By Doug Smith
In 1952 a group of St. Boniface residents banded together to create the Co-operative d’Habitation de St. Boniface. It was what was known as a ‘building co-operative’, since the members would build homes co-operatively, but once the mortgage was paid, the co-operative would be dissolved, and the former members would own their homes individually. (OGHC is a continuing co-op, since the co-operative continues even after the mortgage is discharged.) At a cost of approximately $300,000, the Co-operative d’Habitation de St. Boniface built thirty-two wood-frame houses on a two-acre site that they dubbed Cabana Place (for a local Catholic clergyman) on the edge of St. Boniface’s industrial zone. Lawns, sidewalks, and landscaping would cost an additional $200,000. The project’s development was guided by the Reverend Adélard Couture, the director of social work for the diocese of St. Boniface. According to a news report, every home was sold to “factory, industrial and railroad workers in the area.” [1]
Drawing of Cabana Place.
The Co-operative d’Habitation’s history can be traced directly back to a Roman Catholic adult-education and social movement that has come to be known as the Antigonish Movement, since it was directed by staff at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Historian Gregory Baum described the Antigonish Movement as the “most original and the most daring response of Canadian Catholics to the social injustices during the Depression.” [2] At the heart of the movement were two cousins from the Maritimes: J.J. Tompkins and M.M. Coady. Both men were priests and had studied adult education and co-operatives in Europe. As a vice-president of St. Francis Xavier, Tompkins initiated what he termed “People’s Schools,” in which adults would come to Antigonish (and later Glace Bay) for two months of study.
Following a conflict with his superiors at the university, Tompkins was dispatched to the impoverished fishing district of Little Dover. Having witnessed the exploitation of the fishing families, both as producers and consumers, Tompkins initiated community-based adult education intended to bring about social change. The instrument of the change was to be co-operatives. When the St. Francis Xavier Extension Department was created in 1928, Coady became its first director. He used his position as an institutional support for community education work that Tompkins was pioneering. The movement was both a response to capitalist crisis and growing working-class interest in socialism, which Tompkins and Coady, in keeping with papal teaching, abhorred.
The movement employed a three-step process: an initial mass meeting at which an outside speaker, often Coady delivered a talk intended, in Coady’s words, to “shatter” people’s pre-existing views and open them up to an “honest search for truth.” This was followed by the creation of a study group: it examined local issues and developed solutions that local people could implement. This almost invariably led, in the third step, to the creation of a co-operative. By 1937 the Antigonish movement had played a central role in the establishment of over 140 credit unions, 39 co-op stores, 11 co-op fish plants, and 17 co-op lobster factories. [3] The following year would mark an historic development, the co-operative construction of eleven homes for miners in Reserve Mines, Nova Scotia.
Tompkins had been transferred to the Reserve Mines mining community just outside Glace Bay in 1935. [4] The poor quality of the housing that the mine owners provided their workers had been a disgrace of longstanding. During a bitter strike in 1926, the Toronto Star dispatched the artist Lawren Harris to Glace Bay to provide reports and illustrations of the struggle. The images that he produced reflected his view that the mining towns were “drab and dreary and bedraggled even on a sunny day. The miners’ houses are in monotonous rows on either side of beaten earthen lanes.” [5]
Lawren Harris drawing of mining life in Glace Bay.
The following decade brought little improvement. The company houses in Reserve Mines had no basements, no indoor plumbing, were drafty, hard to clean, poorly repaired and sited on small lots that were near impossible to garden. If a miner lost his job through injury or an economic downturn, he and his family could find themselves homeless. [6]
Joseph Laben, a miner in Tompkins’s parish who had helped form the town’s credit union in 1935, placed a recommendation that there be a housing co-op in the church question box. Following the inevitable mass meeting, a study group of eleven miners was established. For months, they studied law, business regulation, bookkeeping, and project management. These studies were led by Mary Ellicott Arnold, who, along with her life partner Mabel Reed, had been visiting Nova Scotia to learn about co-operatives. They may not have had much to learn: she and Reed had already helped develop a 13-storey 67-unit housing co-operative in New York. A Quaker by faith, Arnold had remarkable business acumen coupled with a commitment to providing low-cost housing in a way that addressed the needs of people who were being housed. In her work in New York she pioneered the use of surveys and questionnaires to ensure that all potential members, as opposed to the most talkative, had input.
Arnold and Reed were so intrigued by the prospect of the proposed co-operative housing project that they volunteered to stay and help in its development. They stayed for over two years and Arnold was eventually hired by St. Francis Xavier. Under Arnold’s direction, the co-operative lobbied successfully for changes in provincial legislation that would allow the co-operative to receive low-cost loans originally intended only for private developers, got the province to reduce the required cash contribution, oversaw the study groups, which included the budgeting, designing, building of scale models of the houses, and even a test house that Arnold and Reed lived in one winter.
Mary Arnold and Co-operative Housing Study Group
The miners did much of the construction themselves, working evenings and weekends, contributing twenty-five per cent of the costs through sweat equity. One historian wrote of Arnold that “it is highly unlikely that the new housing program would have developed without her determination and assistance.” The miners certainly thought so, they renamed their co-operative after her, while the development itself became known as Tompkinsville. When the miners moved into their new homes, which had been built on land the local Catholic parish had originally intended for a cemetery, in 1938, they named the development Tompkinsville. By 1973 building co-operatives had constructed over 5,500 housing units in Nova Scotia. [7]
There is a direct link between the Antigonish Movement of the 1930s and the creation of a house-building co-operative in St. Boniface in the early 1950s. In 1937 Father Couture, then a priest in rural Manitoba, was instructed by the Bishop of St. Boniface to establish caisse populaires (credit unions) in Franco-Manitoban parishes. It was thought these economic institutions would strengthen local communities and stop the exodus of rural Franco-Manitobans to Winnipeg. Couture was reluctant, having already been involved in a rural cheese co-op in La Broquerie that had failed, but the bishop was insistent. Couture gained the support of the then agriculture minister, and future premier, Douglas Campbell. With provincial funding, Couture and Campbell travelled to Antigonish and Quebec to study the existing caisse populaires and the broader Catholic co-operative movement firsthand. Campbell was sufficiently impressed by what he saw to sponsor Manitoba’s first credit union act on his return.
Couture went on to organize the establishment of a network of caisses populaire in rural Manitoba, becoming known as the “father of Caisses Populaires in Manitoba.”
Adélard Couture’s book on Caisses Populaire.
In carrying out this work, Couture followed the St. Francis Xavier model: a lecture, usually in a church basement, a series of study sessions to educate the community about the caisse, followed by a founding meeting. By 1945 were over 20 caisses populaires in rural Manitoba by 1945. [8]
Alexander, Anne McDonald. The Antigonish Movement: Moses Coady and Adult Education Today . Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1997.
Balian, Oannes Sarkis. The Caisse Populaire: A French Canadian Economic Institution in Manitoba. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Anthropology Papers, September 1975, revised 1980.
Baum, Gregory, Catholics and Canadian Socialism: Political Thought in the Thirties and Forties. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1980.
Baum, Gregory. “The relevance of the Antigonish Movement today.” Journal of Canadian Studies, Volume 15, Issue 1, Spring 1980, 110–117.
Coady, M. M., and Alexander Fraser Laidlaw. The Man from Margaree: Writings and Speeches of M. M. Coady, Educator/Reformer/Priest . Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971.
Harris, Richard. “Flattered But Not Imitated: Co-operative Self-Help and the Nova Scotia Housing Commission, 1936–1973, Acadiensis, XXXI, 1 (Autumn 2001), 103–128.
Lander, Dorothy. “Urban/Rural Border-Crossing: What Would Mary Ellicott Arnold Say.” Canadian Quaker History Journal, 76, 2011, 23–32.
Mifflen, Frank. “The Antigonish Movement: A Revitalization Movement in Eastern Nova Scotia.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston College, 1974.
Pitt, Antony. “Co-operative Housing: The Social Imperative.” Masters’ Thesis, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, 1994.
[1] “Co-op plan raises 25 homes,” Winnipeg Free Press, October 10, 1953; Frank Mifflen, “The Antigonish Movement: A Revitalization Movement in Eastern Nova Scotia,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston College, 1974, 131.
[2] Gregory Baum, Catholics and Canadian Socialism: Political Thought in the Thirties and Forties, Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1980, 202.
[3] Frank Mifflen, “The Antigonish Movement: A Revitalization Movement in Eastern Nova Scotia,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston College, 1974, 8–22; Anne McDonald Alexander, The Antigonish Movement: Moses Coady and Adult Education Today , Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1997, 68, 139, 173.
[4] Anne McDonald Alexander, The Antigonish Movement: Moses Coady and Adult Education Today , Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1997, 91–92.
[5] David Frank, “Miners’ Houses: Lawren Harris in Glace Bay, Active History, https://activehistory.ca/2020/06/miners-houses-lawren-harris-in-glace-bay/, accessed August 14, 2020.
[6] Antony Pitt, “Co-operative Housing: The Social Imperative,” Masters’ Thesis, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, 1994, 151–159.
[7] Frank Mifflen, “The Antigonish Movement: A Revitalization Movement in Eastern Nova Scotia,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Boston College, 1974, 132–134; Antony Pitt, “Co-operative Housing: The Social Imperative,” Masters’ Thesis, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, 1994, 151–159; Richard Harris, “Flattered But Not Imitated: Co-operative Self-Help and the Nova Scotia Housing Commission, 1936-1973”, Acadiensis,XXXI, 1 (Autumn 2001), 103-128; Dorothy Lander, “Urban/Rural Border-Crossing: What Would Mary Ellicott Arnold Say.” Canadian Quaker History Journal, 76, 2011, 23–32.
[8] Oannes Sarkis Balian, The Caisse Populaire: A French Canadian Economic Institution in Manitoba, Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Anthropology Papers, September 1975, revised 1980, 35–40.