Allison Sparling, my friend since high
school and one of the most committed people to life in this city and province I
have ever met, is leaving for Toronto. Like it did for so many others, Toronto
offered her a better opportunity and a chance to finally put down roots.
But she leaves with a very heavy heart. If
you have not already seen it, you should read her emotional goodbye to Halifax
here.
I have lived in Halifax my whole life, and
I have experienced a great many of these goodbyes. Each time someone leaves, there
are generally two unspoken reactions that I see among those left behind. The
first is self-deprecating, and suggests a provincial inferiority complex: "Well,
of course she left. She's going on to bigger and better things." But the second
is insidious: we pretend that it was fundamentally their choice to leave, and
there was nothing we could have done to change their mind.
Allison's story is clear proof that all too
often, people don't have a choice. She fought hard to cobble together a life
here. In the end, she couldn't manage it. And you can accuse Allison Sparling
of a lot of things, but accusing her of not trying hard enough is as wrong as
accusing the ocean of being insufficiently wet.
People should always have the choice to
stay, but they don't. Worse yet, we accept that.
Stephen Harper once infamously said that
the Maritimes have a culture of defeat. He was wrong, but not for the reasons
most people claimed. We don't have a culture of defeat; we have a culture of
farewells.
"Farewell" is in the blood of Nova Scotia.
Even in our most prosperous times, our economy was built on ships and trade –
things that necessarily took people out of the province and sometimes never
brought them back. For Halifax in particular, as a navy town, our identity was
forged in sending young people away to Europe over the course of two World
Wars.
When new people actually came, we didn't
get our hopes up. If Pier 21 was the gateway to Canada, Nova Scotia was the
foyer; somewhere to get dried off before proceeding to another room. But
because we had already seen so many others leave, we accepted that this was the
natural order of things.
Even our unofficial provincial song is called "Farewell to Nova Scotia". Few people seem to question how fatalistic this is.
Imagine a country with a national anthem that expresses the sentiment, "I wish
I could stay, but I have to go." In our own national anthem, we promise to
stand on guard for Canada. In our provincial equivalent, we merely hope that Nova
Scotia is still in one piece when we get back.
Perhaps this is why we are so averse to
change. We think about all those who have left and want to make sure that when
they finally come back, Halifax and Nova Scotia are still just like they
remember them. To change is to betray them, to fail to "heave a sigh and a wish"
for them.
We think so much about people coming back
that we forget to think about why people might actually stay.
***
My own relationship with this province is
one born out of happenstance. Although my mother grew up in Cape Breton, my
father is from Germany, and even bypassed Pier 21 entirely to land instead in
Ontario. They met in London, Ontario, and moved to a variety of places across
the country, but never back to Nova Scotia. That only changed when, after my
dad's unsuccessful stint as an entrepreneur in Fernie, British Columbia, my
mother convinced him to move back east. I was born barely a year later.
I did very well in high school, so I had
the opportunity to go to university virtually anywhere I wanted. For some reason,
I chose to stay in Halifax – I don't entirely recall why – but I still entertained
ideas of going elsewhere. Ottawa was a beautiful city with unparalleled
political action; Montreal would give me the chance to be immersed in the
French language and francophone culture; Vancouver offered the vision of
another harbour city with seemingly infinitely more opportunities (and big-name
concerts).
In my second year of undergrad, I applied
for the Parliamentary tour guide program. I craved the opportunity to live in
Ottawa for the summer and perhaps make connections there, even though I knew I
would miss home. I made it through the initial round of interviews, but
ultimately failed the telephone-based French proficiency test by a fairly slim
margin. For the first time, I was stuck here against my will. I made the best
of the situation, though I retained a lingering wanderlust.
My mind began to change a year later, when
I became a page at the Nova Scotia Legislature. At the time, I only really paid
attention to federal politics. They were flashier, more exciting, and dealt
with "bigger" issues. Although I had gotten involved in the campaign that
brought the NDP to power in 2009, I imagined provincial debates as little more
than glorified municipal council meetings, a pale shadow of the House of
Commons.
Being a page showed me how wrong I was.
Thanks to our unique constitutional system, provincial legislatures are where
most of the big decisions that affect people every day get made. Health care,
education, transportation, and even municipalities themselves all fall under
the jurisdiction not of the House of Commons in Ottawa, but of the House of
Assembly in Halifax.
However, seeing Nova Scotia politics
up-close also forced me to confront some troubling things about this province.
I saw big, exciting ideas get attacked as being too ambitious, and therefore
dangerous. I saw politicians of every stripe accept the grave challenges we
face, but offer no solutions beyond empty platitudes. This happens seemingly
everywhere, but particularly in Nova Scotia, it is emblematic of more than just
the shortcomings of the Westminster parliamentary system.
Within a year, I had also landed my dream
job from two years before, with a twist: I was now a legislative tour guide,
but in Halifax rather than Ottawa. Rather than the seemingly endless crowds
touring Parliament Hill, I was responsible for the handful of tourists,
business travellers, and cruise ship passengers who happened to see the "free
tours" sign in front of the old sandstone building dwarfed by the office towers
around it.
What struck me the most about giving tours
at Province House (and Government House) was the number of locals who wandered
in without even knowing it was there, or even if they did, not knowing what it
was. It seems that all too often, even the people who stay are hesitant to get
too invested in the city and the province, lest they be the next to be forced
to leave.
That was when I had my epiphany. Ever since
I was small, my main goal in life has always been to help people. I like finding
ways to make other people's lives better, even if it is in small ways. And like
so many others, I thought I had to go somewhere like Ottawa to do that.
What I realized is that in a smaller place,
each person's impact is proportionally larger. In Truro and Lunenburg and
Yarmouth and Sydney and even in Halifax, one person can change the entire town
and create ripples from one end of the province to the other. In a place with
so many people who accept leaving as an inevitable fact of life, the simple act
of deciding to stay is profound.
That realization killed any desire I had
left to bid my own farewell to Nova Scotia. As I let go of my previous
ambitions, I found new ones, and I felt myself falling in love with this place
more and more. By the time I was applying for law school, I had begun to shape
my life and career plans around a question that is far too often a stumper: "How
do I make sure I can stay in Nova Scotia?"
***
Halifax has the potential to be one of the
most exciting cities on the continent. We are the largest population centre in
an entire region of four interconnected provinces, and yet we are still small
enough to retain a small-town culture. We have such a massive surplus of
universities and colleges that we have to pull people in from elsewhere just to
fill the rooms. We stand at a crossroads of history and modernity, of big and
small. We are just the right size for one person to make a huge difference.
Which brings me back to Allison Sparling.
I will be perfectly frank. One of my
biggest personal failings is my tendency to live inside my own head. Although I
am no longer in university, I am still an academic at heart, delighting in
ideas and concepts yet all too frequently failing to translate them into
actions.
Allison Sparling, more than almost anyone
else I've ever met, knows action. When she finds something that needs to be
fixed, she puts everything she has into it. She makes sure the world knows what
she thinks, not because of crass self-promotion, but because her actions speak
louder than any words ever could.
She has always been this way. When we were in
high school, Allison took up the cause of raising awareness of the genocide in
Darfur. She and Erika Schneidereit (another person I was very sad to see go several
years ago) founded and led one of the school's most vocal social justice groups,
which went on to stage a wildly successful march that extended from the Halifax
Shopping Centre to Grand Parade. I merely helped out here and there.
When it came time to introduce our special
guests, who included both federal and provincial elected representatives, the
megaphone was handed to me for some reason. Maybe my voice was louder. But
without Allison's (and Erika's) actions, my voice would have been very quiet
indeed.
Allison Sparling loves this city the same
way I love it. In the end, the only difference between us is that I was lucky enough
to have ambitions in a profession that offered more opportunities to stay in
Halifax. It is a cruel irony that the one with the actions loud enough to make Halifax
better was forced to leave while the wistful academic got to stay.
And therefore, I end this post with a
challenge. A challenge to myself, and to everyone else who is still lucky
enough to call this city home. Figure out some way you think you can improve
life in Halifax, and act on it. Go to a public meeting on some municipal issue
you care about. Do some Christmas shopping at a locally owned business.
Introduce yourself to a neighbour. Take a walk through an area you haven't
explored yet, and maybe take a photo or two while you're there. Anything that
you feel would make this city a better place.
This city and this province are not just a
stepping stone on the way to something bigger. Watching our friends and loved
ones leave is not an inevitable fact of life. Things can and will change if we
all embrace and become part of that change.
Halifax may be losing a bright star, but we
still have 400,000 more that have the potential to shine just as brightly. We owe
it to ourselves to turn this city into a galaxy.
