Let's Talk Antigonish Podcast

Antigonish is a community people often celebrate for its welcoming small-town feel, its lineup of cultural events, and its strong sense of connection. But what does it mean to belong to an otherwise welcoming community when you can’t get into a building, cross a street safely, attend an evening event, or visit a friend’s home?

Justin and Anuj sit down with Anne Camozzi, a longtime Antigonish resident, artist, and disability advocate, to talk about what it means to live with a disability in a town that still has a long way to go on accessibility.

Anne arrived in Antigonish in 1979, intending to stay for just a year. She fell in love with the ocean, the natural surroundings, and the community, and has called the town home ever since. For years, she led an active life, travelling, working as a consultant, and enjoying outdoor activities. Then, in 2003, a serious illness dramatically changed her mobility. She gradually moved from crutches and a walker to a wheelchair, with each transition bringing new challenges and new adjustments.

But the physical and medical challenges were only part of the story. The town itself presented barrier after barrier. As Anne adapted to life with a disability, she also rediscovered her creativity through art and eventually became a persistent advocate for change—not just to improve her own circumstances, but to make life better for others.

A Town That Can Be Difficult to Navigate

Accessibility is often understood in simple terms: is there a ramp instead of a staircase? Anne explains that the reality is much more complicated.

A curb cut might be too steep for someone using a wheelchair to navigate safely. An “accessible” doorway might still be impossible to fit through. An elevator might require a key that visitors don’t have. A building might technically be accessible, but the route from the parking space to the entrance might not be.

Anne describes dangerous street crossings in Antigonish where she has had to stop, adjust her powered wheelchair, and maneuver onto the sidewalk while impatient drivers wait (or sometimes fail to wait). She has stopped using one intersection altogether because she considers it too dangerous.

These seemingly small design problems can turn an ordinary trip across town into a serious safety risk. Accessibility is more than just a ramp. It is the whole chain: the crossing, the curb, the entrance, the elevator, the washroom, and the journey home. If one link fails, the entire trip can become impossible.

The barriers extend beyond public buildings. Many private homes are inaccessible, which can severely limit social lives. Anne says there is only one private home in Antigonish that she can enter, because its owner built a ramp. When friends’ homes aren’t accessible, social gatherings have to happen somewhere else, or not at all.

For Anne, participating in community life can depend on whether a suitable venue exists, whether she can get there, and whether she can get home again.

Transportation Is About More Than Getting Around

One of Anne’s central concerns is transportation. She helped write the early grants that established Antigonish Community Transit, which she describes as one of the biggest victories for people with disabilities in the area.

She is also quick to defend the organization. Antigonish Community Transit, she says, works incredibly hard with limited resources and has made an enormous difference in her life. The problem is that the service cannot meet the full range of community needs.

Rides often need to be booked in advance, making spontaneous trips difficult or impossible. And there is no option for evening transportation. “There is no transit in Antigonish on any weekday … on any weekend on any holiday after 5:00 PM at night,” Anne notes. “And that’s when all the activities in this community take place.”

What’s worse: If someone needs to get to an unexpected medical appointment or a ride home from the hospital after hours, accessible transportation may not be available.

Anne recounts situations in which an ambulance has been the only practical way to get where she needs to go, at a personal cost of around $300. The point is not that Antigonish Community Transit is failing; it is that a small nonprofit cannot reasonably be expected to fill every gap in a community’s transportation system.

Anne argues that accessible transportation should be treated as a municipal responsibility rather than left to an organization operating with limited funding and resources.

She points to Halifax, where accessible taxis have made it possible for her to participate in activities such as comedy nights and live music. Getting that service required advocacy through the human rights system, but the result has made a meaningful difference to her independence and social life when in Halifax.

For Anne, the issue is straightforward: people with disabilities have the same need to participate in community life as everyone else. Access to medical care matters, but so does the ability to socialize, attend events, go to the beach, and spend time with family.

Disability Can Be Expensive

The conversation also explores the financial realities of living with a disability. Anne explains that disabilities can make it harder to earn an income, while mobility equipment and other medical necessities can create substantial expenses. Some devices and supplies are not covered by insurance or MSI, leaving individuals to pay out of pocket.

These pressures compound one another. When people are already dealing with medical needs, housing challenges, and the costs of equipment, they have fewer resources available to advocate for change. Even participating in public meetings can be difficult when transportation and accessibility are barriers.

Anne is candid about the advantages she has had. She worked until she was 49, had some financial resources, and was able to sell a house to help fund her care. She also had an education, professional experience, and the ability to communicate publicly.

She sees herself as relatively fortunate—and recognizes that even with those advantages, she continues to encounter barriers. She uses her voice to advocate for a wider community, including people who may not have the same financial resources, energy, or opportunities to speak up.

Why People with Disabilities Must Be at the Table

A recurring theme in the conversation is Anne’s insistence that people with disabilities must be consulted when buildings, streets, and public spaces are designed or renovated.

“We know what works,” she argues. A project can appear to meet accessibility standards on paper and still fail in practice because a doorway is unusable, the route is poorly designed, or the parking arrangement makes reaching the entrance unsafe. A washroom may satisfy a technical standard but be impossible to reach along the route provided.

Anne describes years of advocacy around accessible parking in Antigonish, including the effort it took to secure a drop-off space on Main Street. She also raises concerns about parking at the library, while praising library staff for listening to accessibility concerns and taking action.

Her broader point is that accessibility cannot be an afterthought. The people who will use a space need to be involved from the beginning.

This is the principle of universal design: creating places and services that work for people with different ages and abilities. Thoughtful design can make spaces more usable for wheelchair users, older adults, children, and many others. Anne offers the example of a kitchen with counters at different heights, allowing a child, an older adult using a walker, and a wheelchair user to share the same space.

When accessibility is built into a project from the start, solutions can also be simpler and less expensive than retrofitting a space later.

Accessibility Is About Every Kind of Disability

Although much of the discussion focuses on mobility, Anne emphasizes that disability takes many forms. People may have vision or hearing impairments, invisible disabilities, or other needs that are not immediately apparent to others. Anne has visual and auditory disabilities herself, and points out that being disabled can mean facing several different barriers to being included.

There is no single checklist that can guarantee a space will work for everyone. The answer, she argues, is to ask people what they need and include a diverse range of experiences in decision-making.

Nova Scotia has legislated a goal of becoming accessible by 2030, and municipalities are required to have accessibility committees. But Anne questions whether committees are meeting regularly and moving recommendations forward. Having a committee or a policy is not enough if the work does not lead to meaningful change.

She also points to the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Disabled people had been asking for remote participation in meetings for years, but virtual options became much more common when people who were not disabled suddenly needed them too. The experience demonstrated that accessibility solutions are often possible when institutions recognize a need and make it a priority.

What Would a More Accessible Antigonish Look Like?

For Anne, improving Antigonish means making reliable, accessible transportation available beyond the limited hours currently served. It means safer crossings, accessible entrances, practical parking and drop-off options, and public spaces designed with disabled people rather than merely for them.

It also means recognizing that participation in community life is part of health and well-being. Being able to get to work or a medical appointment matters, but so does being able to go out with friends, attend a performance, or take part in an ordinary weekend activity.

Anne’s message is not that Antigonish has made no progress. She celebrates the creation of community transit, acknowledges the people who have listened and helped, and expresses gratitude for those who have worked to make things better. She gives particular credit to Antigonish Community Transit and to people who have taken accessibility concerns seriously.

But she believes the town and county need to turn good intentions into sustained action—and that governments must provide the resources needed to make access a reality.

Change Happens When People Speak Up

Anne believes meaningful change comes when ordinary people get involved, speak out, and insist that their communities do better. But she also makes clear that disabled people need to be invited to the table in the first place—and that participation must be possible in practice, not just in principle.

Anne’s story is one of advocacy but also personal transformation. An illness led her to rediscover art. She is now working on a book, encouraged by her medical team, about how a person can still have a life within severe constraints. It is not simply a biography or a book about disability, but a reflection on what it means to build a life around the things that remain possible.

Her decades of experience show how individual stories can expose problems a community has learned not to notice.

As the conversation closes, Anne reflects on the privilege of living in Canada and the importance of not taking democracy for granted. A democratic society depends on people being involved in their communities.

That idea is at the heart of this episode. Accessibility is not simply a matter of ramps, doors, or transportation schedules. It is about whether everyone has a genuine opportunity to participate—and whether a community is willing to listen when people explain what needs to change.

Anne’s challenge to Antigonish is a practical one: when planning a building, organizing an event, or making a decision about public space, ask who might be left out. And then invite those people to help shape the answer.

Because a community cannot truly welcome everyone if some of its members cannot get through the door.

An offensive sign at a St. Francis Xavier University student house during Homecoming sparked a much bigger conversation in town about misogyny, sexualized violence, and the culture that allows both to persist. But what does it take to move from outrage to meaningful change?

This week on Let’s Talk Antigonish, Justin and Anuj sit down with Laura Lambe, an assistant professor of psychology and a clinical psychologist at StFX, and Taeya Jones, provincial program coordinator for the Healthy Relationships for Youth program at the Antigonish Women’s Resource Centre and Sexual Assault Services Association.

Together, they explore why the Homecoming sign struck such a nerve, how rape culture and unequal power dynamics show up in everyday life, and why preventing sexualized violence requires a shift in mindset at a societal level. They also discuss promising research on Waves of Change, a bystander intervention program developed in Antigonish that helps people recognize harmful situations and practice ways to intervene safely and effectively.

The conversation moves from the university campus to schools, workplaces, and the wider community—and asks a difficult question: if we want a different culture that is safer for women and vulnerable communities, what are we actually prepared to do differently?

The Sign That Sparked a Bigger Conversation

During Homecoming, a sign appeared outside an off-campus student house depicting a “drop-off zone” for “Acadia girlfriends.” The sign was photographed, shared on social media, and became the focus of widespread criticism and discussion on a national level.

For Lambe and Jones, the issue went beyond one offensive sign. It was an example of the objectification of women and a broader culture in which misogyny and gender-based violence can become normalized.

One of the most troubling aspects of the incident, they suggest, was not just that the sign appeared, but that many people were unsurprised by it. When degrading behaviour becomes familiar enough that people expect to see it, that normalization is not just a sign of the problem, but a part of the problem.

The discussion also unfolded alongside renewed attention to sexual violence cases elsewhere (like Cornell), adding to a sense that many people had reached a breaking point. The familiar response—“It’s just a joke” or “Why are you making such a big deal out of it?”—became part of the conversation too.

What Do We Mean by Rape Culture?

Rape culture is a “term that describes an environment where rape is pervasive, normalized, and accepted as inevitable.” As Lambe explains, terms like rape culture, patriarchy, and misogyny have a common denominator: they circle around the question of who has power, and who has to think about the consequences of speaking up?

Power affects who can speak freely, who risks social or professional repercussions, and who is expected to adapt their behaviour to avoid harm.

Jones describes the everyday precautions many women learn from a young age: watching their drinks, staying close to friends, carrying keys between their fingers, and changing how they travel at night. These precautions can become so routine that they are treated as ordinary parts of life.

But why should avoiding harm require so much vigilance from the people most at risk? Why isn’t more of the focus on teaching people not to harm others?

The conversation examines how responsibility is too often placed on women to manage their own safety, while the underlying behaviours and systems that enable gender-based violence receive less attention.

Prevention Starts Earlier Than We Think

Jones coordinates the Healthy Relationships for Youth program, which originated in the Antigonish–Guysborough area and has since expanded across Nova Scotia.

The program works with Grade 9 students, opening up conversations about consent, healthy relationships, violence, and power. Jones would like to see age-appropriate programming reach younger students as well, arguing that these conversations are more effective when they begin early.

Nova Scotia has introduced gender-based violence curriculum outcomes across grades Primary to 12, an important step. But, as Jones explains, prevention cannot end with a classroom lesson. Healthy relationships require skills, practice, and reinforcement throughout life.

As Jones points out, schools teach children mathematics and other foundational subjects. Yet people can reach adulthood without ever having been explicitly taught how to navigate conflict, recognize unhealthy behaviour, establish boundaries, or learn about consent.

The guests discuss why education needs to be accompanied by accountability. If harmful behaviour occurs, there must also be meaningful responses—not simply another conversation about why the behaviour was wrong.

Waves of Change: Teaching People How to Step In

Lambe’s research focuses on Waves of Change, a bystander intervention program that was originally developed in Antigonish with the Women’s Centre and has since been adapted for use across Nova Scotia.

At StFX, the program is delivered through peer-led training during Welcome Week, with student leaders helping incoming students learn about sexual violence, consent, power, and privilege. Additional training is offered to groups such as athletes and student leaders.

The central idea is simple: people who witness harmful behaviour can influence what happens next. But knowing that something is wrong doesn’t automatically mean knowing how to respond.

The program therefore combines education with practical scenarios. Students consider situations they might encounter and practice different ways of intervening that are safe and effective.

The guests explain the bystander effect: when more people witness a situation, each individual can become less likely to act because responsibility feels shared. People may also worry about embarrassing themselves, losing friends or social status, facing retaliation, or simply not knowing what to do.

Social norms matter, too. When nobody else responds to a harmful situation, it becomes easier to assume that intervention isn’t necessary—or that speaking up will make you the odd one out.

Practicing different responses helps people recognize these barriers and gives them options beyond confronting someone directly.

The Research: Promising Evidence That Training Makes a Difference

Lambe discusses a study conducted with her students and research collaborators, including honours thesis students Emmy Stewart and Madison Walker, colleague Elvira Prusaczyk, and StFX collaborators Heather Blackburn and Gowry Kaliyiluvila Rajesh.

The researchers surveyed students over multiple time points, examining participation in Waves of Change, knowledge about sexual violence, confidence in their ability to intervene, and reported intervention behaviours.

The results were promising. Students who participated in the program reported more bystander intervention behaviours than students who did not. The researchers also found that greater knowledge of topics such as consent, power, and sexual violence, alongside greater confidence in one’s ability to help, helped explain the relationship.

Lambe is careful to acknowledge an important limitation: almost all participants in the study were women. The difficulty of engaging men in both the programming and the research makes it harder to know how fully the findings represent the the behavior of the wider student population.

That limitation matters, particularly when the goal is to change a culture that affects everyone. Effective prevention requires broad participation—not just from those who are already motivated to engage with the issue. And it especially requires the participation of men.

You Don’t Have to Be a Hero

One of the most practical parts of the conversation is the reminder that bystander intervention doesn’t have to mean confronting someone in the moment.

Depending on the circumstances, intervening might mean:

* Creating a distraction or changing the subject.

* Checking in with someone afterwards to ask whether they’re okay.

* Documenting what happened.

* Reporting a concern anonymously.

* Finding another person who can help.

The appropriate response depends on the situation, including the safety of the person experiencing harm and the bystander. The point is not to demand that everyone take the same action, but to make sure people understand that they have options.

Small actions can matter. A person who feels supported may be less isolated, and someone who sees harmful behaviour challenged may realize that it is not universally accepted.

As Lambe emphasizes, you don’t need to be a hero. You can do something small—and still make a difference.

Why Reporting and Accountability Are So Difficult

Education and prevention are only part of the picture. What happens after an incident matters just as much.

Jones describes how survivors can face systems that are difficult to navigate and may leave them feeling blamed, disbelieved, or retraumatized. Reporting sexual violence can mean entering institutions that survivors do not necessarily trust to protect them or hold perpetrators accountable.

This creates a difficult cycle: people are encouraged to report, but the response they encounter can make reporting feel unsafe or futile. Underreporting then makes it harder to understand the full scale of the problem.

The guests argue that responsibility cannot rest on survivors to navigate these systems or repeatedly recount their experiences. Institutions need to examine how they respond, how they support people who come forward, and whether their processes lead to meaningful accountability.

The conversation touches on StFX’s work to review its sexual violence policies. Lambe notes that an external review took place and that the university was working to implement recommended changes, while cautioning that she could not assess their effectiveness.

The broader point is that prevention and response must go together. Training bystanders is valuable, but it cannot substitute for institutional policies and practices that protect survivors and address harmful behaviour.

This Is Bigger Than One University

Although the conversation began with an incident at StFX, the guests stress that sexualized violence and the attitudes that sustain it are not confined to one campus.

Schools, universities, workplaces, municipalities, and governments all have a role to play. The conversation also raises questions about how organizations can make education accessible and culturally responsive for people arriving from different backgrounds, including international students and newcomers.

People do not all arrive with the same experiences or understanding of consent and healthy relationships. That makes clear communication and inclusive education especially important—but it also means organizations must do more than simply announce their values. They need to put those values into practice.

Is There Reason to Be Hopeful?

The guests acknowledge that the wider cultural climate can be discouraging. Yet they also see reasons for hope.

Lambe reflects that in earlier years, a sign like the one displayed during Homecoming might have appeared without generating the same level of public discussion or outrage. The fact that people are challenging such behaviour and demanding a response suggests that expectations can change.

Jones points to the many ways people can participate in that change: calling out inappropriate comments, supporting organizations doing prevention work, volunteering, and continuing conversations that might otherwise be avoided.

Neither guest suggests that one program or one intervention will solve the problem. But research, education, community involvement, and institutional accountability can all contribute to changing the culture.

The challenge is to turn concern into action—and to make sure that the responsibility for change is shared.

What Can We Do?

The conversation ends with a practical message: if something happens that feels harmful or wrong, you have options. You don’t have to be the loudest person in the room or put yourself in danger to make a difference.

You can check in. You can interrupt a moment with a distraction. You can document what happened, report it, support someone afterwards, or help strengthen the organizations doing this work in the community.

The goal is not simply to condemn one sign or respond to one news story. It’s to build a community where harmful behaviour is challenged rather than normalized, survivors are supported rather than blamed, and people know how to act when something isn’t right.

Because changing a culture doesn’t happen only through big gestures. It happens through the choices people make every day—and through the institutions that decide whether those choices are supported.

Links and resources

Healthy Relationships for Youth (HRY) Program

Waves of Change StFX

Laura Lambe’s recent article on the efficacy of the Waves of Change program

Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE):1-877-800-SANE (7263) (Eastern Nova Scotia)

Mental Health Crisis Line: 1-800-429-8167

Hope for Wellness Helpline: 1-855-242-3310

When you call 911, you probably aren’t thinking about how the fire department is structured, how much training the firefighters have had, or whether the person coming to help you has another job to get back to in the morning. You just expect someone to show up who knows what they’re doing.

This week, Justin and Anuj sat down with Adrian VandeSande, Chief of the Antigonish County Volunteer Fire Department, to talk about what happens behind the scenes when that call comes in. They cover the network of fire departments serving Antigonish Town and County, the surprisingly wide range of emergencies firefighters respond to, the challenge of recruiting and training volunteers, and a new training centre being built in Lower South River that could make a significant difference to fire services across the region.

The conversation starts with a simple revelation: these are volunteers. All of them. Even the chief.

Nine Departments, One Community

Justin opens with a confession. He recently had a chimney fire and discovered only when he called for help that he didn’t actually know which fire department served his property. He had assumed it was Four Valleys. It was Antigonish County.

It’s a useful starting point for understanding how the system works. There are nine fire departments serving Antigonish Town and County, each with its own boundaries, equipment, membership and resources. When an emergency falls near a boundary or requires more people and equipment than one department can provide, neighbouring departments respond together.

Adrian describes mutual aid as one of the system’s greatest assets. He gives the example of a structure fire where the roof was too unsafe for firefighters to work on directly. The town’s department brought in its ladder truck to ventilate the roof, allowing the operation to proceed safely.

The departments also meet every three months to coordinate their work. They are separate organizations, but they are not isolated from one another. When a serious call comes in — particularly a highway collision or a situation where someone is trapped in a vehicle — Adrian says he’s often already thinking about which neighbouring department he might need to call.

For residents, the important thing is that the system is designed to get the appropriate help to an emergency, rather than simply sending whichever department happens to be administratively responsible for an address.

The Extraordinary Reality of Volunteer Firefighting

Anuj was surprised to learn just how completely volunteer-based the service is. Adrian confirms that neither he nor the firefighters in his department are paid for their work. He estimates that roughly 95% of Nova Scotia’s firefighters are volunteers.

And this isn’t a casual commitment. Adrian’s department has around 40 members, who must balance emergency calls and training with their jobs, families and other responsibilities. The department is on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Some incidents are resolved in ten minutes; others can occupy firefighters for eight or nine hours.

The workload also follows the seasons. As temperatures drop and people start lighting their wood stoves and fireplaces, chimney fires become more common. A blocked chimney, an old nest or years of accumulated debris can turn the first fire of the season into an emergency. Snow and ice bring more vehicle collisions.

And fires are only part of the job.

Adrian’s team responds to vehicle crashes requiring extrication, false alarms, people trapped in elevators and even automatic crash notifications from mobile phones. The department also has a medical first responder team that assists Emergency Health Services, handling approximately 20 to 25 such calls a year on top of its other work.

Then there’s traffic control. Firefighters may be called to an emergency late at night and end up staying until morning because they are helping divert traffic around a collision. Adrian says this has become a significant concern: firefighters are there to respond to emergencies, but they can lose hours doing work that stretches beyond their core role.

The sheer variety of the work helps explain why recruiting volunteers is difficult. It isn’t simply a matter of showing up, putting on a uniform and riding in a truck. New members must meet training requirements and demonstrate a sustained commitment to calls, meetings and volunteering.

A Small but Important Request to Drivers

One of the most practical parts of the conversation is Adrian’s reminder about what to do when an emergency vehicle approaches.

Find a safe place to pull over, stop, and let the vehicle pass. If two vehicles are approaching from opposite directions, both should pull over where it is safe to do so, leaving room for the emergency vehicle to get through between them.

And don’t follow the fire truck.

Adrian says firefighters increasingly encounter drivers who film emergency scenes on their phones while passing. Sometimes a driver has one hand on the wheel and their attention on the accident rather than the road ahead. An emergency scene is already dangerous, and distracted drivers create additional risks for everyone there.

Who Becomes a Firefighter?

How do you persuade people to take on a demanding job that pays nothing?

Adrian describes two recruitment routes. The first is a junior firefighter program for young people aged 14 to 18, which his department introduced in the past year. Participants learn skills such as handling hoses, using fire extinguishers and conducting searches, although they do not take part in live-burn exercises. The department has had success bringing some of these young people into full membership when they turn 18.

The second route is through membership drives, which typically produce five to ten applicants. Not everyone makes it through. The biggest obstacle is time: prospective members need to be able to attend training and respond to calls while maintaining their other commitments.

Physical fitness matters for many aspects of the job, but Adrian emphasizes that there are roles for different people. Nobody is forced into a burning building if they aren’t comfortable doing interior firefighting. Members can contribute in other ways, and some develop additional specialties, including medical first response and vehicle extrication.

The conversation also raises the possibility of recruiting more newcomers to Canada. Adrian welcomes their participation but identifies language and communication as important practical considerations. At an emergency scene, conditions can be loud, firefighters wear masks, and instructions are transmitted by radio. Everyone needs to be able to communicate clearly when safety depends on it.

For anyone interested, his advice is straightforward: contact your local fire department, drop by when people are at the station, or get in touch through Facebook and ask about applying.

The Training Problem

This is where the conversation arrives at its central issue.

Becoming a qualified firefighter requires substantial training. Adrian explains that when he completed his Level 1 training 13 years ago, the process took roughly 16 months. He traveled to Pictou every second weekend for practical instruction, then went to Waverley, near Halifax, for a live-burn weekend and the assessments required for certification.

That training qualifies a firefighter to undertake many of the essential tasks of the job, including entering a burning structure to conduct a search or carry out other interior operations. Members may also pursue additional training in medical first response and vehicle extrication.

But certification is only the beginning. Firefighters need to keep practicing. Their departments might respond to only five or six structure fires in a year, which means opportunities to use some of their most important skills in real conditions are limited.

Adrian has recently traveled to Texas for specialized training involving liquefied petroleum gas — the sort of high-pressure fuel hazard that might arise in a serious transport incident. Even after 13 years of firefighting experience, he found the experience eye-opening.

His point is that classroom instruction has limits. You can learn procedures on paper, but there is no substitute for hands-on experience in a controlled environment that reproduces the pressures firefighters may face in a real emergency.

The problem is that access to this kind of training has been difficult, particularly for volunteer departments whose members must fit courses around their working lives and families. Traveling across the province adds time, accommodation costs and other expenses.

And without training, eager recruits can’t always be put to work.

Building a Training Centre in Lower South River

The proposed solution is a new regional training centre on Macquarrie Drive in the Lower South River Industrial Park.

The project has been a long-standing ambition among local firefighters: a place where new members can earn their Level 1 certification and experienced firefighters can continue practicing, without having to travel elsewhere in the province.

The site covers ten acres, of which three have been cleared. The access road, culverts and other civil work have been completed, and a large concrete pad has been poured. Five shipping containers have been acquired to form the basis of a training structure. They will be stacked and engineered into place, with a propane-powered live-burn system installed by a specialist company from Ontario.

This isn’t a plan to improvise a dangerous fire and hope for the best. Adrian describes a controlled system with a control room and temperature monitoring, designed to let firefighters practice in realistic conditions while managing the risks.

The ambitions go beyond basic structural firefighting. The centre is intended to support training in medical first response, vehicle extrication, water and ice rescue, and other specialized skills. It could also host firefighters from across the region, from Pictou County to Cape Breton, allowing departments to train together and share access to facilities.

Adrian hopes the centre will be used during the week as well as on weekends. Volunteer departments often schedule training around their members’ work commitments, leaving weekdays underused. By offering high-angle rescue training and other specialized courses, the facility could also serve companies working in sectors such as wind energy and fuel.

The potential benefits are considerable: better-trained firefighters, more opportunities to practice, reduced travel costs and a shared resource for departments that might otherwise struggle to access this kind of facility.

The Funding Gap

There’s one major obstacle between the vision and the finished centre: money.

Adrian credits the town and county municipalities with providing valuable support, including the county’s contribution of the land. But the project still needs additional fundraising to move forward.

The financial pressures facing volunteer fire departments are considerable even before a regional training centre enters the picture. Adrian points to a new fire truck purchased by his department the previous year at a cost of $800,000. Equipment, training and protective gear are expensive, and the funding available to individual departments doesn’t always cover what is needed.

Protective equipment creates its own challenges. A full set of bunker gear can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and it must be fitted to the individual firefighter. It can’t simply be handed from one member to another whenever someone new joins.

That becomes especially relevant in a university town. Students may be interested in volunteering, but they may leave Antigonish during the summer or move away after graduation. Departments have to consider whether the substantial cost of outfitting a recruit will translate into a sustained contribution to the community.

Adrian is not dismissive of student volunteers. Rather, he is explaining the practical decisions that come with trying to build a dependable volunteer force on limited resources.

The training centre’s core working group is only five or six people, supported by the wider network of local fire chiefs and firefighters. Adrian himself runs a landscaping business, has three children, and is fitting the centre around his regular job and his responsibilities as chief. It is a substantial undertaking for a small group of people who are already giving their time to the community.

The Recruits Waiting on the Sidelines

Perhaps the most striking moment in the episode comes when Adrian explains what the lack of training capacity means for his department right now.

He has seven or eight relatively new members who joined within the previous two years. They are eager to help, but they have not completed their Level 1 training. The fire school in Halifax had been closed, leaving them unable to finish the process required to take on the full range of firefighting duties.

Adrian describes having to hold these enthusiastic recruits back because they aren’t yet qualified to do the work.

His question to the province is pointed: how long can a department keep promising people that they’ll soon be able to serve?

A local training centre could remove a major barrier. Instead of spending weekends traveling to distant facilities, recruits could train close to home. Existing firefighters could return regularly to practice. And departments across the region could share a resource designed around their needs.

Justin asks whether the result would be a safer community. Adrian’s answer is unequivocal: absolutely.

When someone calls 911, he says, they are probably having one of the worst days of their life. They expect the firefighters who arrive to know what to do. Making sure they have the training and experience to meet that expectation is the entire point of the project.

What Comes Next?

The centre is still under construction, and Adrian is clear that fundraising will determine how quickly it can move forward. In the conversation, he suggests that a major contribution — half a million dollars, for example — could make a dramatic difference to the timeline, potentially allowing training to begin by August of the following year.

That’s a scenario rather than a confirmed opening date. The project still needs the resources to complete the work and establish the staffing and operational arrangements that a facility of this kind requires.

Adrian anticipates that running the centre will eventually require at least a couple of full-time positions to manage the site, maintain the grounds, coordinate courses and ensure that inspections and safety requirements are met.

For now, the project rests on a small group of people trying to build something that could benefit a much larger region.

The conversation is a reminder that rural emergency services depend on much more than the trucks we see on the road. They depend on volunteers who answer pagers in the middle of the night, the training that allows them to do difficult work safely, the equipment that makes that work possible, and the community’s willingness to support all three.

Adrian and his colleagues are trying to create a place where firefighters can train together, improve their skills and be better prepared for the day someone needs them. The goal is simple enough: when the call comes, the people who show up will be ready.

Antigonish Area Fire & Rescue Training Centre Facebook page

Antigonish County Volunteer Fire Department Facebook page

Justin and Anuj sat down for a frank discussion about the Let’s Talk Antigonish podcast; what lessons have been leaned about life in this town, the benefits and limitations of podcasting, and what their hopes are for the future of both Antigonish and the podcast itself.

The Public Face Problem

Justin’s first observation is something he hadn’t fully anticipated when they started: most of the people they interview are representing an organization, and that shapes, and often limits, what they can say. The mayor, the warden, the MLA, the MP, the ER doctors, the heads of arts organizations and businesses; all of them come in with a public face and have to stick to talking points to some extent. They represent employers, electorates, and institutions, so they can’t just say whatever they think.

This isn’t a complaint about any particular guest. It’s an observation about the structural constraint the podcast keeps running into. Academics like Jim Bickerton and Doug Brown can speak more freely because, as academics, they are somewhat freer to speak their mind. Someone employed by Nova Scotia Health cannot come on and rail against their colleagues or employer, and it would be wrong to expect them to. But it means listeners are not always getting the full picture. Justin and Anuj are both aware of this and have accepted it as part of the format they’ve chosen, which is conversation, not interrogation.

Anuj makes a hypothesis: guests who are willing to be self-critical and self-reflective—the ones who stray from formal talking points—are the ones audiences respond to most warmly. Not because they say raw, unhinged things, but because the honesty reads as trust.

Favourite Moments

Anuj’s most memorable episode: the Filipino Association. Not just because it was a chance to discuss their amazing performance at the Highland Games parade, but because of what Cheryl revealed about the internal life of that community; how it functions, how it looks after newcomers, how deeply grateful it is to be here. What struck him was how little complaint there was. A community of over 200 people, working multiple jobs, navigating a country not their own, and what came through was warmth and gratitude. He didn’t know that community existed before the parade. Neither did Justin.

That leads to a broader point Justin raises: there are almost certainly dozens of communities like that in this town; groups of people doing significant things that you’d never bump into unless you you are already part of the community. The podcast has surfaced a few. There are more still waiting to be found!

The other episode that comes up: Trevor Gould at Paqtnkek. Anuj describes the moment he still thinks about when Trevor said: I feel like I have a place in town now. I feel visible.

The Sisters of St. Martha’s episode is the one Anuj keeps coming back to. Sister Joanne was, he says, self-reflective and candid in a way he had not expected. The depth of what the Sisters have contributed to this community—as caregivers, as advocates, as people who quietly pushed against institutional power even within their own church—was something neither of them had fully understood before. And the Sisters, as Justin notes, rarely toot their own horn. They just do the work.

The Gaps

Justin admits that the podcast reflects his interests more than it should. He’s in the arts, so the podcast has done a lot of arts episodes. It’s not a problem exactly as all of it is genuinely interesting, but sports is enormous in this town and the podcast has barely touched it. Hockey hasn’t come up once. The Riverside Racetrack is on the list but the personal relationship to make it happen isn’t there yet.

The daycare issue is another one they’ve been trying to crack for months. The problem is exactly the one identified earlier: everyone who knows the daycare system well is employed within it, which constrains what they can say publicly.

Coming down the pipe: Senator PJ Prosper, who was recently in town. The mosque, which has renovated and rebuilt its space from the inside. StFX President Andy Hakin, who has has agreed to come in, though scheduling someone running a university is its own challenge.

The No-Vision Observation

The conversation turned toward something Justin noticed while working through his list: there is no collective vision for what Antigonish is trying to become. The tourism board has a direction. The town and county provide infrastructure, but less direction. Individual organizations build what they need. Projects happen; affordable housing units, the new RK facility, a possible arts centre, the Women’s Resource Centre planning a new building, L’Arche building new space, but they’re parallel tracks, not a coordinated plan. Nobody is standing at the front of the room saying: this is where we are going, and here is how everything we do fits into that.

Anuj frames it as the absence of a collective imagination. Individual vision exists everywhere. A shared vision for the whole community is harder to find.

When pressed, Justin’s hasty example is Canso: Spaceport Nova Scotia gives it an identity and a driver. Orlando has Disney. Sometimes a single massive anchor reshapes what a place is for. Antigonish already has two anchors, the hospital and the university, but has perhaps taken them for granted so that neither functions as an anchor for a unified vision these days. Off -the-cuff ideas are bandied about, including the idea that the town could focus on building to attract families and be known as the ideal place in Canada to raise children. Anuj suggests the town might also lean into being a genuinely elder-friendly destination, given that over 25% of the population is now over 65.

Neither of them is proposing a solution. They’re noticing a pattern across 32 conversations. Whether the absence of a single vision is a problem or just a feature of a community where, as Anuj puts it, a thousand flowers bloom is an open question.

What they both agree on: on the day they record this episode, there’s a food truck rally down at Columbus Field and a film festival at Immaculata happening simultaneously. Justin is planning to attend both. It is, he says, hard to be bored in this town. Perhaps the lack of a single vision and diversity of ideas is part of the town’s charm?

The Podcast Itself

Justin is honest about how this thing actually works. He does all the recording, editing, and social media posting. It runs about three to four hours of work a week on a good week. The hardest part isn’t the recording or editing, but the scheduling of guests; the constant feast-or-famine rhythm where three guests are ready the week you don’t need them and nobody is confirmed for the Saturday that’s coming.

Neither Anuj or Justin have yet to pay themselves for the podcast. The money earned from subscribers and sponsors is being saved to help pay for guest content creators. They have two community sponsors, Whidden Park Campground and HARP, The People’s Press, whose support they are genuinely grateful for. And there’s a growing list of paid Substack subscribers whose contributions paid for audio equipment and will help fund future expansion. Even if the podcast never earns enough to pay its hosts, they’ll keep going either way, so fear not! A special episode is coming, assembled by host Anne Simpson and editor Jeanmichel Cote, which will be something a little different from the usual format. This is the kind of special content they want to see more of from guest contributors.

The request to the audience: write in. With ideas, with feedback, with suggestions. Some of the best adjustments to the podcast—including the longer written episode summaries that now accompany each episode—came directly from listener notes. The rare complaints, Justin says, have on the whole been quite useful. Praise is also welcome, of course!

Anuj is back, and to mark the occasion, Justin and Anuj sit down with Kathleen Robertsson, president of the ABC for Kids Society, to talk about the Dolly Parton Imagination Library and why Antigonish is being cited nationally as a model for how this program can work.

What Is the ABC for Kids Society?

The ABC for Kids Society is the local organization behind Antigonish’s Dolly Parton Imagination Library program. Its mission is wonderfully simple: make sure every child in Antigonish Town and County has access to books from birth to age five.

Through the program, every registered child receives one free, carefully selected book every month, mailed directly to their home and addressed to them by name. The ABC for Kids Society’s job is to make that possible locally, raising the money needed to cover the community’s share of the books and building the partnerships that have allowed the program to reach an extraordinary 80% of eligible children in Antigonish.

The books themselves come through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which handles the selection, printing, and mailing. The local society never has to buy, store or distribute the books. Its role is community building: fundraising, outreach, partnerships, and making sure families know the program exists.

And Antigonish has taken that role seriously. What began with a few people around a kitchen table has grown, in just three years, into one of the most closely watched local Imagination Library programs in Canada, earning the town a nickname that captures the whole idea: the little place that reads.

Who Is Kathleen Robertsson?

Kathleen is from Antigonish; her father was Henry Sullivan of Henry’s Barbershop, which will ring a bell for anyone who’s been here long enough. Like many Nova Scotians, she spent a significant chunk of her working life in Alberta, teaching in Fort McMurray.

She retired back home with a plan. In Fort McMurray, her friend Julianne sat on the Dolly Parton Imagination Library’s blue ribbon book selection committee. They talked about the program often. Kathleen told Julianne that when she retired to Antigonish, she would try to start it there.

She meant it.

In April 2023, Kathleen sat down at a kitchen table with some friends and asked: would you help? They said yes, and the ABC for Kids Society was born.

What the Program Actually Is

The premise is simple. From birth to age five, every registered child receives one free book per month, mailed directly to their home. The book is addressed to the child by name.

There is no catch, no free trial that converts into a subscription, no hidden cost to families. Kathleen says she still has to convince people of this because their first instinct is that it’s too good to be true.

Dolly Parton’s organization handles all the logistics: the book selection, the printing and the mailing directly to the child’s mailbox. The local society doesn’t touch a single book. What it does is raise $3.85 per book per child per month—$46.20 per child per year—to cover its share of the cost.

Everything else is funded by The Dollywood Foundation.

The books are not secondhand selections or publisher leftovers. They are properly curated, beautiful books selected annually by a blue ribbon committee that convenes in Tennessee for five days, scouring hundreds of titles for books that address character development, language, numeracy, imagination and age-appropriateness.

And the selection committee isn’t simply a room full of PR people or publishing executives. It includes bookstore owners, psychologists, and elementary teachers. Canadians are represented, too. Kathleen has been, as Julianne’s guest, to that gathering herself.

Occasionally a Nova Scotian author will make the list. One of those is Freddie the Flyer, about the first Indigenous pilot, written by Halifax-based author Danielle Metcalfe-Chenaila.

The Numbers

There are 815 children between birth and five years old in Antigonish, according to the census. Kathleen’s program currently serves 650 of them.

That’s an 80% enrollment rate.

The national target for a program like this is considered to be around 65%. Antigonish blew past that. Jan, who heads the national Canadian operation, mentions Antigonish regularly. The program has attracted attention across the country.

Why 80% Matters

This is not a program designed only for families who can’t afford books. Kathleen is emphatic about this.

The goal is a shared foundational experience; a common library of books that children arrive at primary school having read. Teachers at the pre-primary and primary levels have told her it is making a tangible difference. Kids come in with shared language, shared stories, and shared points of reference.

The program reaches the whole community, including families out in Tracadie, Arisaig and Havre Boucher who don’t need to drive into town and spend gas money to put books in their children’s hands.

The books come to the mailbox. And the name on the label matters enormously. Kathleen tells a story about a three-year-old named Luke from Pomquet who runs in from the mailbox each month holding his book to his heart, pointing at the label and spelling it out: L-U-K-E. “That’s me. This book is for me.”

That moment—a small child learning that someone out there knew his name and sent him something—is what Dolly Parton designed the whole program around. She understood, Kathleen says, that what you need a child to feel is that someone, somewhere, cares about them, regardless of what’s going on in their life.

Dolly

The program started in 1995. Dolly Parton’s father was illiterate, and she wanted to give him a gift. She decided to give free books to all the children in her home county of Sevier County, Tennessee.

Her father loved the gift.

The program grew from one county to the whole state, and from one state to the entire United States, and then to Canada and beyond. Today the Imagination Library mails out three million books per month to children worldwide.

Kathleen notes that this makes it bigger than both Walmart and Amazon by certain logistical measures. The whole operation runs out of a small office above a bank back in Sevier.

Dolly once said she wanted to be remembered not for her looks, but for her books. She ran the whole thing on this principle: she put in her own money, she found people who loved children and loved books rather than people who were good at corporate PR, and she insisted that every community do its own part — the shared partnership model that means the program can scale without becoming top-heavy.

How Antigonish Did It

Perhaps unsurprising, it was easy for Kathleen to get the idea off the ground in Antigonish. Most community orgs she approached said yes to the idea right away. The Kinsmen. The Town. The County. The Sisters of St. Martha’s. 98.9 XFM. The Monsieur Hugh McPherson Council of the Knights of Columbus. The Antigonish Lions Club, which runs a full breakfast fundraiser every year. The 100 Women Who Care.

And StFX, where Professor Mark McIsaac’s fourth-year business class—which Kathleen calls Team X—met with her six times over the course of a year to help build out the society’s social media presence and financial infrastructure.

That last piece, Kathleen says, is part of why Antigonish grew so fast. The students were phenomenal. They helped professionalize an organization that started at a kitchen table and turned it into one of the most recognized programs in the country within three years.

Dolly Day: September 25th

To mark Dolly Parton’s passing and celebrate what the Imagination Library has meant to this community, the Town of Antigonish has proclaimed September 25th Dolly Day. (Nine-Two-Five)

The ABC for Kids Society is inviting everyone to sparkle it up a little — wear something pink, something glittery, play a Dolly tune, bake a batch of Dolly Cookies, and give your staff a cup of ambition (rather than your boss).

If you want to donate, you can find the org’s page on CanadaHelps at this link: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/antigonish-imagination-library/

A gift of $9.25 covers two months for one child. You get a tax receipt. Boom, boom, it’s done, in Kathleen’s words.

And if you have a child between birth and five in Antigonish Town or County and they’re not yet enrolled, that is easily fixed. Just visit this link to register:

https://antigonishimaginationlibrary.com/

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Thanks to Whidden Park Campground and Healing Arts Reconciling People (HARP): The People’s Press, Community Sponsors of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Email us at [email protected]

When the Helpers Need Help

There is a particular assumption that comes with being a first responder or frontline worker: that you are somehow built differently. You run toward emergencies. You help other people through the worst moments of their lives with bravery and a calm demeanor. Surely, then, these first responders are born with an ability to encounters these situations on a daily bases without it negatively impacting their mental health.

That assumption is at the heart of this week’s conversation on Let’s Talk Antigonish.

Justin sits down with John Garth MacDonald and Matt Beson, two committee chairs with Helping the Helpers, an organization that began in Antigonish twelve years ago with a straightforward but urgent goal: to raise awareness about post-traumatic stress disorder among frontline professionals and, perhaps most importantly, to make it easier for people to ask for help.

The organization’s annual Awareness and Education Day has now grown from 74 people at its first event to regularly attracting more than 200 participants. What started as a local initiative has developed a much broader reach, with speakers and participants from across Canada. But the conversation makes clear that the heart of Helping the Helpers remains local: creating a place where people in our community can talk openly about something that for a long time was rarely discussed.

The Myth of the Invulnerable First Responder

John Garth’s own experience is what started the organization. After years working as a paramedic, he went off work in 2012 with a workplace mental health injury—PTSD.

What struck his colleagues was not simply that it had happened, but that it had happened to him. He had been a supervisor, mentor and facilitator. If someone like John Garth could be affected, his colleagues wondered, who might be next?

That question became the beginning of Helping the Helpers.

The conversation returns repeatedly to the idea that frontline workers are not immune to trauma. In fact, the nature of the work can mean that they encounter in a single day things that another person might never encounter in an entire lifetime. And because helping others is such a central part of these professions, there can be a tendency to keep going—to absorb what happened, go home, put on the uniform again the next day and carry on.

As John Garth puts it, when he began his career, you weren’t supposed to ask for help. You weren’t supposed to cry. You were expected to show up the next day as though nothing had happened.

The culture is changing, but the legacy of that culture remains.

The Invisible Injury

One of the most enlightening ideas in the conversation is the understanding that PTSD is as an “invisible injury.” From the outside, someone can look completely fine. They can report for work, follow procedures and do their job.

The signs may only appear elsewhere.

For some people, it can mean anger or heightened sensitivity. For others, withdrawing from family and friends, avoiding activities or becoming increasingly isolated. There is no single way that PTSD presents itself, and that can make it especially difficult for someone to recognize what is happening to them.

The common thread, Matt suggests, may simply be that the person isn’t quite themselves anymore.

And sometimes they are the last person to notice.

That’s where colleagues, friends and family become so important. The people around someone may see changes long before that person recognizes them as signs that they need help.

The Forgotten Family

Perhaps the most moving part of the conversation is the discussion of what happens to the people around the person experiencing PTSD.

When John Garth went off work, his wife Michelle became his advocate. She was caring for the children, working two jobs, managing the household and helping him navigate the system to get the care he needed.

But, as John Garth points out, nobody was initially asking Michelle what she and the children needed.

Families can experience what Matt describes as vicarious trauma too. They live alongside the changes, the stress and the uncertainty. They become part of the recovery process without necessarily being given support themselves.

That is one reason spouses and family members have become an important part of Helping the Helpers’ Awareness and Education Day.

A Day Built Around Hope

The Awareness and Education Day isn’t simply a series of lectures about PTSD. It brings together frontline workers, people who have experienced occupational mental health injuries, mental-health professionals and the families and communities surrounding them.

There are presentations, lived experiences, a speakers’ panel and opportunities for questions. There are also three psychologists on site, along with therapy dogs.

But perhaps the most important thing the day offers is a safe environment.

John Garth explains that the original motivation was simple: if someone sharing their story could help one person—a paramedic, a first responder, a family member or a child—then the day would be worth it.

That idea of helping even one person runs through the entire conversation.

The Challenge Coin

One of the most tangible symbols of the organization is a challenge coin, originally inspired by a coin John Garth himself received and later redesigned by his wife Michelle.

On one side is the Helping the Helpers logo and the message “Not All Injuries Are Visible.” On the other are raised hands and the words “Reach out, you are not alone,” along with “Strength together” and “Heroes are human.”

Participants carry the coins with them. The idea is deliberately tactile: when things are difficult, you can take the coin out, rub your thumb over the raised hands and remind yourself that there is someone you can reach out to.

John Garth says people have contacted him to tell him they have rubbed the hands on the coin so often that they have nearly worn them away.

It’s a small object carrying a surprisingly large message.

From Stigma to Recognition

There has been progress since John Garth began his career. Workplaces are increasingly checking in with employees. Supervisors are asking questions that might not have been asked ten or twenty years ago. There is greater recognition that a mental-health injury can be an occupational injury.

But the stigma has not disappeared.

John Garth talks about the fear he experienced when he was preparing to return to work. He wondered whether his colleagues would see him as “damaged goods.” Would they still want to work with him? Would they trust him?

Instead, he discovered that his colleagues had been asking his wife when he was coming back. They needed his experience, his guidance and his skills.

The realization mattered.

The problem wasn’t that John Garth was incapable of doing his job. As he explains, paramedics can function extremely well in emergency situations. The difficulty can come afterward—in dealing with what they have seen, heard and carried away with them.

Recovery Isn’t a Finish Line

Another important point in the conversation is that treatment isn’t necessarily a quick process. Recognizing that something is wrong is often the first and hardest step. From there, someone might work with their family physician, mental-health professionals or specialized PTSD services to develop a treatment plan.

And it can take time.

John Garth speaks openly about recovery as something ongoing rather than something that simply ends when someone is cleared to return to work. Taking care of himself, staying connected with professionals and maintaining the supports that have helped him are all part of that continuing process.

But the conversation is not ultimately about despair.

Quite the opposite.

Both men talk about seeing people who have recognized what was happening, sought treatment and are now doing well. The Awareness and Education Day can be heavy. There are difficult stories, and there are tears. But there is also humour, connection and, increasingly, stories of recovery.

Heroes Are Human

That may be the simplest way to understand what Helping the Helpers is trying to accomplish. The organization is challenging the idea that strength means being unaffected.

The people who spend their careers helping others are still human. They can be affected by what they see. Their families can be affected. Their colleagues can be affected. And asking for help doesn’t erase their strength or their professionalism.

In fact, John Garth’s final message is perhaps the most important one of the episode: reach out. You are not alone. You deserve help.

The next Helping the Helpers Awareness and Education Day takes place October 24 in Antigonish and is open to anyone connected to the subject—not only frontline professionals or people who have experienced PTSD themselves, but family members, educators, community members and anyone who wants to understand more. To register or for me info, visit helpingthehelpers.ca

After twelve years, the organization continues for the same reason it started: because if one person hears something that makes them recognize they need help, the day has done its job.

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Thanks to Whidden Park Campground and Healing Arts Reconciling People (HARP): The People’s Press, Community Sponsors of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Email us at [email protected]

Justin sat down with Kyra Lambert (Artistic Director and Curator of Antigonight Arts After Dark Festival) and Abby Fraser (Festival Coordinator) to discuss this year’s Antigonight (taking place on September 19th), and what will be changing thanks to the provincial budget cuts to the arts.

What is Antigonight?

First, a primer for anyone who hasn’t been: Antigonight Arts After Dark is a free, fully accessible public arts festival that happens after dark in downtown Antigonish. No tickets. No mandatory stay time. No pressure. You walk around, you encounter both large- and small-scale art installations — light displays, participatory crafts, performance pieces, shadows and movement — and you engage with them however you like, or you don’t, and you move on to the next one. Some people come away having made something themselves. All of it is free. Quite a lot of it is genuinely surprising in the best way.

The nighttime setting is part of the design, not just the name. Darkness invites artists who play with light and shadow and movement in ways that a gallery setting doesn’t permit. A lot of the pieces presented at Antigonight are first public showings — artists taking a shot with work that’s new or ambitious. That’s also by design.

Last year the festival drew nearly 3,000 visitors across the event. This year the festival is concentrating itself around the public library, Creighton Lane, and back toward the Piper’s Pub parking lot — a more compact footprint than in some previous years, which is partly about creating a denser energy and more buzz.

16 Years, Down to One Night

Antigonight is in its sixteenth year, which Kyra describes as genuinely impressive and credits in large part to Fenn Martin (friend of the podcast) whom she calls a visionary, a person of enormous energy and chutzpah. It was Fenn who stewarded the festival, under the umbrella of Antigonish Culture Alive, into what it has become: a festival that employs artists and arts workers and brings new ideas into town.

The festival has classically run for two nights. This year it runs for one.

The reason is money. Since 2024, the operational budget for Antigonight has been cut in half; a direct consequence of Nova Scotia’s provincial arts funding cuts. Kyra says that saying it sucks is the understatement of the year. The team has been using grant funding to the last nickel, as they always do, and this year they predict they will still go into the red simply to properly pay their artists, vendors, and staff. They have turned away artists with genuinely good projects—work that would have enriched the community—because they couldn’t afford to take it on. The community table-setting first night, which functioned as a welcoming, low-pressure entry point into the festival for people who find arts events intimidating, is gone this year for the same reason.

Paying artists is the non-negotiable. The festival’s entire philosophical foundation is that artists deserve to be properly compensated for their work, and Kyra is clear: that is not on the table as a place to cut. So they cut elsewhere, and this year that means one night instead of two.

This Year’s Theme and Artists

The theme for the 2026 festival is Turning Tides. Kyra is careful about how she frames it: the prompt she sent to artists was to radically imagine what it would look like if the tides turned for the better. Not a lament, a provocation. What do you need in a better world? What can we imagine together?

The lineup this year leans local. The Willows Bend Collective—a group of willow weavers and practitioners of regenerative coppice agriculture—will be doing live weaving tutorials where festival-goers can make their own pieces using willow branches cut and grown right here in Antigonish, alongside large-scale installations of the team’s own collaborative work.

Michelle Sylliboy returns, described simply as a local legend. And Diane Langevin, who is completing her MFA through NSCAD, brings a series Kyra first saw at the Halifax library system: a Mi’kmaq-rooted body of work about sea creatures that serve as portents of things to come, which Kyra says maps onto the Turning Tides theme with almost uncanny elegance.

The Funding Reality, Honestly

This is the conversation the episode has really been building toward. Antigonish Culture Alive, like arts organizations across rural and coastal Nova Scotia, has been pushed toward the business community and individual donors to make up the shortfall. The problem, as Kyra points out, is that every other arts organization is doing exactly the same thing simultaneously, which means local businesses are receiving more funding asks than ever before at exactly the moment when their own revenues are under pressure from broader economic conditions. The well is being drawn from by more people just as the water level drops.

Municipal funding bodies are under their own strain. Kyra says plainly that she cannot in good conscience tell the town to fund Antigonight when that money could go to housing or food support. She believes that arts are a base need. She also believes people need roofs and food. Working out how to navigate that tension when everyone is sharing the same small pot of money is the problem she can’t solve from where she sits.

The deeper point she makes is about what gets lost when rural and coastal arts programming is underfunded. The things Nova Scotia points to with pride—the culture, the music, the identity—largely didn’t originate in Halifax. The Rankins, she notes by way of example.

The Antigonish Movement Connection

One of the more striking moments in the conversation comes when Kyra talks about how the team has been thinking about their situation in terms of the Antigonish Movement itself. She recently watched a National Film Board documentary about Moses Coady and Father Jimmy Tompkins, and one line from it stuck: You are poor enough to need it, and you are smart enough to do it. She’s applied it directly to the arts community’s current predicament. The funding isn’t coming from the province in the way it used to. The answer isn’t to wait for it. It’s to organize, to build the thing from the ground up, to pool what’s available and use it well.

One such examples is the MOU recently signed on closing night of Festival Antigonish this past weekend. An agreement between Antigonish Culture Alive and Festival Antigonish to collaborate on the long-discussed idea of a dedicated arts centre for the town. Kyra calls this deeply futurist. It’s not government-led. It’s not guaranteed. But it is tangible evidence that the arts organizations in Antigonish are thinking seriously about how to be interdependent, how to build something lasting, how to function even without the provincial support they’ve been relying on. Hope, as she says, is not a plan.

On Paying Artists and the Union That Doesn’t Exist

One of the deeper discussions in the episode is about free labor in the arts — a thing that has always existed, that everyone in the room has participated in as both provider and recipient, and that is now getting worse. Kyra makes a distinction that matters: Antigonight pays artists properly, full stop, even going into the red to do it. But she worries deeply about what happens when other organizations, stripped of their grant funding, start asking artists to work for less or for nothing.

Her dream is a union for arts workers. She knows how complicated it would be across different mediums with different material costs and different labor requirements. She knows “union” is a word some people flinch at. But the protections ACTRA has built for screen performers, as well as EQUITY and SAG and others, are exactly the model: collective bargaining that establishes that your work has value and that you cannot be asked to give it away indefinitely. Until something like that exists for the broader arts community, artists are on their own.

She also cites a statistic from a book by Nova Scotia’s own Kate Beaton: if your household income as a child was over $100,000, you are ten times more likely to become a professional artist than if your household income was $50,000. What gets produced as culture, what gets shared as a common identity, is filtered through class and money long before anyone makes a conscious curatorial decision. Part of what Antigonight specifically tries to do is resist that — deliberately deprioritizing MFA and BFA credentials in its artist selection. Is the work good? Will people connect with it? Will it challenge something? That’s the question. The letters behind someone’s name are not.

On AI

Justin drops the subject of AI in toward the end. Kyra would like all of it to burn down—her precise words—and finds the idea of AI generating art not just philosophically wrong but politically incoherent. Art is the process of making it. Outsourcing that process to what she calls an environmental suck machine is, in her view, antithetical to what art is for. Abby agrees: if you’ve involved AI, it’s not art anymore — it’s scraped data, and it’s theft from the people whose actual work trained the model.

The Antigonight application explicitly forbids AI use. You can call in your application, draw it, or present it in any alternative modality you choose. But you cannot populate it with AI. If you do, you’re out. That policy was not a difficult decision for the board.

September 19th is fast approaching

The final message from both guests is filled with excitement for the upcoming festival: Antigonight happens September 19th in downtown Antigonish, and it is free, accessible, and family-friendly. The team is stubborn and talented and committed to making it happen regardless of what the budget looks like. If you’ve been before, come back. If you’ve never been, this is the year to start.

If you want to support the festival: donate online. Volunteer on the night — setup, teardown, artist support, friendly face guiding people through the installations. Reach out via their website at this link.

As Justin puts it at the close: the Festival may be smaller, but it’s still mighty. Kyra’s correction: mightier, even still.

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground and Healing Arts Reconciling People (HARP): The People’s Press, Community Sponsors of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Email us at [email protected]

Dr. Gord Simms is a family doctor in Antigonish, but that’s only part of his job. He’s also a hospitalist, looking after patients admitted to St. Martha’s Regional Hospital. He has a PhD in biochemistry, a particular interest in complex chronic disease, and a patient roster whose median age is somewhere around 72 to 75.

We sat down with Gord to talk about what family doctors actually do all day, why a 15-minute appointment is not really a 15-minute appointment, what happens when your doctor doesn’t call you about your blood work, and why the family doctor shortage is still such a problem in Antigonish.

So What Does a Family Doctor Actually Do?

The short answer is: almost everything.

Family medicine is designed to be the first point of contact with the healthcare system. Gord sees children, adults and patients over 100 years old. His practice includes preventative care, chronic disease management, acute illnesses, mental health, addictions and palliative care. He also has patients he has technically never met — people who are registered with his practice but haven’t yet needed to come in.

His own patient roster is unusually complex. When Gord began practicing in Antigonish three years ago, he took patients from the provincial registry, some from a retiring physician, and others from people he encountered while working as a hospitalist who had significant medical problems but no family doctor. The result is a practice with a median patient age in the mid-70s.

He likes it that way. Complexity, it turns out, is one of the things that drew him to family medicine.

From the Lab to the Clinic

Gord didn’t exactly take the conventional route to becoming a family physician.

He fell in love with chemistry as an undergraduate, then went on to complete a PhD working on Alzheimer’s disease research. He spent years in front of a laboratory bench, a computer or an NMR machine, developing molecules that might eventually contribute to treatments.

But something was missing: people.

Research can take decades to produce a tangible result. You can work on a molecule for years and, if everything goes perfectly, perhaps a drug eventually helps somebody twenty years down the road. Family medicine offers a rather different form of gratification. A patient can walk into your office with a problem and, five minutes later, tell you that you’ve helped.

Gord realized that what he really enjoyed was the human connection — building relationships with people and helping them directly. He applied to medical school, didn’t get in on his first attempt, applied again, and eventually made the transition from the laboratory to the clinic.

The 15-Minute Appointment

One of the questions almost everyone with a family doctor has probably wondered about: why does my doctor seem to be running late?

Gord’s answer is that the 15-minute appointment is more complicated than it sounds.

If you’re seeing 25 patients in a day, adding just five minutes to every appointment can add two or three hours to the working day. And a 15-minute appointment isn’t actually 15 minutes of conversation. There are questions to ask, medications to discuss, blood work and imaging to order, referrals to arrange and notes to write.

Gord tries to negotiate the appointment with patients: What’s your list today? What do they want to discuss, and what does he need to address? Sometimes everything can be dealt with. Sometimes something has to wait.

If something is genuinely urgent, however, the rules change. A patient who needs 45 minutes gets 45 minutes. The consequence is that someone else may have to wait.

For many family physicians, these time constraints—and knowing that there is a backlog of patients in the waiting room—are a constant source of stress.

The Inbox Avalanche

The part of family medicine that patients probably see least is the work that happens after they leave.

There is an overstuffed email inbox. It never stops.

Specialist letters arrive. Blood work arrives. Imaging arrives. Notes from other healthcare providers arrive. There are decisions to make about patient care, calls to return, forms to complete and results to communicate.

Gord describes it as a never-ending avalanche. Even though the clinic day might officially run from eight to four, he estimates that another two or three hours of work can follow.

And the inbox doesn’t take weekends off.

If a specialist calls on a Saturday about one of his patients, he answers. If an urgent blood test comes back while he’s working his hospitalist week, he deals with it. During a seven-day hospitalist shift, he might see 25 patients a day while simultaneously managing issues belonging to his family practice patients.

So Why Didn’t My Doctor Call?

There is another side to the communication question.

If you’ve had blood work or imaging done and haven’t heard from your family doctor, it doesn’t necessarily mean that nobody has looked at it. Gord’s practice tries to “close the loop” with patients when results are normal — staff may call to say that everything is fine and that an appointment is only necessary if the patient wants to discuss it further.

If something requires attention, patients will be contacted.

That said, Gord’s advice is straightforward: if you’re concerned, call your doctor. It never hurts to close the loop yourself.

Maple, 811 and the Four-to-Six-Week Wait

Gord’s current wait time for a routine appointment is around four to six weeks, which he says is fairly standard.

That creates an obvious question: what do you do when you need medical care before your appointment?

There are alternatives. People can call 811, use Maple or virtual healthcare, or go to an emergency department when appropriate. Gord doesn’t consider it a failure if one of his patients sees another doctor for an acute problem when they can’t get in to see him.

The limitation is continuity. A Maple physician may not have access to all the same records Gord has, and Gord may not know what was discussed during that appointment.

That is one of the reasons the province is moving toward a “one person, one record” system. The goal is that a physician in one part of Nova Scotia will eventually be able to access the relevant blood work, imaging and medical information generated somewhere else in the province without having to navigate several different systems.

At the moment, Gord says, things are considerably more piecemeal.

Collaborative Medicine

There is also a new model emerging in the province and Antigonish: collaborative practice (officially called Health Homes).

Instead of every patient belonging exclusively to one physician, a truly collaborative clinic has doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and other healthcare providers working together around a shared pool of patients.

Gord’s current practice at the Mediplex is what he calls quasi-collaborative. Doctors maintain their own patient rosters, but leave openings in their schedules to see one another’s patients when something acute comes up.

There are obvious advantages to a fully collaborative model, particularly when a physician wants to go on vacation. Someone else can monitor the inbox, blood work and imaging.

The Best Part of Being a Family Doctor

For all the discussion of workload and burnout, there is a reason Gord chose family medicine.

It’s the longitudinal relationship.

You see someone not once, but over years. You learn their history, their values, what treatments they’ve tried and what has worked or failed. You watch people move through different stages of their lives.

And Gord likes advocating for those people.

The healthcare system is strained, he says, and access can be difficult even for people who have a family doctor. Helping patients navigate that system and get the care they need is one of the things he finds most satisfying.

He also enjoys the complexity — patients who have accumulated illnesses over the course of their lives.

Burnout

The downside is that the same continuity that makes family medicine rewarding can also make it difficult to leave.

Gord describes the pressure of constantly having something that needs attention. There is the clinic. There is the hospital. There is the inbox. There are specialist calls. There are urgent results. And because you know and have a long-term relationship with your patients, it can be difficult to simply hand them off to someone else.

During one hospitalist week, Gord estimates he can work around 90 hours over seven days.

His approach to staying sane is fairly practical: take a week off every three months, exercise, and recognize that he has some control over how busy he chooses to be. He has a three-year-old and a five-year-old at home, and a wife who he describes as “hyper-capable” and who keeps the household running while he works.

He is, he admits, always tired.

Five Things

When Justin asks Gord what people can do to avoid needing to see a family doctor in the first place, the answer comes down to one word: Lifestyle.

Gord breaks it into five components: exercise, sleep, hydration, diet and social interaction.

None of these things will prevent every illness, he says. People get sick. But it is easy to let one or two of these pieces disappear from your life, and when several do, the effects on health, energy and general wellbeing can be significant.

It’s perhaps the simplest piece of advice in an hour-long conversation about a very complicated healthcare system.

Why Antigonish?

Gord grew up in Dartmouth. His wife, Holly, is from Antigonish. They moved to Antigonish with their children and Gord’s father to be closer to family.

The town’s size is part of the attraction. There is plenty for children to do, a university bringing energy and culture to the community, access to nature and enough of the amenities of a larger centre without actually being one.

Professionally, Gord says the medical community is another reason to stay. There are specialized clinics that support family doctors, local internal medicine specialists, and a surprisingly young cohort of physicians.

Since he arrived three years ago, approximately ten family doctors around his age have been recruited to the area.

The Things That Would Attract More Physicians

Gord is also involved in physician recruitment, so he spends some time thinking about what makes Antigonish attractive to doctors — and what makes it difficult.

His answer isn’t really about doctors.

It’s daycare and housing.

He and Holly were on a daycare waiting list before they even arrived in Antigonish, and then waited another year after moving here before getting a spot. If you’re trying to recruit professionals with young children, access to childcare isn’t a luxury; it’s a prerequisite for being able to work.

Housing is another problem.

These aren’t exclusively physician recruitment issues. They’re problems for anyone trying to move to Antigonish and for people who already live here.

Where Things Stand

There are still roughly 2,000 people in the Antigonish area without a family doctor, Gord says.

But there is some genuinely good news.

The percentage of Nova Scotians without a family doctor has fallen from 10.4% in January 2025 to 5.5% in May 2026. Gord and others involved in recruitment are starting to see the results of their work.

The problem isn’t solved. Rural and remote communities continue to face greater access challenges, and those challenges put pressure on both family practices and emergency departments.

But the numbers are moving in the right direction.

And Gord is optimistic that the work being done locally is beginning to make a difference.

After all, he came to Antigonish because he wanted a place where he could build a life with his family. He found a medical community he enjoys working in, a town with plenty for his children to do, and a profession that gives him the human connection he was missing when he was working in a laboratory.

The system is strained. There are still too many people waiting for care. And Gord’s inbox will presumably continue to avalanche.

But he’s happy to be here.

Every second Friday during the summer months you will find a tiny village of tents in Chisholm Park in Antigonish. A gaggle of local artists can be found there—both well-known professional artists and aspiring youth—selling an eclectic mix of wares from jewelry to paintings. The nearby gazebo sees a steady stream of musicians and dancers take the stage. It’s a highly visible affair, impossible to miss if you happen to be driving through Antigonish when it’s on. But what exactly is this art fair? Who runs it and where did it come from?

We sat down with Aida Arnold and Beth Latwaitis to talk about the origins of the Antigonish Art Fair, now in its fourteenth year, running five times a season on the park grounds that just so happen to be named in honour of Beth’s father, the former Mayor Colin Chisholm. Her father had passed by the time the art fair began, but she says he would have loved it — he was a community man through and through.

The Art Fair is an outdoor evening market for artists, musicians, makers, and performers, held every second Friday in the summer months, with the park gazebo and surrounding grounds forming a natural stage and gathering place. Weather is the only real variable; if it turns, the event moves to the 4-H barn. But both Aida and Beth are clear that Chisholm Park is the soul of the fair, and the reason for its success.

David Miller

You can’t tell the story of the Art Fair’s origins without telling David’s story.

David Miller approached Beth in 2012 with an idea: a summer event in Chisholm Park that would bring the community together and draw people from outside. He had the vision and the energy; she had the organizational capacity. Together they built the first art fair out of nothing, just an idea and an ability to wrangle the people they needed to make it happen.

David had run the McDonalds on James Street for 23 years. He had an MBA, understood what money moving through a community could do to improve people’s lives, and spent a significant portion of those restaurant years talking to travelers passing through town—people headed to Cape Breton who’d stopped for food—telling them about Antigonish and giving them reasons to drive down Main Street.

With a shared love of art and a desire to bring people from both inside and outside the community together, Beth and David tapped local artists and persuaded local politicians to back the idea. After a successful grand opening, the Art Fair has been back every summer (with the exception of a small break during COVID) and there’s no indication that it’s stopping anytime soon.

What Makes It Work

One of the Art Fair’s quieter distinctions is that it doesn’t separate the well-known from the brand new. At the last fair, established artist Anna Syperek was showing here work in one tent, while in another, a teenager was selling handmade cards — maybe their first public showing of anything. These artists can coexist here in a way that doesn’t happen at other art events, and the downstream effects of that for a young artist truly matter. Several people who showed at the early fairs have since gone on to pursue art studies. Some come back. Most have moved away, but they remember.

Aida has stepped into the role of booking musical artists to play during the event. She scouts performers at the Saturday farmers market — she’ll approach someone she hears, hand them a card, and a few have shown up to perform. Jazz students from StFX who stay in Antigonish over summer have performed. Theatre Antigonish cast members have been invited. Volunteer MCs anchor the evening. Performers are paid — something Justin notes is unusual for a volunteer-run community organization of this size. Five young people are employed each fair to put up and take down the tents and distribute tables and chairs.

The unusual 50/50 raffle deserves a mention. It’s a raffle where you indeed win money, but with a simple caveat: you have to spend it at the art fair.

The Arts House

The second major strand of this story is the Arts House — the small building near Boston Pizza that started life as the Antigonish Tourism office, a moveable structure that was deposited on whatever free land the tourism bureau could find.

Beth and David had already been using the building during the winter months between art fairs, renting it for offseason activities and storage. When it came up for purchase, they made a rapid decision and bought it. The vision was a space where artists could teach and be paid for sharing their knowledge, where people could take lessons in anything from watercolour to music. It was another lurch into the unknown, as Beth describes it.

The pottery program is now the most developed offering. The Dr. J high school donated six pottery wheels and a kiln they no longer needed. Home Hardware donated an adjacent structure to house the kiln. What started as noticing consistent demand for pottery classes has become a full studio with kiln on site.

The building itself sits on land owned by the corporation that owns the mall (Canadian Tire), which donates the space — a contribution Aida describes as huge, huge, huge. The Arts House has since hired a part-time coordinator and continues to run classes through fall and winter when the outdoor events stop.

The Flowers

There’s a thread in the conversation about Aida and David's overarching desire to bring more beauty and art to the town. Long before the Art Fair took shape, Aida and a group of about six friends looked at what Charlottetown had done with plantings and street-level gardens and asked why Antigonish couldn’t do the same. They lobbied businesses to install iron hangers on their buildings. Pleasant Valley Nurseries donated flowers basket to hang from them. Somebody had seen baskets on bridges in another city and suggested trying it here. That’s how the bridges got their baskets.

Expanding the Table

One of Aida’s ongoing projects for the Art Fair is broader cultural representation, in both food and performance. Filipino food has appeared at the fair, and Syrian food, and Mexican. A group of Filipino children performed a pop music dance in the walkway between the two sections of the park, which Aida describes with visible delight. She is working toward featuring the Dabke; a traditional line dance from Syria and other Middle Eastern communities, performed at weddings and celebrations.

One More This Summer

The final Art Fair of the 2026 season is Friday, August 21st at Chisholm Park. All are welcome. If it rains, it moves to the 4-H barn, and Beth and Aida will have been watching the Weather Network closely enough to tell you by Thursday afternoon where it will be.

The Arts House accepts class registrations year-round. Both organizations are supported by the town and county through community grants, and by the generosity of a long list of individuals and businesses that both women acknowledge would take the rest of the podcast to properly thank.

The closing words in the episode belong to Beth, and they’re about David: He was brilliant, but he was kind. He was creative, but he wanted to get things done. He had a wonderful mix of humanity. Beth went from a single coffee and conversation about an art fair idea to years of work alongside him. And Aida has been there all along, happy to continue David’s legacy of bringing more art, beauty, and joy to Antigonish.

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground and Healing Arts Reconciling People (HARP): The People’s Press, Community Sponsors of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Email us at [email protected]

Dr. Rosie Pitkin and Dr. Michael Krauthammer are both originally from the United States, both trained in American hospitals, and both ended up in Antigonish as ER physicians. In this episode, they give us the lowdown on what is happening behind those closed doors at the St. Martha’s Regional Hospital Emergency Department.

The Question Everyone Actually Has

Justin opens with the question he knows everyone wants answered: why do we have to wait so long when we go to the ER?

Rosie notes that the doctors tend not to be the ones who hear complaints about long wait times. The triage nurses are front-facing, first-contact, and closest to the waiting room, and they usually are the ones to field complaints about waiting times. The physicians, shielded by a pair of swinging doors, are perceived very differently. This observation turns out to be a recurring theme in the episode: nurses absorb a disproportionate amount of everything - from complaints to workload.

The structural answer to wait times is the triage system; a 1-to-5 scale of urgency rooted in a military model. After seeing the tirage nurse, each patient is assigned a number indicating how urgent their particular medical case is. A code one is cardiac arrest: everyone in the resuscitation room, blood from the blood bank, the ICU physician called in. A code five is someone who needs a prescription refill because their family doctor is on vacation. The system means that when a heart attack or stroke arrives, everything else pauses. Often these most urgent cases are hidden from those of us in the waiting room; an ambulance that has just arrived at the back door with the whole department scrambling to deal with a code 1.

The broader explanation is space. There is simply not an unlimited supply of beds and medical personnel to handle the influx of people arriving at the ER each day, so the triage system is in place to move people with the highest priority issues through as fast as possible. This is not uncommon for waiting rooms in both Canada and the US although, as we find out later in the episode, the family doctor shortage in Nova Scotia is likely a contributing factor.

This Is Not The Pitt

Brendan, a fan of the medical drama The Pitt, asks how closely the show reflects reality. Both doctors are diplomatic about the show. The chaos is dramatized, they agree. The last thing you want in an emergency department when someone is genuinely sick is chaos — you want calm, method, priority. The volume of patients crammed into every corner is, however, a fairly accurate portrayal of what a big inner-city hospital looks like in both the US and Canada. St. Martha’s is a different scale entirely. Some days people end up in the halls like on TV, but this is rare. Most days it’s quieter. And experienced physicians, they note with mild amusement, are probably simply more chill than the residents featured on The Pitt.

Canada vs. the States: The Honest Version

Both Pitkin and Krauthammer trained in American hospitals before coming to Canada, which gives them a comparison most Canadians don’t have. Rosie’s assessment is unambiguous: it’s a thousand times better here. Every metric. Quality of life for the physician. Quality of the nursing team. The sense of internal closeness among the staff.

In the States, as Rosie describes it, medicine is a product to be bought and sold, and that reality shapes everything — how patients interact with staff, what happens when the bill arrives, what gets ordered and why. Michael describes Canadian healthcare as a limited resource that the system is set up to conserve — which has its frustrations — while American healthcare is a product, which has a different set of problems. Where the American system works, he says, is in access to specialty care and innovation, provided you have the insurance, the funds, and you happen to live near a centre that has what you need. For the routine stuff — the things most of us actually need most of the time — Canada is significantly better, they both suggest.

The Nurses Are Running the Show

Both physicians agree that nurses are the beating heart of the ER. The nurses at St. Martha’s are, in Rosie’s words, “bananas good”. She insists that nurses, like teachers, should probably be paid more than doctors. They work longer hours, do most of the physical lifting, absorb the patient frustration, manage the actual logistics of who goes where and when, and serve as the central nervous system of the whole operation.

The triage nurse in particular, she says, has one of the hardest jobs in the building. Every single patient walking through the door is having their worst day. They’re in pain, they’re frightened, and they can’t concentrate on anything other than the physical complaint that brought them to the ER in the first place. Whatever friendly version of themselves shows up in the supermarket is not the version showing up to triage. The triage nurse takes their vitals, takes their history, assigns a code, and does this all day — so intensively that the role typically has to rotate between two people over the course of a single shift just to manage the load.

Rosie also notes with evident pleasure that St. Martha’s is, in her experience, a nurse-run department — something she has never had before. Her previous working environments were predominantly led by men in suits with bow ties who talked down to her. Her current boss, Dr. Tania Sullivan, is, in Rosie’s words, “like a god to me”.

The person who actually knows the most about what’s happening in the emergency department at any given moment, Rosie adds, is the housekeeping staff — because they know exactly which bed is empty, which is dirty, which is clean and ready for the next patient. This is invisible, essential work that nobody talks about.

Is the ER filled with people who don’t have a family doctor?

Justin ask what percentage of ER patients, at a rough estimate, are there not because of a true emergency but because they don’t have a family doctor and need a less urgent medical consultation? This, it would seem, must be one of the main reasons the ER is so busy.

While they don’t have the actual numbers, Michael estimates that somewhere between 30 and 50 percent on a given shift fall into this category. Michael notes it varies depending on which community hospitals are open that day, since St. Martha’s serves a broader catchment area when satellite sites are closed. Neither of them minds this. From their perspective, if you’re in the emergency department, it’s not a low-acuity (meaning non-urgent) situation for you regardless of what the problem is. Something brought you to the ER, and so you were meant to be there. The challenge isn’t resentment from ER staff — it’s limitation. Emergency physicians are trained to a specific scope of practice, and the family doctor shortage is pushing the ER to expand that scope in ways it wasn’t designed for. These are physicians trained to be experts in resuscitation and urgent diagnosis, not dermatology or obstetrics.

The example that illustrates it best: Rosie tells the story of a colleague who ordered punch biopsy kits so that ER physicians could take skin biopsies and send them to Halifax for patients who have been waiting years for a dermatology referral. Michael’s response to this was a pained expression. Who, he asks, is going to get those results and call the patient back to follow up? Is a punch biopsy even the right test? These are dermatology questions, not emergency medicine questions. The well-intentioned workaround creates new problems for ER docs being asked to work outside of their scope of practice.

He puts a name to this: scope creep. It means being expected to do more than you were trained to do. He doesn’t resent the patients for needing it. He just knows it has limits.

How They Both Got Here

Both Pitkin and Krauthammer took unconventional routes into medicine — routes that both, in retrospect, seem perfectly logical but at the time felt like accidents.

Rosie majored in art history at college because she thought it was cool. Her mother wouldn’t let her go to art school. She eventually decided that art conservation — the science of preserving and restoring artworks — required organic chemistry, and if she was going to take organic chemistry anyway, she might as well see what else was possible. She shadowed a doctor in an emergency room because that was the one medical environment where a college student off the street could walk in and observe. She liked what she saw. She went back. Both she and Michael ended up doing post-baccalaureate pre-med programs — a US pathway for humanities graduates who want to do the pre-med sciences without going back to undergrad — and she describes medical school with a mixture of disbelief and joy: she still doesn’t entirely know how she got in, she says.

She was also, she says plainly, ready to quit before she moved here. The pandemic left her, like many physicians, burnt out and running on fumes. COVID accelerated a wave of early physician retirements in both countries that meaningfully worsened the doctor shortage that already existed. Antigonish changed her calculation.

Michael started in a psychiatry lab as a research assistant, studying mind-body interventions for chronic pain at a time when most American doctors were prescribing opiates for everything that hurt. The research was ahead of its time. Like Rosie, he hadn’t taken a single science class in college. He describes being about 26 or 27 and realizing he had spent his youth doing things that came naturally, when what might actually be interesting was doing the things that were hard.

He thought throughout most of medical school that he would go into psychiatry — a natural trajectory from a humanities background. Then he hit every rotation and found something interesting in each one. He landed in emergency medicine because of the variety. On a given shift, he’ll see twelve to twenty people from every walk of life. The intellectual exercise of differential diagnosis — building a list of probable causes for someone’s symptoms, running two tracks simultaneously for most likely and worst case scenario — turns out to be endlessly engaging regardless of how minor the complaint appears on the surface.

What They Actually See

So what is the most common reasons people come in to the ER?

It’s seasonal, apparently. In winter: broken wrists from falling on ice with an outstretched hand, broken hips from falling down stairs. Logical. But Michael, quite surprisingly, reveals that he sees a surprisingly large number of patients that he diagnoses with cancer. Having worked in big-city hospitals like those in Philadelphia he has been surprised by the number of cancer cases he sees at this small-town ER. He is careful to note that this is just his subjective impression not based on data from St. Martha’s, but also notes that Cape Breton has historically been a cancer hotspot; something for which there is indeed reliable data.

Why they love it here

Michael says that he is “really happy to be a part of the community.” Since he moved here, everyone has been welcoming. It’s been “a soft landing”. His experience in the emergency department — with patients, with colleagues, with staff — “has been almost uniformly good.” Rosie echoes this sentiment; she too is grateful to be living and working here. “I feel like we live in a great community and I’m just really glad to be here,” she says. “This is probably the best job I’ve ever had in my life and the nicest community I’ve ever worked with.”

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground and Healing Arts Reconciling People (HARP): The People’s Press, Community Sponsors of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Email us at [email protected]