Toilets! Since 2019!

Tourism at its finest

I’ve spent much of this week researching tourism opportunities in Nova Scotia, the part that is more or less south of Halifax. In many ways the tourism industry here reflects a lot of life in this region.

Although “Toilets onsite since 2019” will surely stand out in my memory.

As does the placement by Parks Canada of the PiqueNique chicken box.

The thing about the south end of Nova Scotia is that, unlike most places, there are more or less no local newspapers. The big Maritimes chain, “Saltwire” is now bankrupt, and isn’t very good to start with. Like almost every other chain in Canada they made the choice to eliminate a large proportion of their reporting staff using the excuse that the Internet was stealing all of their readers. At the same time it can be argued that they leaned heavily in favour of the Irvings, and the other major corporations that gobbled up so much of the provincial income, while ignoring a lot of the things that are wrong in the province.

(A side note, there are though a couple of good independent publications: The Lighthouse Now, out of Bridgewater, and the Halifax Examiner out of Halifax.)

The upshot of all of this is that businesses and individuals don’t plan their work to fit within the major media outlets - there are none. Instead almost anything you need to find is either on Facebook, or travels via word-of-mouth.

For someone new to the region this means that you often miss important things because you just haven’t been in the right place, at the right time.

That lack of concern for getting the word out is reflected in an on-line presence that is often really weak. Any number of annual events that take place in June or July still don’t have 2024 dates on their web pages. In two cases the committees involved haven’t even decided their dates yet.

In other cases you would be very hard-pressed to know exactly what things - dances, parades, auctions - are planned. It’s just kind of assumed that everyone knows.

The other big challenge for visitors is that Nova Scotia loves big fat highways over everything else. That means you can drive from Halifax to the very bottom of the province and never actually see a town. Instead you have to take off onto the old, coastal highways, which are slower, and have more pot holes, but are a damned sight more interesting.

After the last week I realise that I really do want to show off my new home province. There are in fact tons of interesting events and sights, but finding them is a real challenge.

Part of that challenge is to rebuild a media landscape that actually serves the needs of our communities. And part of that is convincing the Nova Scotia government to actually invest some serious money into signs, maps, and into the very organisations that run so many of the local events and attractions.

Meanwhile, there is one event this summer that you surely do not want to miss: