What it's like to be a young person in Nova Scotia

Figure from the Ivany Report (2014)

If you are in Nova Scotia right now (or even elsewhere in the Maritimes/Canada), you know that we are in pretty hard times here. The statistics are grim when it comes to unemployment, cuts to rural services, and youth out-migration, but statistics don't tell a story. I can tell you a story. I am not complaining or griping. I don't think the world owes me a living. But I am not sure people outside of the Maritimes, or even older people in the Maritimes, quite understand what it's like to be a young person here. So, take a walk in my shoes...

Imagine you grow up in a mid-sized town in Nova Scotia. Your parents are not well-off, but you always had enough. Your family vacations always consisted of camping and cottaging trips around Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, and you grew up with a strong sense of place and belonging.

There is no doubt that this is where you belong: where you know the spot to forage for fiddleheads in the spring, and where every family gathering inevitably ends up with someone playing the piano, someone playing the fiddle, and everyone tapping their feet. There is hodgepodge at the harvest and church suppers with strawberry shortcake in the summer. It was where you know every pothole in the road, where the beach is never more than an hour away, and where wooden houses in every shade of paint line the streets.

And everyone in your high school can't wait to get out of your town. But most people, after high school, don't go far. There are the few adventurous ones who go to Ontario, Alberta, the States, overseas, but most stay close to home: the agriculture college, Mt A, St FX, Dal, SMU, MSVU, NSCC, Acadia... we are fortunate to have so many of the country's best colleges and universities within a couple of hours of our town.

And you go to one of these places, and you excel, just as you did in high school. Since you were young, everyone told you that you were smart, important, that you were going somewhere with your life. And you got on the dean's list, were involved in campus leadership opportunities, got jobs in the summer, and enjoyed your university experience.

Then university is over. You have an honours degree and a few thousand dollars in student loans, and you feel like you can do anything in the world. You are a Christian, and you feel God may be calling you to be a missionary, so you try it out, and right after you graduate you move to Mozambique for three months, living cross-culturally and doing linguistics research for a Christian organization.

But even when you are halfway across the world, you ache for your Nova Scotian home, and you wonder if you were ever meant to leave. So you come back, you live in your little university town that has become your home and you look for a job. You apply for perhaps fifty jobs before landing a job as a server. It's an OK job, but it's not the kind of job you thought you would have when you graduated and thought you could do anything in the world. You feel like you have so many more skills and talents to offer.

After working as a server for a while, you realize that you are not being a very good steward of the education and skills that God has given you. So you begin to explore other options, and eventually decide to go to grad school. But of course grad school is in Ontario.

So you spend a year away from Nova Scotia and the whole time, you miss it dearly. You wonder if you are having trouble letting go. You keep in touch with your friends from high school and university. There is your university housemate from Saskatchewan who wishes she could stay in Nova Scotia, but returns to Regina to get a job. There is your friend from high school who has a bachelor's degree and works as a cashier. There is your classmate from university who moves to Halifax to get a job but after months of searching, still has no stable employment. There are your many friends who have relocated to Alberta to work in towns like Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Edmonton, Calgary. There are your friends who have a degree in teaching and who have just been substituting for years. There is your friend from New Brunswick who works in Ottawa, and longs to move home to the Maritimes, but knows she will not find employment in her field here. There are your friends who work in the arts and move to cities like Vancouver and Toronto, where there are many more opportunities.

The narrative is always the same: you wish you could stay in Nova Scotia. But there are just no jobs.

You return home, triumphantly, half a master's degree under your belt, and ready to do research on Nova Scotia's rural areas. But you also need a job, and you search. And the search is discouraging and you wish there were jobs in somewhere other than Halifax, but the majority of jobs in your field are in the HRM. And you wish you had gone into something sensible, like engineering, nursing, or the trades. But when you were young you thought you could do what you love and get paid for it too, and so you studied economics, theology, and languages. You do not doubt that you are bright, talented, creative, and hardworking. But you start to feel like these things are not valued in your beloved home province.

It is hard not feel bitter when you see, for example, a local organic milk company start, struggle, and then eventually fail, in part because of regulations that are heavily influenced by the two other competing milk companies in the province, both owned by out-of-province entities. It is hard not to feel bitter when you see the province turn a blind eye to dangerous levels of emissions from a large pulp factory, just because, apparently, this factory (unsurprisingly, owned by an out-of-province entity) "creates jobs," and threatens to leave. Meanwhile, the forests of our province, softwood and beautiful hardwood alike, are getting literally ground to a pulp, and the woodlot owners get a pittance of what the wood is really worth. It is hard not to feel bitter when the government cuts assistance to students and to workers in the film industry, yet offers twenty-two million dollars to RBC-- again, an out-of-province company. Did I mention the CEO of RBC makes about 7.5 million a year?

The statistics show that Nova Scotia needs young people. Workers, on the whole, are growing older and retiring earlier, and the people to fill those jobs are moving "Out West," where they can actually make a decent living. We need our young people to stay, but we act as if we just do not value them. Each year, we get thousands of keen, bright young graduates out of our many post-secondary institutions. And they toss their graduation caps in the air and drink one last round of Keith's and then they board a plane for Anywhere But Here, and their highly-skilled labour, as well as their consumption, is enjoyed by places other than Nova Scotia. And you drive in the countryside and you pass countless abandoned homes and businesses with "for sale"signs in the window, and you feel helpless, like you are a passenger on a sinking ship. But you love this ship. And with your bailing bucket you try to fight the ocean.

Figure from the Ivany Report (2014)