Getting the BALLE rolling in Nova Scotia

By Jodi DeLong
On a fine autumn evening in late September, there was a hubbub of congeniality and expectation emanating from the waterfront campus of the Nova Scotia Community College in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The hubbub surrounded the official launch of BALLE-NS, the newest member of nearly 80 BALLE networks throughout North America, and only the third in Canada. BALLE stands for Business Association for Local Living Economies, and is the next step in the buy-local way of thinking that helps to build stronger communities in our own backyards.
The concept of buying local began as a need to support local farmers and create more food sustainability. But supporting local means more than local sourcing of the food we eat. There are literally thousands of locally owned businesses throughout Nova Scotia providing goods and services from newspaper printing to real estate, from fairly traded fashion items to computers.
There’s a need to develop a strong manufacturing base in the province, as well as a stronger service base portion of the economy. BALLE-NS’s membership and board of directors include professionals from a wide range of livelihoods; organic food growers and fair trade retailers; self employed writers, speakers and consultants; environmental organizations and renewable energy providers. And the list is growing.
Zero waste
It’s appropriate that BALLE’s roots were established in Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, more than 20 years ago, although its formalization and name establishment happened in 2001. Along with encouraging grassroots economic development, BALLE focuses on sustainability in businesses, encouraging zero-waste manufacturing through reduced consumption of carbon-based energy sources such as oil, and minimalizing the production of waste products.
Most of us are aware that the days of cheap petroleum prices and availability are rapidly coming to an end, and that the cavalier way in which such resources have been squandered has led us to the maelstrom of climate change. Bringing economies back to focus on locally produced goods and services includes looking at alternate energy resources. One of BALLE-NS’s founding members, Minas Basin Pulp and Power, is deeply involved in a tidal turbine energy project now being tested in the waters of the upper Bay of Fundy.
Wooden Monkey
Lil MacPherson is founder and co-owner of the Wooden Monkey Restaurant in Halifax, and inaugural chair of BALLE-NS. In 2003 when Hurricane Juan came ashore and ravaged properties and the power grid throughout parts of Nova Scotia, MacPherson began thinking seriously about renewable energy systems, food sustainability, and other issues that ought to concern the province’s leaders and citizens. “Nova Scotia is almost an island,” she said at the September launch. “How strong are we as a province? What happens if all planes, trains, and Sysco trucks stopped bringing food and other goods into Nova Scotia?”
Within six months of the hurricane, MacPherson had opened her restaurant as a way to help both her family and food producers in the province.
Meals are created from local meats and produce, wines and beers, sodas, tofu and cheeses, and many other products; a local printing company produces her menus, and the restaurant’s cleaning supplies are developed and sold locally.
Musicians from the Maritimes provide evening entertainment, while the works of local artists adorn the walls and décor of the restaurant. MacPherson emphasizes the economic benefits to NS if families increased their local purchases by only a small amount. “If households shifted just ten percent of their food purchases to buying local products, 1700 new jobs would be formed, just in one sector of the economy!” she says.

Co-operatives leading way
Unsurprisingly, co-operatives are among the many businesses leading the way in developing a new local economy. Peruse the BALLE-NS website (balle-novascotia.com) and you’ll see that co-operatives including Just Us Coffee Roasters, Farmers Dairy, Farmers Markets of Nova Scotia, and Caisse Populaire Clare are several of BALLE-NS’s founding members. CP Clare’s CEO, Paul Emile LeBlanc, secretary of the fledging organization, is deeply enthusiastic about potential benefits for Nova Scotian communities.
“We need to get our local economies and local businesses recognizing that it’s important to do business with one another,” LeBlanc says, adding that he’s keen to see similar networks start in neighbouring provinces. “Local Living Economies are the way of the future.” He stresses that this doesn’t mean cutting off trade with other areas, but rather, creating or sourcing locally whatever’s reasonably possible, and then trading with other communities for goods and services that can’t be developed here.
Buying locally and supporting networks like BALLE-NS gets you a seat on a train that embraces the idea of strong, local communities, not towns and villages with the lifeblood sucked out of them by big box commercial wastelands. It’s a train that encourages similar activities in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland & Labrador: a train of ideas whose time has come.