Moses Coady - Criticisms

Criticisms

Biographer Michael Welton (Little Mosie from the Margaree: A Biography of Moses Michael Coady, 2001) depicts Coady as a flawed man. “Coady’s agonal last few years reflect, I think, a profound state of hubris. No one can be certain how Coady deceived himself into thinking that he had a divine mission to liberate the peoples of the world.” Welton compares this millenarian mindset to that of contemporaries Hitler and Stalin. He writes that although Coady tried to mask his feelings behind a veneer of faith in democracy and ordinary people, the veneer wore thin later in his life, and Coady’s faith in others was replaced by a sense of betrayal and a tendency towards manipulation.

Another recent biographer, Jim Lotz (The Humble Giant: Moses Coady, Canada's Rural Revolutionary, 2005) criticizes Coady for precisely the opposite flaw: his unwillingness or perhaps inability to confront political corruption and rent seeking in his home province. “Coady’s belief in the power of ideas to change the hearts and actions of men and women came up against … the petty, patronage-ridden political system in Nova Scotia in the 1930s.”

Lotz also documents the difficult relations between Coady and the Acadian co-operative movement. For example, the Rev. Alexandre Boudreau, a co-operative leader from the region of Chéticamp in Cape Breton claimed that Coady kept Acadians out of important positions in the Antigonish Movement.

And while acknowledging their debt to Coady and to the study club approach, Acadians felt like outsiders in the New Brunswick Credit Union League. This led to the emergence of a parallel Acadian federation in New Brunswick in 1946. Today, the credit union system in this officially bilingual province has over twice the market penetration of the system in Nova Scotia. Its performance is largely driven by the 200,000 member Mouvement des caisses populaires acadiennes.

In Nova Scotia the dynamism of the movement did not survive Coady’s generation. Of 60,000 credit union members in Nova Scotia at the time of Coady’s death in 1959, nearly half joined the movement during the period 1932-39, when Coady was spending most of his time in the villages. By contrast, the mantle of Alphonse Desjardins was inherited by very able successors like Cyrille Vaillancourt whose leadership and innovation continued to drive the Quebec movement from one success to the next.

In the words of Coady’s protégé Alexander Laidlaw “if co-operatives are to be a true people’s movement, they must generate their own power from within.” As historian Ian MacPherson shows in the case of British Columbia (another very successful province), enduring success results from multi-faceted roots – which in that case included active participation by an active agricultural cooperative system, urban unions, farmers organizations, the Catholic Church, private welfare groups and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation.