Nova Scotia (45 page)

   
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
ÿ
Holiday
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 
i
The Mountain and the
Valley
, first published in
1952. Hugh MacLennan explored the despair and tragedies of life in
a Cape Breton coal mining town in
Each 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 Canadian 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
in
We 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.