What people are really saying after they move to Nova Scotia. The good, the hard and the stuff no one tells you. Plus new blogs, data from the community, and tools to help you decide if Nova Scotia is actually the right move for you.
Are you Nova Scotian yet?
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THE QUESTION Five years in and I'm still trying to figure out if I'm a Nova Scotian yet. I asked a question in the group this week. Not as a poll, not as a prompt to get people talking. Just as the actual question I woke up with on a May morning, standing in the greenhouse with 25 strawberry plants and mud on my boots and three kids who had just helped me shove 55 very unintelligent meat chickens back into their coop. These were things I used to dream about in Ontario. Things I knew I couldn't have there, not without a very expensive property tax bill and a mortgage that would have eaten us alive. The rural life we have now felt, for years, like something other people got to live. So when I asked the group whether there was a moment it clicked, whether anyone had ever stopped being from away, I expected the usual mix. Some warm stories. Some hard ones. Some people still waiting. What came back was something else. THE FIRETRUCK Wayne Waldron has been here almost four years. He joined the local fire department in year two. In year three, his fire chief asked if he wanted to drive the firetruck in the tintamarre parade. For those who don't know the tintamarre, it's an Acadian noise celebration, part protest and part joy, an old tradition that marks survival. You don't just show up to a tintamarre. You belong to one. Wayne drove the truck. His chief told him he was now an honorary Acadian. That same year, he received a volunteer recognition award. "I will never be quite the Bluenoser that my wife is," he said. "But I'm definitely feeling like it." THE INTRODUCTION Kathryn is two years in. She didn't have a firetruck moment. Hers came quieter. "I realized I hadn't had to start introducing myself as from away," she wrote. "Most people I meet just assume I'm from here or already know me." Nobody gave her anything. She just looked up one day and noticed she wasn't explaining herself anymore. THE TWANG Lee moved here alone in the spring of 2020, right at the start of COVID. She had never been to Nova Scotia. She didn't know anyone here. She bought her home through video tours because she couldn't travel to see it in person. She had been saving for years. Working a job she despised, running a part-time laser cutting business on the side, putting money aside while she figured out how to leave. Foster care. A long marriage to an abusive man. A life spent in places that never felt safe. Nova Scotia kept calling her name. She narrowed down the area by spreadsheet, amenities, hospital proximity, small town feel, and arrived with everything she owned and no one waiting. The locals didn't make it easy. She learned quickly that reputation in Nova Scotia travels faster than a nor'easter, that in a province where who you know is the primary currency, being from away isn't just an observation. It's a door that stays closed a little longer. She learned the twang. Let people assume she was simply a quiet woman from somewhere down south shore. She built her client base with nothing but high quality work and consistency. She adjusted her sails. "I went from trying to un-CFA myself," she said, "to finding a tribe of people who value my New Nova Scotian perspective." Her business is now full-time. Her clients are mostly right here in Nova Scotia, including many who were born here and moved away and buy her coastal designs because they miss the place. "I'm not just imagining a lighthouse," she said. "I'm living among them." THE SOUL Kayla had the courage to say the thing most people don't. "I really thought moving here would be more life changing," she wrote, "and it was, in all the right way, but it didn't fill my soul immediately in the way I thought it would. A change in location brought us the life we wanted, but at the end of the day it's still just a place, and I still need to continue working on myself to find true happiness. Not just rely on a move." She said she never really felt like an Ontarian. She still doesn't fully feel Nova Scotian. Just a person trying to find her place in the world. There is no tidy ending to Kayla's story yet. She is still in the middle of it. That might be the most honest place any of us can be. THE PIONEER Wendy has lived in Ontario, Manitoba, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island. She has thought about this question longer than most. "Being a Nova Scotian is so much more than an address on a driver's licence," she wrote. "It's having a sense of place. Of belonging. Of making the place better than you found it." She drew a line between two kinds of people who arrive on these shores. The ones who come with hands outstretched, waiting to be sustained, contributing nothing, resenting everything that isn't what they left. And the ones who arrive looking for what they can add, who put their heads down, show their intentions and slowly become part of the fabric. She called the second kind pioneers. Said their children and grandchildren would be born as Nova Scotians, while they themselves might always carry the identity of where they came from, Irish, Scottish, French, from Ontario, from away. But the province would know the difference between someone who built something here and someone who didn't. It's a harder measure than years lived. It asks more of people. It also leaves the door open in a way that pure bloodline never could. THE SETTLEMENT Jacob arrived in the spring of 2021. He has a theory about what it takes. "Tourists come when it's easy and leave when things get hard. The more hard things you stick out, the more Nova Scotian you get. With every hurricane, storm, or nor'easter you stick out you become more Nova Scotian. With every wildfire season you become more Nova Scotian. If you help your neighbors after a fire you become more Nova Scotian. Historic drought, crops ruined? You just got more Nova Scotian." "Hard to settle, easy to leave. We don't leave." And if you have a moment, the one where it clicked, or the one where you realized it hadn't yet - hit reply. I read every one. |
From Away To Nova Scotia
What people are really saying after they move to Nova Scotia. The good, the hard and the stuff no one tells you. Plus new blogs, data from the community, and tools to help you decide if Nova Scotia is actually the right move for you.
The question came to the group. The one a lot of us hold quietly. The one we feel a little ashamed to ask, as if it is some kind of failure, or a feeling we are not allowed to have after making such a big leap. Has anyone moved here and now wants to go back to Ontario? Close to two hundred replies came in. When I go back to Ontario, I don't recognize it. I miss the familiarity of old friendships and places. I miss where I grew up. I also know it is not the same place I grew up anymore and...
THE WEEKLY DISPATCH The conversations, posts, and questions worth paying attention to this week. Community supporter · Sponsored Sam + Lottie Aldarwish Carpenter · South West NS Full gut renovations move in sequence: structural, rough-ins, inspections, insulation, drywall, finishes. Most buyers budget for finishes and underestimate everything above them. Budget 20–25% contingency - and more timeline than feels necessary. Beam & Birch buys neglected homes, restores them, and lists them and...
My community keeps pulling me back into the real, raw emotional stuff. They want to say it out loud. They want to feel like it's allowed. So here it is: you are allowed to love Nova Scotia and grieve what you left behind at the same time. You are allowed to be someone who made the right choice and still feel the cost of it. Two things can be true, and this community has space for all of them. Being in the garden this spring has me thinking about transplanting. Some plants take to new soil...