Globe and Mail – Appalbarry.com

December 18, 2025December 24, 2025

I thought Canada was cold. And then I moved to England

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
December 18, 2025
980 words

EDF Smart Meter

A few weeks ago, we began our Christmas season with the Advent Procession service at Great St. Mary’s in Cambridge. Like all older stone-built churches in Europe, St. Mary’s has no heating system. Despite our scarves and heavy winter coats we were shivering by the time that the choir and organist had finished, and even Rev. Clare Stephenson, who led the service, and offered us her blessing as we left, had the look of someone who was very ready for a warm fire and a glass of Christmas cheer.

The British are a proud people. They are justifiably proud of their history, still dwell on their memories of empire, can celebrate literary icons like Chaucer and Shakespeare, and more recently still have vestiges of waning pride in their rejection of Europe during Brexit. But more than all of that, the British find their greatest pride in being cold.

Before moving to Cambridge, where my wife Susan is studying for her Master of Philosophy in Musicology, I had of course heard the jokes about slippers and cardigans, and about the British obsession with not spending money on heat. What I now know is that these weren’t jokes – they were the very foundations of a national culture.

We’re renting one of the Charterhouse terraced cottages in the village of Grantchester, on the outskirts of Cambridge. It’s a lovely home, built around 1880, with a great landlord, and the 250-year-old Blue Ball Inn just two doors down. That pub turns out to be a very good thing because when our home is too cold to stay in, the pub always has a roaring blaze in the fireplace. The downside is that our bills for cask ale and pork pies are approaching what we pay for electricity.

We have a Smart Meter from EDF, our electricity company. Minute by minute a little light is either green (good), amber (caution), or red – you’re using too much power! The screen shows us exactly, to the penny, how much we’ve spent on energy as each day progresses. During the cold snap in November that daily number crossed £10. Our Canadian minds quickly translated £300 a month to $550 Canadian dollars!

What I’ve learned since arriving in Britain is that yes, everyone wears layers of clothing indoors, and that yes, likely only one room in the house is heated at any time. Old houses are drafty, and the heating systems are unlike anything I experienced in Canada. Our cottage has “storage heaters,” which take advantage of half-price overnight electricity rates (charging double the rate we paid in Vancouver) to heat large, heavy ceramic blocks inside of a radiator. In the morning when electricity prices jump (to triple Vancouver rates!) that stored heat is allowed to escape and heat the room. At least until around dinner time, when the stored heat has run out.

As I sit on the sofa, reading, with my feet curled up under me keep them warm, or while we snuggle under a duvet while watching the BBC, I’m reminded of our home in Canada. Homes there have big gas or oil-fired furnaces, double glazed windows, and (oh how I miss it) under-floor heating. I remember being able to walk from room to room and stay warm no matter where I went. I look back fondly on turning up a thermostat without a moment’s hesitation, making everything just a little bit warmer because, really, it costs so little.

Like a lot of Canadians, we’ve spent many evenings watching programs like The Crown and Downton Abbey. In both series the most memorable set pieces show people deep in discussion beside a roaring fireplace. What I now realize is that 10 feet away from the hearth people were likely shivering frigidly. Even the wealthy and powerful in Britain live half the year in the cold.

Because the heating systems in British homes are so spartan, almost every single room in the house – including the bathroom – has a small, plugged in, electric heater to “take the edge off” the cold. These inefficient little boxes do warm things up a bit, but are an expensive solution.

Although their homes and apartments may be cold, the British people are genuinely warm and helpful. When we’ve complained about being chilly, they’ve been quick to suggest solutions.

“Layer the floor; even newspapers under a rug stop the cold coming up.” “Eat something warm and calorie-dense before bed to keep core temperature steady.” “Cafés with poor ventilation tend to be warmest; linger.”

And my favourite: “A small pet is effectively a mobile heat source. Cats are the most efficient, but anything warm-blooded helps.”

Which is not to say that the British couldn’t also improve their insulation, and add weather-stripping to doors, and price their electricity a little bit more for comfort than profit.

Of course, when I look back fondly on our toasty, warm Canadian homes, I can’t help but think about how they were heated. In B.C. you might be able to use the power from hydro-electric dams, and in Ontario from nuclear power plants, but more likely your furnace still burns natural gas, or in Atlantic Canada, heating oil. We were warm all winter in our Nova Scotia farmhouse, but the oil heating is one small part of the global warming that led to this year’s Maritime drought.

The other morning, I came down for coffee and breakfast. I stepped into a freezing kitchen and found Susan warming her hands over the toaster. “Seriously,” she said, “I feel like Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Match Girl’, scrabbling for whatever scrap of warmth I can find.”

I smiled at that image – until I took the time to read the story that I vaguely remembered from childhood. The Little Match Girl was found frozen to death.

November 1, 2025December 3, 2025

What happens when the well runs dry? After months of drought, Nova Scotians are finding out

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
November 1, 2025
935 words

Dug Well

Barry Rueger is a writer currently based in the U.K.

A few weeks ago, our well ran dry. Our Western Head farmhouse, near Liverpool, N.S., is old. Approximately 46 per cent of Nova Scotia homes rely on wells for household water. Like many of them, we have a dug well – a stone-lined hole in the ground, maybe one-and-a-half metres across by seven or eight metres deep. That well normally holds 3,000 gallons of water, filled by the groundwater that flows up from deep in the Earth.

That groundwater has disappeared, and now our well is dry. Four hundred dollars bought us a 3,000-gallon tanker full of water to refill the well, but instead of stabilizing the water level, it’s disappearing quickly into the soil. We’re faced with a choice: Spend $20,000 for a new, deeper, drilled well, or close up our wonderful farmhouse and ask our tenants to find a new home – one with running water.

Canada’s severe drought is a sign of future climate conditions and calls for action, experts say

The larger question is what the Nova Scotia government is doing to assist homeowners with dry wells. They’ve been quick to suggest that you take shorter showers, or use waste water to refill your toilet tank, but when you have literally no running water that doesn’t help.

If you’re retired and living on a pension, or if you’re a single mother struggling to feed your children, you need a government that will pay for water delivery to your house, or even for part of the cost of drilling a new well. You need a government that understands that clean, running water is essential to life. It’s not a luxury.

Atlantic Canada has been in a drought for months now. According to Agriculture Canada most of Nova Scotia has received less than 40 per cent of normal precipitation during a recent three-month stretch. For the first time in many years the summer went by with no tropical storms, or indeed storms of any sort. Without rain the ground dries out, and then wells dry out too.

For much of rural Nova Scotia this is a disaster. There’s no count of the number of households without running water, but the number is large enough that drilling companies and water delivery services are working overtime.

As I write this I’m talking to drilling companies to see who could create a new well for us. In Nova Scotia anyone who can provide water is working seven days a week. Heather Jefferson, operations manager at DJ’s Well Drilling, up the road from us in Bridgewater, tells me, “We are drilling wells through the week and putting pumps in on the weekends. We are booking for the end of December or the New Year.”

Another major drilling company, after being profiled in the Halifax newspaper, has a voice-mail box that’s constantly full, and an e-mail address that just bounces back to the sender. Every drilling company is busy, as are water delivery services.

Life in Nova Scotia can sometimes be hard, but life without running water is an entirely different level of difficult. We were used to hauling five-gallon bottles of water for drinking and cooking from the Queens County water refill station, but that doesn’t get you a hot shower after a long day at work, or run your washing machine.

‘Forever chemicals’ in tap water leave these communities in a toxic limbo

The reality for rural Nova Scotians today is this: If you can afford to spend $20,000 – or more – you can drill a new well that likely will give you water. If you don’t have that money – and Nova Scotia has an aging population, and low incomes – you really have no options except to shower at the local municipal gym, and hope for rain.

Hiring a company for $20,000 to drill a new well may not even help you. Sometimes they drill a dry well and you still need to pay, or pay thousands of dollars more for fracking to break up the underground rock and let water seep in. If you’ve lived your life in a city or town with running water, let that sink in: In Nova Scotia you can pay $20,000 and still have no water.

Right now my wife and I are in Cambridge, in Britain, while she completes a degree at the university here. A dry well doesn’t affect our day to day lives, but it means we’re spending hours each day looking for a solution. After trying to find some way to provide running water for the three young construction workers renting from us, it feels like closing up the house is the only choice.

For most people this drought was a surprise. Our well has stayed full to the top for more than 100 years, and there was no reason to expect it to suddenly stop giving us water. Just two weeks before the tenants moved in, a cleaning crew scrubbed the house and never ran out of water. As of today we no longer have tenants, and we no longer have the monthly income that we are relying on to pay our rent in England.

This is not the fault of individual homeowners. What many in Nova Scotia (and in other drought-stricken places across Canada) believe is that droughts like this are tied to global warming and the dramatic shifts in weather patterns caused by climate change.

Unfortunately, because our governments refuse to stop the extraction and use of fossil fuels, climate change will continue, and this won’t be the last time wells in Nova Scotia run dry.

August 14, 2025August 27, 2025

Why I added my name to the long ballot in Pierre Poilievre’s by-election

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
August 14, 2025
858 words

Barry Rueger is an author and is running as a candidate in the Battle River-Crowfoot by-election in Alberta.

In April of this year, I worked for Elections Canada. I was a service agent in the weeks leading up to the federal election, helping early voters to complete their ballots.

I have two distinct memories.

There was a young couple from Syria who brought in their Canadian citizenship certificates, barely two weeks old, and showed them to me proudly as they prepared to vote here for the first time. They took the process incredibly seriously, and had obviously done their homework.

Another group of voters that stood out were older, Canadian-born, didn’t know who the candidates were, and, in some cases, didn’t even know which riding they were voting in. These were people who voted for one party election after election, with no questions asked.

Such people are the reason why Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre is now running in the riding of Battle River-Crowfoot, in Southern Alberta. On April 28, more than 82 per cent of the riding’s voting constituents (or 53,684 of 64,807 eligible ballots) elected Damien Kurek, the Conservative candidate. They voted for a local boy who was a “fifth-generation farmer” and who had been a worker in the oil-and-gas industry. It was the third time in a row they had elected him, but just a few days later, he indicated he would be willing to resign his seat. The reason? Mr. Poilievre had been defeated in his Ottawa-area riding of Carleton, and needed a presumably safe seat to return to Parliament.

Like that young immigrant couple, I care a lot about my vote. I take the time to look at candidates and parties, and try to choose the person who I think will represent me and the people who live in my town. I don’t just vote for a party; I vote for an individual.

If I were one of the 53,684 people in Battle River-Crowfoot who voted for Mr. Kurek, I would be angry right now. I would be wondering why someone who had received my vote in three elections would suddenly abandon his position as a member of Parliament for a job as a lobbyist. And I’d be wondering how a candidate who had just been defeated in his own riding in Ontario was supposed to understand my needs, and fill the role of a rural Alberta MP.

Mr. Kurek’s decision to step down is why I joined 200 other Canadians in registering with the Longest Ballot Committee. Our names will all be on the ballot with Mr. Poilievre, not because any of us expect to win, but because we’re saying that there is something very broken in Canadian politics.

I’m running in this by-election because I believe it’s time for Canada to find a new way of choosing the people that we send to Ottawa. I’m running because I’m one of the people who felt hopeful when Justin Trudeau promised a new and better electoral system, only to back out when he realized the old system worked better for him. I’m also running to make the point that the rules determining how MPs are selected, and how governments are formed, should be crafted and implemented by a non-partisan body of independent citizens, the genuine working people who are most affected by government actions – or inaction – and not the politicians themselves.

I’m the grandson of homesteaders who broke barren ground in Saskatchewan and lived in a sod hut. I was born in Calgary, and went to school there. My relatives are all Albertans; people who work on farms, or in oil and gas, who hunt and fish, and volunteer for the local fire department.

When I look at Mr. Poilievre, I see someone who has never worked a real job in his life – who has never got his hands dirty picking fruits or vegetables (like I have), or done factory work (like I have), or carried sheets of plywood across an icy construction site.

With Mr. Kurek, the voters in Battle River-Crowfoot had a candidate who truly represented their community: someone who had done the same sort of work as his constituents. Now, instead, they’re being handed a life-long professional politician.

Since his defeat in the Carleton riding, and his appearance on the Battle River-Crowfoot ballot, Mr. Poilievre has called the Longest Ballot Committee’s actions “a scam” and wants our form of protest to be banned. Some social-media pundits have posited that running for office should require a $1,000 deposit (which was rendered illegal by a Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta ruling in 2017)

Since John A. Macdonald in 1867, every single one of Canada’s 24 prime ministers has been either a Conservative or a Liberal. When voters’ choices are limited to the two “natural” governing parties, it’s inevitable that politicians will grow lazy, or even corrupt, and will wind up offering no real choice to the electorate.

I am running in Battle River-Crowfoot because I agree with my fellow Longest Ballot nominees that our electoral system needs reform, and that those reforms will only come to pass as a result of pressure from ordinary Canadians. Other countries have managed this, and it’s time for Canada to do the same.

June 19, 2025June 24, 2025

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.

June 29, 2024July 15, 2024

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 helmet When 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.

June 1, 2024June 1, 2024

Japanese fusion comes to Nova Scotia’s South Shore

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
June 1, 2024
962 words

Partners and co-owners of Main & Mersey Dining Room and Coffee Bar, Shani Beadle, left, and Andreas Arnmar, right, are photographed at their restaurant in Liverpool, Nova Scotia on December 30, 2023.Meagan Hancock/The Globe and Mail

Andreas Arnmar and Shani Beadle’s road to restaurant ownership was what you could call uphill, right from the concept stage.

Late last year the husband and wife opened the Dining Room at Main & Mersey, an Japanese-fusion restaurant, in Liverpool on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. With a population of 2,500, the town boasts culinary options that lean toward fish and chips and lobster rolls.

Believing locals would appreciate the dishes they were envisioning, such as Oyster Mushroom Tempura or Agedashi Tofu, was a real leap of faith, they say now. And that was just the first challenge.

The couple’s culinary journey started small: with coffee. After moving to Liverpool from the U.K. in 2017 (Beadle is from B.C., while Arnmar was born and raised in Sweden), they opened home-furnishings store Main & Mersey on the town’s Main Street. Beadle’s background in fabric design positioned her well for the endeavour.

While she ran the shop, Arnmar renovated their new home and raised their young daughter. Two years later, they launched a small coffee shop behind the store because, in the words of Arnmar, “there wasn’t any good coffee that we liked around this area.”

Main & Mersey’s menu offerings include, lobster kani salad, left, and salmon misozuke, right.Meagan Hancock/The Globe and Mail

The coffee bar did a lot better than they expected, and so did the bakery they added in 2022, serving up treats such as cinnamon buns, lemon-curd croissants and spinach and feta rolls. Soon, she adds, “I saw how many people we turned away asking for proper food, who didn’t just want fish and chips and chowder. There was a massive gap in the food spectrum, especially when the tourists are in town.”

To fill that gap, Beadle and Arnmar knew they wanted to do something new, namely to go higher end and introduce different flavours to the town’s dining scene. They secured a bigger location just a few feet away from the furniture shop in fall, 2022, and began construction on the space.

A brand-new restaurant kitchen, a welcoming bar and an accessible washroom are all complemented by wood-topped tables, tropical plants and cozy lighting. Much of the painting and tile work was done by Beadle, Arnmar and local volunteers. And they converted the upper floor of the building into apartments, with rent offsetting part of the cost of renovations.

The interior of Main & Mersey Dining Room and Coffee Bar.Meagan Hancock/The Globe and Mail

The couple decided to bring along their pastry chef from the bakery, Aimee Corbet, and hired winemaker and mixologist, Alexandra Beaulieu, as well as a Peruvian-Japanese chef. Their Japanese-fusion menu is integral to their vision, of course, but Arnmar stresses that they’re out to do more than just serve food on plates.

“You can get a great cocktail, you can try a really amazing bottle of wine that you may not have had before. You get food that you may not have tried before, good service‚ and you’re in a beautiful space. It’s just kind of ticking the boxes.”

But inevitably, there were delays. Their grand opening was punted forward two months owing to a shortage of tradespeople in the region and because of government paperwork. In the meantime, they were on the hook for mortgage payments, construction costs and staff salaries.

And then, when opening weekend finally arrived last August, their chef made a sudden departure.

Beadle and Arnmar were faced with a new and almost impossible challenge: How do you run a restaurant without a trained chef? Fortunately, he had already trained the rest of the kitchen to prepare his menu. And Beadle stepped up to take on a job she never expected to fill as a member of the kitchen staff, doing prep for the evening, creating new menu items and training her staff. Meanwhile, Arnmar is up front, welcoming customers and greeting regulars by name.

The restaurant’s grand opening was punted forward two months owing to a shortage of tradespeople in the region.Meagan Hancock/The Globe and Mail

Opening the restaurant stretched the couple’s financial resources to the limit. The first big lifeline came from the FarmWorks Investment Co-operative, a Nova Scotia for-profit co-op that lends funds to food businesses in the province. The funding comes on the condition that the restaurant will buy from provincial producers, and serve Nova Scotia fish, meat and produce.

Beadle is on board. “The idea is we use 50 per cent locally sourced ingredients. That can be wine, that could be produce, that can be meat, that can be mushrooms or whatever. It could be distilled liquor that’s made in the province. Obviously, it’s easier in the summer months than in the winter, but we’re also doing things like pickles and other preserved ingredients. ”

Main & Mersey crowdfunded for the final push before opening day. Beadle posted an appeal on their website and received 85 per cent of the $50,000 they were seeking. “You can’t pull out once you’ve taken people’s money. It’s really impressive, that people in our community will step up like that.”

One of those community members is local Laurie-Anne Brown, who grew up in Liverpool in the 1980s when “it was a thriving paper mill town” with a bustling Main Street full of shops and restaurants.

She hopes new establishments like the Dining Room at Main & Mersey will restore “a thriving Main Street that I once knew.”

Beadle notes that the restaurant had donors from as far away as London and Toronto, but they’re counting on locals, like Brown, and residents of the province from further afield, too. “Build it and hopefully they’ll come. People already get in their car and drive an hour and a bit for our pastries so if the food is good … that’s the plan.”

March 8, 2024March 23, 2024

How to save a bundle on rental car insurance and make sure you are covered

By Barry Rueger
Published: Globe and Mail
March 8, 2024
1065 words
Downloadable PDF

After landing at an airport, many of us will proceed to collect our luggage and head to the car rental counter. It is there that they will invariably offer to sell you insurance.

I’ve been in this same situation countless times, but after a recent trip to Vancouver where the price of the insurance offered was more than the price to rent the car, I decided to do some digging to find out the smartest options.

Every rental will include basic liability coverage. It’s required by provincial law. But some kind of additional insurance to pay for damage to the car is a good idea. The cost to repair even small dings or a cracked windshield can quickly run into the thousands of dollars.

Accepting the offer at the counter is usually a very expensive way to get that insurance.

We recently rented a car in Vancouver from Hertz. When we made the booking on Expedia, the site offered insurance for nearly half of the price that we were going to pay for the car rental. We declined Expedia’s offer and assumed we would do better at the Hertz counter.

We were wrong. For a two-week rental of a mid-sized car, Hertz was charging us $380.72. The “loss damage waiver” it offered, covering physical damage to the car, as well as theft or vandalism, but not injuries, would have cost an additional $489.86.

We declined.

What I have learned is to plan ahead.

There are choices out there, but the time to research them is well before you book the car, not at the rental desk.

Almost every insurance option requires that you already be a customer, whether it’s your own auto insurance company, the credit card you use, or the website that you use to make travel bookings.

In our case, it turned out that Expedia would have been a better option than Hertz. If we had purchased rental insurance through Expedia, we could have bought a “travel insurance policy” for the same two-week rental for $241.80 – that’s $16.12 a day, or slightly less than half of what Hertz wanted to charge us. Even more amazing: The Expedia package includes not just collision coverage, but trip cancellation coverage, and will pay some emergency medical expenses.

If you don’t use Expedia (or similar booking websites), those rates are similar to another option called RentalCover.com, a standalone rental car insurance site that will set up your insurance prior to picking up the car. Unlike some car rental insurance policies, RentalCover will insure all drivers listed on the rental agreement as well as fees for loss of use and towing, and they’ll cover trips of more than 30 days. They’ll also cover you if you’re renting a motorhome or recreational vehicle.

In this case, while still at the rental counter, we chose to call the insurer who provides our car insurance in Nova Scotia. Our agent added rental car coverage to our existing auto policy, and assured us that we were now fully covered for an annual fee of $32 a year. That quick call saved us hundreds of dollars.

The other insurance option that is often available is though your credit card. Most major credit cards offer some form of rental car insurance as part of their package of benefits. Call your card company or visit their website ahead of time to make sure your specific card package includes this coverage.

As you’re doing this research, be sure to ask some careful questions. For instance, if you decide to accept insurance coverage from the rental company, will you still be covered by an outside insurance policy? It’s generally an either/or proposition. And you should be clear that the auto rental company might require the cardholder to pay for damages with their credit card, with your card company reimbursing you after the claim is processed.

In other words, you might find your credit card maxed out.

Beyond that, rental insurance plans all have various rules. Most companies have age restrictions. Expedia, for instance, excludes drivers under 25 years of age, or over 70. Some insurance packages exclude camper vans and the like. All of them insist that you stay on paved roads and obey rules about drinking and driving.

Before booking your rental car, look carefully to make sure that your credit card insurance includes your entire planned trip – especially if you’re travelling to more than one country – and the specific vehicle type that you hope to drive.

And if there will be more than one driver, always ask if both you and your partner are covered. Some rental car insurance packages will charge double for a second driver.

If you damage your rental car, understand that using outside insurance may leave you faced with paying the entire cost of repairs before you can claim it from your own insurance company. Hertz, for instance, is specific that if you “choose to decline Hertz’s coverage, you will be responsible to Hertz for the full value of any damage due to loss of or damage to the Hertz vehicle. If loss does occur, you must then submit a claim for reimbursement to your credit card company.”

In recent years, we’ve had to negotiate claims with both car rental companies and the company that moved our household. We’ve learned that it’s worth taking the time to document anything that might come back to haunt you. Even though you’ll be anxious to get on the road, find a well-lit spot to stop, examine the car for existing damage and take photos. If you see any sort of dings, dents or scratches, call the rental office and tell them.

And if you bring the car back, and the rental agent suddenly demand hundreds or thousands of dollars to repair damage? Always be reasonable, but never feel a rental agent’s assessment is the final word.

People make mistakes, and they especially make mistakes when examining a dirty car in a dark, underground garage. Insist that they show you exactly what they think needs repair. If you don’t believe that you caused the damage, or that the damage merits a claim, say so.

I love rental cars and the chance to drive a new make and model of car every time that I travel. Now that I understand how to manage my insurance, I’m sure my next trip will be that much more relaxing.

November 17, 2023April 10, 2025

In Nova Scotia, drag racing is a family affair

By Barry Rueger
Photographs by Susan Evans
Published: Globe and Mail
November 17, 2023
1526 words
Downloadable PDF

In the 1970s, back home in Kelowna, B.C., I had fantasies of becoming a race car driver. My cherry red ‘69 Dodge Charger was too fast for my own good, and speeding tickets were a regular expense. I drove fast, and I loved cars that went fast.

On the Greenfield Dragway near Liverpool, N.S., I’ve rediscovered that love of fast cars, of roaring big V8 engines, and have found one of the last places where global warming and fuel economy just aren’t on the table for discussion. It’s not that people aren’t aware of these things, or don’t care, it’s just that when you’re driving a car at 320 kilometres an hour, they really don’t enter your mind.

I’ve also found one of the few remaining places where virtually everything on wheels has a North American nameplate. In an age when the car business is global, and when electric cars are becoming more and more common, drag racing is still the domain of big-block Chrysler and Chevrolet engines, with a smattering of Fords. Even the token Volkswagen Beetle and the two Honda Civics manage to squeeze in loud and powerful Detroit engines.

At the Greenfield Dragway, which leases the little-used South Shore Regional Airport runway for several weekends each year, Noel Peach is repacking the drag chute that slowed his car at the end of his first run.

Driver Noel Peach packs his parachute. A chute is required for any car that goes faster than 150 miles anhour. Drag racing still uses imperial measurements.
SUSAN EVANS/THE GLOBE AND MAIL — Driver Noel Peach packs his parachute. A chute is required for any car that goes faster than 150 miles an hour. Drag racing still uses imperial measurements.
SUSAN EVANS/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

It’s a tricky business, and one that benefits from a second set of hands. On this sunny October weekend, he was helped by his wife Lindsay.

Peach’s dad was a racer, too. After Noel and Lindsay met, it was natural that Lindsay became part of the race team – or more accurately, exactly one-half of the team.

Nova Scotia drag racing is still dominated – although not exclusively – by male drivers, but partners are integral members of most teams. Whether providing bookkeeping and planning skills, or hands-on maintenance and support, a lot of drivers rely heavily on their partners. (It’s a good thing Noel and Lindsay are a team in other ways, too: The couple’s home in Upper Tantallon, near Halifax, burned in the wildfires just a few months before, when they were here for another race.)

Drag racing still uses imperial measurements – a quarter-mile track is about 402 metres. Cars are measured in inches and feet, and an explanation on the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) website explains that a Top Fuel dragster “can burn up to 15 gallons of nitromethane fuel during a single run,” reaching more than 330 miles an hour. That’s more than 50 litres during a 3.7-second run at more than 530 km/h.

Peach drives a 1988 Trans Am, a car that hit 164 miles an hour on this day. He explains that even though drag racers are fierce rivals on the strip, they’re a strong community back in the pits. If you need a hand, or a part, someone will step up to sort you out.

Working together is what Peach and Lorne Buchanan of Bedford, N.S., did when it came time to upgrade their cars. Peach wanted to buy his current car from another racer, but didn’t want the engine that came with it. Buchanan’s dragster was fine but needed a new engine. Buchanan and Peach bought the white Trans Am together, and each took what they needed.

Today the two cars are parked side by side in the pits. Buchanan’s partner, Brenda Rafuse, guides the dragster into the pit, and helps him to pull off the hood covering the electronics. If you look for it, you’ll see Rafuse’s name is also painted on the side of the car.

Author Barry Rueger sitting in LorneBuchanan’s dragster.
SUSAN EVANS/THE GLOBE AND MAIL — Author Barry Rueger sitting in Lorne
Buchanan’s dragster.
SUSAN EVANS/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

If you only have cursory knowledge of drag racing – fat tires and loud engines – you may be overwhelmed by the many classes of cars and races. The NHRA points out that there are 10 classes that feature a straightforward, heads-up race between similarly classed cars.
Two cars line up beside each other at the “Christmas tree,” watching as a sequence of
three yellow lights flashes, one after the other. When the bottom light turns green, they both take off.

At the Greenfield Dragway, things get more complicated. Cars range from full-length dragsters, to various levels of pro and super-pro cars, to what seem to be factory stock sedans. Each is assigned a handicap based on the number of seconds the weight and configuration says it should run a quarter-mile. And each car can choose to run in more than one class.

In practical terms, you usually see two cars lined up side by side, with the slower one getting the green light first.

Greenfield is still a small-town race, and spectators aren’t kept in the grandstands. You can walk up and down the pits, talk to the drivers and their teams, and take the time to marvel at the cars and the obvious pride of the people who maintain these vehicles.

Beyond the (usually) shiny paint jobs and sponsor logos, serious cars need to meet a plethora of NHRA safety rules intended to protect the drivers, crew members and spectators. In all but the slowest cars, a roll cage is required, made to specific dimensions. Safety belts are replaced every two years, and helmets and neck collars are mandatory. Faster vehicles need to add a drive shaft loop and axle retention devices, and cars that can hit 150 miles an hour must have a parachute at the back of the car.

All of this costs a lot of money, and as Fred Thibeault from Middleton, N.S., describes it, it has been many years since the winnings at a Nova Scotia race paid enough to cover what it cost to build the car. At this point, everyone is doing it for the love of fast cars and the thrill of racing.

Thibeault’s 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS is a shiny red thing of beauty. He has been racing this car for 34 years, and it’s obviously his pride and joy. The car is, in some ways, still stock – the same car that came off the dealer’s lot when it was purchased – but over the years it has been slowly upgraded in nearly every way allowed by the NHRA rules.

Under the hood, the car is cleaner than most kitchens. The stock 375-cubic-inch engine has been bored out, and has seen the pistons, rings and camshaft replaced or upgraded to boost performance. A dry-sump oil tank makes sure that everything stays lubricated under extreme conditions. And the transmission – well, the outside is stock Chevy, but what’s inside is another thing altogether.

Another of Thibeault’s cars is the 1989 Camaro parked right next door at the track. It’s driven this weekend by Thibeault’s son Scott. He has three sons who drive, and two are here on this cool October weekend.

The race track family goes beyond the children and spouses who are part of the teams. The 160 drivers and hundreds of family members and spectators all seem to know each other, and spend as much time socializing as they do prepping their cars for the next run.

Drag racing today is high-tech. The Christmas tree tower at the start and the photosensors at the finish line time each run and generate the printed slips that each driver picks up on the way back to the pits. Inside the cars, many of today’s dragsters rely on an electronic box to time each shift to perfection. All you need to do is steer the car for a few seconds – the computer will make sure that each shift happens at the perfect moment.

Not everyone wants such a high-tech racing experience. The head of the Greenfield Dragway Association is David Joudrey. He explains that when he’s racing his 1979 Chevrolet Nova, he’ll do so in the “non-box” class, racing against people who still shift their own gears instead of letting the “box” do it.

At the start line, some things haven’t changed. Once you’ve done your prerun “burn-out” to warm up your tires, and have positioned your car’s nose at the starting point, you’ll have both the brake and the throttle pushed in as the Christmas tree counts down. You want your engine revs to be as high as possible before you start moving. Your aim is to release the brake when the lights hit “1/3 yellow” – if you wait until the green light comes on, you’ve already lost.

After a day revelling in the smoke and sound of these cars, I’m sadly reminded that I hardly drive over the speed limit any longer, and that it’s been years since I even did my own oil change. My Mazda CX-5 SUV is a convenience now, not the passion that my Charger used to be.

Still, as David Joudrey reminds me, if I can borrow a helmet, and can pass the safety inspection, my Mazda and I can join them at the Greenfield Dragway next season and recapture those days of speed – though I doubt my insurance policy will allow it.

October 14, 2023July 15, 2024

Falling For Fall

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

Western Head Lighthouse In 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.

June 24, 2023May 16, 2024

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.