Community Building Basics:
The Roots
Of Community Building

The Antigonish Movement

A group of angry lobster fishermen building their own cannery and starting a fishing cooperative in the 1920's does not provide a simple model for our urban culture that is wired into technology in an international marketplace. But to ignore the lessons of these hardy workers would be a mistake.

Nova Scotia, the Canadian east coast maritime province, and Cape Breton Island on its northeast shore had fallen on its hardest times in the early 1920's. Huge fishing trawlers and wealthy conglomerates in Ontario and Quebec slowly drained the economic life from the fishermen. The inland steel mills and the mines were grinding to a halt. Within six years, 42% of the manufacturing jobs disappeared.

Little hope remained among the miners, loggers and fishermen until the arrival of two charismatic Catholic priests. With their encouragement, dispirited workers organized a fishing strike in a small fishing village on Canada Day, July 1st, 1927. It marked the beginning of the Antigonish Cooperative Movement.

Over the next twenty years Cape Bretoners organized Study Groups that met in meeting halls and homes. There they learned why they were paid so little for their cod and lobsters, why they paid so much for their mill housing and why they could get little help from the government. When they learned the answers, they joined together, organized their economic power and acted.

• The Dover Lobster Cooperative borrowed money and invested their own. By brokering lobsters, they turned a profit while every villager became a reader through the Study Groups.

• In Reserve Mines, Cape Breton villagers decided to answer the question, "Why can't we build our own houses?" Apparently, everyone laughed. With their own money and a loan from the government eleven families built their own homes. By 1953, thirty-five cooperatives had built four thousand homes; the first cooperative housing in North America was a success.

• With money being drained off to inland banks, the Cape Bretoners started people's banks or credit unions. By 1935 Nova Scotia had forty-five credit unions that invested their money back into the community.