by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Douglas Jack, 52 - an otherwise progressive and agreeable West Island soul - is looking for a fight. He's seeking somebody to try to disprove his theory that cooperative enterprises need an immediate philosophical overhaul. So far, he reports, few are willing to put up their dukes.

Jack is part of a small team of Montrealers working to set up a 100-unit housing co-op based on the principle of time-based accounting. Rather than just rely on the goodwill of participants, the idea is that the co-op participants be remunerated for their work within the residential community in a corresponding number of shares, which would mean that the more you work, the more input you have in how the organization is run.

Jack says that the lack of direct reward leads to the persistent demise of cooperatives. "I've worked in co-ops for 20 years and they've always had big problems," he says.

In Jack's system, a wide variety of tasks, from repairs and maintenance to cooking, cleaning and babysitting, would translate into more voting power.

In his explanation, Jack invokes good and bad examples of cooperative systems in the Hanseatic League, the Iroquois Federation, the Communist revolutions in Russia and China, as well as such innovative corporations as the Tembec forest giant and Dofasco Steel.

"Typically, co-ops don't account for the labours of their members," he says. "Things are done in a volunteer style so people invest themselves for years and get no particular equity or recognition. It leads to the paradox that somebody comes tomorrow and has the same rights as someone who's been there for 20 years."

Jack says his efforts at changing conventional wisdom have been fruitless. "We've tried to get the co-op movement [especially the Caisse populaire Desjardins, a big co-op funder in Quebec] to have a look at this, but they've refused any debate or dialogue on the subject," he says.

After being involved with a pan-continental food co-op that went belly-up in the early 1990s, Jack stumbled across another approach. "I was reading about the Inca of Peru, and their system involved time-based accounting," he says. "They didn't have money in their pocket, but they paid for services in shares."

Jack's gang is shopping for a downtown space to transform into their reformed co-op model. So far, however, the project is still entirely theoretical, although he is interested in setting up his housing co-op either in Point St-Charles or Griffintown. Local engineer and inventor Dagwood Radicevic has offered his St-Lazare farm for a rural version of the same project.

Sculptor Marcus Macdonald is also on board, but recognizes the resistance to the time-based accounting model in traditional cooperative institutions. "To a lot of people in alternative movements, accounting is the devil's practice," he says. "They think of it as the tool corporations employ to rape the land, but they're just abstract techniques we need to appropriate in a proper way."

But rewarding work is essential to continuity, he believes. "If you don't give value to things and if you don't count and assess contributions, then in your ignorance you're just wasting that energy," says Macdonald.

By validating and encouraging their efforts, it's hoped, the system would boost morale. "Right now in co-ops, it's one member, one vote," says Jack. "So it doesn't matter what you do, there's no contribution you could make that would be recognized. That model leads to crime and drugs and other profound problems in social housing because the system is totally passive."