Against the Grain: The Unusual Case of Saskatchewan's Credit Union Deposit Insurance Scheme

Abstract

"In this paper, I test the proposition that Saskatchewan’s deposit insurance scheme embodied until recently many of the features that Ostrum identified as key to the successful if seemingly improbable management of a common pool natural resource. Drawing on an initial review of archival material, published accounts and official documents, I propose that Saskatchewan’s scheme represents a socially-determined common good along the lines of the arguments found in Perilleux and Nyssens (2017), who show that co-operative financial institutions can be understood as human-made commons. That said, my research suggests that this deposit insurance scheme and its common-pool nature owed at least as much to government actions as it did to the credit unions that operated and mostly governed the scheme. Further, if Saskatchewan’s insurance scheme can be said to have evolved to a point where it more or less conformed to Ostrum’s design principles, then this may have some important implications for anticipating the consequences of what could happen as the deposit insurer gradually unwinds some of these design features, a situation that now seems to be happening."