Eric Harding is describing life in Clearland, N.S., a village where he lives with his artist wife and three-year-old daughter, in a house with three acres of property that cost far less than any Vancouver condo. The family kayaks, bikes, skates on a pond and spends precious hours together, and if they could live anywhere else — they wouldn’t.
“There are great daycares, an excellent school within walking distance of my house, a park and a sense of community, ” Mr. Harding says. “You could always make more money in Toronto, or somewhere else, but you wouldn’t have this lifestyle.”
Mr. Harding did live in Toronto, for a time, but grew up in nearby Bridgewater, where his father and grandfather were in real estate, as he now is, too. His oldest friends often wax dreamily about moving back home. Few do.
They are slugging it out in Halifax, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver — or overseas — wherever the jobs are since, unless you are a realtor or an artist or a doctor or a teacher or a nurse or a retiree or an irrepressible optimist or an entrepreneur willing to bet on Atlantic Canada or someone with the good fortune to win the employment lottery and land a secure, well-paying gig in small town Nova Scotia, you probably don’t live there.
And, even if you do live there, it is not all sunsets and ocean paddling.
The rest of Canada has heard it for decades: Nova Scotia is in financial trouble. Only the news is worse than that: Nova Scotia is dying.
Economically stagnant, depleted by out migration, populated by nursing homes and small towns, including Springhill, Bridgetown and Hantsport, that can’t afford to pay their bills so are electing to dissolve instead of waiting to go bankrupt.
How bad is it? In mid-February, Ray Ivany, the president of Acadia University and chair of the Nova Scotia Commission on Building Our New Economy, released the commission’s much-anticipated report. The title: Now or Never: An Urgent Call to Action for Nova Scotians.
“The evidence is convincing that Nova Scotia hovers now on the brink of an extended period of decline, ” the report states. “Two interdependent factors — an aging and shrinking population and very low rates of economic growth — mean that our economy today is barely able to support our current standards of living and public services, and will be much less so going forward unless we can reverse current trends.”
Almost 20% of Nova Scotians are 65 or over, the economy’s annual growth rate is the lowest in the country while the GDP per capita ($37, 349) is second lowest — 20% below the national average. The kicker? Forty three percent of Nova Scotians live in rural communities, more than double the Canadian average. It is in these communities where the depopulation bomb is exploding and a fiscal reckoning is in full swing.
On Monday, in Bridgetown, the “prettiest town in Nova Scotia” according to its 949 residents, 100 hardy souls braved an ice storm to gather at the local fire hall with Mayor Horace Hurlburt. Item no. 1 on the agenda: making the prettiest town in Nova Scotia a thing of the past.
“We’re not down and out yet, ” the mayor says. “But it’s moving that way, and with the heartaches of trying to sustain the infrastructure and service level of a little community, dissolution becomes required.
“When the towns incorporated in the late 1890s things were bustling, there was shipbuilding here and a major distillery.”
Robin
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