What Garner calls “wild scenes of debauchery between drunken servicemen and local girls” might also have been viewed by another observer as serious sexual assaults. If it was the navy who started the riot, other service men and civilians were not far behind in joining in the fun (or devastation, depending on what you had to lose).
While all this was going on, most of the guys in charge – the mayor, the politicians, and the heads of the army, navy and air force – were taking part in the memorial service on the Garrison Grounds. Once Admiral Murray got wind of the liquor store break-ins, he mustered up the idea of a military parade for all three branches to calm things down. Admiral Murray and Mayor Butler were out driving around using loudspeakers to talk to the crowds and gather the servicemen for the parade. This must have had some strange soothing effect on a large number of men, many of whom would have been too drunk to march in a straight line but, nonetheless, the great staggering mob was divided into army, navy and air force and marched (more or less) back to barracks.
Navy men were reported to have been the instigators and the major cause of damage. An 8 p.m. curfew was imposed and, by midnight, the war-torn city of Halifax would begin to pick up the pieces and reflect on how calm things had seemed during the war and how devastating the devices of peace.
The very next day, as clean-up efforts began, accusations were flying. Whose fault was it? Who made the biggest screw-up here and why hadn’t they all seen this coming?
Admiral Murray, a career navy man from Pictou, was fired as commander-in-chief and resigned his commission by March of 1946, retiring to England. Murray was made a scapegoat for the whole fiasco, and his supporters point out that the armed forces lost an important man at a crucial time of winding down the war. Murray appears to us now as a sort of tragic figure in all this, having done an exceedingly good job in helping to win the fierce Battle of the Atlantic. He accepted the blame for a whole whack of things that went wrong and an emotionally supercharged history of poor relations between Halifax and military men. The royal commission chaired by Justice Kellock, in fact, blamed the whole mess on the navy, although we know now it was much more complex than that.
Chapter 40
Chapter 40
Of Kilts and Cold War
In 1955 the Canso Causeway was completed, linking Cape Breton to the mainland. It was the sort of megaproject that inspired enthusiasm for a number of other grand schemes, many of which turned out to be bitter disappointments. Nonetheless, the Causeway was sure to improve the transportation between this colourful island, mainland Nova Scotia and the rest of Canada. The following year, when Robert Stanfield came to office as premier, hh*is government shelled out $110 million over four years to improve highway transportation, as if to say it was time for Nova Scotians to forget about ships, forget about trains and simply drive, drive, drive.
Urban Nova Scotians were being fully integrated into mainstream North American culture as a result of the automobile, the radio and the TV. In many rural areas of the province, however, the lifestyle and livelihood still revolved around fishing, farming or making a living from the woods. Paved roads and TV signals had not reached every fishing community or farm and, in fact, many Nova Scotians still lived without electricity and had little desire to change that fact.
Meanwhile, Nova Scotia was trying to establish itself as a tourist destination and could still capitalize on the picturesque old-fashioned charm of the province. An article in ÿHoliday magazine in 1953 waxed absurdly eloquent about the province, saying, “In the scenic land of Longfellow’s Evangeline, the haven of the Grand Banks fishermen, the home of heroes, you’ll find a friendly remoteness from the confusions of the world.” One tourist photo, circa 1957, shows a kilted Nova Scotian of Scottish descent performing on his bagpipes by the highway on the Tantramar Marsh before a very fashionable suburban mother and her two daughters. e
Nova Scotia was certainly not at the cutting edge of industry or modern expansionism but the province’s “friendly remoteness” helped to put it front and centre in the global peace movement. In 1957, as the Cold War kept getting colder, as Canadians and Americans alike began to prepare for a nuclear holocaust with backyard fallout shelters, Cyrus Eaton brought together twenty-two scientists from ten nations to his estate in Pugwash for the first of the “Pugwash Conferences.” The purpose of these gatherings was to promote world peace and solve global problems. Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell were two major supporters of the conference and helped fortify the foundation for a worldwide disarmament movement, and the work begun by the Pugwash founders continues on to this day, a distinguished and persistent worldwide effort to tackle the most daunting of planetary problems. (It wasn’t until 1995, however, that the founders of the movement belatedly received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.)
Another goodwill initiative, Moses Coady’s co-op movement which began in the 1930s, had grown by leaps and bounds under the auspices of St. Francis Xavier University. Coady’s ideas were being put into action in developi*ng nations around the world where impoverished farmers and fishermen banded together to improve their welfare by establishing better economic control over their livelihood. Co-operative land ownership and housing, as well as fishing and farming co-ops, were part of the new economic salvation being preached by such emissaries of good as Father Harvey Steele of Glace Bay. In Latin America, these efforts proved to be monumentally successful but also drew the ire of dictators and corporations alike who saw Nova Scotia’s co-op movement to be a menace.
The “Economic Conquest” of Nova Scotia
As the decade progressed in Nova Scotia, fewer and fewer men were working in fishing or farming. Manufacturing jobs, however, were not on the rise and as many as 82,000 workers left the Atlantic region in the 1950s, seeking their fortunes elsewhere. On the other hand, government jobs, including work for the military, were on the increase. The Cold War, like every other war that had involved Nova Scotia, was good for the Halifax economyd. By 1961 almost twenty-five percent of the jobs in that city were related in some way to the naval establishment.
With job shortages in other sectors, women were once again denied equal access to employment, but in 1955 a federal law which barred married women from work in the civil service was repealed. The next year Nova Scotia legislators passed a law calling for equal pay for equal work, but it would take a long while for this legislation to have an effect throughout the working world. Inequality was everywhere, and other less-enlightened legislation actually sustained the problem. For example, women, even working women, were still banned by law from entering taverns. For Nova Scotian Blacks, though, some headway toward equality was being made as segregated schooling disappeared and a 1955 bill was passed making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin or even union membership. *
For many Nova Scotians life was still a struggle. Ernest Buckler documented just how rough life could be on a North Mountain farm in his beautifully executed novel iThe Mountain and the Valley, first published in 1952. Hugh MacLennan explored the despair and tragedies of life in a Cape Breton coal mining town inEach Man’s Son. Thomas Raddall of Liverpool was mining a rich literary vein in his novels rooted in Nova Scotia history, perhaps the most daring being The Nymph and the Lamp, which concerns the inequality of women and the life of a telegraph operator on remote Sable Island in the early part of the century.
In the 1950s most Nova Scotians were aware that they were living in a have-not province. Around the end of the war per capita income was nearly twenty-five percent below the national norm. By 1955 a Nova Scotian’s income was closer to thirty-three percent below average. The promise of prosperity that was supposed to come with Confederation was never to be fulfilled, even after a hundred years. To make matters worse, the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway led shipping traffic directly into the heartland of Canada. Ports on the East Coast could be entirely ignored. Once again Nova Scotians felt victimized rather than befriended by government. Atlantic Canadi
an historian W.S. McNutt referred to the sinking of the Nova Scotian economy in military terms as a brand of “economic conquest.”
In politics, issues of Maritime Union were discussed in hushed tones and the substance of the previous Maritimes Rights movement was resuscitated. Some still hoped for something grand and ambitious to come from all of the Maritimers’ bottled-up frustration. In 1957, McNutt saw some hope that the Atlantic premiers would light the fires necessary for sweeping changes but he worried that “unless the people of the Atlantic Provinces are united behind them the Atlantic Revolution would be one of the great mute inglorious revolutions of history.” Such a revolution was really calling for nothing more than simple regional equality for the Atlantic Provinces with the other regions of Canada.
The 1960s and 1970s brought better economic times and heavy government involvement in social welfare and economic development. Stanfield’s Industrial Estates Limited, a Crown corporation, enticed industry to come to Nova Scotia. While a handful of companies prospered and became mainstays of the economy, Micheline being the most notable (Volvo arrived in 1963 but pulled out in the late 1990s to move to Mexico), other big business boosts were abysmal failures. Clairtone’s electronics factory proved to be a bust and a heavy-water industry for Cape Breton proved to be a monumental fiasco. Involving Cape Breton in the nuclear industry seemed to suggest that if workers there were willing to undertake such dangerous underground employment as coal mining, then they would be more than willing to step into an even more dangerous field like the nuclear industry. Long after the heavy-water plant was closed down, Cape Breton entrepreneur s wrestled with what to do with the white elephant. One suggestion was to turn it into a distillery but by then government support for such ventures had pretty well dried up.
The Environmental Price Tag of Progress
Along with economic development came a hefty price tag in terms of environmental degradation. One of the sadder tales in my opinion concerns the building of a pulp mill by Scott Paper at Abercrombie Point in Pictou County. At the time of construction, expedient measures were put into place to deal with the tainted water used in the manufacturing process. Effluent from pulp mills tends to lower oxygen levels in the natural water it is spilled into. Residues and a variety of harmful chemicals also find their way into the ecosystem, radically changing the natural habitat. Fish die off and other species are adversely affected.
When the Pictou County mill was under construction in the early 1960s, it was decided that the effluent from the mill would be pumped under Pictou Harbour to Boat Harbour, a natural body of water that was used by a local Mi’kmaq community. Boat Harbour would cease to be anything more than a “settling pond” for the pulp-mill effluent before the water continued on its course out into the Northumberland Strait. While the atrocities against the Mi’kmaq people stretch back to the first arrival of the English settlers, it is unnerving to see how even in recent times Native people are bullied in the name of economic expansion. Dan Paul inWe Were Not the Savages describes how the Mi’kmaq families of Pictou Landing were shown pictures of supposedly similar pulp plants where the skies and waters around had remained clean and pure. The Federal Department of Indian Affairs and the province supported the claims of Scott, and the Pictou Landing residents reluctantly accepted $60,000 to allow their land to be used for the mill and ultimately the settling pond.
In the name of economic growth and jobs, the plant was constructed and, as planned, the once-immaculate Boat Harbour was literally killed. This traditional fishing and recreation area of the Pictou Landing Mi’kmaq was d estroyed. The province also bought up much of the land around the new black lagoon, realizing that it would no longer be liveable.
Dan Paul notes that Mi’kmaq suicides in the area increased after the deal was signed. Many other Mi’kmaq simply moved away. The community also happens to be downwind of the Pictou plant, and many feel that high levels of respiratory illness among the Mi’kmaq children today can be attributed to the gases emitted from pulp-mill stacks.
In the early 1990s, a “solution” to the problem was discussed involving a $17 million extended pipeline that would distribute the toxic effluent further out into the Northumberland Strait. Arguments were pu*t forward on exactly how this might affect the fragile fish stocks in this region and to what degree the effluent washing back ashore might affect beaches along this scenic coastline of Nova Scotia.
A Drain on the Public Purse
With 20/20 hindsight it seems that both federal and provincial governments, overzealous with plans to improve the economy, all too often failed to recognize the true assets of Nova Scotia: environment and culture. In thle race to drag Nova Scotia kicking and screaming into the industrial economy of North America, decision-makers ignored the importance of rural traditions of self-reliance; they failed to protect our richest resources in the sea and in the forests. Efforts at tourism failed to promote the wonder of the wilderness environment that remained, and the province was slow to exploit the pool of talent in music that existed in Celtic, Black and Acadian cultures. It wouldn’t be until the 1990s that Cape Breton fiddlers, Acadian singers and Black musicians would finally reach a truly international audience. m
Instead, the Federal Department of Regional Economic Expansion (DREE), created in 1969, fostered big business and big development. DREE backed a host of big-time money losers, while avoiding serious attention to small-scale, decentralized growth which may have proven to be sustainable. Much of this so-called expansion led to more people moving from rural areas into the cities. By 1971, nearly one-fourth of the entire population of the province was living in the Halifax-Dartmouth metropolitan area.
Following in the wake of so much government optimism concerning growth was a wave of bitter human disappointment. It seemed that more internationally owned industries meant less local control over jobs. Not all Nova Scotia workers were ready to roll over and play dead when foreign-rowned companies started to renege on their promises of keeping jobs in Nova Scotia. It would be up to that same overly optimistic government to help put workers back to work. For example, when Hawker Siddeley, a London-based corporation, closed down its Sydney Steel Plant in 1967, 17,000 angry citizens protested in the streets and called for government intervention. The province ultimately did take over the plant and it proved to be a massive drain on the public purse all the way into the 1990s, when a deal was struck with a Chinese company to take over operations of the mill. But in 1996 MinMetals backed out of the agreement. Efforts to find another buyer failed and in 2000 the provincial government closed Sydney Steel, ending a 100-year-old tradition. The steel plant was eventually demolished and all jobs vanished .
Chapter 41
Chapter 41
The Roots of Racism
What would it be like to wake up one day and be told by your city government that you had to move out of your home, that you had no choice in the matter? And what would it feel like to watch as your worldly possessions were loaded into a city garbage truck to be hauled off to some new designated place to live? If you lingered behind, you would have seen the house where you grew up smashed and levelled by a bulldozer, along with those of your neighbours. And what would go through your head if you returned later to look at a wasteland of rubble which was once the community where you grew up? What thoughts must go through the minds of those who have seen their little hometown systematically erased from the face of the earth?
If you were a resident of Africville, Nova Scotia, in the 1960s you would be able to answer these questions. But for these Black Nova Scotians who were driven from their homes, a whole host of other questions remain unanswered and unresolved.
The story of Africville is rooted in the deeper history of Black people in Nova Scotia, one that begins with Mathieu da Costa, a Black man who came from France around 1605 to work in the fur trade at Port Royal. He was a free man, not a slave, and proved to be an excellent interpreter of the Mi’kmaq language, but alas his tenure here was brief, for he died within a y
ear of his arrival.
There are records of a freed slave living around Cape Sable in 1686, but the next evidence of Black immigrants isn’t until the founding of Halifax. Some of the wealthy settlers at that time had Black slaves and occasionally advertisements would appear for the sale of slaves on the auction block. Notable among the free Blacks was Barbara Cuffy, who owned land and a homestead in the fledgling town of Liverpool in 1760.
A wave of Black Loyalists came to Nova Scotia by British invitation from 1782 to 1784, arriving at Port Roseway, Annapolis Royal and Halifax. The government had a hand in organizing settlements and there was a clearly unequal distribution of good land and fair justice between the Black and white Loyalists. Impoverished segregated communities emerged near Shelburne (Port Roseway), Digby, Guysborough and Dartmouth. David George was an immigrant of this period, a preacher who wrote an account of his life here and helped to organize churches and education. Another immigrant named Thomas Peters, from North Carolina, proved himself to be a staunch activist, working to gain equality and rights for Nova Scotia Blacks. He travelled the region and lobbied in London to improve the situation for his people here but all too often his arguments fell on deaf ears. Thirty-five hundred Black Loyalists had made their way to Nova Scotia during this time but of that number 1,196 left in 1792 in hopes of a establishing a better life in Sierra Leone.
The Maroons (whose story is told elsewhere in this book) enlarged the Nova Scotian Black population and arrived here by way of some convoluted political manipulation on the part of the rulers of the British Colonies. They too found Nova Scotia an inhospitable place and in 1800 more than 500 of them also moved on to Sierra Leone.
More American Blacks were lured to Nova Scotia around the time of the War of 1812. Two thousand fugitive slaves made their way here from the South but most found there were no land grants as promised. They too discoverefd themselves segregated from the mainstream of society. In 1815, Governor Sherbrooke was more worried about his own public image than the plight of the new arrivals as he admitted Nova Scotia was “totally unprepared” forr the influx of Blacks. He was afraid that his lack of preparedness might make him look bad. Of the 727 Black immigrants “housed” in the prison on Melville Island, many died from harsh treatment or disease.
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