Why Jo-Ann Roberts and Ken Kelly are leaving Victoria
Former CBC Radio host Jo-Ann Roberts and her husband, Ken Kelly, who ran the Downtown Victoria Business Association, are pulling the plug on Victoria and moving to Halifax. It’s all about family and the Maritimes.
This feels backward. People hit 60 and move to Victoria, not away from it. Leaving seems particularly odd when the dearly departing have woven themselves so tightly into the fabric of the community, as Jo-Ann Roberts and Ken Kelly have done.
Roberts spent more than a decade hosting CBC Radio’s Victoria-based All Points West, sat on the boards of the Victoria Foundation and other non-profits, and was a fixture behind the microphone at charity fundraisers.
Kelly spent more than a decade running the Downtown Victoria Business Association, where he was an eternally ebullient presence with a serious social conscience.
But now they’re moving to Halifax.
Why? Family. Roberts’s 85-year-old mother lives in Halifax. Two of their four children are nearby. Roberts also cites a homing instinct that never leaves deep-rooted Maritimers. “It’s time to go back.” The Maritimes is where they came from in 2004 after Roberts was chosen to launch All Points West. She had spent 10 years getting up at 3:30 a.m. to host CBC’s morning show in Moncton, New Brunswick. If the prospect of living in Victoria was tantalizing to the couple, so was the idea of being on the same sleep schedule.
Kelly, a Vancouver-raised urban planner with a passion for heritage, had run Moncton’s downtown business association. He wasn’t in Victoria long before landing a similar post with the newly resurrected DVBA. He quickly become an unflagging champion of downtown, one so cheerfully optimistic that he would, with tongue planted cheerfully in cheek, knowingly engage in self-parody. (Victoria Coun. Chris Coleman does a funny impression of Kelly calling out from his office across Centennial Square from city hall: “Hands across the square, Christopher! Hands across the square!”)
Kelly’s approach included working with, not against, those who spend their days on the streets. He is particularly proud of creating the Clean Team, made up of marginalized people hired by the DVBA to pick up trash and scrub away graffiti.
He was also, along with Victoria Coun. Charlayne Thornton-Joe, the driving force behind the Canada Day living flag. They attracted 350 people to the first red- and white-clad spectacle on the legislature lawn in 2006. It’s up to more than 5,000 now.
Ask Roberts and Kelly what’s most awesome about Victoria, they give answers that reflect the jobs they did here.
“I think the best thing about Victoria is the creative nature of the people who live here,” Roberts says. Can’t swing a cat without hitting a top-level artist or a distinguished diplomat or someone else from the top of their field, yet nobody — not the city, not the accomplished people themselves — makes a big deal about it. She remembers meeting Lorna Crozier, one of the most important poets in Canada: “She popped into the studio as though she were my neighbour from down the street.”
Atop Kelly’s list is Victoria’s rejuvenated downtown. He singled out three developers who have played big roles in its repopulation and revitalization: David Chard, whose first Victoria condo tower sprouted in 2004; the Jawl family, builders of the Atrium, Capital Park and the new project rising across Douglas from city hall; and Chris LeFevre, known for breathing new life into heritage buildings throughout the core.
Life took a turn for both Kelly and Roberts a couple of years ago. First, she pulled the plug on the CBC so that she could go public about her unhappiness about budget cuts at the corporation. She then ran for the Green Party in the 2015 federal election, losing to incumbent New Democrat MP Murray Rankin.
One month later, Kelly was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Surgery came in January 2016. “It was a wake-up call that time is always a gift,” he says.
What life holds in Halifax is unknown. They both talk about becoming engaged in their new community. Vancouver-raised Kelly hopes to continue studying for ordination as a Roman Catholic deacon. (“I know what it’s like to live with a clergyman,” says Roberts, whose father was a United Church minister.)
Both will have those peculiarly Victoria moments they miss.
She talks about the reflection of the legislature lights twinkling on the water. For him it’s “listening to and getting on Harbour Air, flying from downtown Victoria to downtown Vancouver.” That never gets old.
She quotes A.A. Milne: “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”