Moses Michael Coady (3 January 1882 – 28 July 1959) was a Roman Catholic priest, adult educator and co-operative entrepreneur best known for his instrumental role in the Antigonish Movement. Credited with introducing "an entirely new organizational technique: that of action based on preliminary study" to the co-operative movement in Canada, his work sparked a wave of co-operative development across the Maritimes and credit union development across English Canada. Due to his role and influence, he is often compared to Alphonse Desjardins in Québec. The influence of the movement he led spread across Canada in the 1930s and by the 1940s and 1950s, to the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
Early years
Born into a large Irish Catholic family on a farm in the Margaree Valley of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Moses was the eldest boy in a family of twelve. As a youth he was very concerned at the scale of outmigration from the valley: young men and women leaving for the steel mills and coal mines, or taking up jobs as domestics in the "Boston States". He determined he would get a good education so he could help people make their farms more profitable and give them a reason to stay on the land.
Coady would draw on an unusual combination of gifts, having ‘the soul of a poet’ and ‘the mind of a mathematician’. After graduating top of his class at ‘St. FX’ (St. Francis Xavier University) in Antigonish in 1905, Coady was persuaded by his first cousin Jimmy Tompkins to enter the priesthood. He followed Tompkins to Rome, where he studied theology and philosophy.
Moses Coady lived in Havre Boucher during the early 1900s and served as the communities Parish Priest for 8 years. He is accounted for on the 1903 Census as Moses Codie.
Fighting a "weird pessimism"
After his ordination in Rome in 1910, Coady began teaching at St. FX. He put on special classes for students at risk of failing, and prided himself on being able to teach maths to anyone. He honed his considerable oratorical skills and developed a talent for making complex concepts easily understood.
Emigration from Nova Scotia continued, and Coady fought against a kind of "weird pessimism (that) so benumbed everybody that nothing has been attempted to break the spell." In 1921 he helped organize the province's school teachers. Typically earning about $35 a month, four out of five were young women who lost their jobs as soon as they married. At a meeting of the teachers’ fragile union in Truro that year he urged action and was elected secretary-treasurer. He spent much of the next 3 years expanding support for the union and founding/editing the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Bulletin.
The defining moment in Coady's career came when he testified before a Canadian government commission in 1927. Drawing on his own experience and that of other Movement leaders like Jimmy Tompkins and Hugh MacPherson (an early co-operative pioneer) he maintained that the local economy could be revitalized if the right type of learning was cultivated in ordinary people: especially critical thinking, scientific methods of planning and production, and co-operative entrepreneurship.
Launching a movement
The report of the MacLean Commission was catalytic: in late 1928 St. FX organized an Extension Department to carry adult education to the people of the province, appointing Coady as its first director. The Canadian Department of Fisheries asked Coady to help the government "organize the fishermen".
Through the years of the Antigonish Movement, financial support came from St. FX, the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation (two New York-based charities), and the local Scottish Catholic Society. Coady's own staff resources were supplemented by collaboration with the Department of Fisheries, and later by widespread volunteerism in the villages.
The chronic decline in the fisheries gained new urgency with the onset of the Great Depression. Mines closed and thousands of miners were thrown out of work. Out-migration slowed, but for all the wrong reasons. Many jobless emigrants returned home.
Through the new department, Coady linked adult education with co-operative business ventures in the distinctive blend that became known as the Antigonish Movement. The immediate priorities of the Extension Department were the formation of ‘study clubs’, the emergence of new co-operatives and a school for leaders.