16 Dec A young person leaves Halifax: here’s to kindness on your journey
Allison Sparling,* the young Halifax activist who (with Evey Hornbeck and Katherine Taylor) deliciously put the boots to a repulsive crew of travelling anti-abortion protesters from Upper Canada, is herself moving to Upper Canada. In a blog post, she offers a personal check-list of things Halifax should fix to retain youth:
Transit. Every other bus trip makes you feel like you would be better sawing off an arm with a spoon. The transit system here is so bad for a city of it’s size it almost feels like an insult. Recently, my partner and I decided to try to buy a tablet as a present for his grandfather. Halifax has gutted its downtown to the benefit of large business parks, so we tried to take a bus to said large business park one Friday evening. Three busses, all headed in the same direction all came within the same 2 minutes. The next ones came in 30 to 40 minutes.
We did not buy the tablet that night.
The cost of rent. I know, I know, I’m moving to Toronto, how dare I complain about rent? Unfortunately, with the transit system being so bad in Halifax, it really limits where youth are able to live without a car, making the cost of rent on the peninsula, and now even downtown Dartmouth, completely out of whack with the available salaries here. We could move further out of the city, but car payments and gas gobble up any savings. Youth can’t afford the home boomers want to retire out of when rent for a one bedroom apartment can easily eat up half of your income.
The insistence that entrepreneurship is the answer to everything. Lots of entrepreneurs are strong, smart people with lots of grit that can drastically improve the economy, but being repeatedly told that this is the answer for youth with sky rocketing debt is a slap in the face. You can’t pay student loans with hustle alone. This is often a solution tossed out in a talk with very little tangible support, just a little suggestion to imply that we’re just not working hard enough. I admire the amazing entrepreneurs in this province. You have worked so hard to make Nova Scotia amazing, sometimes against very difficult circumstances. Entrepreneurship is wonderful.
But if an upper middle class white person with a pension never says the word hustle again it will be too soon.
The idea that every time someone does something different it’s an affront to others instead of a lifestyle that works for them. This one is a little harder to explain, but I think it resonates well. If you bike as a hobby, that’s great, that’s a hobby. If you bike in the city to get from A to B, it means you might use a bike lane, which might lead to more bike lanes. And that is deeply political. So fuck you. There is a very deep-rooted fear of the other here. Sometimes it manifests itself against a method of transportation, and sometimes it’s against entire races and cultures of people. I do believe in Maritime hospitality, but frequently we love the person and fear the idea. We lose so much in not realizing that ideas are what make communities great.
Sparling has also been a dedicated New Democratic Party volunteer, and, frankly, she shares the blind partisanship that infects so many of that party’s activists.** So take what follows with a grain of salt, but I think she has a point. Whatever its strengths, the McNeil government has repeatedly managed to convey the impression it couldn’t care less about Nova Scotia’s young people—their concerns, aspirations, habits, and creations.
Speaking of political, I hesitate to pin all of the problems of an economically depressed region on one particular government, so I won’t, because I would be wrong, but I will say this: damn this provincial government is terrible. It’s not scrapping the graduate retention rebate and not reinvesting a comparable figure in youth, it’s not the tuition reset that make education even less affordable, it’s not the arbitrary axing of credits that drive my friends out of province… it’s all of those things and more. I don’t think the government actively hates youth, I just think they don’t care about us very much, but both net the same results.
I am the kind of person who believes in the importance of government, and I respect the people who put themselves forward to be part of it, but I have so many angry questions. Why are you picking a fight with my healthcare worker mother? My best friend who is a teacher? My drinking buddies who all work in the film industry? That random person out there who just wants to cross the street? And they’re not logical fights, they’re not fights that seem all that well thought out, and the recent budget forecasts suggests they’re not effective either. I can’t settle down in a place where the direction of the government feels like a drunk person waving a knife around, but with my new salary I can donate some money to people I think will make competent politicians so that I might one day be able to return.
I am writing this in Cape Breton, of course, where the sadness of leaving home—if only to go to Halifax!—is seared into popular culture. These lines from wonderful Ronnie MacEachern seem fitting:
Go off on your way now
And may you find better things
Don’t wait around till you have no fare to leave.
All the best if you’re staying
All the best if you should choose to leave
Here’s to kindness on your journey
Here’s to joy in your new home.
—
* She is a granddaughter of the late and much admired Mary Sparling, longtime curator of the MSVU Art Gallery and a force in Nova Scotia’s arts community for decades.
** Blind partisanship infects all three of Nova Scotia’s political parties. It’s a blight on our political life. But I do find the hard core New Dems, perhaps because they endured so many years of arrogant treatment from the Liberals and the Conservatives, to be the most blinded these days.