Could the pandemic lead to rural renaissance?

I've been hiding from the COVID-19 virus down along the South Shore of Nova Scotia, typing these columns sometimes in a quiet room outside which I have seen both Arctic hare and porcupine, and occasionally, in an upstairs bathroom, since it is the only place in the house where cellphone reception is assured.

It hasn't overly changed my productivity. Words arrive on an editor's laptop in more or less the same order and numbers that they always have.

The next day, poof, there they are in your newspaper, while, as always, I sternly glower down the column picture.

Yesterday, something occurred to me: if I can do this an-hour-and-fifteen away from what Statistics Canada calls a census metropolitan area, so can a lot of people.

What is more, if the pandemic has proven anything — besides the power of people working together, and the folly of warehousing our seniors — it is that we don't need to be huddled in an office to be a good worker bee.

All of which made me wonder something that has to be stated carefully in a province still reeling from the slaughter in Portapique and the COVID-19 deaths: Is it possible that the pandemic might have an unforeseen benefit for rural Nova Scotia?

Wouldn't some people, unshackled from the necessity of going into a cubicle in an soulless city office tower, welcome the possibility of a new life far from high-rises and traffic jams, where you don't have to sell a kidney to own a house?

OK, I'm just going to come right out and say it. Could the pandemic help trigger a rural renaissance — could it be just what is needed in a province where, according to the last census, more than 42.6 per cent of the population live in the countryside, compared to 16.8 per cent in Canada as a whole?

When I called Karen Foster, Dalhousie University's Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Rural Futures for Nova Scotia, she said she had been wondering some of the same things.

Until recently, she had also been waiting out the pandemic in the countryside, not much more than a kilometre from where I was.

There she had a chance to look at some of the surveys coming in since the forced work-at-home experiment began. The executive summary: It hasn't been nearly as bad as everyone thought it would be.

For the most part employees are happy, while most employers are fine with the productivity levels of their staffers.

Last month, Twitter announced it will allow its people to work from home forever, should they want to, while ecommerce giant Shopify said that it will keep its offices closed until 2021, after which most of its staff will stay home.

And if you don't ever have to go into the office, do you even have to be in the same city as your employer or customers, or for that matter the same province or country.

“It is not totally crazy that this could be a pathway for more rural living,” Foster said.

Newcomers will discover that its no paradise: in some places the Wi-Fi, a prerequisite for a remote working lifestyle, can be dodgy, which is why it is good to note the series of internet funding announcements in February that increase the percentage of Nova Scotian homes and businesses with access to high speed internet from 70 to 86 per cent.

Though Foster and her family have only been parttiming it on the South Shore of Nova Scotia for a year, the advantages of life in the countryside are already obvious: the stirring geography and recreation activities, the lifestyle offering more to do with your leisure time than just consuming.

To that I will add a report from a South African bank I read yesterday pointing out that “the restrictions on travel and movement imposed by social distancing have highlighted not only our increasing desire to be outside (and in doing so to escape the confines of our own four walls) but also a growing understanding of nature's therapeutic effects and ability to quell anxiety.”

Rural life, of course, changes all of that. The financial advantage of making for the countryside will also lower the stress level.

According to the most recent figures from the Canadian Real Estate Association, the average house on the South Shore of the province —including toney places like Chester and Mahone Bay that inflate the numbers — was just $196,164.

In the Annapolis Valley the average house costs $202,085, while in Cape Breton that number dips to $150,376.

By comparison, according to MLS stats, the average Toronto house sold for $931,000 in recent weeks, which is enough to buy you a small subdivision in northern Nova Scotia, where the beach is 20 minutes away, and at night, instead of the city's din, all you hear is silence.