February 11, 2026:
Justin Cantafio, Director of Policy
Yesterday, Scotland passed the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Bill, the first national legislation of its kind in the world.
This is a big moment for anyone who’s spent years watching rural communities do more with less while wealth drains out through corporate concentration, external ownership, and supply chains that get more centralized, more fragile, and less accountable every year.
Scotland just put a practical framework into law. It makes something clear that many communities throughout Atlantic Canada have been saying for years. Public money should do public good, and communities should have real agency over their economic futures.
Community Wealth Building (CWB) is a proven and pragmatic approach to local economic development that focuses on keeping wealth rooted in communities by strengthening local ownership, using procurement as a local economic engine, supporting good jobs and fair wages, aligning capital with community agency and benefit, and treating land and buildings as shared assets. It’s about retooling the everyday mechanics of the economy so value circulates locally instead of being extracted from our communities.
Scotland’s passing of this historic legislation signals a shift in economic thinking, and opens the door for other jurisdictions to follow suit. That matters in Atlantic Canada because we’re living through the consequences of the old economic model in real time.
Atlantic Canada’s rural communities generate enormous value through land, labour, fisheries, farms, forests, healthcare, arts and culture, and public spending, yet too often those benefits flow outward. CLP’s import replacement research estimated regional “leakage” at at least 40%, meaning roughly four out of every ten dollars spent in the region leave and do no economic good locally. That’s not some character flaw of rural places. It’s a structural problem – the predictable outcome of consolidation, external ownership, and an economic model built for extraction rather than regional sufficiency and resilience.
In passing this CWB bill, Scotland has made it clear that they’re not waiting for trickle-down economics to start working. They’re aware that it’s done the opposite. Instead, Scotland has made the bold move to use the tools they already have, especially public procurement and public investment, to build local wealth. Just as importantly, CWB gives local communities the agency and policy backing to do the right thing for their communities, including aligning land use, ownership, production, housing, care, and essential services with local priorities, rather than chasing outside capital or short-term growth.
“Scotland just proved something a lot of communities in Atlantic Canada have felt for a long time. There’s nothing inevitable about economic leakage. If wealth is leaving your community, it’s because the rules and systems are set up that way, and we can change the rules. Community Wealth Building is a practical framework for doing exactly that.” Justin Cantafio, Director of Policy, Centre for Local Prosperity
Atlantic Canada already has a strong foundation and the ingredients to put CWB into action. Our opportunity lies in connecting the dots and scaling what’s already proven to work. We’ve got levers we can pull immediately.
We can treat procurement as an economic engine, not an administrative function. CLP’s procurement research found that surveyed local vendors re-spent $0.40 per contract dollar in-county and $0.78 in-province, implying a 1.78 multiplier for local contract dollars. That’s retained value without new spending, because the spending already exists.
“Atlantic Canada is primed for this work. We already have strong anchor institutions, major public spending, and place-based sectors. The opportunity now is to align procurement, ownership, land, investment, and finance so that public dollars circulate locally and start compounding.” Justin Cantafio, Director of Policy, Centre for Local Prosperity
We can rebuild the missing middle of our food economy and move toward real food sovereignty. That means aligning what we grow, process, and distribute with regional needs and markets, not just export-first supply chains. This includes radically investing in scale-appropriate aggregation, storage, inspection-ready processing, cold chain, and distribution infrastructure. Without this infrastructure, “buy local” will stay aspirational.
A serious approach to food sovereignty also requires protecting migrant and temporary foreign workers, whose labour underpins much of our food system but whose rights and security are too often treated as disposable. This also means taking farm succession seriously. Without coordinated support for land access, ownership transitions, and viable regional markets, we risk losing farms not because they aren’t productive, but because the next generation can’t afford to take them on.
The same logic applies to energy sovereignty. Community-level leadership in places like Berwick shows how local ownership of energy infrastructure can keep benefits circulating locally while reducing exposure to external shocks.
“If we’re serious about resilience, food and energy sovereignty, and a just transition, then we need less extraction and more local control. CWB is one of the most immediately usable strategies we have.” Justin Cantafio, Director of Policy, Centre for Local Prosperity
We can build and mobilize coalitions of anchor institutions, so hospitals, universities, municipalities, schools, and Crown agencies stop defaulting to bundled, centralized suppliers and start aligning their procurement targets and contracts in a way rural businesses, cooperatives, and non-profits can actually meet.
We can get serious about inclusive ownership and land. Cooperatives, community-owned enterprises, employee ownership transitions, Indigenous-owned businesses, and community land trusts aren’t niche ideas. They’re a practical way to keep farmland, housing, and community assets in long-term community benefit over the long term, including Black community wealth-building and land-based strategies defined by communities themselves.
In a time where Atlantic Canada’s key sectors are becoming increasingly corporatized, consolidated, and concentrated, CWB offers a community focus that encourages the growth and scaling of small to medium scale businesses and cooperatives to rebuild community wealth and reduce economic leakage. It also lines up with what more and more people mean when they talk about relocalization. Shortening supply chains where it makes sense, replacing imports with what we can make here at home, building our regional processing and production capacity, and reducing vulnerability to shocks.
It aligns with degrowth and sufficiency thinking in a very grounded way, by shifting away from “more and faster” to “enough, stable, and resilient”. This is especially true in foundational sectors like food, housing, healthcare, and energy, where stability matters more than endless growth. And CWB is a just transition tool because it gives us a way to move investment and decision-making closer to communities, while supporting fair work, local ownership, and sovereignty in multiple forms, including Indigenous economic sovereignty and Black community wealth-building.
CLP is ready to lead this in Atlantic Canada. We exist to bridge research and real-world implementation. We work at the intersection of policy design, on-the-ground projects, and institutional change, helping communities and public bodies move from ideas to repeatable practice. We identify and test levers, measure what’s working, and help partners put those levers to work . We’ve done applied research on import replacement and local procurement, and we work with communities, partners, and institutions to translate these ideas into actual change through procurement practices, community projects, and local wealth retention strategies.
Scotland has taken a bold stance to relocalize their economy. By adopting this historic legislation, Atlantic Canada now has a proof point. Now the question for Atlantic Canada is whether we’ll keep doing more of the same, or whether we’ll take the tools we already have and start building community wealth on purpose.
If you want to see how Community Wealth Building is getting implemented in Atlantic Canada, follow CLP on social media and subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll be sharing practical examples, policy opportunities, and implementation stories as they emerge across the region.
And if you want to work together, we want to hear from you! CLP welcomes conversations with governments, municipalities, anchor institutions, Indigenous governments and organizations, Black-led community initiatives, cooperatives, social enterprises, and rural leaders who want to turn CWB into a real implementation agenda in Atlantic Canada.
Our rural communities deserve better than more of the same, and now we have a clear path forward.
See our press release below.
For Inquiries please contact
Justin Cantafio, Director of Policy, Centre of Local Prosperity
justin@centreforlocalprosperity.ca