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Demand for action: false Canadian ownership claims and lack of Canadian-owned products

To Whom It May Concern,


I recently went to your website to see whether Co-op yet offers a toothpaste made by a Canadian-owned company. It does not. Canadian-owned companies like Green Beaver (Hawkesbury, ON), Nelson Naturals (Nelson, BC), Druide (Pointe-Claire, QC), Attitude (Montreal), and Change Toothpaste (Edmonton) all make toothpaste today. There is no excuse for Co-op not carrying at least one of them.


Prime Minister Carney has stated that Canada is now "at war" with the United States following the collapse of trade talks. An economic war is still a war. Co-op likes to remind me that holding a membership number makes me an owner of this co-operative — and as an owner, I'm not staying quiet about it.


This isn't new for me. When Trump was first elected, I began changing my purchasing habits, and by the end of his first term I had moved most of my internet hosting to Canada. When I found out that SaskTel was using Microsoft Exchange for their email service, I moved away from it to a Canadian host. I understand Exchange is built on an open standard, but it was developed by Microsoft, and it's unclear how the US CLOUD Act might affect organizations using that service — so I stopped using it. I raise this to be clear that I hold myself to the same standard I'm asking Co-op to meet.


First: Co-op does not carry a toothpaste made by a Canadian-owned company, despite several being readily available. This needs to change.


Second: your flyer places a maple leaf symbol next to Tylenol. The Tylenol you sell may be manufactured in Guelph, Ontario, but it is not made by a Canadian-owned company. Putting a maple leaf beside it is false advertising, plain and simple. The same flyer places a maple leaf beside Pepsi and Coca-Cola products as well, and neither of those is a Canadian company either. I am not asking you to reconsider this — I am telling you it needs to stop. Remove the maple leaf from any product that is not made by a Canadian-owned company, full stop.


Third: I have a package of Co-op-brand rice in front of me right now with "www.storebrands.coop" printed on it. When I tried to visit that site, my web browser blocked it as insecure and would not let me proceed. I run my own web security setup and block a significant amount of tracking from major US tech companies, so having a site printed directly on your packaging get flagged and blocked is concerning, not reassuring. I looked into it further, to see if it was something on my end blocking it, and it does not appear to be; but what I did find was that the domain's nameservers are run through Cloudflare, a US company. CIRA (cira.ca), Canada's own domain and DNS authority, offers Anycast DNS hosting as a Canadian-based alternative. I want to know why a Canadian, member-owned co-operative is routing its DNS through US infrastructure instead of a Canadian provider, and why a domain you own is throwing a security error to the members who trust it. I expect a direct, specific answer — not a vague reassurance.


I am telling you this, not asking you. I expect a response detailing what Co-op is going to do about each of these three points, not a form letter thanking me for my feedback.


Sincerely,

Reann Legge

I use the pronouns she/her

reannlegge.ca