The ‘group scheme’: modernisation, regionalisation, and the origins of rural public library service in British Columbia and Saskatchewan in the 1930s

Abstract

By examining the structural-political and discursive origins of rural-serving regional public library systems in British Columbia and Saskatchewan, this paper investigates a key phenomenon in the development of the modern welfare state in Canada, the phenomenon of intra-provincial regionalisation. From the perspective of rural communities, regionalisation currently appears as part of neo-liberal strategy on the part of senior levels of government, involving a reduced commitment to social welfare and the simultaneous offloading of responsibilities onto local governments and undermining of local authority. Rural public library service in Canada, however, was often instituted through the regionalisation of that service. This paper, then, describes two moments of regionalisation in rural Canada in the twentieth century, the first, happening from the 1930s to the early 1950s with the creation of regional public library systems, contrasting sharply with the second, the experience of regionalisation in rural places since the 1980s.