From 1956 through 1958, I attended Stillwater Elementary, a small schoolhouse twenty-two kilometres south of Powell River. Its three rooms accommodated six grades, and children were summoned to class by a hand-rung bell left over from the region’s railway-logging days.

One ordinary school day, a visitor appeared. She was Ruth Allan, known locally as the “Credit Union Lady.” She lived to be 102 and touched the lives of many people.

Ruth had come from Powell River Credit Union to do something I understood only much later was quietly radical: explain to a room of nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-olds how a financial institution could belong to the people who used it.

She told us that her small local organization was different from the large banks. Its members owned it. Decisions were made close to home, and the benefits of its success remained in the community.

Much of that went over our heads. We were young and more interested in recess. But she told us to put pennies in a piggy bank and to put our nickels, dimes, and dollars to work in the credit union. She returned to the school regularly to collect deposits and update our little account books.

Powell River Credit Union—later called First Credit Union—was the first credit union chartered by the Province of British Columbia. From its early days, it was closely allied with Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Mill Workers Local 76 and Papermakers Local 142. A decade earlier, those unions had helped create a sick-benefit society offering one of the most comprehensive health plans on the continent.

The unions, the sick-benefit society, and the credit union helped people live with greater security in a town where a single company controlled jobs, housing, land, and even retail stores. These community institutions became particularly important when workers began a three-month strike in 1957, seeking improved wages and working conditions.

Powell River Credit Union offered low-cost accommodation loans—usually only a few dollars—to be repaid on the next payday. Much later, predatory lenders discovered that the same basic service could be offered at annualized interest rates approaching 400 percent.

That credit union is gone now—not failed, but folded into something larger. “Amalgamated” is the word the industry prefers. First Credit Union is now part of Vancity, Canada’s largest community credit union. Decisions once made in Powell River are now made in Vancouver by people who probably never visited the community that is 90 miles and two ferry trips away.

In my community, North Shore Credit Union became BlueShore Financial and was later absorbed into Beem Credit Union, itself assembled from several formerly independent institutions. Among them was Gulf and Fraser Fishermen’s Credit Union, an organization whose name once clearly identified the people and communities it served. Beem’s headquarters are in Kelowna.

Across Canada, small member-owned credit unions have been merging into regional and provincial institutions for years. It is a slow tide that rarely makes the news because no single merger appears to be much of a story. A branch remains open. The sign changes. Accounts continue to function.

But something else changes too, slowly and less visibly: the distance between the institution and the community it serves.

The board of a local credit union was made up of neighbours. Lending decisions were made by people who knew the community and understood why a particular family might need patience when it could not meet a financial obligation. They understood what new businesses might need and how ideas could be adjusted to gain success.

A large regional institution, however competently managed or financially secure, cannot easily carry that knowledge within it. It has policies rather than memories and centralized procedures rather than personal relationships. It may remain member-owned, but it is now a growth and profit-oriented business, not a community institution.

I think of Ruth Allan standing in our classroom, patiently explaining shared ownership to children who were mostly thinking about what their savings might someday buy. She represented a relationship between an institution and the place it served—a relationship built on the assumption that each would still know the other ten or twenty years later.

That assumption is harder to make now.

Amalgamations have costs that do not appear on balance sheets: the weakening of local relationships, the loss of community knowledge, and the gradual disappearance of institutions that were, in small but meaningful ways, ours.