Ownership Matters: A Canadian Policy Agenda for Community Ownership of Wealth-Generating Assets

Hachigian and Scale Collaborative used a SSHRC grant to convene stakeholders to inform policy innovations that are needed to support community ownership of wealth-generating assets in Canada.

The COVID crisis and resulting economic climate have exacerbated systems of extraction, displacement, and divestment that have long hollowed out local economies and disempowered communities. While alternatives to the concentrated and extractive ownership practices of private equity investors and large corporations exist, such as co-operatives, community interest companies, and employee-owned businesses (Mair & Rathert, 2021; Nicholls, 2010; Spicer, 2022), significant challenges stand in the way of scaling these more democratic and community-based forms of ownership and control of the economy (Dubb, 2016; Spicer, 2020; Spicer, 2022).

Innovative public policy initiatives aimed at enabling and incentivizing more democratic forms of ownership that build wealth for communities are emerging across the globe, but significantly less attention has been paid to questions of ownership of the economy by Canadian policymakers. To be sure, cooperative and social enterprise movements in regions such as Quebec, Alberta, and BC are vibrant and well-established. And at the national level, civil society organizations have advocated for a national policy framework for employee ownership and are piloting community wealth-building models and advancing supportive ecosystems for social enterprises. But compared to other jurisdictions, such as the UK legislation that gives priority to community organizations to purchase wealth-generating assets, and innovative legal structures in the US that allow communities to own wealth-generating assets in perpetuity, community forms of ownership in Canada remain dependent on the initiatives of civil society actors and lack a supportive and cohesive policy environment.

The overall goal of the proposed outreach activities was to convene academics and community leaders representing diverse and vibrant place-based initiatives to inform policy innovations that support community ownership of wealth-generating assets in Canada. Specifically, the objectives of the outreach activities are to (i) catalyze local (BC-based) policy initiatives to advance community ownership opportunities in the Vancouver Island region; (ii) advance a distinctly Canadian approach to community ownership and wealth-building that is grounded in local knowledge and contexts; and, (iii) inspire community economic development leaders to bring an ownership lens to their initiatives to create more enduring impacts for communities.

The first outreach phase included a virtual speaker series, and the development of resources to showcase evidence and trends on community ownership. Building on this foundation for understanding why ownership of wealth-generating assets matters, the second phase hosted a two-day in-person workshop featuring a series of academic presentations and interactive roundtable and plenary sessions to explore issues such as overcoming legal and regulatory path dependencies and identifying specific policy initiatives that could be adapted both in local contexts and nationally to transform systems that hold wealth inequality in place.

The outreach activities built on policy research funded by a Vancouver Foundation Systems Change Grant and participants' research and practice in this area. For more information, please see the post-convening paper, available at https://ownershipmatters.ca/post-convening.