's everything from Executives down to Frontline staff running close to minimum wage depending you know or minimum wage depending on what kind of stuff you're talking about and to think that it is democratically and equally basically spread out amongst those people it is it's one of those stories where it's like how do you say no to this right like I can almost imagine some companies basically or some very concerned certain parties basically say okay the the company has to look like this right it has to have X percentage of basically not it can't just be a high-end consulting company where everybody earns like 300 000 a year or something like that right it can't be transferring from the wealthy to the wealthy right I can see I can see

someone trying to game that right or or legislation preventing that sort of gaming but for the vast majority of businesses in this world the vast vast overwhelming majority we're not talking about businesses that look like that very few businesses look like that so I think the reality is that when you actually think about who the net benefactors of this are this is anyone anyone who grew up without money knows these are their parents these are their their aunts and uncles these are these are the people in their community that are the net benefactors of being business owners who never would have been a business owner and there's something that's I think also that is more incentivizing or psychologically different than owning shares through an Esau plan because people just treat that as a form of compensation when you have

this kind of like hey I have a stake in this company I don't even cash out until I leave like this is this is yeah this is me I'm part of this yeah I mean look I think the fundament from a public policy perspective the most important point is that these companies are going to be sold to somebody right it's not like this is like the option is the owner lives until they're 300 and keeps the company and exactly they're going to sell it to some and we have to start thinking about how we want the economy to be owned I mean we've been entirely ignoring that for the last three or four decades and as a result we're becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands we are seeing the rise of

ownership by people who are buying and selling companies every three or four years and these are not useful ways to if you had said to someone 30 years ago that we're going to work towards a company or an economy where companies are bought and sold every five years by people who never even go to the company well you just said that is a terrible outcome but that's where we're going where we're learning clear right my booking a super clean or tearing apart or sell it off for pieces or yeah like I mean like you know look you're not and it's an old story right Jason it's a story it's a story that's as long as like it's not like this is something new God robber barons you name it go back to the beginning of capitalism but but the reality is is that like look and we're

not I'm not about to paint private Equity with a with a terrible negative brush over this right like there's plenty you do not do that sort of thing but but there is something that you said about yeah you know what again they buy these things the clock is tickling there's a five-year window they want out yeah and they want out at a higher price than what they paid and they're highly leveraged for it so how do you do that through cutting a cost through basically restructuring the company through things that might be short-term again if five years is not a long-term incentive right so the it's not support you know we can see plenty of studies and criticisms of the fact that wall Street's obsessed with three month intervals right private Equity is obsessed with five-year intervals yeah employees should be you know are concerned with their careers and I think that there's something to be said about that idea of there's this

concept of permanent Capital now within the permanent within the private it's a very long-term duration and how you can Steward a business better that way I think this is completely in line with that well so so the best story about it in Canada is a company called freezing so this is one of the best stories I mean the you know there's lots of Palestine PCL there's probably like 60 or 70 of these in Canada you know versus the thousands and the other places but um in Altona Manitoba a family reasons managed to find a way through kind of you know they've had to like do a ton of administration over the past you know 40 or 50 years but they have turned a company called freedoms Publishing Company one of the second largest I think it's the second largest in Canada

one of the top two into an employee owned companies 100 owned by their employees Altona is a town of four thousand people this company employs 600 people every year they get calls from private Equity firms in the U.S they get calls from other Publishers in the U.S who want to buy the company but because their employee owned they don't sell last year every employee all this the average employee at reasons got a a profit share of ten thousand dollars right and this is you know where the average salary is probably around 50 Grand and that happens every year at freezes so you have a you know you have

exactly what we have decided to give up on in Canada right if you talk to someone about the factory in the small town people say well that is that's gone that's history that's inevitable they're all going to be Consolidated it's never going to it's hap like if this thing exists right in this small Border Town in southern Manitoba and can exist in all sorts of communities and this is part of the answer to getting there we have to start coming up we can't just Lament The inevitability of the destruction of the economy we need things that help us not destroy the economy and this is one of those things and do we need to put a little bit of money behind it yeah we do but the alternative is bad right or at least it's bad in a lot of cases right I know

this is the need of services in need of of of a body of people and that's fine right services in need of shareholders that is capitalism but you know the if you if you want to shift your focus to the concept of stakeholder capitalism which is more common in Europe and you worry about the entire ecosystem now I get I've heard interesting debates on this and the value of that the framework and I think that there's no perfect system but to basically create a system whereby the stakeholder primary stakeholders outside of the consumers which is the employees basically have their needs basically being addressed as a primary reason for the existence of the business is not a negative like that's a net positive if that option exists totally I mean one a nice example

I'd like to talk about is there's a grocery chain called Longos in the Toronto area and it is exactly the kind of company like the the longo family family owning family owned and operated we're getting to the end of their ownership of that they didn't have another generation who was going to take it on they they need to sell it in the U.S there are a ton of grocery chains basing exactly that situation that have sold to esops and are now owned by their employees what do Bongos do they sold to Empire one of the three main consolidators of Canada eventually in the long enough time I will only be one company in this country you know like so so what do we want like what are we after here and are we going

to be willing to put some political will right behind shifting away from that out yeah I mean you know and we had an example happen several years ago where you know Heinz pulled out of Leamington after a hundred years exactly yeah that that was largely saved by the fact French has started manufacturing out of there but one of these things where I think there was a I can't remember correctly if the community bought out the plan itself but you know that's that's an example of something where if they had taken ownership of that plan they could have just contracted with multiple people they ended up basically ending up almost in a sure a employee sharonship trust type of situation over the use of the plant asset itself so so it's it's one of these things where hey we see real life examples and and you

know what that plant is viable right it just wasn't as it wasn't what Hines needed it wasn't going to work for Heinz but that is still still powering the community yeah I mean I think that's exactly right and once we give in to the idea that there's an inevitability around financial decisions made by a large companies or financial investment firms that is a that's giving into something that we don't need to give into right there's no reason to give up and you know it just it just it requires like I say some political will to set up other options I mean these are owners who often want something different right like I was talking to a the owner of an engineering company aerial-based engineering company who does business all over the world and he's he called me

said look I've been following your work I was really looking forward to this employee ownership trust but I just I've read about what has been proposed and I don't even I don't get it he said you know I'm not eligible because it requires me to be focused only in Canada and so I got these operations all over the world and so so that's weird to me there's the governance structure that I don't understand at all like I don't I don't get it right like and it seems crazy and completely different from what I've seen elsewhere and he said and I see that there's no incentives which I was surprised by he said you know I don't the incentive isn't going to make it break it for me but but given the other things and the incentive I you know I can't see using it and that's heartbreaking because he's he said my only other options he's like in his

early 70s or to sell to private Equity or to sell uh to a competitors competitors from Europe okay let's zoom out let's have a discussion about the Canadian experience so what happened to Canada with the place from this let's look at the bigger picture what happened in the implementation of this in Canada what did they do and where does it fall short so we've been working on this the last three or four years the expectation was we were going to see as a movement in this last budget and we did and so they they proposed there is proposed legislation so it's pretty well developed plan and it included some surprises right so one of those a lot of surprises yeah well you know look I I we can talk about the whole how it got here as well but but where we ended up was

The Proposal includes an eligibility requirement that I understand to mean um 90 of business assets need to be used need to be Canadian owned or it needs to be based in Canada at all times it's similar to the candidate control private corporations yeah it's intended to mimic or I think it exactly mimics the requirement for the long-term capital gains exemption correct yeah it has a governance structure that asks the employees to elect a trustee that will govern the trust it asks for that to happen prior to the transaction we'll talk about why that's an issue and then it has re-elections every five years after that so the employees now have a

democratic say in who governs in the trustee who is responsible for the trust and that's that's new no one's ever tried that before so that's a new experiment that we have concerns about and finally included only a very small incentive where now if you sell your company and get paid over time you can postpone your capital gains tax over five years you gotta have to pay 20 a year or five years that's the minimum that currently exists and and they've extended it for the purpose of these trusts to 10 years so you have to you have to pay at least 10 a year for 10 years if you're paid over time and so it kind of accounts for the fact that you're going to get paid over time here but doesn't provide any reduction in capital gains tax just defers into match

payments so again much less than you're seeing so in the US and the UK thanks no thanks in a lot of ways it's basically saying okay we'll allow these things to exist but we have really created zero in tax incentive other than the fact that we get you to let you let you delay the bill another five years potentially now let's be clear on this that potential deferral is basically again from five years where you're paying 20 20 20 20 to 10 years or you're paying 10 10 10. that only applies if the payments come in that it's the less it's the greater of payment or the deferral uh escrow so the reality is is that if these if the thing can be financed entirely by debt up

front there is zero deferral to this yep no that's true that's true you know if it can be defined it's entirely up front that's not a bad result for the owner but but I agree with you it means it there's nothing here it's not a bad result but it's not an incentive Beyond benevolence for lack of a better term but for sure that's where it is right now and it just before we get into the details just step back to give the government some credit right no one has ever looked at this you know in the last 40 years this thing has existed in the US no Canadian government has ever put this in a budget bill so I think those on the political side earnestly and genuinely want this to be good it fell to its maybe appropriate places or relatively low priority among all of

their other priorities on the political side and fell to the bureaucracy to create it and that's where the issue occurred right I I do believe that the government wants there to be a good employee ownership trust me and the ship hasn't seen right so we are now in have a few months at consultation period this bill won't be introduced to be passed until probably October November either you know in another budget act not supposed to be in place until January so we have some time to fix some of these problems and I do believe they generally want to but the first step was not particularly great so to your point there's no real incentive there's a new and untried Democratic governance

approach which sounds great but if you actually walk through some of the potential scenarios is quite scary frankly for the employees yeah and and of course eliminates a number of companies that have been super successful in the US and the UK like exporting companies International companies are not allowed to participate which then that is frankly more than anything else created anger among our constituency companies who are very successful Canadian companies who have been told to go do your best overseas compete globally cannot participate in this program well and I think it's you know and these are already people who have to restructure their corporate structure if they were if they got it in time in order to qualify for Lifetime capital gains exemption prior to becoming prior potentially going offside

from the rules right so they've already had to do that they had to jump through a hoop in order to make sure that something that is that is afforded to a less successful business creating Less jobs is basically afforded to them right yeah and now now instead we're also saying that this other thing that would have been benevolent is basically off the table for them completely which is ridiculous and then in addition to that there is no net additional benefit other than benevolence quite honestly to basically put these in place and frankly like look I get again the messaging around giving successful business owners a big tax break right but I think that there's and and maybe maybe finances thinking is that well we already have the lifetime Chapel games exemption

that's going to be a million dollars shortly and we know people are multiplying this with family members that's probably enough well you can't make that assumption on multiplication but I think there's a lot of Territory between 100 tax-free and million dollar lifetime exemption like that's a that's a potential lot about real estate there that could basically be you know it doesn't have to be a hundred percent it could simply be on to whatever portion gets transferred to the employees up to a certain threshold or whatever else it is right like there's lots of room to play with this and to Simply make it just pay us slower if you get if you get paid slower right come on no well I mean look there's no so first of all if you sell it to a your competitor if you're

long goes and you saw the loblas you still get your lot from capital gains so there's no there's no additional benefit to this process over what you can do today and we did a survey which of we had 29 respondents from advisors to business owners and said you know this new thing what do you think how often is it going to be used and I think 25 of the 29 said never or sell them and in fact when we said if the owner was deeply committed to uh selling to their employees would you even use destruction and 27 of them said no they'd use an employee hold code or some other existing version so if you want to do a benevolent transfer to your employees

you can do that now that's not the point of this the point of this is to direct of the hundreds of thousands of businesses that are going to sell over the next 10 odd years is the Baby Boomers require to direct some of those businesses to us to an ownership structure that benefits workers and communities that's the point of this thing and to do that you need some form of incentive and you need a simple and reliable structure that was sustainable over time none of those things are true about the current proposal and I think it's important to stop on this sort of sustainable overtime business because the US and the UK have developed these indirect governance structures over time through a lot of trial and error we ignored them entirely like that we've

ignored that success entirely to create this elected trustee situation and let me kind of explain the potential downside here for workers so let's say an owner sells to their employer employees through this and and then five years later there's a there's an election for trustee you could have an enterprising m a lawyer go to that employee base and say listen you should elect me as your trustee because what I'm going to do is I'm going to sell the company and when I sell the company I'm going to distribute all the benefits to you the workers who are here today destroying all potential future value for workers of the future and rewarding an employee who'd been there say for 13 months the same way as you reward an employer who's been there for 30 years

right like and because most companies are comprised of people who've been there for less time right you you have kind of your veterans who've been there for a long time but mostly it's been people who've been there for less than five years you just need to win a democratic election first of all we don't know how those elections are supposed to take place hard enough to do it like a union vote now you got this new thing there's no rules that was hard enough and you're right so so you know I just there's all of these potential downside scenarios for workers created by something that I think they think sounds good but I really hope in the next version of this that is hunted out the window because we know how to do this right we have all this experience and all this stuff to follow we just

need to follow it it's yeah I mean it's and look I've been involved in policy before and I know sometimes and it's it's basically it's it gets kicked over to people who are in charge of certain understanding Canadian legal code and everything else and they don't necessarily have the awareness of what's worked elsewhere in other code or don't just or the experience that you have for example as an advocate for it and they think well okay this is how we'll make it work here without necessarily going to those steps and and that's where a lot of this stuff sometimes goes wrong is yeah you know misnomers misjudgment lack of awareness being told to get this done by a deadline and fortunately this deserves so much more attention so I you know like mend your efforts I support

them I hope that we can uh we can change this get rid of the troubling governance mechanism copy what does work and hopefully find ways to incentivize this because frankly it's where's the downside the downside is yeah you give some tax break to a successful business owner but then again I will be the first to argue we don't give enough tax breaks to successful business owners because small business drives the economy and this is a small business planning podcast but yes I hate mail but the and then but to the net specific benefit of not large corporations or PE firms or anything else but to the net benefit of everyone down to Frontline service workers of of those employees of those

of those companies like to the right down to the janitors employed by them hard to see how this isn't a massive social win and as you said there's all kinds of data that shows that it absolutely is look and there's a reason why in the US and the UK politicians go to employable companies all the time to cut ribbons and make announcements and it's because of how successful they are and how wonderful they are for people and communities we want Canada to be a country of altonas with a bunch of freedoms in those communities building better communities and this is a way to get and look I I think everything you said about policy was right Jason I think I think they are good people there trying to do the right thing I think

their initial stab was probably driven by a lot of the deadline based stuff you just said I just it's a it's actually quite a complex idea it sounds simple but when you get into the details it's quite complex and I really am hoping and yeah I'm really hoping that they put the effort into figuring out you know what's worked in other places and give us the type of program that can lead us to a number of altonas and a number of reasons here in Canada excellent Sean thanks so much for taking the time for this where can people find you and hopefully throw their support behind this initiative well we have a website uh this has been you know what I didn't mention is is there's been a Groundswell of support behind this we have the the Canadian employee or employee ownership Coalition was created only in January

you can see that employee Dash ownership dot CA and a number of leaders from across the country have stepped up to say we really need this in Canada and then our work is at socialcapitalpartners.ca but for this for the this the context of this conversation employee.ownership.ca is a place where you can learn a lot more about you know how we can get this structure in place and the types of people who are advocating for here in Canada excellent thank you so much for your time thank you Jason so that was my interview with John shell I hope you enjoyed that if you are someone who is interested in this concept and can see the merits of it by all means please lend your voice and support to it because frankly there's still time to fix this before it gets into law I mean there's always time

to fix it afterwards it's always best to do it right the first time as always if you enjoyed this podcast please review on Apple podcast SoundCloud Stitcher Spotify or wherever you get Podcast and until next time take care to you by Woodgate Financial an award-winning financial planning firm catering to high net worth individuals business owners and their families to learn more go to woodgate.com you can subscribe to this podcast on Apple podcast Stitcher Google Play and Spotify or find more episodes at jasonparera.ca you can even ask Siri Alexa or Google