AI Analysis: Canadian Co-operatives, selected financial data by categorical variables

Executive Summary

Canadian co-operatives demonstrated steady financial growth from 2016 to 2023, with total revenue rising 22.1% to $55.1 billion CAD and total assets expanding 24.6% to $47.3 billion CAD, even as the number of co-operatives declined slightly by 3.5% to 5,605. The sector's financial variables are tightly interconnected, with most key metrics showing correlation coefficients above 0.9, reflecting a cohesive and internally consistent industry structure. Data quality is strong, with no extreme outliers detected across the 8-year period, supporting reliable trend analysis across 18 co-operative characteristic categories.

Key Findings

• Total revenue for Canadian co-operatives grew 22.1% from $45.1 billion in 2016 to $55.1 billion CAD in 2023, while total assets expanded 24.6% from $38.0 billion to $47.3 billion over the same period.
• The number of active co-operatives declined modestly by 3.5%, falling from 5,808 in 2016 to 5,605 in 2023, suggesting sector consolidation alongside financial growth.
• Revenue and Sales are nearly perfectly correlated (r = 0.999), and 7 variable pairs in total exceed the r = 0.9 threshold, indicating that most financial metrics move in tight lockstep across the sector.
• Assets and Shareholder Equity are very strongly linked (r = 0.992), while Assets and Liabilities also correlate at r = 0.987, reflecting typical co-operative financing patterns where debt and equity grow together to fund asset expansion.
• Revenue is the largest and most variable financial metric, ranging from approximately $198 million to $63.7 billion with a median of ~$5.6 billion, highlighting significant size disparities across co-operative categories.
• Co-operative counts range from as few as 23 to 5,817 and employment from 0 to 104,040 (median ~16,234), underscoring the wide diversity in scale across the 18 characteristic categories tracked.
• No extreme outliers were detected using the 3×IQR method across key financial variables, confirming the dataset's consistency and reliability for trend and comparative analysis over the 2016–2023 period.