A Bit More Detail

Facebook's Michael linked to this essay by Allison, a long-time Nova Scotian and Haligonian, who is leaving for Toronto shortly because of the problems of her home city.

This is the city where I co-chaired then chaired the Active Transportation Advisory Committee, the city whose food feels like a full body experience, the city where I went to school, the city where I gained skills outside the classroom, the city where I got my first job, then my second, then another… where I spent that money in local shops, the city that I was always happy to come back to, the city where I started my little family, the city where I met amazing people who did amazing things, the city where I poured countless hours a week into volunteering for people and things who could help me stay in this city, the city that helped me bring visions to life, the city that has helped me so much, the city that I helped whenever I could.

I fought really hard for what we needed to stay in Halifax. I saved my money, I got the best job I could, I worked a second in my spare time. I started interviewing for the next contract before the current one ended. I cobbled together a happy life here that is great, but entirely unsustainable if I ever want my little family to be any bigger. If you’re doing okay in Halifax, you can have the best brunch you’ll ever taste every weekend but you can’t have a baby.

I worked a very short contract in Toronto this past fall. My first weekend, I walked across the entire city, as my step counter can quantify. I got bagels, I got dumplings, I saw friends, and at 7 in the evening, just as I was about to go home, I took the bus to High Park to see the sunset, because I had a transit pass, and I saw the bus coming, and the bus said High Park, and I knew that another bus home would just show up.

In Halifax, there is so much greatness but also so much to consider for every single action. 25 years in this city have made me an exceptional planner, mastering a transit system that is neither consistent nor logical, preparing for work that won’t last, finding new best friends every year because no one stays. In Halifax it's hard to be present; if you're not thinking ahead it's your fault for not being prepared.

Halifax, it is breaking my heart and my identity to leave. I know what happens when people leave. I know we turn against them, we say it was their problem, not ours, we pretend they just had to try harder. I’m not saying that if situations change I won’t be back, I’m just saying it’s looking harder than it makes sense for me to admit to myself. I took my love for this city and made it a series of verbs that I practiced every day to try to stay here.

One thing is, Halifax is probably the best-off city in the Maritimes. If it can't retain people, what community in the area can?

CBC's Catharine Tunney reported on the sadly ironic emigration of Haligonian poet laureate El Jones to the United States in search for work. Greater Halifax, I would note, is probably the most prosperous region of the Maritimes: Things are not better in Sydney.

Halifax's poet laureate says she is leaving the province at the end of August for a job in the U.S. because she can't find a permanent teaching job in Nova Scotia.

"I need to eat. I need sleep," said El Jones in an interview with CBC News.

"I'm going to be homeless for the month."

[. . .]

The writer and activist has had jobs at Acadia University and the Nova Scotia Community College. She said it's hard to work in Nova Scotia. Between her teaching, activism and poet laureate duties Jones says she had been working 16 to 20 hours a day, sometimes for free.

According to the Halifax Regional Municipality, the poet laureate is a poet or writer who lives in the city and "has achieved excellence amongst their peers and whose work is of relevance to the citizens of HRM."

The person in the position receives a small stipend of $4,000 for the two-year term and acts as "an advocate for literary arts and reflects the life of HRM through their work. As an advocate for poetry, language and the arts, the poet laureate attends events across the Municipality to promote and attract people to the literary world."

One thing I've been thinking about a lot in the aftermath of the recent general election on Prince Edward Island is the election of Wade MacLauchlan as premier. As noted by, among others, the National Post, MacLauchlan is gay: quite out, partnered, all of it. This did not hinder his election.

This little island is often cast as a bastion of social conservatism in Canada. It is predominantly rural with 140,000 people, where you can throw a cat from anywhere and hit saltwater, as one bar patron put it this week.

All this makes frontrunner Wade MacLauchlan somewhat of an unlikely candidate.

MacLauchlan, an academic with little political experience, stands to be the first openly gay man to be elected premier in the province. But it hasn’t been a factor during the election campaign, he says.

“Absolutely zero,” the Liberal Party leader told the National Post this week. “I’ve been open about the fact that I’m gay. And my partner has been front and centre as appropriate, we try to keep some home life and privacy as anyone with any sense would do.

“That has not come up at any doorstep or any of the discussions that I’ve had across the island,” he said, noting that P.E.I. was the first to elect both a female premier and a premier of non-European descent.

“In some ways this might be a hat trick.”

MacLauchlan has a long career on Prince Edward Island. Among other things, he was president of the University of Prince Edward Island from 1999 through 2011. The first three years of his presidency were the last three in which I was studying at the same university and living and worrying and feeling afraid for reasons I could not articulate to myself.

I had no idea what was going on, on Prince Edward Island in regards to people being gay and living as gay openly or otherwise. I still have no idea what was going on, not really. I just felt afraid all the time, for reasons I was not able to articulate to myself. Fear of being different, fear of being visible, fear of being somehow found out: all of it was there. There was so much fear that I don't think I can actually say, with any degree of certainty, what was going on, what would have happened if I'd come out earlier than 22 (21, 20, 19, 18, younger). I know only of specific things that happened to me: laughter over the table as friends of my parents laughed at the idea of a Pride parade in Charlottetown, a quite possibly over-friendly high school teacher who killed himself the next term after doing something with a student and the relief I felt, the mockeries of high school and the deepening depression I felt.

I don't know. I'm not sure you can understand how terribly this frustrates me. When I was much younger, I loved too enthusiastically Descartes and his argument that the human mind could understand its entire environment so long as it was sufficiently rigourous. This seemed to work for me as long as my world was cramped, narrow. Now that it has been exploded, even years later, I don't know what was actually going on. I wonder if I ever will, if I ever could.

Prince Edward Island Peter Rukavina has a great, funny photo post describing how he saved the roof of his Charlottetown home from the recent record snowfall.

It snowed. And snowed. And snowed. Over a metre of snow over a couple of weeks. So that by last weekend our back yard looked like this:



Back yard + Snow

That’s a 5 foot fence, to give you a sense of the how deep the snow is.

And that’s a tree, not a bush.

And so we ended up with a lot of snow on our roof.

And with my eye off the ball, paying attention to the snow on the ground, not the snow on the roof, we started to get ice dams forming along the gutters.

By Friday afternoon we started to fear that the ice dams would result in water getting into our house, and so it was time for evasive action.

Catherine made a round of calls to teams of shovelers that we’d used before, but we were not alone in our plight and they all replied with “maybe we can get to you by Monday.”

So it was up to me.

Feeble old me. Action.

Go, read.

Adrian Lee of MacLean's describes the Maritime Canadian tradition of stormchips.

New York may not have been slammed by snow as predicted, but the eastern seaboard, including the Maritimes, was hit by heavy gusts, and more than 30 cm of snow in some areas. For Atlantic Canada, though, these tough wintry times have only one balm: #stormchips, a year-old hashtag for Haligonians to fete the snacks they’ve stocked up on. As Tuesday’s storm approached, the tag began to trend nationally yet again, and East Coast businesses and political parties took up the stormchip cause. It all started with Stephanie Domet, who hosts the Mainstreet Halifax program at CBC Radio One. Domet spoke to Maclean’s about how it all started, her personal #stormchip rules, why stormchips feel quintessentially Maritime, and what it’s like to have all this (strange) power.

So how did it begin?

We here in Nova Scotia went through quite a period last year of winter storms all the time, it felt like, for weeks and weeks and weeks. And it seemed like, last January, that every time the forecast was for stormy weather, I got the urge to get chips. I love chips. My total kryptonite is plain ripple chips—but we never have them in the house, probably because I love them too much. So they’re a super treat-thing for me, and I realized that every time there was a storm I got this incredible urge to get chips. So this one morning I go to my husband and say, “It’s going to really snow tomorrow, we should get some chips tonight.” And then in an off-the-cuff conversation, live conversation on the show that I host, I was talking with our news reader Ryan Pierce and he talked about the storm, and I said that the only thing on my grocery list to stock up for the storm is chips and dip, and he admitted that it was a similar conversation they were having at his place, what snacks to get before the storm. Maybe we talked about it a little more on the show before we were off air, and then I went to the grocery store and I got my ripple chips and dip, and took a photo of it, and tweeted, “Success! #stormchips.” The rest, as they say, is history, I guess. (Laughs)

So why do you think this blew up? There’s a feeling, for me, that the #stormchips phenomenon is kind of this essentially Maritimey thing.

The only thing I can think about it was that this was a thing that everyone was always doing, and that I just happened to tap into the zeitgeist and that’s why it resonated. I don’t know if it’s a particularly Maritimey thing. Maybe we take storms more seriously here because of the ocean? I don’t know!

This weekend, I learned that the former home of the congregation of the u>Sackville United Church is up for sale, for the price of one dollar Canadian. This doesn't include the cost of moving the church from its current location, on 112 Main Street in the New Brunswick town of Sackville.



The Sackville Tribune-Post's Katie Power noted last February that the sale price is a matter of last resort.

Property owner John Lafford of Lafford Realty Inc. said he has listed the building through a local real estate agent and is open to discussions with anyone interested in purchasing the former church.

[. . .]

The Laffords purchased the property (which includes nearly three acres of land surrounding the church) more than a year ago after a decision was made by the Sackville United Church council to downsize to a smaller and more efficient building, one which didn’t require hundreds of thousands of dollars in maintenance and repairs.

Lafford has been busy over the past year developing commercial and residential units on another section of the property but he admits the time is soon coming to begin making plans for the rest of the site, hence the need to sell the church building.

A group of community members have come together in the interest of saving the local landmark and Lafford said he has tried to give them ample time to develop an action plan, “something viable” that would ensure the building could be maintained.

“I didn’t want to make any rash decisions,” he said, “and I think I’ve kept a pretty open mind.”

The cost of maintaining the church, along with the shrinking size of the congregation, is cited in multiple sources as the reason for the church being placed for sale. I'm a bit surprised this is the case, since Sackville, in the penumbra of greater Moncton and home to Mount Allison University, might be expected to fare somewhat better.

I wonder what will happen. Will the church, with its architecture and its history, be saved? Or will it be torn down, bits perhaps scavenged? (The stained glass windows are to die for.)

CBC reported these weekend just past on a proposal that the herd of horses on Sable Island, almost literally a giant sand bank several hundred kilometres southeast of Nova Scotia, be removed to the mainland. Biologist Ian Jones makes a convincing two-pronged argument, that the non-native horses not only are damaging a fragile environment but that they themselves are suffering in an environment that cannot support them in health.

According to a scientific report ordered by Parks Canada, excessive inbreeding, a tiny population and extreme weather linked to global warming all pose risks of extinction to the fabled horses. Parks Canada is the newly appointed custodian of the historic sand crescent that lies about 175 kilometres off the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia.

The herd, first introduced to the island in the 1760s and left to fend for itself since 1960, now numbers more than 500 animals but the population could drop precipitously after just one harsh winter, with food hard to access under heavy snow or ice, according to the study. The ponies also may suffer from low genetic diversity, making them less resilient to disease and prone to reproductive failure.

But Jones argues the horses "hurt" the island and "cause destruction."

"Remote island ecosystems are the most endangered ecosystems," he said. "Sable Island is such a place and the horses are modifying the island. They need to be removed."

Jones adds that the island's environment is hurting the horses.

"I love horses ... and I certainly wish the very best for those horses," he said. "Every bite they take, they get a mouthful of sand and grass. Their teeth are wearing away. They endure a lot of suffering because of the climate.

"If you or anyone kept horses in these conditions on your farm, you would be charged and convicted with cruelty to animals."

The National Post's John O'Connor in his article "Potato sabotage traced to P.E.I. town, where everyone seems to have a theory about who did the crime" describes an unsettling situation.

Sylvia Doiron knew the police would be coming to question her eventually. Where else were they going to go in Summerside, P.E.I., to speak with an expert about darning needles, the instrument at the centre of a major RCMP investigation that has folks around this pleasant seaside community of 15,000 wondering whodunit and why?

“It is a real mystery,” says Ms. Doiron, the owner of Pins & Needles, a sewing shop on Water Street. “It has been the talk of Summerside, because Linkletter Farms are a very well-known business around here, and the family is very well-liked. These are good people. Who would do such a thing?”

Nobody knows. Not the locals, although everybody seems to have a theory about the crime, and not the police, although they continue to press ahead with the investigation. But the facts are these: on Oct. 2 an undisclosed number of sewing needles were discovered in potatoes by workers at the Cavendish Farms plant in New Annan. Production was immediately halted, and the sabotaged spuds were traced to Linkletter Farms, one of the island’s top producers and a family operation with roots in Summerside dating from 1783.

Several additional Linkletter tubers, stabbed clean through with darning needles, surfaced in bags purchased by consumers at stores throughout the Atlantic provinces, triggering a massive recall of 800,000 pounds of potatoes. An X-ray machine set up in a police-secured potato storage facility was used to screen the suspicious spuds. The technique proved inadequate. Metal detectors were then acquired and farmers, working after hours, hour after hour, ripped open and swept clean countless bags of potatoes; a process that continues.

Meanwhile, 10 needles, not including those discovered at the Cavendish plant, have been found since Oct. 2 and sent to a forensics lab for further analysis. The potato industry is offering a $50,000 reward for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the individual, or individuals, responsible for the crime.

The blame that is being cast on environmentalists, who--some hint--might have done this in retaliation for environmentally problematic deep-water wells, seems like the sort of thing that would be done in a situation like this. I'd be surprised if this was the case, for the reasons that environmentalist Sharon Labchuk states in the article. At this point, no one knows.

CBC Prince Edward Island carried a report on the reward that went into some detail about concerns that the brand of Prince Edward Island potatoes might be hit negatively.

The potato industry in Prince Edward Island is coming together to offer a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for recent potato tampering incidents.

The Prince Edward Island Potato Board said in a release Monday, up to $50,000 will be available in a fund recently set up.

[. . .]

Greg Donald is general manager of the potato board. In the release he stated, "For the health of Linkletter Farms and the entire industry, we know we all wish to see this incident resolved as quickly as possible."

Donald said people in the industry wanted to do something to help and that he believes consumers are viewing the tampering of Linkletter Farms potatoes as an isolated incident.

Donald said to the best of the board's knowledge, the incident hasn't had a wider impact on potato sales. He says the board has hired a consultant to see if the industry can further improve safety.

At the National Post, Mark Bourrie describes Prince Edward Island's silver fox pelt boom of the 1920s. It's a story of significant, if ephemeral, achievement.

In the 19th century, Prince Edward Islanders were frugal, if poor, people. Before the fox bubble, they had one of the highest savings rates in the world. After sometimes violent confrontations with agents representing absentee land owners, by the end of the 1800s most farmers had been able to buy the land they worked.

But some Islanders looked for ways to make easy money. Silver foxes are a mutation of the common red fox. The gene for the black/silver colour is recessive, and to have a reasonable chance of breeding more silver foxes, both parents should be silver. Every once in a while, trappers caught a silver fox and sold the pelt for a jaw-dropping price. They were popular among the nobility of the Hapsburg and Russian empires, a customer base that would eventually have serious problems of its own.

Charles Dalton, a druggist from Tignish, and Robert Oulton, a New Brunswick-born farmer, began working together in a secret location on Oulton’s farm on Savage Island, near Alberton, in the 1890s to catch, domesticate and breed black foxes.

The trick was to get the foxes, which were territorial animals that didn’t adapt well to captivity, to breed. Oulton and Dalton discovered foxes are monogamous, so they built them small apartments within larger pens. They made sure the fox pens were located in quiet places and kept visitors out from January until July, since mother foxes kill their babies when they’re distressed.

Close confinement in small pens exposed the foxes to diseases, especially internal parasites, so the breeders built big, spacious enclosures with lots of room for exercise. Oulton set up his pens in copses of trees. He found a British-made wire mesh that the foxes couldn’t chew through and sank the wire deep into the ground so the foxes could not escape by tunneling.

It worked. Oulton perfected the breeding operation while Dalton quietly sold the pelts on the London market as wild-caught animals. In January, 1900, a single pelt brought $1,807 at auction, but the sheer volume of Dalton’s inventory tipped off the London fur merchants that the source of the pelts was too productive to be wild.

MacLean's hosts Alison Auld's Canadian Press article describing how, after the closure of New Brunswick's only private abortion clinic, women in that province looking for an abortion are going far outside the province.

Pregnant women from New Brunswick are travelling to Maine and Montreal to obtain abortions after the province’s only private abortion clinic shut down last summer, angering pro-choice advocates who say the government is moving too slowly in removing barriers to the service.

Staff at abortion clinics in Augusta and Bangor in Maine said they have seen a spike in the number of telephone inquiries and visits from women from New Brunswick since the summer when the Morgentaler clinic in Fredericton closed, citing a lack of government funding.

Ruth Lockhart of the Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Centre in Bangor said the independent clinic used to see one or two women from the province over six months. There are now women from New Brunswick at every weekly clinic, sometimes with five or six at a time, she said.

“My concern is with the women who can’t do that — who can’t get time off from work, who can’t find childcare, who can’t afford the fees or don’t have a passport,” she said in an interview.

“To have to leave your country? I don’t know, that doesn’t seem right to me. None of that is fair to women.”