Economic Forum for Developing the Eastern Shore

Developing the Eastern Shore

300 Gammons Road, Port Dufferin, B0J 2R0 902-654-2265

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   Increasing the tax base of the provincial government at any cost--i.e., turning rural areas into resource grab bags and waste disposal sites. What must be sought is a balance between paying our fair share of taxes and affording the services to the community that citizens both require and desire. The Eastern Shore should not be viewed as a territory for extraction industries, merely to generate tax revenue for the provincial government and justified by the claim to “create jobs at any cost.”
   
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   Creating jobs at any cost. Yes, we do have some unemployment on the Eastern Shore, but the majority of our citizens are not actively seeking employment right now. We agree we must find solutions for high, seasonal and chronic rural un and under-employment. But those solutions may be more complex than imposing industries that belong to the pollution economy on the shore. Such impositions threaten to destroy the lives of the 90% of citizens in Nova Scotia who are well in order to create a few poorly paying jobs. Job creation must be respectful of what is already working and of value in our society.
   
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   There is a difference between an increase in the Index of Wellbeing and an increase in GDP. Some increases in GDP are worse, not better for the citizenry. For example, as GPI Atlantic has shown, an increase in crime may increase GDP thanks to costs of insurance, policing, jail and rehabilitiation time, lawyers, the courts, etc. but crime is clearly not an enhancement of social wellbeing. We need to bear such distinctions in mind as we debate suggestions and solutions for rural economic development in Nova Scotia.
   
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   Economic Development in rural areas probably needs to follow an ethic like that of the Hippocratic Oath: First of all, do no harm to what is healthy about us.
   

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   For years we have been asking the provincial government for an economic development officer to work with the community and businesses to help develop the potential of the Eastern Shore. These requests have, to date, been in vain.
   
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   Over the past four years, the NDP government has added $2.3 billion to the provincial debt (Bill Black, Chronicle Herald). Every year, past and present Nova Scotia governments have allocated between $300M to $500M in discretionary funding to various projects for economic development in Nova Scotia. Currently, we see a lot controversy over the fact that recently, much of that discretionary spending has been on corporate welfare for large companies such as Irving Shipbuilding, IBM, Bowater, Stern, Cooke Aquaculture, etc., with little to show for these massive investments in terms of increased employment, tax revenue, or wellbeing.
   
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   Almost none of that discretionary government spending has come to the Eastern Shore.
   
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   Who are we on the Eastern Shore? For the last dozen years, as you drive this direction from Dartmouth/Halifax, you might notice a steady growth of residential building gradually spreading east along the HWY 107 and 7.
   

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  Members of the Mi’kmaq First Nation.
  
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  Long time residents who work in tourism, fisheries, lumber, pulp and paper, and retail.
  

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  Commuters who work in metro HRM and other parts of the province and country.
  
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  Telecommuters who work from home offices on the Eastern Shore on contracts from around the province, country and world. (For example, the authors of this document are among these commuters and telecommuters.)
  
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  Retirees from Nova Scotia and the rest of Canada who have settled here for the affordability, beauty, and community-spiritedness of the Eastern Shore.
  
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  Seasonal recreational dwellers from around the Canada and the rest of the world.
  

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   SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHICS are a concern. There is a decline in young families with school age children to support the school system and provide a trained worker base in the community. Youth are leaving the Eastern Shore to seek different experiences and more lucrative employment opportunities elsewhere in the province and country.
   
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   LOCATION: Most of the Eastern Shore lies within the Halifax Regional Municipality and should therefore benefit from equitable allocation of services. The Eastern Shore is located within 45-90 minutes of the bridges. Sheet Harbour is 75-80 minutes from Stanfield International Airport and the Marine Gateway. As Jane Jacobs argues in Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, this geographic situation enables the Eastern Shore to develop and benefit from import/export replacement in relation to the metro area which, comparatively speaking, is currently thriving economically. By replacing with our own production or value-added activities strategic items that have been imported into Halifax from much longer distances elsewhere, we may build strength, health and sustainability into the local economy. Strategies to develop the Eastern Shore can and must build on this advantage. Its favourable location vis-à-vis the urban center distinguishes the Eastern Shore from many other more remote rural regions of the province.
   

Governance and Regional Development expert, Donald Savoie, in his Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes, first of all acknowledges that our disadvantage is an inability to compete with the huge economies of scale in the rest of North America. He asks the question: “Where Can Little Dogs Eat?” The Eastern Shore is an even smaller dog than the little dog that is Nova Scotia.

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  Low Capital Intensive Development
  
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  Sustainable Triple Bottom Line Full Cost Accounting Economics
  
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  A Place Brand that Focuses on Best Practices
  

Many demographic studies show that citizens in our society are:

In Debt

Short of Time

Inactive to point of ill health

Stressed and Mentally Depressed – “the New Common Cold” (Ideas/CBC)

Lonely – (the family is no longer the household norm)

Insufficiently skilled for available employment (Over 40% of Nova Scotians struggle with basic literacy and numeracy skills.)

Worldwide the experience that people say they appreciate and seek most is Unspoilt Nature.
WORKING HYPOTHESIS

The Eastern Shore has the potential to address and market to these needs and wants and attract people to settle and work in our communities. We believe that the Eastern Shore can develop its key assets in the context of providing an affordable place to live where you can see the ocean every day, and get access to the facilities of a city or major airport as you need them.

The backbone of the Eastern Shore Economy is our lobster and other wild catch fisheries.

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  Tangier Lobster markets our lobster to Asia for a substantial economic premium capitalizing on a brand of “pristine, unspoiled, pure and healthy seafood.”
  
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  The Maritime Gateway and proximity to metro-HRM increase opportunities for import and export replacement here.
  
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  Our lobster fishery is one of BEST PRACTICES and should be acknowledged, maintained and further developed as such. We should do nothing to compromise this industry and its marketing premium.
  
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  This is why we must refuse open pen salmonid feedlots not only on the Eastern Shore, but in all of Nova Scotia’s coastal waters. The danger to the health of the lobster fishery and other successful or recovering wild catch fisheries such as herring, cod and wild salmon, not to mention our “pristine ocean” brand is great and scientifically substantiated.
  
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  We must also keep alive a reality principle that weighs true costs and real occurrences against corporate hype and false promises. (See Appendix A, which shows the real statistics re economics and job creation vs the hypothetical claimed economic and employment figures for the open pen fin fish feedlot industry.)
  
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  We can continue to develop marketing strategies that promote the brand of Eastern Shore Fisheries as pure, healthy, delicious, sustainable, organic, and untainted around the world. There is a great premium to be realized for the Eastern Shore and Nova Scotian wild catch fishery.
  
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  Shellfish Aquaculture Industries (mussel, clam, oyster farms) thrive on the Eastern Shore and should be encouraged and enabled to benefit from strategic enhanced marketing. We need to avoid tainting the Shellfish Aquaculture industries with the same internationally negative perceptions that accompany open pen fin fish aquaculture—they will ruin the former’s brand.
  
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  Close containment finfish aquaculture is the best practice for Aquaculture. Grocery chains are recognizing and testifying to this. Nova Scotia and the Eastern Shore could be on the cutting edge of the development of closed containment aquaculture were there a level playing field in terms of government subsidies, waste management practices, CFIA compensation for destruction of ISA diseased fish, and all of the risks not incurred and infrastructure not required in a controlled water filtration system, from chemicals to disease to water pollution.
  
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  The fact that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is now permitting ISA-infected open pen feedlot salmon to be marketed for human consumption, has the potential to irremediably damage Nova Scotia’s other fish products, resulting in millions of dollars of lost opportunity costs. Beware!
  
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  Link the wild catch fishery to tourism both as gastronomy and as experience, both in developing tourist venues and in marketing promotion.
  

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  Do a full-cost accounting of the loss of forests to the Eastern Shore.
  
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  Figure out what can be done to preserve and enhance the forests we have.
  
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  Do a full cost accounting of the state of these forests.
  
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  Consider developing a local heat source biomass industry from renewable forest resources—not as is currently advocated by NSP. See “Keeping Wealth in Our Community”: http://www.yellowwood.org/Keeping Wealth Local.pdf
  

Quite frankly the provincial government’ support, development and marketing of tourism on the Eastern Shore has been disappointing, even downright ignorant of the fact that national and international trends have moved towards marketing tourism as activity driven and demographically targeted. Generalist platitudes like “Come to Life” simply won’t cut it anymore, and never did. The fact that the lion’s share of funding for tourism goes to the bureaucrats in the Department of Tourism is a scandal. Today, tourists no longer want to sit in a car, eat bad food, and look at folkloric items. Much more is required. We need to learn from and adopt best practices in tourism marketing and development.

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  TIANS and DEANS have branded the Eastern Shore as “pure, pristine, unspoiled coastlines and islands.” The potential of this brand, which is also a true description, is enormous, given the worldwide tourist demand for activities in wild, unspoiled nature.
  
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  The NS Nature Trust has determined that the Bay of Islands, off the coast of the Eastern Shore, remain in a pristine post Glacial Age state of wilderness.
  
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  The Lake Charlotte Proposal for the Bay of Islands Heritage and Marine Tourist Destination needs to be supported and rapidly developed by government funding at all levels – municipal, provincial, and federal.
  
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  Marketing Sheet Harbour as the “Gateway to the Bay of Islands” could yield dividends like some of those that come to Gananoque, Ontario, which touts itself as the “Gateway to the 1000 Islands”.
  
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  There are a few struggling marinas on the Eastern Shore. The Sheet Harbour Chamber of Commerce is proposing to develop a marina. Maritime leisure tourism will continue to flounder without a Best Practices Strategy.
  
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  We suggest developing a Marine Parks network akin to the British Columbia Marine Parks network. Learn from the BC success: BC developed a growing network of Marine Parks all along the BC Coast, which then created easy to reach multiple destinations for local and visiting boaters from the US, other parts of BC and Canada and elsewere. BC markets these parks well, and every year thousands of local and visiting boaters enjoy the parks and the services that local communities supply around them. These boaters spend money on everything from food and drinks to large repairs and supplies and they often leave their boats in storage or for repair in BC during the off-season. Some of these visitors, seduced from the water, then buy property, settle and start up businesses in BC. We see a potential market of thousands of boaters on the Eastern Seaboard, from Newfoundland to Cape Cod and beyond. A strategically developed, marketed, promoted, targeted development of Nova Scotia Marine Parks would bring these clients and their spending power to Nova Scotian marine industries.
  
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  Even better, a NS Marine Parks network would provide a venue for healthy, active living for citizens of Nova Scotia, and other Maritime Provinces, which could join and enhance the network. The health benefits in terms of full cost accounting could be enormous.
  
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  Incentivize a Power and Sail Boating School in Sheet Harbour.
  
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  Work with the Coast Guard to offer a Leisure Captain’s License training – the first in the country.
  
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  Start a boat charter company at the Sheet Harbour Marina. The harbour is long and deep and sheltered – a great place to learn sailing skills.
  
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  Build a Dry Storage Facility for the winter storage of boats. All that would be required is a securely fenced in flat surface. Boat storage is scarce and expensive in HRM and the USA. Sheet Harbour is 90 minutes from the airport.
  
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  Market Sheet Harbour as an ideal place to store and repair vessels. This then provides work for mechanics, joiners, detailers, security personnel etc.
  
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  Build a Bike Trail from Dartmouth to Canso: Add a bike trail along the shoulder of highways 7 and 107 and map it out to follow the various loops from Dartmouth to Canso. The Greenways Bike network in Quebec has added millions of dollars to the Quebec economy. Nova Scotia can easily and cheaply do the same. The Eastern Shore is a wonderful place to bike. B&B’s, campgrounds, hotels, restaurants, all can be mapped onto the bike trails as stopping places.
  
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  Build more Hiking Trails and market the trails we already have along the Eastern Shore: We have an excellent set of hiking trails along the Eastern Shore. We need to maintain these trails, add more, and market the Shore as a great hiking destination.
  
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  Tourists are concerned to be active and healthy these days. We have the goods to offer that. Why isn’t there a B&B close to Taylor’s Head Park? There are enough trails there for a long weekend sojourn.
  
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  Leave the parks open all year long. Market hike in shoulder season and winter tourism. Taylor’s Head Beach and Psyche Cove is wondrously beautiful in winter.
  
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  Develop Domestic Fitness: Once again, providing venues for recreational activity not only brings in tourist and in-settlement dollars, but by marketing and encouraging recreation possibilities for local students and citizens, we reap the triple bottom line economic benefit in terms of decreased health and crime costs. If this isn’t financially worthwhile to government, what is?
  
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  Develop the quality of the hospitality industry by offering extension courses in Sheet Harbour in these areas.
  
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  Change up the quality of gastronomy. The most common criticism we hear from tourists from the rest of Canada, the USA and Europe is that there is a gourmet deficit in our restaurants.
  
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  Link gastronomy to the wild catch fishery more creatively. Define the cuisine of the shore with creative use of locavore produce.
  

A recently opened Arts and Crafts Shop in Sheet Harbour carries work from more than 180 local artists and craft-workers. Hundreds of Arts and Culture workers live along the Eastern Shore.

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  Brand the Eastern Shore as a community of Arts and Culture workers.
  
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  Network these Arts and Culture workers and actively recruit more to the area with incentives such as affordable studio space and decent public transit to metro HRM.
  
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  Offer extension courses in Arts and Culture from NSCAD and the NSCC at Sheet Harbour.
  
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  Support the construction of the Quality of Life/Multi-purpose Center adjacent to the new consolidated school in Sheet Harbour.
  
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  Liaise with the schools to hire local Arts and Culture workers to teach extracurricular courses in the school.
  
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  Hire local Arts and Culture workers to teach the community enrichment adult-education programs.
  
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  Support and enhance marketing endeavors and arts festivals on the Eastern Shore.
  
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  Provide venues and instruction for theatre, film, writing, and musical arts in the community – developing on what is there, e.g., men’s choir, local musicians, photographers etc.
  

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  Build on the alternative health care craze as an industry.
  

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  Convert the floundering Liscombe Lodge into a year round weight loss, lifestyle coaching, convalescence, fitness clinical resort. See the best practice examples of Safety Harbour and Canyon Lodge Resorts in the USA. The Liscombe Lodge is excellently situated in a calm meditative space, far from the hustle and bustle of cities, accessible to airport, furnished with appropriate spaces and recreational facilities to easily be converted into such a health resort. Alternative health, fitness, and life-style coaches would settle in the area for work at this lodge and in private practice. The main challenges would be assuring part-time medical follow-up for difficult cases and of course carrying through on a demographically targeted, national and international promotion campaign. There is a need for such a facility in the province and in the vicinity of HRM.
  
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  Encourage and incentivize alternative health care providers such as, naturopaths, acupuncturists, physiotherapists, massage therapists (one has recently set up in Sheet Harbour), psychotherapists, to start small (part-time) businesses east of Musquodoboit. Co-ordinate this with mainstream health care providers. Explore the possibility of covering alternative care on medicare. Full-cost accounting may show that it is cost-saving to pay $45/hour to an alternative health care provider if it keeps the patient fit and out of acute and critical care.
  

Florida, Arizona, Mexico, and Victoria, BC are all retirement capitals. Their economies flourish from the retirement industry. Their main drawing card is agreeable weather in winter time. With global warming and extreme weather, Nova Scotia’s drawing card is temperate weather in the summers. When the rest of North America is sweltering in heat waves and humidity, we on the Eastern Shore are enjoying liveable temperatures and cool sea breezes. Currently, in Nova Scotia the dogmatic argument is that to encourage retirees to settle is a liability, entailing health-care costs that federal health care transfer payments, now based on population numbers, will not cover.

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  Make a representation to the federal government to demonstrate to them that it is for the benefit of the country to have seniors move to a place which is more affordable to house and feed themselves, than living in economically stressed conditions in cities such as Edmonton, Toronto or Vancouver. Rectify the health transfer payment issue making it a constitutional issue of “portability”.
  
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  Retirees pay income taxes, land taxes; they consume and spend money where they live; they invite their extended families to visit as tourists; they have time to serve as volunteers in their communities; they make, own and operate small businesses; they seek out entertainment and leisure activities.
  
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  The Eastern Shore is already developing as a retirement community for these very reasons. This is not a negative development. Recruiting retirees to the Eastern Shore is one way to ensure the reversal of depopulation.
  
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  Develop a retiree recruitment campaign following best practices such as that of Elliot Lake in Ontario: “Come retire to affordable quality of life on the Eastern Shore.” “Come back from away.” “Come from away. Retire Here!”
  
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  Advertise temperatures along the Eastern Shore during the summer months in a banner across the pages of newspapers and websites in cities along the US East Coast and Toronto and Montreal. Do so when these cities are sweltering in heat waves or reeling from tornadoes.
  

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  Develop energy import replacement schemes.
  
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  HRM floated an incentive to finance loans for conversion to solar hot water. Take this program as a model and expand it to our coastal communities to convert to household-based solar and wind power and use local wood as small scale biomass for heating. Our scruffy black spruce forests and alder groves could be cultivated as renewable biomass for local energy production which would also create employment.
  

GPI Atlantic developed a formula for quantifying the economic value to a society of volunteerism. Atlantic Canada leads the way in Canada for volunteerism. Governments need to recognize the economic contributing value of volunteerism in their tax codes.

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  The Eastern Shore hosts many volunteer organizations: Chamber of Commerce, Legion, Lions Club, Masons, religious groups, Eastern Shore Forest Watch, LEA Place, Association for the Preservation of the Eastern Shore, Guides, Scouts, Cadets, Arts society, Friends of Taylor’s Head Park, etc.
  
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  Build the Multi-Purpose Center: Housing many of these organizations in common spaces, such as the planned multi-purpose center attached to the new school, and the Deanery at Ship Harbour, would go a long way towards streamlining their overheads and freeing up more funds for actual community enhancement projects.
  
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  Hire a Recreational Co-ordinator/Facilitator to co-ordinate these groups towards the realization of more ambitious, meaningful, much- needed community projects. The populations in most need are youth, elderly, and women. The Eastern Shore deserves such a co-ordinator as its fair share of human resources in HRM.
  

Every year some service is cut from health care provision in the Sheet Harbour Hospital. Further cuts are threatened. Government service bureaus hours are cut—sometimes even the office itself is closed. There are many tax payers along the Eastern Shore. We do pay our way and deserve our fair share of services and contributing personnel in our communities.

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  Recruit and hire government employees who will reside in the community.
  
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  Arrange with unions and institutions to make every attempt to recruit teachers, doctors, nurses, technicians, facilitators, co-ordinators, development agents, etc. who will commit to their community as productive residing citizens, not commuters.
  
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  In turn the communities and institutions along the Eastern Shore need to do their part to sort out why government employees do or do not want to reside here.
  
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  We need to promote our attractions and rectify our short-comings.
  

Youths in rural communities face the same issues that youths in cities do, but both rural youths and rural regions have far fewer resources to cope with these issues. For years the Sheet Harbour School has been ranked near the bottom by the AIMS survey. Illegal substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, failure to complete education, childhood deprivation and other factors are all chronic problems in rural Nova Scotia. How can we have full and wealth-generating employment when over 40% of our population is struggles with basic literacy and numeracy? How can youth expect good salaries if they have not completed secondary school, let alone some kind of post-secondary education? How can kids stay out of trouble if there are few extracurricular recreational possibilities on offer to them?

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  Offer enhanced early childhood development and education programs for the pre-schoolers along the Eastern Shore. Break the vicious circle of deprivation.
  
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  The best practice in education today is recognized to be in Finland. There they insist on mental health first and foremost. Involve mental health in our training of teachers and more proactively in our school-based health care system from an early stage in childhood development.
  
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  Change up our schools – a team of multi-disciplinary specialists needs to oversee the new consolidated school and find effective solutions for improving the level of education on the Eastern Shore.
  
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  Hire a recreational director to co-ordinate with the schools and rest of community recreational offerings to keep kids proud and active outside of school hours. It is known that targeting at risk kids with socially productive offerings is the best harm prevention.
  
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  Offer skills training and continuing education in the community that respond to community needs. Restore a branch of the Nova Scotia Community College in Sheet Harbour to offer course in building trades, navigational skills (our fishermen could be qualifying as licensed mates for other shipping industries), marketing, retail, financial management, hospitality industry, Arts and Culture etc. These courses combined with enhanced remote education offerings should enable our citizens to at least make a start towards career training from within their community.
  

Recently on the Eastern Shore we had a frightening but enlightening experience. We were threatened with the imposition of open pen salmon feedlots in our coastal bays and harbours, which threatened our wild catch fishery, tourism, and environment. Thousands of citizens wrote and petitioned government to request that this development not take place. Hundreds of full and part-time residents on the Eastern Shore mobilized to form the Association for the Preservation of the Eastern Shore – APES – which linked up with 116 other organizations province-wide to call for a moratorium on the development of this industry in Nova Scotia’s coastal waters. Discovering the energy, talent, devotion, team work, and generosity of these citizens was the silver lining in this cloud. What a shame that all of these resources had to be spent preventing something negative rather than making something positive. Imagine if governments worked with citizens rather than against them to harness their capacities and will to make rural communities a better place to live and work? Proper government consultation and co-ordination could achieve this result.

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  Community co-ordinators could recruit and join the forces of all stakeholders and residents of the Eastern Shore to earmark priorities for development projects and then work as a team to carry them to fruition.
  
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  One great rift and waste of resources lies in the gap between the “Come-From-Aways” and Seasonal Residents on the one hand, and more long term residents of the Eastern Shore, on the other. There is surely blame to be had on both sides for these rifts, but how are we going to encourage a needed diversity of immigrants to come to settle and stay here if we cannot even broach the historic gaps that exist between these two groups?
  
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  Both groups need to communicate about projects in each other’s interests and desires, share their different yet complementary resources, both quantitative and qualitative, and focus on making economically viable development projects work.
  
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  How about a recruitment campaign--100 NEW CITIZENS A YEAR!