Community Wealth Building
March 12, 2026
A new kind of economy.
In our editorial on March 10, we promised to start exploring what people are doing to move away from the authoritarian decision-making politics that now dominates Nova Scotia and so much of the developed world. We will be looking for examples where people practice listening and inclusive decision-making; where communities are tackling problems at the level at which the problems occur; where everyone is committed to transparency and accountability; where communication with government is effective, bilateral, and based on mutual respect.
There is a name for the process of creating this kind of economy: it’s called Community Wealth Building (CWB). The basic idea is simple: to design an economy that keeps money, ownership, and decision-making power within a community, rather than allowing community wealth to drain away to outside corporations.
In the trade war that the U.S. launched against Canada, we all responded to the call to “buy Canadian.” Community Wealth Building extends this idea: the call is to “buy local.” By buying local, we move towards having a local circular economy where the same dollar gets earned and spent in the community, rather than flowing away to some distant corporation and its shareholders. Buying local can be as simple as picking up those screws you need to finish up a deck by going to the locally owned hardware store instead of going to some national or international big box store. We can also insist that the various levels of government, and our anchor institutions like hospitals, focus their spending as locally as possible, or at least within the province.
Private land ownership is one of the big obstacles to building more affordable housing. Community land trusts (CLTs) are a way for a community to take land out of the ever-soaring private real estate market and ensure that the control over the use of that land stays in the community. Community land trusts are relatively new to Nova Scotia. In the historic African Nova Scotia (ANS) community of Upper Hammonds Plains, the Upper Hammonds Plains Community Land Trust (UHPCLT) was founded to acquire land to build affordable rental housing. This CLT is the first in Canada exploring how land can be returned to descendants of the community’s original settlers. In August of 2025, the federal government announced a grant of $61.2 million for UHPCLT to build 136 co-op housing units.
Economic stress can be a big driver of changes that foster community wealth building. Nova Scotians responded to the economic devastation of the Great Depression in the 1930s by banding together to form hundreds of locally owned- and operated cooperatives, credit unions, and trade unions, a movement that came to be known as the Antigonish Movement after its two principal organizers out of Antigonish, the Rt. Rev. Doc. Moses Coady and Fr. Jimmy Tompkins. As we struggle today with a deteriorating economy, we can draw on that rich history of cooperative law and practice. You can see the importance of cooperatives in Sheet Harbour, where all the big commercial banks have pulled out. But the East Coast Credit Union is still there, so that people don’t have to spend hours driving to the nearest privately-owned banks.
Looking a little farther afield, earlier this year, the Scottish Parliament of Scotland passed the Community Wealth Building Bill in a ground-breaking political move that the struggling Nova Scotia government might want to consider adopting. According to a government website, the bill (once it receives Royal Assent) “will make sure there is consistent implementation of the CWB model of economic development across Scotland. It does this by requiring public bodies to work together to use their economic levers to deliver sustainable growth and promote resilience in our local economies.” (https://www.gov.scot/policies/cities-regions/community-wealth-building/). (Getting the three levels of government in Nova Scotia (HRM, provincial, federal) is notoriously difficult.)
