Informative, insightful, and startlingly entertaining, The Co-operators is the untold story of the rise and fall and rise again of one of the most resilient and innovative forces for social and economic change Nova Scotia has ever created.

Veteran journalist Alec Bruce traces the journey of Nova Scotia’s credit unions and co-operative enterprises from their humble beginnings in early 20th-century resource-dependent communities to their modern influence as economic innovators in towns, cities, and suburbs across the province. Through the eyes of its bankers, entrepreneurs, and leaders – in particular, the Nova Scotia Co-operative Council – Bruce paints a rich and engaging tapestry of the “private sector” nobody knows.

Meet the dynamic, charismatic, and brilliantly flawed founders Moses Coady and Jimmy Tompkins giving average families hope and means to run their own businesses, create their own jobs, and build their own houses in the midst of the Great Depression. Read how the dream almost died during the post-World War II era, and later, suppressed by big government and business. Learn how the new generation of 21st-century Co-operative Council thinkers and doers have brought it back from the brink to speak compellingly and persuasively to a new generation of dreamers and doers.

As The Co-operators shows, the “movement” is alive and well and better than ever, illustrating how people not only can, but do, work together to solve, survive, and succeed; how they are creating educational and employment opportunities for aspiring young folks and entrepreneurial ventures that are both locally relevant and globally competitive; how they are tackling tough problems, like affordable housing and food security, with equal measures of compassion and practicality. The message is as powerful today as it was 75 years ago.

Multi-award-winning Halifax writer and author Alec Bruce has been a reporter, columnist, and editor for major Canadian newspapers and magazines for 40 years. He writes on business, politics, and society in the Atlantic provinces and is the author of three commissioned biographies of prominent Canadians and their families. Bruce holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

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