Buying into East Coast lifestyle? Then higher taxes are table stakes
Re: “Whacking come-from-aways with taxes is such feckless folly for Nova Scotia.” After reading Noah Richler’s April 11 opinion piece, I felt compelled to give Mr. Richler a mite of perspective in the hopes that his feckless outrage might simmer down.
To begin his article by claiming that he found an abandoned house “no one wanted to live in” makes me shake my head. Not all of us are wealthy Torontonians who can flutter about the provinces renovating heritage homes from the ground up.
Richler never once addresses the fundamental question: Why are Nova Scotians wary of Ontario folks coming in and scooping up plum real estate? Adding salt to the wound is Richler’s patronizing offer to create jobs for the locals with his arts centre, as if the locals need to be reminded that work in rural Nova Scotia can often be gruelling, sparse and tough.
The town where I was born and raised, Yarmouth, boasts the highest teen pregnancy rate in Canada.
There have been waves of violent crimes the likes of which wouldn’t make sense to a wealthy “come from away,” because what do they know of being trapped in a system of rural poverty with scarce resources and rare opportunities?
Rich Ontario families dip in and out of rural Nova Scotia because they love the ramshackle houses and the proximity to the sea; they find our shabbiness charming without ever stopping to fully comprehend why things are shabby in the first place.
The rub is that these families, and I’m specifically addressing Noah Richler’s, do come from away. Meaning they chose to live their entire lives somewhere else. Meanwhile, many Scotians are there because they can’t afford to go someplace else. More common, though, is that the lives of Maritimers hold deep and richly tangled roots — their families have legend, lore and myth.
Richler wants to claim this experience for himself and seems to think that by coming in, throwing money around, buying the houses that maybe the locals would have liked to buy if they had the money, he is entitled to the community’s embrace and the government should go easy on him.
The Nova Scotian government is poor and faulty and they’ve got their back up. Meanwhile, Richler wants more tax breaks for his wealthy, multi-property-owning family, and even goes so far as to say he is being discriminated against. But when Richler needs a doctor, he can just fly back to Ontario. When locals need a doctor, a hellish process of waiting, searching and driving for hours, begins.
With his tax money that — let’s be honest — he could have afforded to pay, Nova Scotians could have attracted doctors, maybe opened their own community centres, and offered better programs for kids. (But the government dropped its plans to levy a non-resident tax earlier this month in the face of sustained backlash.)
The City of Halifax, however, thinks the way to be a city is to fill it with unaffordable condos and bistros and wine bars and let the students and young parents fend for themselves. Halifax is thriving, but only because it’s started to imitate Toronto, the very place Richler is trying to escape.
People who ‘come from away’ romanticize rural Nova Scotia as a Canadian Cape Cod. They want to have some kind of Home and Garden renovation experience, chat with the locals at the grocery store, and then be embraced by a community that has likely known each other for hundreds of years, enduring unimaginable struggle and unknowable change.
Has Richler ever really given a good, long think as to why those houses he’s been scooping up are sitting empty? Most likely, the elderly couple who once lived there either died or went into a nursing home and their kids couldn’t afford to take it on because they moved to Alberta for work.
Enter Richler’s wealthy family, in their white linen and indoor-outdoor scarves, coming to buy the East Coast lifestyle.
If you’ve been born and raised in rural Nova Scotia, you’ve been raised with many specific values: Sundays are for visiting. Only strangers use the front door. Always ask after family members. Most importantly, anytime you leave Nova Scotia, you will miss the smell of the salt air and the water so much it’s as if someone’s lopped off a limb.
Of course, it is nationalistic and hostile and unevolved to talk about birthright or to be wary of outsiders but, like it or not, when a community feels threatened by outsiders, there will be a closing of the ranks. I believe some locals feel as if their culture and heritage and history is being preyed upon by rich Ontario folks who believe anything can be bought. And how like the wealthy, to be angry when taxed — it’s become a cliché at this point.
One can argue that these CFAS are injecting money into the province, but not really. They’re buying themselves houses and what — shopping at the Sobeys occasionally?
The government is trying to actually inject money back into the community by saying, “You want to come here and buy our ‘abandoned’ houses and offer us jobs because we seem destitute to you? Fine, but you’re going to pay taxes for that.”
Does Richler actually want to be a part of the Digby Neck community? Then he needs to participate financially. Nova Scotia needs money and he has some. Lord knows there’s not enough to go around inside the province.
I’m not saying people need to buy their way in, but I am saying that if you have the money to come down, buy heritage properties, restore them, and settle into a community you haven’t been born and raised in, then maybe you should prove to the community that you’re worth knowing, that you’ve seen and understood the lineage of struggle in rural Nova Scotia, and that, though you have come from away, you’ve come to participate.
“People who ‘come from away’ romanticize rural Nova Scotia as a Canadian Cape Cod. They want to have some kind of Home and Garden renovation experience ...” Ceilidh Michelle
Montreal-based Ceilidh Michelle is originally from Yarmouth. She is the author of the novel Butterflies, Zebras, Moonbeams, which was shortlisted for the Hugh Maclennan Award for fiction. Her nonfiction book, Vagabond: Venice Beach, Slab City and Points in Between, was published internationally in March by Douglas & Mcintyre. Her novella, Living Waters, was shortlisted for the 2022 Malahat Review Novella Prize.