33 minute read
JOEL PLASKETT REFLECTS ON LIFE’S JOURNEYS
A soundtrack for the journey
Talking with Joel Plaskett about middle age, finding one's way home, and surviving the pandemic
BY KEAH HANSEN PHOTOS BY BRUCE MURRAY/ VISIONFIRE
An early spring day last year found me sitting outside the dentist’s office in my parents’ car. I had driven my sister to her appointment, which was running long. I fiddled with the radio and made occasional eye contact with a man drinking out of a paper bag sitting on a stoop close by.
Between the new sounds, came a familiar voice. It was Joel Plaskett, crooning what sounded like a ballad, about having gratitude for each other and the frontline workers during the pandemic, while the “world is slowing down.” I listened fixedly as this figure from my past sang plainly about my experiences of the past year. Then my sister came out, and we drove home.
It was an unexpected but familiar experience — being seen by Joel, while setting out on an uncertain path. I grew up in Dartmouth and came of age musically right about when he released his Three album. Coming of age musically in the late 2000s meant that I spent more time listening to Rihanna and the Black Eyed Peas than Joel but nonetheless, he was there, making small but frequent appearances on the radio during drives to school, and at free summer concerts.
Just like with “Barrett’s Privateers,” my friends and I would belt out the lyrics of “Love This Town” when we watched him live at Alderney Landing. Even though we did sort of love Halifax, we were also 17, antsy to get going to wherever life was going to take us.
The lyrics to some of his other songs, like those in “Through and Through and Through” felt more fitting for these unanswered questions. “I’m the Berlin Wall / I’m a Communist / you’re a wrecking ball / in a summer’s dress” was mysterious. Lifted from some future which held knowing, raves, protests, and heartbreak in its distant palm.
In “Work Out Fine” Joel sings, “all my friends / where did they go? / To Montreal / to Toronto.” I also left the East Coast, moving to Montreal for university. When you move away, suddenly you’re branded by where you are from. Being from the Maritimes, it was easy to make friends with other people from the Maritimes. These new friends, old friends from Halifax, and I were suddenly one big Maritime clan.
One of the many things we had in common was our growing love for Joel Plaskett’s music. I think I saw one of his shows every year of university. They were comforting in their familiarity. Joel would sing the same hits, and we would dance and sing along. He would make the same jokes while wearing silky printed bowling shirts, and we would all laugh. He would bring the same earnest energy of his performance down onto the floor after the show, and we would stick around a bit to overhear his conversation. Each concert was cool, and an affirmation of home.
Joel’s songs have provided respite when I’ve found myself alone, moving through various cities and small towns for different jobs and studies. I would listen to “Rollin, Rollin, Rollin,” and speak alongside him that I was “gathering no moss.” I would play his rockier sounds when I was feeling angsty and would feel something like pride in my heart when I heard him sing about crossing the harbour via the Dartmouth ferry, or the Macdonald Bridge.
— JOEL PLASKETT
Sometimes, I feel lonely, but not wanting to listen. It felt too cyclical. I wasn’t back in the Maritimes but nor was I totally in my new home. All the same, his lyricism drew me in. I was also a budding writer, appreciating how he blended the irreverent and aphoristic in his verses. Even as his songs turned ballad for me in their communal re-enactments, the lyrics themselves felt like conversations Joel was having with himself, defining his lessons learned, as he himself felt his way through his early adult life. I listened.
Joel turned 44 in 2020, and released a new album, titled 44. The album contains four sets of 11 songs, each set focusing on a different theme: leaving one’s home, returning to find one’s home unfamiliar, transitioning to being found, then arriving at a personal destination.
Critic Stephen Cooke from the Chronicle Herald calls the album “autobiographical, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and spiritual,” while critic Adam White called it “comfort food,” and Josh O’Kane from the Globe and Mail says it demonstrates the value of “slowing down to enjoy the moment.”
We’re here for a conversation with Joel, not an album review, but it is fitting that he released 44 during a year where we had all been made to slow down, and exist, in very long moments. The pandemic brought me from my freshly carved-out life in Toronto back to Halifax. With this came moments of reflection that many of my friends also say that pandemic had foisted onto them. As we make sense of the changing world, the new album resonates.
So many Haligonians grew up listening to you singing about Halifax — how much is your music influenced by where you are from?
“It’s been a huge influence for me. Halifax has all these artists in town and a strong sense of place, and it’s also informed my own sense of place as I’ve never lived elsewhere. I remember listening to Bruce Springsteen at this live performance of ‘Rosalita,’ which was 11 minutes long and really celebratory, and I realized that what I really liked about him as a writer, was the sense of New Jersey he had in his music. And I wasn’t really out to imitate that, but I recognized a parallel there, this sort of melancholy sense of place. When I would reference, say, the Dartmouth ferry, I was really digging in my heels, saying that this was a song for back home. But I also think the universal lies in the idiosyncratic, and that it’s an easier place for me to be.”
What is the mood of Halifax that you try to capture in your music?
“I didn’t grow up in a super workingclass neighbourhood; we were in the suburbs. Springsteen writes a lot about working-class Jersey, and that wasn’t my experience. That being said, Halifax definitely wasn’t a bustling place in the ‘90s, and certainly had an underdog status in the national context. There wasn’t a lot going on, but there was a lot of art. Some music did come out East, and there used to be this really cool venue called the Flamingo, that people would come and play at, but there were fewer international musicians touring here generally, so I think that people had to entertain each other ... By the late ‘90s though, a lot of Nova Scotians started leaving. So, when I would tour, there would be a sea of Maritimers at my concerts, and all of the sudden the Nova Scotian flag would go up and everyone would say ‘You’re from back home!’ I think I stayed because of a sense of place, and opportunity, but there was definitely a weird serendipity in my staying, in being able to connect with other Nova Scotians living elsewhere.” Your 44 album was released right at the beginning of the pandemic; do you feel like any of the themes from your album spoke to themes or experiences from the pandemic?
“I’ve been a touring musician for all my adult life, and I think that in some of the songs, there was sort of this sense of trying to slow down and take time to move through memories and ideas, and life, at a different pace. And then that got forced upon us. The first part of the pandemic was definitely difficult for me, because it happened right before my tour for my 44 album. I think that touring is the period when the music I make becomes gestural and naturally starts changing, after a really hyper-focused creation period. So I had to change my flow. With touring, you tend to move through places so rapidly, you’re just taking in the big picture environment, but I feel like during the pandemic, I’ve been moving really slowly ... I think the album contextualized itself a bit in the sense that it’s a boxset, which inherently takes a lot of time to digest, and I got some really nice notes from people who told me they had listened to the whole thing. So, it’s definitely been difficult and surreal, but I’ve been trying to find blessings in it.”
— JOEL PLASKETT
— JOEL PLASKETT
To you, what is your 44 album about? How do you think it differs from the tenor of your Three album?
“I feel like there are production touches that I’ve developed through experimentation that are still there. I also think that there are lyrical connections that are in both albums, in between the lighthearted and melancholy. I was also processing the loss of a few friends, which I think appears in my album. I feel like in both projects, I was set out to do something ambitious, and I do feel like the numerical feel of Three relates to 44. I also feel like I don’t often know what I’m doing when I’m doing it, but I have a sense of what I’m doing. I think that themes and ideas in 44 tended to make constellations and relate to themes of Three, and my earlier work, when I’m reflecting later on.”
What is your favourite song from the new album?
“I’m quite fond of ‘Kingfisher.’ It definitely felt like it transitioned something in my mind, with the album. I’m also quite fond of ‘A Benefit for Dreamland.’ We brought a lot of local female musicians on deck to perform it — did a live recording, which you can find on YouTube. The performance itself was kind of emotional, and also cathartic, because I knew that it was going to be the last song on the album. The last line of the song is ‘you’re a soft drug from a wildflower / life’s a slow dive through the magic hour’ — I think the song itself is about slowness and togetherness.”
What are you looking forward to musically?
“I’m excited to perform, and to feel more relaxed. It doesn’t necessarily have to get back with what it used to be, but I am a hopeful person, and I’m hopeful to perform again. I’ve been doing a lot of introspective and solitary writing, which I’ve been enjoying, and which I think might find a place. I’ve also been doing some video performances and guitar tutorials for old songs. There isn’t a lot of urgency at the moment, which I think is OK.”
What makes you excited about Halifax now?
“I’m interested to see how the city can grow, and become a busier place, while keeping a balance between capital and a sense of uniqueness. So, for example, if you are removing an old building, you have to be mindful that you are removing a place that held memories for people. Now that’s not to say that every old building can stay, but I’m interested to see how Halifax develops. Sense of history runs through cultures, and not all histories are good, and we have to acknowledge that, but it is through this flow that we develop a sense of who we are. Histories and cultures keep us alive.”
BUILDING ON A HISTORIC FOUNDATION Nova Scotia Archives and Records Managment
Sarah B. MacDonald guides Halifax’s 128-year-old Council of Women through new challenges
BY JANET WHITMAN
ACW Photography
Days before setting sail on the Titanic, property developer and internationally known publisher George Wright changed his will, bequeathing his stately South End Halifax home to a local feminist organization.
Since Wright’s untimely demise in 1912, the grand Queen Anne Revival manor on the corner of Young Avenue and Inglis Street has been a vital asset for the Local Council of Women Halifax, as it works to improve the lives of women and children.
But, in more recent years, the drafty old building with peeling paint and crumbling façade has become a bit of an albatross.
The not-for-profit’s former president, Sandra MacLennan, recalls getting a $9,000 government grant to repair a back wall, which had mostly rotted out. “Contractors found so many other things wrong and the price went sky high,” she says.
Her husband ended up making a non-interest-bearing loan to help pay the bills. “That’s how bad it was,” says MacLennan, who led the organization for 7.5 years until stepping down in 2017. “The house was just bleeding us dry.”
She wondered about selling the empty lot next door on the south side of the property that was part of Wright’s gift. She balked when realtors told her it would make George Wright House itself unsalable. The idea of selling the mansion came up but was never seriously considered beyond wondering where they might rent, she says.
“Drowning in day-to-day emergencies” meant the council could do little more than talk about how to use the building to do something more for women and attract new members, she recalls.
Councillor Waye Mason remembers getting a call from MacLennan five years ago. (He considers her a mentor. As a property manager for Halifax Developments Ltd., she took a chance on him in the 1990s and rented him space in downtown’s old Trade Mart Building when he was setting up a recording studio.)
“She said, ‘I’m in my late 70s. My husband and I are trying to maintain this giant building. The other two active board members are in their 80s and 90s,’ ” Mason recalls. “To lose this historic and amazing space and organization would have been a crying shame.”
The first person he thought of was professional fundraiser Sarah B. MacDonald.
“I knew her from her activism in the community and from social media,” he says. “She’s done a lot of fundraising stuff and she’s also an activist whose personal politics align really well with the history and potential future of the Local Council of Women.”
MacDonald met with MacLennan. It was a match. She took over as president in May 2017.
HALF LANDLADY, HALF ADVOCATE
MacDonald, 32, is an avid volunteer. Her day job is assistant dean of advancement with Dalhousie University’s law school, and she did fundraising stints with the YMCA and Saint Mary’s University.
The council presidency is like nothing she’s done before. “It’s half landlady, half advocate,” she says. “Sometimes you get called to comment on something that’s happened in the news. Sometimes you’re calling a plumber in the middle of the night because something’s happened with the toilet.”
One of her first initiatives was reimagining how to best use the 2.5-storey heritage home to serve the community and ensure it’s around for another hundred years.
The main floor, with a large double parlour, sunporch, kitchen, and butler’s pantry, remains open as a community space. The upper floors, long rented as apartments, were renovated to create eight offices for women and gender minorities at below-market rates.
“We had to find a new business model that would further our mission and further the work we wanted to do and also, of course, cover the cost of running a community center with no external funding,” MacDonald says. “We were getting back down to the floorboards, so we made sure we had folks in who knew heritage buildings. It was a big investment, but it really paid off.”
Top left: Philanthropist George Wright bequeathed his South End home to the council. Left: Local Council of Women president Sarah B. MacDonald. Above: The historic house seen from Young Avenue.
Shakira Weatherdon (second from left at a Strait Area Sister 2 Sister Conference) is the council’s newest tenant with the Black Girls Gather non-profit she launched to give Black women entrepreneurs a boost.
The council hasn’t lost any of its renters during the COVID-19 pandemic, except for one who left to run her business from home. “It’s something we’re proud of,” says MacDonald. “In a lot of other spaces, people lost tenants because they couldn’t pay their rent on time. We took a more community-based approach.”
The council is donating the open spot to Black Girls Gather, a non-profit helping Black women entrepreneurs. “It’s more aligned with the kind of work we want to do moving forward, while still managing to be sustainable,” says MacDonald.
Black Girls Gather founder Shakira Weatherdon says she didn’t know about the Local Council of Women before connecting with MacDonald on LinkedIn. “The history is so unique,” she says. “And what an opportunity for them and us to enter a space that perhaps, historically, we haven’t necessarily been a part of.” Attracting a new, broader membership with more young and diverse women and gender minorities was part of MacDonald’s mission from the get-go. She started on that by rewriting half of the council’s bylaws to make them more inclusive. Gendered language and references to particular religions were removed. Annual individual membership dues were dropped. The council also nixed a policy granting honorary memberships to the wives of the mayor, premier, and lieutenant-governor. “That might seem funny to you and me,” says MacDonald. “But imagine if you’re a non-binary or trans person and read that on the website. How would that ever be welcoming?”
The council has around 40 like-minded organizations as affiliate members, with each paying annual fees of $20, and more than a hundred individual members.
MacDonald says between 25 and 40 members tend to show up for general meetings, which are held six times per year.
“Members range in their level of engagement, for sure,” she says. “What was really encouraging was, just this last fall, when we started in-person meetings again, about half of the folks that attended that first meeting were new.”
At her first meeting five years ago, most of the women were older and homogenous in their makeup and backgrounds. “They were doing fantastic work,” she says. “But without the different points of view and life experiences, you don’t get the full picture of what the community needs.”
The council is electing two new volunteer executives (treasurer and secretary) to work alongside MacDonald and vice-president Rebecca Faria, a local activist and communications coordinator at the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers.
MAKING HISTORY
The Local Council of Women Halifax was founded in 1894 after Lady Aberdeen, an ardent feminist and wife of Canada’s then-governor general, visited the city and invited women’s groups to gather at Government House. Representatives from 44 groups showed up. The Halifax chapter of the national multi-faith, non-partisan council was born.
Historian Janet Guildford says inclusivity was a struggle for the council in those early years in Halifax. “Divisions between Protestants and Catholics were very strong,” she says. “The practice that caused the most contention was the reciting of the Lord’s Prayer … One ultra-Protestant woman kept insisting the Protestant version of the prayer should be used to open every meeting. It flew in the face of what Ishbel Aberdeen had hoped for the council.”
Even so, the local council did a lot of good for the city, says Guildford. She’s unearthed records of members going to restaurants looking for dirty and cracked dishes and reporting them to the health department. “They would have called it municipal housekeeping,” she says. “It was through these kinds of services and interventions that first-wave feminists believed they could increase their power and influence in their society.”
In 1906, council members established Halifax’s first supervised public playgrounds, part of the North American Playground Movement. A plaque at the North End’s Bloomfield Centre recognizes the spot as the city’s first playground, crediting the council.
Legend has it a chance meeting in London between council president Agnes Dennis and George Wright before he boarded the ill-fated Titanic to sail home led to the donation of his mansion. “I think she’d already asked him to make sure it would go to the council, and she reminded him of that,” says Guildford.
Wright, who made his fortune by creating a wildly popular international business directory, was a reformer who was committed to better housing and living conditions for the working poor. The council’s efforts would have been in line with his thinking, says Guildford.
It also didn’t hurt that Agnes Dennis was married to the publisher of one of the city’s biggest newspapers.
“She was an influential person and there were other influential women among the leadership of the council,” says Guildford. “When they asked for favours and support, they were likely to find it.”
Over the years, the new headquarters was used as a hostel for women, while some rented rooms for longer term as a safe, reliable place to live.
In its advocacy work, the council’s heyday was during the First World War, when members marshalled various women’s groups to help the war effort, says Guildford.
It’s also credited with gaining seats for women on school boards and pushing for the right for women to vote during the suffrage movement.
In the 1960s, the council invited representatives from African Nova Scotian churches and other Black women’s groups to become members.
“It’s a shame that not more of us know about the Local Council of Women,” says Guildford. “From time to time, it exerted a very positive influence over social policy and social conditions in Halifax.”
FULL STEAM AHEAD
When she took over as president, MacLennan remembers getting help from two women in their eighties: Eva Cromwell and her sister Laura Daye, the quiet force behind her husband Buddy Daye’s activism in the African Nova Scotian community.
“They were there as long as they could hang out,” she says. “That was the problem at that time. People were getting older and there were no new members. Organizations go through those cycles a lot.”
MacLennan, now 83, is happy new life is being breathed into the council and the property. “They both played such an enormous role in the history of Halifax,” she says.
With so many historic homes torn down on upscale Young Avenue, many Haligonians wondered if the decrepit-looking George Wright House was in danger of the same fate. The property is assessed at $1.45 million. The empty lot next door, without the constraints of a heritage home, is assessed at $2.58 million.
MacDonald says the council has no plans to sell either. “There’s no way,” she says.
Instead, it’s full steam ahead on tending to the home, which was built for Wright between 1902 and 1903 by James Dumaresq, the patriarch of a family of architects who designed many of Halifax’s best-known buildings.
MacDonald says the council is seeking major funding, primarily through grants for now, to renovate the building. Accessibility, longevity, and energy efficiency are the goals.
To ensure its heritage is preserved, the council enlisted Dalhousie Architecture and Planning experts to complete an entire internal and external scan of the home. They produced “as-built” architectural drawings and plans for a more accessible first floor. “Now, when we need to fix things, we can in a really accurate and skillful way,” says MacDonald.
The council isn’t sure yet how much money is needed for all the work that should be done over the next decade, she says. “That’s why we’re using part of the funds we have to build a solid understanding of what shape the building is in now and develop a plan.”
Top on the agenda is creating an accessible washroom on the main floor, something that will be a requirement for all buildings by 2030. “What we learned this year is that it’s very expensive to create a truly accessible washroom, whether or not it’s in a heritage building,” MacDonald says.
The estimate is about $60,000. MacDonald is applying for grants and hopes to get the retrofit done in the spring.
Fixing up the building’s exterior is also high priority, and not just for aesthetics. “If something isn’t painted, the building underneath it isn’t going to be in really good shape,” says MacDonald.
One thing already taken care of is the jungle that was growing on the exterior and around the property. “We hired an all-women-owned landscape company that did wonderful job clearing and making it manageable,” says MacDonald.
Mason quietly donated $50,000 left over from his district capital fund to kick off the fundraising effort. “I’m on board with we need to save this building and we need to save the organization,” he says.
Cash from the new office rentals keep the lights on. Membership dues and the community space, which is available at $40 an hour for public rentals and half that for members, are a help.
The community rooms were booked up before COVID-19, with events ranging from Pride celebrations to Girl Guide meetings. MacDonald expects things to pick right back up once concerns about the pandemic ease.
“Traditionally, people have always been interested in the space,” she says. “More and more people are interested in the advocacy piece, that really old idea that the council worked to further different political issues. That’s exciting to see.” “More and more people are interested in the advocacy piece” — Sarah B. MacDonald The grand stairwell at George Wright House, part of the sprawling downstairs that’s a community space.
Bruce Murray/Visionfire
Riding Riding the waves the waves
As Halifax prepares to again welcome cruise ships, COVID continues to raise uncertainty, and concerns rise over the uneven benefits of the industry
BY PHILIP MOSCOVITCH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEXANDER MACASKILL
It was cool and cloudy on Nov. 6, 2019, with rain falling and winds gusting. At Pier 22, the Oceania Cruises’s Riviera, a 1,250-passenger vessel on a 16-day, cruise pulled away from shore. It was the last of 179 cruise ships to call on the Port of Halifax that year, and officials were optimistic about the following season, with more than 200 cruises booked.
We know what happened next.
Before COVID-19 had even been given a name, the disease was linked with cruise ships. Quarantined in Yokohama, the Diamond Princess became a floating symbol of contagion. On Feb. 20, 2020, passengers and crew represented half of all cases in the world outside China. Ultimately, 712 people on the Diamond Princess tested positive for the disease, and 13 of them died.
By mid-March, the cruise industry had essentially shut down, and the federal government banned cruise ships from calling on Canadian ports.
But now, we are getting ready to welcome cruises back for the 2022 tourist season.
“We’re anticipating the first vessels should arrive here in Halifax towards the end of April,” Halifax Port Authority communications manager Lane Farguson says in a recent interview. “But of course throughout this entire situation there have been so many unknowns, and Omicron is another one of those. A month ago, I would have been a lot more optimistic about the season ahead. But now we’re just like everybody else, waiting to see what happens.”
Speaking in October 2020, Halifax Port Authority CEO Allan Gray said he anticipated “a slow return for cruise,” and that the number of ships would take two to three years to reach 2019 levels.
But that seems to have been unduly pessimistic. Farguson says that as of mid-January, the port had “in the neighbourhood of 160 calls” scheduled, mostly ships coming from Boston and New York.
That’s good news for Dennis Campbell. He’s the CEO of Ambassatours Gray Line and Murphy’s The Cable Wharf — businesses that rely heavily on cruise passengers, offering packages including bus excursions, harbour cruises, and winery tours.
“We thought 2022 was going to be a recovery year,” Campbell says. “We are sort of looking at 2023 and hope it will be the recovery year now, but we still believe 2022 will be reasonably decent.”
Campbell says the company rode out the cruise shutdown in part by refinancing, making it “easier to survive in the long term.” He also says he is in “constant communications” with the cruise lines, and they’ve told him they expect to be operating at full capacity by May, but “that remains to be seen with the Omicron numbers.”
Bill McArthur is another business owner looking forward to the return of cruise tourists. He is co-founder and co-owner of Liquid Gold, a small local chain of shops selling gourmet oils and vinegars. In spring 2020, the company moved its Halifax shop from the Hydrostone to Lower Water Street. “We wanted to tap the cruise market more efficiently, and of course that’s been a bust from the get-go,” he says. Cruise customers would come into the Hydrostone location “in trickles,” he says, but the neighbourhood seemed to be “on the B-list when it came to cruise passengers.”
Liquid Gold has four locations around the Maritimes, so the company won’t live or die by the fate of its Lower Water Street store. McArthur says they had a “generally pretty strong” year, with Halifax being “notably weak” and that he looks forward to the return of cruise ships when they are no longer “floating Petri dishes.”
Maritime lawyer Jim Walker says Halifax should be “gravely concerned” about welcoming cruise ships back. Based in Miami, Walker runs a practice that exclusively sues cruise lines, primarily representing sick or injured crew members. He’s filed thousands of suits over the last 25 years and writes a blog called Cruise Law News, with the tagline “Everything cruise lines don’t want you to know.”
Walker says his sources who work on cruise ships “paint a very disturbing picture of the industry ... It’s an industry that has a historical propensity to hide the ball, hide the truth, and to lie to government officials and the U.S. Coast Guard” about health and environmental practices. “I’ve been calling them plague ships, ships of pestilence and disease,” he adds.
In January, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control strongly advised against cruise travel, even as it eased restrictions: “People should avoid traveling on cruise ships, including river cruises, worldwide, regardless of vaccination status,” the CDC advisory read. “It is especially important that travellers who are at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19 avoid travel on cruise ships, including river cruises, worldwide, regardless of vaccination status.”
The CDC website tracks outbreaks on cruise ships, using a colour-coded system. Of the more than 100 ships listed in January, only nine showed no cases of COVID-19 — and all of those were ships with no passengers aboard.
“Cruise will be part of that new normal. What we don’t know ... is just what that is going to look like” — Lane Farguson
But Walker says the CDC reporting is too vague to be helpful. “The CDC does not disclose the number of positive crew members or guests infected,” he says. “It would seem to me the consumer needs sufficient information to decide whether they want to take their family on a cruise.”
Some ports do a good job of protecting their populations from infected passengers by refusing entry to vessels with more than a certain percentage of positive cases, Walker says. For instance, Panama won’t allow a vessel into port if more than one per cent of the passengers and crew have tested positive for COVID-19. Asked if Halifax has a similar requirement, Farguson says the Port will defer to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
At the time of writing, the agency was, according to its website, “developing a comprehensive framework ... focusing on the COVID-19 related health requirements that the cruise industry must abide by, supporting safe cruise activities in Canada.”
Cruise passengers generally “come in for a few hours and then go out,” says Wendi Dewey, who teaches in the business tourism and hospitality program at Nova Scotia Community College. “Some of them go on excursions outside the city and spend their money visiting our tourism sites, and others stay on the waterfront, explore our attractions and shops, and take tours of the harbour. And all those businesses benefit economically, and they really miss those passengers coming in.”
Develop Nova Scotia spokesperson Kelly Rose says between May and October 2020, foot traffic on the Halifax waterfront was down 56 per cent from the year before. The lack of cruises isn’t the only factor contributing to that drop, but Rose says the industry “provides a baseline of business that allows operators [on the waterfront] to stay open and also support other forms of travellers and the local market.”
Cruises were worth $165 million to the Halifax economy in 2019, according to Halifax Port Authority figures. Farguson says that takes into account not only the dollars passengers spend while onshore but also waste removal and provisioning: “Everything from refuelling and taking on new supplies, like Nova Scotian wine and lobster that they like to serve for that authentic experience.”
But Ross Klein doesn’t buy those numbers. A professor of social work at Memorial University of Newfoundland, he’s studied the cruise industry for over 20 years, and has written four books on its dark side. He co-authored a 2018 paper published in the journal Tourism in Marine Environments arguing that industry figures for 2016 inflated the value of cruise passenger spending in Halifax by 31.5 per cent. “The data from this study can begin to demonstrate how errors in measuring passenger spending are reflected in erroneous measures of economic impact,” the paper says.
In an interview, Klein scoffs at the stated benefit of cruise ships, calling their economic impact studies “smoke and mirrors” and “a quagmire of bullshit.”
When a tourist buys an excursion to Peggys Cove on board, the cruise line marks it up substantially, but the full cost counts towards economic impact, he says. And as for provisioning? “I’ll bet you that local Nova Scotia wine is a big seller on that cruise ship ... What are they paying you to take their garbage? Is it a fair amount? They dump their garbage, buy a couple of lobsters, and go on their happy way,” he says. “Everybody loves the cruise lines. They come in and say every passenger spends $100 per port of call, and the port goes: Wow! Let’s spend more money to attract more cruises!”
Campbell, of Ambassatours, says the markup cruise passengers pay for the company’s tours is substantial. “It varies by line. Many of the cruise companies mark up the excursions anywhere from 60 to 100 per cent. There are times when the cruise lines almost give the cruises away, and look at their profit centres as the onboard bars, casinos, and on-shore tours. That’s just the way it is.” But that also means they are not particularly
encouraging passengers to spend money ashore.
Spend any amount of time looking into the world of cruises and you can start to feel like you’re dealing with parallel worlds. Campbell, who calls the cruising “the most nimble part of the travel industry,” thinks it will “come back with a vengeance,” and adds, “The cruise lines have done a wonderful job to adjust and create new cleaning and sanitizing protocols. I’ve got to say, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
Klein, on the other hand, says when it comes to health and safety, the cruise industry “puts their head in the sand.”
As of mid-January, Walker said there was “just an unprecedented volume of people getting infected on cruise ships,” many of them crew. “You might not realize you’re a couple of cabins down, breathing the same air as dozens of people who are infected, and nobody on the ships is going to tell you that,” Walker says.
Referring to a 2019 incident in which the U.S. government fined the Carnival Corporation US$40 million for illegally dumping oily wastewater into the Atlantic, he adds, “Nova Scotia is going to invite these corporate felons back? Good luck!”
Farguson says the port has heard concerns about the “different challenges that come with cruise” over the last few years, and that he understands “not everybody sees and feels the benefits of the industry.”
Gray, the port CEO, has set up a Port Community Liaison Committee, “made up of different people who are independent of the Halifax Port Authority, but still have a vested interest in what happens in the harbour,” Farguson says. “And, you know, we have been hearing from that group that not everybody shares in the benefit that comes from cruise ships calling on Halifax.”
While McArthur says the Liquid Gold shop downtown has felt the absence of cruise passengers, he notes the neighbourhood is changing, becoming a food destination for locals, and that he expects traffic to rebound, with or without the ships.
“The neighbourhood will continue to mature and become more consumer-friendly all the time,” he says. “As we go on, I think there will be less apprehension about store traffic and coming down with a serious disease. So we have great plans for that store over the coming years, and will continue to evolve consistent with the foodie nature of what we do.”
Rose, of Develop Nova Scotia, says even without cruises, “there was a very strong leisure travel rebound last fall (2021),” in Halifax, which “surpassed pre-pandemic levels.” And foot traffic on the waterfront for September and October increased 94 per cent over 2020 levels — bringing it to just 19 per cent below pre-pandemic levels.
Dewey says some businesses see cruise passengers not as essential, but as a way to extend their season, since ships tend to call from spring to mid-fall. She says we’ll have to wait and see how much the pandemic changes travel, and whether people will prefer travelling in their own vehicles versus being “contained on an airplane or a boat.” But pandemic or no, she says there will always be people who “are avid cruisers and will cruise no matter what. They just want to get back on a boat.”
Farguson says he hopes “a new normal will emerge,” and that “cruise will be a part of that new normal. What we don’t know yet, though, is just what that is going to look like. Will passengers be able to leave the vessel and wander around the downtown on their self-guided tours like they did before? Or will there be some sort of a transition period, where they have to remain in a bubble, remain accounted for, and take those tours where they’re not able to wander off? Those are those type of things that we’re still working through.”
“You’re a couple of cabins down, breathing the same air as dozens of people who are infected, and nobody on the ship is going to tell you” — Ross Klein
