The Co-operative Commonwealth was defined when the CCF party was founded in Calgary in 1932

A co-operative commonwealth, in which the basic principle of regulating production, distribution and exchange will be the supplying of human needs instead of the making of profit." (Calgary Herald, Aug. 1, 1932)

The goal of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the new leftist Canadian political party founded in 1932, was defined as a "community freed from the domination of irresponsible financial and economic power in which all social means of production and distribution, including land, are socially owned and controlled either by voluntarily organized groups of producers and consumers or – in the case of major public services and utilities and such productive and distributive enterprises as can be conducted most efficiently when owned in common – by public corporations responsible to the people's elected representatives" (Laurence Gronlund, Co-operative Commonwealth, An Exposition of Socialism (1884), p. 36 as quoted in Monto, Protest and Progress, Three Labour Radicals in Early Edmonton, Crang Publishing/Alhambra Books, p. 156)

E.A. Partridge's A War on Poverty (1925) had extensively discussed the co-operative commonwealth. He died just before the CCF's founding.

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