I want a home, not an investment

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
June 19, 2025
1055 words

After two years of living in France, it was time for my wife and me to come home. She went first, to Nova Scotia, to look at houses for sale. After a week Susan phoned me, excited, and said, “This is it!”

My inbox was soon filled with videos, property descriptions, and photos of a 140-year-old farmhouse at Western Head, just outside Liverpool.

It was an old, charming and quirky home, with grey cedar shingles, a bay window, and a septic tank that needed to be replaced. It has a barn where I eventually hope to add a writing studio, and it has enough land for a serious garden to grow our own fruit and vegetables.

Built sometime around 1880, it was old enough that we knew it would have hidden problems, and even before we made an offer we could see that the roof needed to be replaced. The money-guzzling oil-burning furnace would also need to go, replaced by heat pumps, or, if our budget allowed, geothermal heating.

In Nova Scotia terms, we’re outsiders. Because we’re coming from “away,” we probably paid more than a local person would have, but the house is perfect for us, with room for books and records, an office and a grand piano. We can look out the windows and see the Atlantic Ocean and the lobster boats, and we can hear the foghorn at the Western Head lighthouse down the road.

Despite all of the shortcomings, we knew we had found our home. And somehow we never once asked ourselves: “But is it a good investment?”

The newspapers are full of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s plans for helping Canadians, especially young Canadians, to buy homes. The stumbling block always seems to be a concern that if governments support building more homes, the resale prices of existing houses will go down – that homeowners will lose equity.

What Mr. Carney is missing is that for most ordinary people, a house, or even a rented apartment, isn’t an investment opportunity – it’s a home. Nearly everyone that I have known has moved into their home with every intention of living there permanently. They repaint the living room and hallway because they like the new colour, and they spend weeks and years building the flower gardens because they love to look at them. They add decks, bird feeders, and lights at Christmas.

They aren’t doing this because they’re aiming to add to potential resale value; they’re making an ordinary house into their home.

Because our farmhouse in Nova Scotia is our home, we don’t really care about its market value. We didn’t buy our farm house to resell it; we bought it to live there, to watch the birds at our feeder, the occasional deer or raccoon, and to watch the family of snow hares that nests under our deck change their coats from brown to white as winter approaches.

We bought that house, and love that house, because the Atlantic sunrises are beyond beautiful, and the stars at night are breathtaking, and because when storms arrive they are like nothing we’ve ever experienced.

And when we get home after a trip, or shopping, or work, we walk in the back door and say, “Oh, it’s so good to be home.”

My parents bought their first house in 1966 in Kelowna, B.C., on Morrison Avenue. That was my home for six years, from grade three to high school. In 1972 we moved into a newly built house a few blocks away on Charolais Road. I lived there, in a bedroom with orange shag carpeting, until I left for university. My mom stayed in that house until after my father died in 1994. She then moved into a sweet little bungalow on Ziprick Road that was her home until she died in 2021 during the pandemic.

Three houses over 55 years. That wasn’t about making investments; it was about making a home.

We moved to Nova Scotia for one reason: Susan’s son Haruki, his wife Sofia, and our three grandchildren lived in another old wooden farmhouse, about an hour down the road, just outside of Shelburne. We really wanted to be close to our grandchildren, but also wanted our separate lives, so the distance between us was just right. Susan cooked holiday dinners, and I built a swing-set and slide in the yard.

Early one morning, just a few months after we finally had all of our furniture, books and sheet music unpacked, we received a distressing phone call. Haruki and Sofia’s house had caught fire during the night, and by morning had burned to the ground. The family escaped with little more than their laptops and the clothes they were wearing. Nearby neighbours brought food and bags of used clothing, and kept the children out of harm’s way.

Susan and I drove the children home to our house in Liverpool, while Haruki and Sofia, likely still in shock, watched the last of the firefighting. While we cared for the kids, their parents took the time to come to terms with what happened, and to try to plan for the coming days.

Our Liverpool farmhouse was suddenly home for seven people, not two. For our children our home was a place of refuge. Days were spent exchanging e-mails and phone calls with insurance companies, and making plans for … well, for starting over from scratch. We shared our home with their family until they decided to settle in Montreal for the summer while insurance rebuilt their house.

A home, a real home, isn’t an investment: It’s the place for family, the place that you know you can return to when your world falls apart. A home is where you hang your hat, and keep your family photos, and raise your children. It’s where kittens and puppies move in, live their lives under foot, and then pass away. It’s where your future and your past are preserved all around you, and where every room holds a memory.

I don’t believe that anyone buys a home thinking only of resale value, or the return on investment. You buy your home – or rent it, as is the case for a third of Canadians – because it’s the place where you feel safe, and where you expect to spend years, or decades, making it part of a wonderful life.

My 79-year-old wife was just accepted into Oxford.

By Barry Rueger
Published: Business Insider
May 28, 2025
594 words
PDF of article

After 25 years as a successful piano teacher, my wife, Susan, decided to go back to school for a master’s degree in music theory — at 79 years old.

When I married Susan eight years ago, I knew she was a gifted teacher, one who puts in the hours needed to do her best and who genuinely cares about every student.

But then last year, Susan started to explore ways she could learn more about music and how she wanted to return home to the UK from Canada.

Almost on a lark, she applied to the oldest university in the English-speaking world: Oxford. In March, word came back that Susan had been accepted at the university that most British students dream of attending.

We couldn’t be more excited, but her 80th birthday is fast approaching, and the road ahead is not easy.

Read this at Business Insider.

Without a strong NFB, Canadians will lose sight of who we are

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
June 29, 2024
1148 words

Bill Mason camera helmetWhen I finally bought myself a lovely, red canoe in 1997, it was because I spent my youth, 30 years earlier, watching the many canoeing films by the National Film Board’s legendary Bill Mason.

I recently rewatched Paddle to the Sea, the Mason classic that virtually every child in Canada saw in the 1960s in elementary school. The 1966 film tells the story of a carved, wooden toy canoe containing an “Indian” paddler. The canoe was set free in a river in Northern Ontario, and eventually was carried down through the Great Lakes and out into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. On its journey, the little canoe was aided by many people – and one dog – who picked it up, rescued it and set it once again on its course to the ocean.

I saw that film during an era when there was no bigger thrill than entering a classroom and seeing a big 16-millimetre film projector and a collapsible white screen. Watching the film again, I noticed some things I hadn’t seen the first time. I was struck by the stereotyped First Nations paddler, but also by the powerful environmental message: The Great Lakes were being polluted by humans, with sewage and industrial waste dumped into the waters. I realized that when I saw the film for the first time, at age 8 or 9, it was the moment I first became an environmentalist, as did a great number of children in my generation.

In an age before the internet, and even cable TV, NFB releases shaped the way generations of Canadian children saw their country, saw the broader world, and saw themselves. Now, it seems as if our country has lost a collective sense of who we are. Sadly, the decline of the NFB has contributed to Canadians losing sight of who we are as a nation and what makes us unique.

As a young person, I learned about the Maritimes through films such as Rising Tide and The Sea Got in Your Blood, saw Saskatchewan grain harvested in Wheat Country, and learned about nickel mining in Sudbury in Miner. Sitting in a classroom in Kelowna, B.C., we experienced dog sleds and igloos in the Northwest Territories (At The Winter Sea Ice Camp), and saw famous singers like Paul Anka and Leonard Cohen – famous Canadian singers in an era when virtually all popular music came from the United States.

Like many of my generation, I allowed NFB films to shape me politically and socially. As I grew older, I explored the experimental and creative reaches of the NFB. The animation of Norman McLaren led me to more political films, such as his 1952 anti-war film Neighbours, and later in my mid-20s, in a church basement in Vancouver, to the controversial and influential anti-porn film Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography. And as late as 1993, Alanis Obomsawin’s documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, led me to a strong understanding of First Nations issues, and especially the standoff in Oka.

This was an era when the NFB still had a global reputation. It was well-funded, had production centres all across Canada, and most importantly, was widely known to Canadians and was a source of national pride. It was the very model of a national media organization, a model that filmmakers in other places envied.

In Britain, every person knows or has visited the British Museum. Paris has the Louvre, and Washington has the Smithsonian. Each of these institutions is a cornerstone of how those nations see themselves. Even in these divided times, Americans will look at the Smithsonian and agree: “This is our history.”

Canada lacks a national institution that teaches us who we are. Part of that reflects our relative youth as a single nation, with Newfoundland only joining Canada in 1949, and Nunavut being created 50 years after that. And part of that reflects a population spread out sparsely across our vast, far-flung country, where you can drive for a day or more between populated centres. Those distances mean that the majority of Canadians have never visited the Museum of Civilization or the National Gallery. Instead, for many decades, the National Film Board was the glue that held us together.

In May, The Walrus wrote about staffing cuts at the NFB. According to the NFB’s union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, 80 out 380 full-time NFB positions were eliminated this year. Regional studios in Edmonton, Halifax and Winnipeg, as well as “interactive studios” in Vancouver and Montreal, have been closed. The union says the recent cuts followed several decades of underfunding. Even though both the NFB brass and the Liberal government claim that the organization is being modernized, or reinvented, the sad truth is that these are insupportable blows and that the film board was already a mere shadow of what it was when I was young. Without production centres in different regions of Canada, and without employees with the time and expertise to create and commission new works, the NFB will cease to be a force that binds our country together.

Despite the boundless reaches of YouTube and TikTok, and despite a Canadian commercial film industry churning out police dramas and Hollywood blockbusters, there is still a desperate need for Canada to have a strong Canadian media production organization that will support the filmmakers and films that Disney or Lionsgate or Netflix won’t touch.

When I was young, the government of Canada was genuinely proud of the National Film Board, and understood that it played a critical role in helping Canadians love and cherish their country. Along with the CBC, the NFB told Canadian stories to Canadians. Even though the CBC is finally seeing some funding to replace the drastic cuts of the 1980s and 90s, the production of popular TV and radio programs is different from the thought-provoking films created at the NFB.

The NFB can still be the place where films are produced that are about us, and where filmmakers of any age can go to learn their craft and produce uniquely Canadian movies and documentaries. The National Film Board can rediscover its role as a cinematic hothouse; a place where non-commercial and experimental forms can thrive, and where the kind of filmmaking happens that will once again influence filmmakers globally.

Just as it was in the past, this is still a time when Canadians – especially young Canadians – need a place where they can see themselves portrayed as genuine Canadians, not as thinly disguised Americans. For that to happen, the government needs to step away from bottom-line concerns, and embrace the value of film as art and film as an instrument for social change. That will require secure and generous long-term funding commitments, and the restoration of production offices in every corner of Canada. The National Film Board is the soul of our country, and it needs to be preserved.

Bad news

By Barry Rueger
Published: THIS Magazine
January/February, 2024
640 words
Read PDF.

THIS Magazine Jan/Feb 2024

One writer’s desperate howl for a good old-fashioned newspaper

WHEN I WAS 11, WE WENT ON A SCHOOL FIELD TRIP TO THE KELOWNA DAILY COURIER.

I can still remember the linotype machines and drum-shaped metal plates of text and pictures that were loaded into the giant presses to print the paper’s pages.

They gave us a still-hot copy of that day’s paper. I kept it for years, and for decades I‘ve subscribed to the local daily newspaper everywhere I’ve lived. For the past year, that’s been in Liverpool, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia. Since arriving, I’ve realized that we’re in a news desert; a place where Facebook is the beginning and end of local news. That situation grew even worse when the Liberal government enacted Bill C-18, the Online News Act.

Since August, two months after Bill C-18 received royal assent, Facebook has refused to allow users to post Canadian news stories. For Facebook’s owner, Meta, leaving entire towns and regions with no local news whatsoever is a better choice than agreeing to pay the news organizations whose work Facebook users have been reporting.

Liverpool is a place where daily newspapers really don’t exist. Outside of one store in Halifax we can’t buy a Globe and Mail out here, there are no local dailies, and the tiny weeklies are hard to find. Nova Scotia’s largest paper, the Halifax Chronicle Herald, recently stopped printing on  Mondays, and has cut back on its home delivery. Still, every now and then one of the big papers or the CBC would run a story about Liverpool, and someone would post a link to it on a local Facebook page. Now, even that isn’t possible, and in the meantime, the prolonged death of newspapers continues.

In September the Hamilton Spectator shut down its newsroom, and its owner Torstar is ceasing to print dozens of small local papers, moving them online instead. Similar shutdowns are happening in small-town British Columbia.  It seems Southern Ontario and parts of B.C. are about to become news deserts just like southern Nova Scotia. Yes, you can still subscribe to many publications online, but there is a tangible difference between holding a printed paper and reading news on a screen. The printed page establishes the trustworthiness of the news outlet. Having trained reporters and editors and a physical printing press requires an investment that almost always leads to serious journalism. The time and money spent on reporters and editors is one reason why the New York Times and the Globe and Mail are still considered reliable. These publications have a long history as trusted news sources, and still feel a duty to maintain those standards. One may not like their editorial slants, but few seriously question the quality of their reporting.

In Liverpool, on the other hand, we just suffered through nearly two months of a boil-water advisory, and unless you followed the Facebook page for Queens County you wouldn’t have known what was—or wasn’t—happening. Because there are no local reporters, there was also no one asking questions about why an entire town had no drinkable water.

Meta’s actions are not new. For decades, the handful of publishers who control almost all of our news outlets have dramatically reduced reporting staff while shrinking newspaper page counts, and at the same time have closed or merged dozens of small local papers that they’d acquired. What Nova Scotia’s South Shore is experiencing, and what southern Ontario and B.C. are about to experience, is the harsh reality of living in a place where media ceases to be the watchdog that holds governments and corporations accountable, and where there’s no trusted source for people to sort fact from fiction.

Sometime before 2000, 30 years after my field trip, I visited the Conrad Black-era Hamilton Spectator with a friend who worked there. My vivid memory is of hundreds of square meters of blue carpet – half of the giant newsroom – sitting empty of furniture.  Governments turned their heads while Black decimated newsrooms, just as they turn their heads today.

-BARRY RUEGER

I’m 68 and hired a personal trainer because I’ve always hated working out. For the first time ever, I feel great and am making progress.

By Barry Rueger
Published: Business Insider
May 10, 2024
554 words
Downloadable PDF

Barry ties his shoes on a bench at the gym.As a kid, I hated gym class and lived with my nose in a book. While my classmates were playing hockey or soccer, I was in the library on my way to becoming a writer.

Over the years, I occasionally visited the gym with my wife who loves working out, but I never really embraced fitness until recently.Exercise is important at any age, but this is especially true for older adults. After all, working out can prevent or delay age-related health issues. With this in mind, I decided to make a change.

Now, at 68, I’ve fallen in love with working out, thanks to my personal trainer. Here’s what starting my fitness journey later in life has been like.

Read the entire story at Business Insider.

Bell Canada owes Canadians

By Barry Rueger
Published: Canadian Journalist.ca
February 13, 2024
1160 words

Bell Canada is set to axe 4,800 jobs, sell dozens of radio stations, cut newsrooms across Canada, and destroy CTV’s star investigative program W5.

The announcement by BCE Inc. made big news-but the real damage was done decades ago.

Canadian news has long been an expanding wasteland.

What saddens me is that government could have prevented this–and still has the power to fix it.

Full column is available at https://canadianjournalist.ca/column-bell-canada-owes-canadians/

At Issue

By Barry Rueger
Published: CBC Gem
December 28, 2023

CBC’s political panel asked me to provide a year-end question.  Rosemary Martin hosts the discussion, and I ask why Justin Trudeau lacks the backbone to stand up to oil companies .  I appear at about 7:32.

Falling For Fall

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
October 14, 2023
1308 words

Western Head LighthouseIn Nova Scotia, September marks the peak of the hurricane season. All of us who live here, right next to the Atlantic Ocean, learn quickly to watch the skies, observe the winds and prepare for the kind of weather that many Canadians will never have experienced. So far this year, Hurricane Franklin grazed us with heavy rain before heading for Bermuda. Hurricane Idalia laid waste to Florida, but missed us. Then Hurricane Lee headed our way – arriving as a still-ferocious “post-tropical storm“ – and all of Nova Scotia braced as it hit us directly.

I grew up in British Columbia. Everything I know about hurricanes I learned from TV. What I didn’t know is that they are incredibly slow to arrive, and incredibly hard to predict. Living on the edge of the Atlantic, you learn that the only thing you can do for an impending hurricane or post-tropical storm is to prepare, and then wait for as long as it takes. After you have gassed up the generator and packed the patio furniture into the garage, all you can do is sit at home, endlessly refreshing Facebook for an update.

I am a city boy: I’ve lived and worked my life indoors, while weather has always been something that happened outdoors. Seasons were defined by changes in wardrobe and themed parties, and nature was what I found at nearby Princess Park, or on a sunny hike on the mountain trails above North Vancouver. The natural world was something I appreciated from time to time, but it wasn’t part of my day-to-day life.

Now I find myself fascinated by the patterns and progressions of the world around me. Since moving to Western Head, on Nova Scotia’s east coast, at the end of 2022, we’ve had different periods when we were overrun by various life forms: first with ticks, then mice, then big ants, and then mosquitoes. We had one week of big fat moths, and then bees and wasps arrived for a short stretch, and some little black bugs that we never did identify before they disappeared, too. And finally this week, inexplicably, we had fruit flies congregating unseen inside of a newly opened wine bottle, before riding the wave, drunkenly, into our wine glasses.

We’ve seen big brown snowshoe hares dancing around the yard, then disappearing, and now returning with little babies. We’ve seen a myriad of birds arrive, then depart as they migrate north or south, and now we look out every morning to see who is perching on our bird feeders today. What we’re learning is that the creatures around us are almost always temporary visitors, so we enjoy them when they’re here, then welcome the new birds that arrive the following week. In more practical terms, we watch the skies each day to calculate whether it’s safe to hang laundry on the line. We know that we need to stay alert for the time each day when the wind changes direction, to prevent the almost-dry clothes from getting damp again. We understand that when you only live a couple of hundred metres from the Atlantic Ocean, the official weather reports are at best a suggestion, and that looking out the window gives a better picture of what weather is about to come your way.

For the first time in my life, I find myself waking at 6 a.m. or earlier for the singular pleasure of watching the sun rise over the sea, revelling in the clouds’ changes as they move across the sky, and gauging the size and ferocity of the waves below us. For the first time in my life, I stop before going downstairs to make coffee, peer out of our bedroom window, and say, “Oh my God, that is so beautiful.”

And at day’s end, I look out from the back of our house and marvel at the breathtaking red sunsets behind our ancient old barn. Living here, you can’t avoid being conscious of the moments when the day begins and ends.

We’re only now learning when and how to plant a garden, and which of our two- and four-legged visitors will invade the vegetables and steal them. As newcomers to Nova Scotia, we planted far too early, and with 101 things to contend with in our new home, managed just barely to find time to observe as the rain and wind turned our tidy vegetable patch into a tangle of colourful but inedible weeds.

Our failing attempts at building a garden are honestly very sad when compared with the established gardens encircling our house. The flowers, bushes and shrubs that we inherited when we bought our home are simply brilliant. Each week, some new flower blooms: some white, some orange, some red, and a myriad of bushes and hedges appear and flourish with little or no warning. Once again, every morning I peek out the windows and marvel at what surprises have appeared. And I thank the people who obviously spent so many hours, months and years building a Garden of Eden that we can now sit back and admire.

The sea, too, changes from week to week and month to month. The height and violence of the waves shift, of course, but the sea winds also constantly change from one direction or another, from cold and destructive to warm and pleasant. When you live this close to the Atlantic shore, you learn to love the hissing sibilance of the waves blowing in from whichever direction the winds choose, and the equally romantic lowing moan of the foghorn in the lighthouse at the end of our road. In our part of Nova Scotia, there is something that has connected us to the natural rhythms of the world around us. In all of this, I’m looking at the patterns, the shifts in weather, the things that appear and prosper and the things that die off until next year. None of these are things that I ever really noticed while living in Vancouver or Toronto.

And now, of course, we’re looking forward to the rest of autumn, and then our first full winter in Nova Scotia. We know it will be cold, wet and windy, but we also now know it will be beautiful, breathtaking and awe-inspiring. And we know that on occasion, the Atlantic weather can be frightening, and even dangerous. I’m looking forward to Christmas; I can already see the snow that will cover the ground and the trees, and can smell the turkey in the oven. I’m planning now to order the plow for our tractor, and where to safely store the outdoor furniture. I’m looking at the big tree that I can see out of my window, looking for all the world like the grandest live Christmas tree imaginable.

In the midst of everything else, and during the endless changes and cycles that are now such a part of my life, I find myself wondering whether we should put the coloured lights in the trees now, while the weather is good.

In all of this, I’ve learned to slow myself, to wait until the next cycle, or the next season, and to be patient. I’ve found the space to stop, to look around me, and to trust that the opportunity, or the delight, that has passed me by will surely return in due course. Just as the birds who visit our feeders accept the bounty of seeds without question, I am learning to embrace the good things I see all around me, and leave aside any fears or doubts for the future in this new place.

For the first time in my life I understand that, like the birds, bunnies and flowers, I am really just one tiny part of a great and all-encompassing world, and that my happiness depends entirely on my accepting my place in that larger universe.

Taking care of ourselves without a family doctor has been a challenge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail 
June 24, 2023
1639 words

In need of medical attention
One of the first things that my wife and I did after moving to rural Nova Scotia was to look for  family doctor, but we couldn’t find one accepting patients. Getting care has been a challenge.

My wife Susan and I arrived at our new home in Liverpool, N.S., at the end of 2022. Since then, we’ve discovered one valuable lesson: If you’re trying to learn anything about how things are done here, it will be via word of mouth. This is especially true if you need health care. The Nova Scotia Health Authority and the provincial government have websites, phone lines and pamphlets, but for real answers you need to talk to the people who live here: your neighbours, workmates, people you meet in stores and supermarkets, your librarian, the man who cuts your hair.
Susan and I had both been hammered by a vicious COVID-19 infection the previous September. Over the course of 10 days, we suffered all manner of extreme symptoms, ranging from sweating and coughing to diarrhea and a complete inability to do anything beyond survive. I have never been so sick in my life. Since that time, and continuing after we moved to our new home in Nova Scotia, we’ve suffered endless aches and pains, and continuing fatigue – symptoms that seem to reflect long COVID. We knew that we needed medical attention, and sooner rather than later.
One of the first things we did after unpacking our furniture was to set out to find a family doctor. At store counters and in lineups it didn’t take long to understand that there are only a handful of doctors in Liverpool, and not one of them was accepting new patients. And as far as we could tell driving around or looking online, there is no walk-in clinic here – those “fallback” services seem inexplicably rare in rural Nova Scotia.
Canada’s health care services are in crisis across the nation, but the situation in rural Nova Scotia feels especially severe. Official statistics say that one in 10 people in Nova Scotia have no regular family doctor. The reality is that the government’s “Need a Family Practice Registry” for people without a doctor recently reported that there are more than 142,000 on the waiting list – more like 14 per cent of the population. If you’re in the one big city, Halifax, you may have some choice, but the rest of Nova Scotia is rural, and doctors are scarce.
People in my area on the registry’s list can eventually sign-up with a “real doctor” at the Collaborative Family Practice at Liverpool’s Queens General Hospital. Until then, though, you’ll be encouraged to visit the emergency department during the few hours a day when they’re open. For instance, in a recent week in May there were four days when the emergency department shut down at 1:30 p.m. until the following morning at 8 a.m.
In the meantime, those 142,000-plus people without a family doctor are being directed to Maple, an online medical practice that operates across Canada. The publicly funded side of Maple in Nova Scotia – there is also a for-profit, pay-for-service side available – is also short of physicians, and many patients are directed to nurse practitioners.
Even if you reach a qualified doctor, there is no route available to you to return to the same doctor for a follow-up or to discuss the results of tests – you are given the first doctor or nurse practitioner available. If needed, it’s possible that you’ll be referred for an in-person consultation, but that usually doesn’t happen, and I can’t help wonder what’s being missed when knee problems or internal aches and pains are being diagnosed by a different practitioner every time, and over an online video instead of in person.
And that is the real problem. As willing and knowledgeable as the doctors and nurse practitioners are on Maple, it’s still a video call on your laptop. You can hold your phone or iPad up to the area where you’re hurting, but sometimes you really do need a medical professional to examine you in-person, touching, prodding and assessing where your problem lies.
The shift from in-person to online medical evaluations makes a profound difference. We’re feeling the lack of having a regular doctor who knows us and our medical histories. Instead of the familiar routine of visiting a doctor who already knows you, briefly checks your file as a memory refresher, and then begins a consultation and diagnosis based on that knowledge, we find ourselves sitting in our kitchen with printouts and pill bottles at the ready. Every consultation involves using most of the brief time allotted to update a new physician. The onus is now on the patient, not the doctor, to maintain, organize and communicate a full medical history.
There’s also the very real worry about what would happen if we need emergency medical care. This week, the mayor of Middleton told Nova Scotians about a frightening incident. In a letter to Premier Tim Houston, Sylvester Atkinson described how on the evening of June 15, the local volunteer fire department was called to the Soldiers Memorial Hospital in Middleton. The local fire department was called because there were no doctors in the hospital, and no doctor on-call, and a patient was in cardiac arrest. The firefighters did what they could, but the patient died. A doctor did drive down from Kentville, a half-hour away, and declared the patient dead. For small-town residents like me, the story is absolutely terrifying.
Fortunately, we haven’t needed any emergency treatments since we moved here, although we have found ourselves at the local hospital for other medical services. Even when the hospital’s emergency room isn’t admitting patients, the hospital lab and X-ray departments are still open, and it’s possible to be in and out for X-rays or blood tests in a few minutes. And even if it’s near impossible to see a doctor some days, we appreciate that the rest of the medical workers there will take the time to explain what they’re doing, why they’re doing it and to gossip about local affairs.
That is honestly the one positive side to Nova Scotia’s woeful medical system: The local health care team of nurses and lab technicians are relaxed and friendly, and likely someone you’ll run into at the library or supermarket. After decades of brusque treatment in big cities such as Vancouver and Toronto, it’s nice to deal with real people who seem to genuinely care about your welfare.
Nova Scotia’s current budget claims to be ramping up health care spending, but the two headline areas in the government releases are retention bonuses for nurses (to the tune of $110-million), plus an additional $50-million to address continued surgical backlogs. Still, many people believe that not enough attention is being paid to the challenge faced by many Canadian health care systems: a significant lack of doctors, especially family doctors. As convenient as it is to access nurse practitioners and pharmacists for day-to-day health needs, the most important member of your health care team is still a consistent family doctor.
I was raised at a time when every family had a doctor – someone who cared for parents and children through all life stages, tracking their history from month to month and from year to year. These physicians lived in your community and were a constant in your life. It was understood that medical care was not just about emergencies, it was about keeping patients healthy on a continuing basis. It was about a long-term personal relationship with a physician who you knew and trusted.
Today, in rural Nova Scotia, that sort of relationship is harder to find. The older doctors are retiring, and news reports tell us that new, younger doctors don’t want to take on a small-town family practice.
I can’t help but think that decades of “restraint” budgets, and the losses to health care funding that resulted, have to be responsible for this change. Young doctors look at practices in small-town Nova Scotia and see nothing but overwork and underpay, long backlogs on routine surgeries and referrals, and medical treatments such as physiotherapy or prescriptions that aren’t covered in one of the poorest provinces in Canada. Is it any wonder they shy away from family medicine?
Ultimately this all speaks to priorities. Nova Scotia brags about an increase of 21 per cent in health care spending over two years, but every time I drive from Liverpool to Halifax to see a specialist or a relative in hospital, I can’t help but notice the tremendous amount of highway construction that is happening. To my eye, neither the population of Nova Scotia, nor the traffic volumes, merit the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to upgrade all these roads to four-lane divided highways.
It feels as if Canada’s second-smallest province – only Prince Edward Island is smaller – chooses highways over health care. That, I think, is the core of the problem we face in Nova Scotia: Health care is seen as an expense, while highways are an “investment.” We’re faced with months of waiting for surgeries, and we sometimes get questionable treatment options over video chat – but at least the drive to Peggy’s Cove is wonderful.
After many months reflecting on the sad reality that we can’t have a family doctor, we had come to accept the unfortunate situation. Last week though, with no warning, we received a phone call from Queens General Hospital’s family practice. I don’t know how we reached the top of the list, but we now have a family doctor once again. Ours was trained in Khartoum, and several weeks ago he’d left a position in Birmingham, England, for his new job in Liverpool, N.S. He tells us he likes the small town that is now his home. We don’t yet know what chain of events led us to having our new doctor, but he seems good, and we’re very relieved. I hope the many other thousands of Nova Scotians on the family-practice waiting list also receive good news soon.

Nova Scotia’s forest fires make me wonder if our dreams of a green, rural life were misguided

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail 
June 3, 2023
815 words

We’ve made our home at the point of Western Head, near Liverpool, N.S. On Tuesday, I was awakened at 4:30 a.m. when my phone shrieked with a warning from the government of Nova Scotia telling me not to light a campfire. By the time the sun rose around 6:30, there was a curtain of thick grey smoke, and I could taste it on the back of my throat. We already knew about the forest fires burning out of control in our province, so the real question was: Where was the smoke coming from, and how close was the fire?

We live right between the two major blazes. The Tantallon fire is about 30 kilometres from the Halifax Citadel. At the time I write this, on Thursday, we’re told that it has consumed about 837 hectares, and is possibly becoming under control. The other one is the Barrington Lake fire in Shelburne County. It had been the fire nearest to our children and grandchildren, burning more than 17,000 hectares. Then late Wednesday night we heard that another wildfire had broken out perhaps three or four kilometres from their house. Fortunately they had already packed up and left to stay with friends in New Brunswick – the smoke was just too much for them.

After waking on Tuesday, the morning was spent on the internet, and looking at whatever media we could find to try and get an up-to-date picture of these blazes. My frustration grew as I realized that anyone who could be updating me had disappeared. Government, media, even the pundits on Reddit and Facebook had all booked off at 8 o’clock the previous night. If the fire changed direction or speed, or if you just needed to know what was happening now, not 12 hours ago, you would need to wait.

Western Head is part of a point of land just below Liverpool. It’s sparsely populated, and has one road that loops along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean that surrounds it. That morning, while we waited for any information about the fires, the isolation that had been so appealing to us took on a different tone.

Ever since moving here people have told us that the summers have become hotter, and the weather dryer. Now I look at the forest and bush that surrounds us and find myself thinking about how fast it could all go up in flames.

And I’m thinking that if the fires are this bad in late May, what on Earth will arrive in July and August?

At one point on Twitter – apparently the best source for up-to-the-minute fire news – I read that Halifax Fire deputy chief David Meldrum had said: “Without a doubt … climate change is contributing to volatility.”

That statement is, in many ways, the one that frightens me most. Right now there are thousands of households evacuated, and multiple fires out of control. If you live anywhere in Nova Scotia you’re wondering if your town or county will be next. The one thing that’s agreed on is that this is not normal for Nova Scotia.

We moved here, bought our home here, to escape the pressures of the big city. A very large part of that decision was a chance to be more self-sufficient: to grow our own food, care for our own land, and rely less on governments and corporations for day to day needs. And yes, doing all of this in an environmentally friendly way is important to us.

Now I’m wondering if our dreams of a rural, green life were misguided – if we were fooling ourselves into thinking that we could remove ourselves from the fast-paced, plastic-wrapped scurry of city life.

The challenge for us now is to try and understand if the changes coming at us because of climate change will overwhelm whatever efforts we can muster to adapt to them. Yes, we can adapt our home, and the ways that we eat and grow our food. We can remove the old oil-burning furnace, and add solar panels. But is that enough to counter global warming, rising sea waters and forest fires?

So far, the fires have stayed away from us, and have even changed direction, but Nova Scotia is heading into a summer of hot and dry weather. Instead of relaxing in our yard, building a compost bin and cutting grass, I’m spending my day on the internet and watching press conferences to try and guess whether we should be loading up the car and heading somewhere else to be safe.

And, of course, I’m asking about the future of our grandchildren.

That, more than anything, terrifies me. So far they’ve survived this year’s fires OK, but what about the next ones, and the ones in the years that follow? Will it become normal for them to wake up to a hazy sky, the taste of smoke lingering on their tongues?