Editorial
February 11 2026
Why libraries matter
On its surface, it is a modest request: a regional library system asking local municipalities for a small, one-time contribution to help buy books, while urging the province to stabilize and strengthen its funding for public libraries.
As we report this week, facing what it calls “a complex and uncertain” financial outlook, Eastern Counties Regional Library is requesting that each of the municipalities it serves in Guysborough County and parts of Cape Breton set aside $2,000 over and above the roughly $230,000 annual funding they already provide.
“Our ability to buy books and other materials (both physical and digital) for your residents has been greatly reduced over the past couple of years,” wrote ECRL board chair James Fuller in a Jan. 26 appeal to local councils – including his own, the Municipality of the District of St. Mary’s, where he serves as warden. He noted “a record low of $36,400 for the purchasing of physical books.”
Beneath the practical ask, however, lies a bigger question.
In an age of instant communication, endless distraction and relentless digital noise, why does the small, local, almost stubbornly old-fashioned community library still matter?
In a culture built around extracting attention, clicks and revenue, the library remains one of the last public institutions – alongside fire halls, church basements and community centres – that still invests in the inner life of a place without demanding a transaction in return.
But more than that, historically, libraries in Nova Scotia have been deliberately designed as engines of learning, imagination and social progress.
The pioneers of the province’s cooperative movement and the Antigonish Movement built their work around learning circles and shared study. Before there were policy frameworks and development agencies, there were borrowed books and makeshift reading rooms.
More recently, libraries, like the ECRL, have evolved to become true community hubs, offering their spaces for workshops, seminars, practical wisdom and expertise on everything from geriatric and women’s health to the care and maintenance of home-based seed farms.
Libraries are not merely repositories of books, or simply quiet places to read or work. In small communities especially, they are among the last truly generous public spaces left, and they do incredible things with that license and mandate.
Which brings us back to today’s small and revealing request for help to buy books.
The troubling part of this story is not that municipalities are being asked to help. Communities helping one another is not new and remains one of the strengths of rural Nova Scotia.
The troubling part is that one of the province’s most quietly important public institutions now finds itself passing the hat simply to maintain the most basic function of a library, keeping its shelves alive.
ECRL’s core budget from the province – about $950,000 – hasn’t budged since 2021, but the library’s cost of doing business has.
To be fair, the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage says that it “values the important role libraries play in our communities and recognize the challenges they face. Since increasing library funding in 2021, the Province has provided the Eastern Counties Regional Library with $952,100 in annual operating funding, along with an additional $46,200 in each of the past three years to help offset rising costs.”
Still, if we allow libraries to become marginal, dependent on one-time fixes and ad-hoc appeals, we sabotage not just their dusty stacks and whispering reading rooms, but their crucial function as public spaces devoted to learning, reflection, imagination and social cohesion.
We are weakening one of the few remaining institutions that still teaches communities how to think together, how to grow together.
