Let's Talk Antigonish Podcast

This week’s guest is Jaime Battiste, MP for Cape Breton–Canso–Antigonish, who popped by the studio as part of the whirlwind summer tour of his home riding.

First, the Name

The episode opens where it probably had to: the name. Jaime is pronounced the Spanish way; perhaps unexpected for someone from Eskasoni. Battiste was named after his father’s closest friend from Harvard Law School; Jaime Cervantes. He doesn’t generally correct people who pronounce it the English way.

Where He Came From

His parents met at Harvard. His mother (Marie Battiste) — a Mi’kmaq scholar pursuing her master’s in education — needed a tutor for an education law course and was referred to his father (James [Sákéj] Youngblood Henderson), who was finishing his law degree. The lessons went well, obviously. Six years later, Battiste was born.

His mother became the first ever Mi’kmaq PhD. Her research focused on bilingual and bicultural education — specifically how to teach Indigenous language students in a way that honoured both their language and the broader education system. Battiste describes this as decolonizing education before the term was widely used. The results are striking: since the Mi’kmaq communities took control of their own education system in the 1990s, graduation rates have climbed from around 60% to 95% — among the highest of any Indigenous group in Canada. His parents eventually went to the University of Saskatchewan for thirty years of academic work before returning to Cape Breton in retirement.

Battiste followed a similar trajectory. He went straight from law school into academia at Cape Breton University at 24, teaching political science, Mi’kmaq studies and history — sometimes to students older than himself. He was also doing significant youth leadership work; in 2004 he was the Assembly of First Nations National Youth Chair, where he met Paul Martin at the Kelowna Accord — a first ministers meeting on Indigenous issues — and describes Martin as the person who made him a Liberal.

He never planned to run for Parliament. He was happy in his work as treaty education lead for Nova Scotia’s Mi’kmaq communities. When his predecessor, Mark Eyking, retired after 19 years, a lot of people encouraged him to run for what would be the first ever seat held by a Mi’kmaq MP. He went in not expecting to win. He was surprised each step of the way when he did. He signed up 800 people for the nomination meeting — roughly 90% of them Mi’kmaq — in a riding where Eskasoni, just under 5,000 people, is the second largest population after Antigonish.

He’s also related to a significant portion of Paqtnkek. His great-great-great-grandfather was the one who established Paqtnkek; the current chief is his cousin, and he estimates somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the community are family.

What Does an MP Actually Do

Brendan Ahren (guest co-host filling in for Anuj) asks the question most people never get a straight answer to: what does a member of parliament actually do all day?

The Ottawa portion of the job runs 26 weeks a year, Monday to Thursday at minimum. As Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations — essentially a deputy to the minister, stepping in when the minister is unavailable — Battiste is there Monday through Friday. His days run 8am to 8pm: committees, caucus, question period, meetings with stakeholders who come to Ottawa on advocacy days (nurses, firefighters, environmentalists, anyone with something to push for), and evening receptions from those same groups.

Back in the riding, the job looks completely different. His riding is over 13,000 square kilometres — twice the size of PEI, which has four MPs to his one. He’s regularly driving two hours to meetings. He wishes he had better cell service — it’s one of his consistent asks in Ottawa — because taking calls on the road is often not an option.

This summer he’s tried something new: an 18-foot trailer with a mobile office and a bathroom, which he’s been taking around the riding. He parks it in communities, works on emails and calls from there, and people stop in. It’s a little like campaigning, he admits. He doesn’t entirely mind. He also doesn’t mind when constituents pop in to say hello if the trailer in town.

How to Actually Get In Touch

This question came directly from Facebook, where the most common complaint when the podcast announced the interview was: I’ve tried to reach Jaime and haven’t heard back. Battiste’s answer is practical. He receives hundreds to thousands of emails per day — his public email address is exactly that, public, findable by anyone anywhere in the world. Constituent emails get priority, but only if they include a home address and make clear the sender is actually from the riding. Without that, a message from Antigonish sits in the same pile as messages from hundreds of non-constituents from BC, Ontario, or even Europe or Australia.

What He’s Been Working on for This Area

A few specific wins and ongoing files come up. The Baddeck skating rink in Victoria County was a significant one — Battiste successfully lobbied to have it named in the federal budget, leading to roughly $12 million in infrastructure funding for what was apparently one of the only counties in Canada without a working rink. That kind of direct budget line item is rare; most advocacy works through broader funds.

The largest fund right now is Build Canada — $51 billion over 10 years, running through three streams. The big infrastructure stream covers hospitals, roads, and sewage treatment. A provincial-territorial stream sends roughly $343 million to Nova Scotia for the province to direct toward health infrastructure and related priorities. A local community impact stream matches smaller projects — a Legion heat pump, a playground, beach volleyball courts — dollar for dollar up to around $50,000.

The hospital access road for St. Martha’s is something Battiste is actively supporting. He knows firsthand what the traffic situation looks like; he and a colleague were stuck in it last December and eventually turned around and did their meeting by phone. He’s been writing letters alongside every mayor and warden in the tri-counties in support of the Build Canada application.

The Maritime Spaceport at Canso, with over $200 million in investment announced by the Prime Minister last week, will ripple into Antigonish: there won’t be enough accommodation in Canso and Guysborough for everyone coming, which means Antigonish benefits from the overflow. He describes this as being right on the cusp of significant growth for the area.

On immigration and newcomers, he invokes Peace by Chocolate — Antigonish’s most internationally known example of what a welcoming community can produce — and notes he’s brought the Minister of Immigration to visit Main Street specifically to show her what that looks like in practice. The harder challenge, he acknowledges, is the mismatch between the number of international students arriving and the available housing, and the difficulty many face in finding work in their specialized field — a requirement for permanent residency. That piece, he’s honest, sits more at the local and provincial level than at his.

The File He’s Most Proud Of: Physician Assistants

Battiste describes knocking on a door during a campaign and meeting a physician assistant, which led him to a question he hadn’t known to ask: why does the United States have over 200 universities training physician assistants, while Canada has fewer than five? PAs take one-third the time and cost one-third the amount to train as doctors, and they can help staff emergency rooms and carry significant patient loads. He took this idea into caucus, to the Prime Minister, to the president of Dalhousie, and kept pushing. Dalhousie now has a Physician Assistant program — the only one in Atlantic Canada. The Canadian Association of Physician Assistants gave him an advocacy award for it. He considers it one of the more concrete things he’s moved.

The Second Generation Cutoff

The one federal policy change he’d make if he could pick only one: eliminating the second generation cutoff rule from the Indian Act. Currently, Indigenous people who have children outside of a registered relationship under the Indian Act can, over two generations, have descendants who lose their status entirely. Battiste calls it discrimination baked into legislation and says the decision about who is or isn’t a member of an Indigenous community should rest with those communities themselves, not with the federal government. He’s been pushing for this for four years. The Minister of Indigenous Services Canada has recently committed to introducing legislation to remove it. He expects the bill in the fall.

The Leadership Race, and What Comes Next

Battiste ran for the Liberal leadership in January. If he’d won, he would have been the first Indigenous Prime Minister of Canada. What would that have changed about Canada as a nation?

He takes the question seriously. He talks about his friend Wab Kinew, Premier of Manitoba, whom he’s known for twenty years — they texted before both their political careers began, and still do. He sees in Kinew the same values he grew up with: empathy, an environmental relationship rooted in responsibility, and the ability to stand firm when something is inaccurate. If he’s being honest, he’d bet on Kinew as Canada’s first Indigenous prime minister over himself.

He ran, he says, because he felt Atlantic Canada and Indigenous voices were being left out of the conversation during the Liberal leadership race. He needed to hear from one of the frontrunners that they’d taken that seriously. He had about three hours of conversations with Mark Carney before giving his endorsement, came to believe that navigating Trump and the current international economic moment required a very specific resume, and stepped aside. He’s watched Carney’s performance since — the Davos speech, the ongoing trade situation — and thinks he made the right call.

Justin’s parting remark: maybe we’ll have you back here on the podcast as The Right Honourable Prime Minister one day. Battiste laughs but doesn’t entirely close the door on the idea.

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground, a Community Sponsor of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

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

After the Filipino float won first prize in the non-commercial category for the Highland Games parade last weekend, Cheryl Jarina—president of the Filipino Association of Antigonish (FAANS)—started getting phone calls asking if the group would be able to perform at other events. We were lucky enough to get her in the Let’s Talk Antigonish studio before she got too busy fielding media queries!

Who Is Cheryl Jarina, and What Is FAANS?

Cheryl has been in Antigonish for fifteen years, arriving in 2009 from Alberta when the recession made jobs there scarce. She works as a financial advisor at Scotiabank, having spent the previous seven years as a teller. She has two daughters: a twenty-year-old studying human kinetics at StFX, and an eleven-year-old who was born here and is now in French immersion in grade five.

FAANS — the Filipino Association of Antigonish — has been around since 2014, growing from informal community gatherings into something more structured. Cheryl was there from the start. The membership, which fluctuates as families arrive and move on, now sits at over 200, all of them in Antigonish proper. The organization officially registered as a society only last year, despite more than a decade of operation. There are roughly twenty board members and committee volunteers, covering everything from newcomer welcome to event planning.

The Parade: The Float Heard Round the Town

The float and its dancers won first prize in the non-commercial category at this year’s Highland Games Parade — the first time FAANS had participated since 2019, when they joined on relatively short notice and danced without a float. After COVID interrupted plans to return, this year felt like the moment. Planning started in January. The costumes were sourced from the Philippines directly.

The thirty-six or so dancers performing in the parade wore the Maria Clara dress — a traditional Philippine costume dating from the Spanish colonial era around the 1500s, which has largely been replaced in everyday use by the more widely recognized Filipiniana style with its distinctive butterfly sleeves. The choice of Maria Clara was deliberate: it’s less commonly seen, considered more extravagant, and the effect on parade spectators appears to have been considerable.

The dance itself was the Sinulog Festival Dance, one of the grandest celebrations in the Philippines, originating in Cebu. The name refers to water, and the characteristic backward-and-forward steps mimic its flow. The Sinulog celebrates a kind of thanksgiving for the moment in 1521 when the Spanish introduced Christianity to the Philippines, presenting the image of the Santo Niño — the child Jesus — to Queen Juanita of Cebu. It is a massive festival back home, full of music, dance, and communal gathering. In Antigonish, it stopped people in their tracks.

The response overwhelmed the organizers. Cheryl says she didn’t expect anything like it. Since the parade, FAANS has received an invitation from StFX to perform at halftime during a football or basketball game, and an invitation from the Filipino Association of Halifax to participate in Natal Day on August 3rd. Their schedule is filling up.

The Community You Didn’t Know Was There

Justin and Anuj make an observation that runs through the episode: the Filipino community in Antigonish is large, well-organized, deeply connected internally, and — until the parade — largely invisible to most people in town. Cheryl doesn’t dispute this. She says she’s often found it hard to identify clear pathways into broader community life beyond the food fair and language fair. You can be present in a place for fifteen years and still feel like the door into everyday local life isn’t quite obvious.

The Filipino community itself, by contrast, has an internal social life running at a remarkable pace. In summer, Cheryl says, someone is hosting a barbecue almost every week. She’ll get a message — we’re doing barbecue, come over — and just go. That rhythm is rooted in something cultural and specific: a concept called Kapwa, a Filipino value centred on a deep sense of shared identity and connection with others. It means that when Filipinos encounter each other abroad, even strangers from entirely different parts of the country, the instinct is immediate — hey, countryman — and an invitation to the house follows shortly after.

During fiesta back home in the Philippines, Cheryl explains, you don’t need to know someone to walk into their house. Everyone is welcome.

Work, Homes, and Staying

A significant portion of the community works in healthcare — nurses at St. Martha’s Regional Hospital and the RK MacDonald nursing home — and in hospitality. Many hold more than one job. Cheryl is careful not to frame this as hardship: Filipinos, she says, are culturally inclined toward hard work and toward providing for their families, and the cost of living right now makes that impulse more practical than ever.

What stands out, as Anuj points out, is that the Filipino community in Antigonish has a notably high rate of home ownership. Cheryl confirms this: buying rather than renting is the goal, and once you’ve decided you’re staying, a mortgage makes more financial sense than paying rent with nothing to show for it at the end. The practical logic is sound, but the deeper signal is commitment. People who take out mortgages in a town are people who plan to be in that town. The Filipino community in Antigonish is here to stay.

The second generation makes this concrete. Cheryl’s eleven-year-old daughter was born here. On a family trip back to the Philippines — beautiful beaches, endless food, extended family everywhere — it was the older daughter who wanted to know when they were going home to Antigonish.

Food, Language, and What You Can Find

The Philippines has 131 languages and dialects. When FAANS gathers, Tagalog serves as the common tongue, understood across the community even by those whose home dialect is something else entirely. Cheryl’s younger daughter, born and schooled here, speaks English as her primary language and is learning French through immersion, but can understand her parents’ dialect fully even without speaking it fluently.

For Filipino food ingredients, the community drives to New Glasgow, where a Filipino grocery store called Balai Filipino and Asian Food Mart (balai meaning house) carries most of what you need. Closer to home, Antigonish now has Omig’s, a Filipino food truck operating out of the parking area near the (now closed) bowling alley. Justin states flatly that it serves the best fried chicken in town and that he is prepared to defend this position against all comers.

Coming Up: FAANS Day

Next month, FAANS will hold its annual FAANS Day at Williams Point — a full community celebration that traditionally centers on lechon: a whole roasted pig, prepared from scratch, starting early in the morning when members gather to get the pig ready before it goes on the spit by midday.

Philippine Independence Day was marked on June 12th with a flag raising at Chisholm Park. The big Christmas party brings the whole community together every year.

Cheryl’s message for Antigonish, offered when asked what she’d say to the whole town if they were listening, is just marvelous:

“We are very fortunate to be in this country, especially in this community. This community…embraced us…it’s so overwhelming…the response during the parade. And we are grateful and thankful.”

Anne Simpson is one of Antigonish’s most quietly remarkable residents; — novelist, poet, visual artist, essayist, community builder. Perhaps not unexcepted for a poet, she thinks carefully before answering Anuj and Justin’s questions resulting in eloquent answers with nuggets of wisdom for anyone considering a career in writing or as an artist.

How It Started: Logistics

Simpson trained as a visual artist, went to art school after university, and assumed for a long time that painting was her future. Then she had children, and large canvases revealed themselves to be deeply impractical when chasing after toddlers. Poetry, on the other hand, is portable. You can write a poem during nap time.

Apples and Oranges

For Simpson, poetry and prose fiction are not the same skill in other forms. They are genuinely different beasts—an apple and an orange—and crossing between them is not as natural as people assume. Poets, it’s often said, can’t write stories. They fall off a cliff when the plot is supposed to start.

What poetry can do, though, is teach you things about language that quietly reshape everything else you write. If a character is frightened in a novel, Simpson might let the sentence run on, the wild syntax itself evoking the fear. That technique doesn’t come from fiction. It comes from years of learning how a line works through poetry. The experiments in one form find their way into the other, whether you intend them to or not.

Her novels, she’s clear, don’t begin from poems. She has no idea where they come from. They arrive, consume you, and then you spend a decade trying to build the world they’ve dragged you into — remembering whether the character has grey eyes or brown ones, keeping the object that was on the table in chapter three still on the table in chapter seven.

What Discipline Actually Looks Like

So how do you turn creative energy into a finished book? Simpson’s answer is reassuringly practical. She’s her own first editor, but she brings in an outside editor about halfway through a manuscript — someone who can look at the whole shape of the thing and say: this is working, these ten pages aren’t, the ending is still eluding you. A perennial problem for writers: beginnings get revised until they’re nearly worn through; endings remain elusive to the last.

Simpson tells the story of an interviewer who once pressed David Bowie on his apparent lack of discipline. Bowie’s response: I have a project in mind, and I will see it through. Simpson holds onto that. The job is to keep going even when, especially when, you feel like you’re failing. The feeling of failure, she’s found, is almost always what arrives just before something rises up into something real.

How She Got Here

Simpson came to Antigonish because her husband got a job at StFX. She didn’t choose it; for a while, she resisted it. She arrived as the so-called wife of a university professor, which came with certain unspoken assumptions about what she would and wouldn’t be. There’s a quiet flash of something when she describes it. The desire to prove those assumptions wrong, she admits, may have had something to do with what came next.

What actually unlocked her writing life was almost accidental. She read a piece about a woman in New Hampshire who had simply turned off the television and focused. Simpson took that literally. Cut the distractions. Write. She sent out poems and short stories by mail—actual envelopes, actual stamps—and when they came back rejected, a mentor told her to send them out again the same day. She did. And so a writing career was slowly built resulting in Simpson wining the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2004.

These days it appears as Antigonish itself has seeped into nearly everything she’s made. Pomquet Beach appears at the end of Speechless. The landscape around Antigonish grounds her poetry. The paintings she made for years were of places nearby.

The New Novel: Marie-Henriette

These days, Simpson is working on a historical novel that she is close to finishing, set in eighteenth-century Cape Breton. She found her subject the way she finds most things: by following a small, specific curiosity. She opened a book about notable Nova Scotian women, looking for someone who might interest her, and found Marie-Henriette LeJeune on the page. The instant attraction is still visible in how she talks about her now, more than six years later.

Marie-Henriette was born in France in 1764, the child of Acadian parents deported during the expulsions who tried three times to return to Nova Scotia before the British permitted them to stay. She would eventually become Marie-Henriette LeJeune Como Ross, but the novel deals only with the years when she was twenty-four to twenty-six, before her marriage to James Ross. She was a midwife, which in her era conferred an unusual freedom: midwives could go where they needed to go, enter any household, cross boundaries that other women couldn’t.

What’s known about her is fragmentary and occasionally vivid. She helped contain a smallpox epidemic near what is now Sydney. She may have had contact with Joseph DesBarres, the lieutenant governor of Cape Breton when it was briefly its own colony. There are stories—possibly apocryphal—that she once fought off a bear in the woods.

Simpson has taken what’s known and met the rest of it halfway. She invented a smallpox outbreak near La Rochelle in France, where Marie-Henriette would have lived before her family’s return, to explain how a young Acadian woman came to know enough to quarantine the sick from the healthy and attempt variolation — the crude precursor to vaccination known in Europe at the time. She gave her a mother and an aunt who taught her. She gave her enemies too: people who blamed her for the sickness rather than crediting her for fighting it. Simpson says she was thinking about nurses in Kentucky being blamed during COVID.

The Community Side

Simpson helped establish what is now StFX’s Academic Success Centre. For Simpson, Antigonish is a place where you want to try things to strengthen the community; where you find yourself looking around thinking: if we partnered with that organization, maybe this would work. Asked whether it’s true that Antigonish punches above its weight in the arts, she says yes without hesitation.

Where to Start

For anyone who wants to find Anne Simpson’s work, she suggests the novels as the easier entry point: Falling, about daredevils and Niagara Falls, or Speechless, about a Nova Scotian journalist who finds herself in the middle of a controversy in Nigeria — a country Simpson spent two years in as a volunteer before, many years later, writing about it in fiction. Both are available through the Curious Cat or the town library. Start with the novels, she suggests and the poetry is where you’ll end up eventually.

Her advice to anyone thinking about writing, or any newcomer looking for a creative foothold in a new place: everyone has a unique voice, and the world doesn’t know it until it’s put out there. It doesn’t have to be a book. It could be theatre, or teaching, or something visual. But the voice needs to go somewhere.

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground, a Community Sponsor of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

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

We sat down with Colette Rennie and Charlie MacDonald to talk about Pomquet's past, present, and the salmon-supper-fille future!

This episode marks something of a first: Justin and Anuj pack up the recording equipment and head out of town — fifteen minutes down the road, as it turns out — to chat with Colette and Charlie inside the Pomquet Community Centre. It’s a fitting location. The centre itself is part of the story they’ve come to tell.

First, Some History

Pomquet is a small, predominantly Acadian community of roughly a thousand people, nestled around two harbours — Monks Head Harbour and Pomquet Harbour — and St. George’s Bay. It was settled in 1774 by five founding Acadian families, though the Mi’kmaq were living there long before any of that. The name “Pomquet” is of Mi’kmaw origin and translates ‘hitting bumps in the water’, referring to the beginning of the formation of the dunes that form Pomquet Beach.

The Acadian origin story requires a little untangling, and Colette does it clearly. The Acadians were not French. They were descended from the first French-speaking settlers to arrive in the Maritimes in the early 1600s — people who, over five generations, developed their own distinct culture, language, and identity entirely separate from France. Then came the British deportations between 1755 and around 1762, when they were expelled back to a country (and to other parts of the world) that was no longer theirs. After years of difficult resettlement in France, a group came back to what had been their home. They likely initially arrived in Arichat, Cape Breton and then travelled to Havre Boucher and Tracadie, before moving westward to settle in Pomquet.

The Language Inside the Language

Pomquet is still a French-speaking community, but the French spoken here is Acadian French — a distinct dialect that preserved old words and expressions long since lost in France, and absorbed some Mi’kmaq vocabulary along the way. Colette offers two examples: bitan or hardes, the Acadian word for clothes, which a standard French speaker would not recognize, and porc-épic — that’s the standard French for porcupine — which in Pomquet is still called madouesse, from the Mi’kmaq word, because the Acadians had never encountered the animal before arriving here and simply adopted whatever the Mi’kmaq called it.

The dialect is, however, slowly changing. Surrounded by English-speaking communities and with decades of outmigration and intermarriage, the level of daily spoken Acadian French has diminished. Charlie is candid about it: Pomquet is not Chéticamp or Île Madame. The community holds its own Development Society meetings in English because some members don’t speak French. The language is still present, but it lives more with the older generations now, and the community has largely made peace with that — or at least, is finding a way to work with it rather than against it.

The School Is the Anchor

The most important institution for the language’s survival is École Acadienne de Pomquet, the Acadian school that operates under the CSAP — the Conseil scolaire acadien provincial — with schools scattered across Nova Scotia. This is not a French immersion school. It is a French school: everything happens in French, announcements included, with a single English course introduced after grade four. The school drew nine graduates in Charlie’s graduating class. This year’s graduating class numbers twenty-six — the largest in the school’s history.

Families are coming from beyond the community to enrol their children here. Some have Acadian roots they want to reconnect with. Others are multicultural families who simply want their children to have a genuine French education in smaller classes with more individual attention. The emerging challenge, as Charlie notes, is that when parents don’t speak French, they can’t help a child with homework — a math problem explained in French is its own kind of puzzle for an English-speaking parent staring at it at the kitchen table.

Chez DesLauriers and the Friday Lunches

If the school is Pomquet’s anchor, Chez DesLauriers is its calling card to the outside world. The property — an old homestead belonging to one of the founding Acadian families was purchased by local journalist Kingsley Brown and then, in an act of considerable foresight, sold to the provincial government so that the entire coastline from Pomquet Beach to Antigonish Harbour is now permanently protected. The Pomquet Development Society leases an acre and the old farmhouse for a nominal fee, and over twenty years has turned it into a tea room, interpretive centre, outdoor stage, and wedding and events venue.

The Friday Acadian lunches held there each summer are now something of a regional institution — traditional Acadian cuisine at reasonable prices, drawing people from across the province. They started with 35 people, which felt like an enormous success at the time. They now regularly serve over 200 each Friday. The problem became too many people rather than too few, and they stopped advertising. COVID took a significant toll on the volunteer base, so the lunches now run on four Fridays in late July and August rather than the full summer program they once had. The view from the site — looking out over St. George’s Bay toward Cape Breton — is worth the drive on its own.

The Salmon Suppers Are Back

The centrepiece of this summer’s news is the return of the Pomquet salmon suppers as part of Pomquet Come Home Days, running August 14th to 16th. The suppers were once a full community institution, run by the Pomquet Ladies Club for decades, drawing over 1,200 people on a single Thursday evening at their peak. The last one took place in 2006. The Ladies Club has since disbanded; many of the volunteers who made those suppers happen are no longer with us.

Last summer, the Pomquet Development Society brought the supper back for the first time in nearly twenty years, not knowing quite what they were getting into. They served over 420 people. The surviving members of the Ladies Club, who had spent decades working those suppers, got to sit down and eat salmon themselves for once. Charlie describes it as one of the more meaningful moments of the whole initiative.

This August, the supper returns on the Sunday (August 16th), with Saturday featuring a full day at Chez DesLauriers — live music, fireworks, bouncy castles, fricot, and barbecue as part of Acadian Day celebrations – le 15 aout. The Friday kicks off the weekend with the last Acadian lunch of the season. People from Halifax have already called to reserve spots for the supper.

The Community Centre

Justin admits he had no idea the community centre existed before today, which is probably true of a lot of Antigonish residents. It’s attached to the school and houses a large hall with a stage and full kitchen that seats up to 200, two meeting rooms, a gym with memberships available to the public, and a museum being opened this summer with the help of a hired summer student.

The building came about through an $800,000 community capital campaign, supported by the federal and provincial governments and the CSAP. The CSAP covers the operational costs — heat, lights, plowing — which means the community organizations that use the space don’t have to fundraise just to keep the doors open. They can put their energy into culture instead.

Crib tournaments run every two weeks in summer. Chase the Ace happens weekly. The winter carnival events are held here. Weddings, birthday parties, and community fundraisers fill the calendar.

Where It’s All Going

Asked about the future, Charlie and Colette are honest: assimilation is real, it’s ongoing, and it can’t be stopped by willing it not to happen. What the school has done is delay the process and give the community a generation of young people with roots in something. The goal now, as Charlie frames it — and as the museum project reflects — is to keep the stories alive for people who may never speak Acadian French but who are still part of this place. Colette points out that the definition of community in 2026 is different from what it was in 1726, and that might actually be a beautiful thing rather than something to mourn.

The closing advice from both guests is simple: come for a Sunday drive. The lawns in Pomquet are notoriously well-kept. The harbours are beautiful. Stop and talk to whoever you see walking. Stop for an ice cream on your way to Pomquet Beach. Visit Chez Deslauriers and take in the breathtaking views. And if you want to get involved, you don’t need to be Acadian, or French-speaking, or even connected to the place by family. You just need to show up.

For more information visit pomquetcommunity.ca or find Société Saint-Croix and Centre historique acadien de Pomquet on Facebook.

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground, a Community Sponsor of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

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

This episode came about almost by accident. Anuj, recruited by Dr. J’s principal to coach table tennis, found himself at the school’s awards night recently — a four-hour marathon event — watching two grade 11 students hold the room together from start to finish. Those two students, Austin Wabbi and Brooklyn Wasson, are the incoming co-presidents of the class of 2027, and Justin and Anuj invited them on the podcast to find out what high school life in Antigonish actually looks like from the inside.

An Outsider’s Perspective

Part of what makes this conversation interesting is the perspective both guests bring. Austin grew up primarily in Uganda, with stops in Egypt, Scotland, and Tanzania, and has been in Antigonish for a year and a half. Brooklyn was born in New York, then moved through Pittsburgh, Alberta, Ontario, and Newfoundland before landing here for what’s now her third year.

Their first impression of the town is overwhelmingly positive. Austin points to the StFX connection specifically: open gym time and workouts with university basketball players, including informal mentorship from coach Doc Ryan, have meaningfully helped his own development as a player (he was on the U17 Nova Scotia Provincial Team and represented the province at the Canada Summer Games). Austin describes Antigonish as “small but full of life.”

What’s Missing

Asked what the town needs more of, the answer comes fast: a movie theatre. With the bowling alley having recently closed, Brooklyn notes there’s a real gap in things to do outside of school for students who aren’t into sports — something echoed, Justin points out, by university students in past episodes asking for the same kind of third spaces.

Sports, IB, and Staying Busy

Both students describe high school life as genuinely full — sports, in particular, dominate. Both credits the sports teams specifically with making the transition into a new school easy, since teammates become friends quickly. Austin is also in the IB program, which he says adds a real academic load on top of an already busy athletic schedule — but he says he prefers being busy to being idle.

As co-presidents, their platform for next year includes bringing back intramurals (informal lunchtime sports and mini-tournaments that have been absent for a few years), more benches around the school, general cleanup, and — a personal project for the two sports-minded co-presidents — streaming live sports, including the school’s own teams (the girls’ hockey team recently won provincials), on the cafeteria projector during lunch.

On AI: Not the Panic You’d Expect

When asked about their feeling on AI, Brooklyn describes it as a genuinely useful tool — not for writing essays outright, but for generating practice tests, checking homework, and getting unstuck on a concept. Austin, who says English isn’t his strongest subject, uses it for help with sentence-level writing and editing. Neither frames it as something to fear or avoid; both frame it as something to use well.

What Adults Get Wrong

Asked what middle aged folks tend to misunderstand about their generation, Austin pushes back gently but firmly on the stereotype that teenagers are simply phone-obsessed and checked out. The more accurate picture, he suggests, is a generation trying to adapt to tools that didn’t exist for previous generations and use them to their advantage — AI included. On the social media bans for under-16s currently being legislated around the globe, both are skeptical they’ll accomplish much: kids who want access will get it regardless, parents will sign them up anyway, and — as Austin notes — tech-savvy teenagers are pretty good at finding their way around these sorts of bans.

Both also push back, politely, on the idea that there’s a real generational gap in actually talking to older people. Austin says he finds conversations with older generations genuinely interesting — people have stories to tell — and Brooklyn agrees that once a conversation actually starts, people tend to find more common ground than expected.

Looking Ahead

On their post-high-school plans, neither has political ambitions beyond their current role as class co-presidents: Austin hopes to play university basketball while pursuing aerospace engineering, with Carleton as his first choice. Brooklyn hopes to play soccer in university and, beyond that, has one clear long-term goal: to live somewhere warm, ideally after travelling enough to find the right spot. For two globe-trotting young people, the search for the ideal place to live seems like a logical life goal. In the meantime, it’s clear that both are quite happy to live and study in Antigonish.

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground, a Community Sponsor of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

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

The question that launched this episode was a simple one, posed by Anuj after a conversation with Justin one day: why doesn’t the theatre put on more plays about harder-hitting social issues like racism, war, and other difficult topics? It’s a fair question, and it opens a door into a genuinely fascinating conversation about what it means to run a professional theatre company in a small Nova Scotia town. Andrea Boyd, Artistic Director of Festival Antigonish, has been answering versions of this question her entire career. She does so here with warmth, candor, and enthusiasm for the magic of theatre.

The 2026 Summer Lineup

But first, a rundown of the upcoming Festival Antigonish season.

The 2026 Festival Antigonish season opens with Murder at Ackerton Manor by Stephen Gallagher — a smart, funny spoof of Agatha Christie in which three actors play seven characters. Quick changes, physical comedy, and a genuinely clever mystery underneath the silliness. Boyd describes it as the kind of play that brings people together through pure shared laughter.

The second production is The Greatest Play in the History of the World by Ian Kershaw — a one-woman show, a love story, described by Boyd as otherworldly and utterly charming. She travelled to Fredericton to see the Theatre New Brunswick production, cried through the final five minutes, and knew she had to bring it here. Kershaw, for context, was one of the writers behind Coronation Street. Performer Amanda Kellock carries the whole show.

Third is Beyond the Sea by Kristen Da Silva, a two-hander — two actors, minimal staging, unfolding in real time. Boyd describes it as the kind of play where the relationship developing on stage becomes genuinely lovely, funny, and then surprisingly deep. Ian Sherwood and Stephanie McDonald are the cast; Sherwood is also performing a standalone concert while in town.

The children’s production this year is The Biggest Little House in the Forest, a one-woman-with-puppets show that Boyd promises will delight even the very youngest audience members.

On the music side: a June fundraiser concert by Carolyn Curry in support of the Bridge the Bauer capital campaign; a concert by Old Man Luedecke, whom Boyd first encountered years ago at the Edmonton Folk Festival and has never forgotten; and the Ian Sherwood and Friends show.

The Theatre Itself: What’s Happening with the Bauer

Longtime listeners will know there have been questions about the Bauer Theatre’s operational future given pending fire safety upgrades. The short version for this summer: the theatre has permission to operate, with renovations now scheduled to begin in the fall. For the past couple of years the stopgap has been what the company affectionately calls ghost watch — a dedicated person wandering the building during performances, checking every room, filling in a form to confirm nothing is on fire. They prefer to think of it as looking for Hector, the theatre’s resident ghost.

Two Companies, One Building, One Mission

A useful piece of context for anyone new to Antigonish’s theatre landscape: there are two separate organizations operating out of the Bauer. Theatre Antigonish is the community company — all-volunteer, a town and gown operation founded in 1974. Festival Antigonish, started in 1987, is the professional summer theatre company with a mandate to bring paid, professional artists to the stage. Both are registered non-profits; both operate under the shared principle, as Boyd frames it, of building community through the creation of excellent theatre.

The community company, Boyd notes, actually gives her more flexibility to take artistic risks — it doesn’t depend on the same ticket sales to survive. For example, Theatre Antigonish produced Girls Like That by Evan Placey a few years back, a play about girls bullying each other in the digital age, so incendiary that a school that had booked it as a field trip cancelled at the last minute because, as they put it, it was too much like what was happening at their own school. Boyd still finds that heartbreaking. Those were exactly the kids who should have seen it.

The Tension at the Heart of Every Season

To answer Anuj’s question as to why the theatre can’t produce more risky plays along the lines of Girls Like That, Boyd is clear eyed: “If we don’t sell tickets we die.” A Canada Council jury once told her in the same breath to take more artistic risks but also to sell more tickets — two instructions that are, she points out with dry amusement, not always compatible. The shift away from the old repertory model, where three plays ran simultaneously and audiences could choose different shows on different nights, removed a useful buffer: one of those three could be a risk play, subsidized by the other two. With the current model, every production carries more weight. In short: the theatre must put on plays that draw a large audience, or risk losing the ability to function from a financial standpoint. It can’t all be hard-hitting plays with social commentary that only die-hard theatre fans would enjoy.

And yet. The New Canadian Curling Club — a play about immigration and belonging — was one of Festival Antigonish’s bestselling productions ever. Boyd credits playwright Mark Crawford for writing work that somehow manages to be both genuinely funny and genuinely important. That sweet spot exists. Finding it consistently is the challenge.

Why Theatre

At the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres conference in Whitehorse, Boyd attended recently, she found herself stumped when asked to answer a simple question posed by the organizers: Why theatre?

Her answer, when she found it, was a memory. She was twelve, didn’t fit in, wasn’t a sports kid, and didn’t have a lot of friends. She saw a sign advertising auditions, walked into a room, and ended up reading the famous Saint Joan monologue by George Bernard Shaw. One by one the drama teacher thanked each student and moved on. When he got to Boyd, he didn’t stop her. He said: keep going.

That moment — being in a room where the fact that she was a little weird didn’t matter, where she was fully herself, where she knew what she was doing and where she belonged — is still what the rehearsal room is for her, decades later.

Getting In the Door

For anyone who’s curious but hasn’t made it to the Bauer yet, Boyd runs through the ways in: pay-what-you-can preview nights (the night before opening, when the show first meets an audience), a Pride night with a pre-show party, relaxed performances with slightly raised house lights and reduced sound cues for those who benefit from a gentler environment, and an arts and culture market happening through the season. Volunteers are welcome — summer ushering is entirely volunteer-run — and Theatre Antigonish year-round is always looking for actors, stage managers, designers, and light board operators.

Tickets and full season information at festivalantigonish.ca.

More info on this summer’s shows at this link: https://www.festivalantigonish.ca/whats-on/upcoming-shows

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground, a Community Sponsor of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

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

Ticks are on everyone’s minds this summer, and also on everyone’s dogs (apparently). Justin and Anuj sat down with Jantina Toxopeus, a professor of biology at St. Francis Xavier University whose research focuses on what happens to insects and arachnids in extreme cold. As Justin puts it, her expertise is figuring out what happens “when you freeze a bug”. As it turns out, that expertise has a lot of practical relevance to this tick discussion.

First, Some Basic Biology

Ticks, Toxopeus is quick to clarify, are not insects. They are arachnids — eight legs, more closely related to spiders and mites than to mosquitoes or flies. Nova Scotia has two species you’re likely to encounter: the black-legged tick (also called the deer tick), which is the one capable of transmitting Lyme disease, and the dog tick, which can’t give you Lyme but will happily ride home on your golden retriever. Understanding which one you’re dealing with matters more than most people realize.

The Lone Star Tick: Headlines vs. Reality

No conversation about ticks in 2026 can avoid the Lone Star tick — the species currently generating alarm because its bite can trigger alpha-gal syndrome, a condition that causes a serious allergic reaction to red meat from mammals. The idea that a tick bite could eventually make you unable to eat a hamburger is, understandably, the kind of thing that lodges itself in people’s brains.

Toxopeus offers a measured reality check. Lone Star ticks have been spotted in Nova Scotia — including by StFX biology students out in the field — but they are almost certainly not established here, meaning they don’t have a self-sustaining population. The reason is winter. To survive in Nova Scotia long-term, a species has to be able to get through our cold season, and there’s little evidence the Lone Star tick can do that yet. The ones showing up are likely hitchhiking in on migratory birds or travellers passing through, not overwintering and breeding. So while alpha-gal syndrome is real and worth knowing about, it is not — for now — a reason for the average Antigonisher to panic.

The operative phrase, Toxopeus notes, is “for now.” The black-legged tick has already expanded northward through Nova Scotia as winters have grown milder, and the same logic applies to the Lone Star tick. It’s something to keep an eye on, not something to lose sleep over today. For those wanting to track it: eTick.ca is a publicly accessible database where people can upload photos of ticks they’ve found and contribute to a real-time map of species sightings across the country.

How Ticks Actually Work

A tick’s life unfolds in three stages after hatching: larva, nymph, and adult. Between each transition, the tick must take a blood meal — feeding on a deer, a mouse, a bird, or, if the opportunity presents itself, a human. Here’s the crucial detail: ticks are not born carrying the Lyme pathogen. They acquire it from a host. That means a larval tick biting you is probably your lowest-risk scenario — it’s almost certainly on its first meal and hasn’t had a chance to pick anything up yet. A nymph, on the other hand, has already fed once, and if that first meal was a deer mouse carrying Lyme disease, the nymph is now a potential vector. In this region, slightly over half of black-legged ticks are carrying the Lyme pathogen — a sobering statistic that explains why being bitten by one is taken seriously.

What to Actually Do If You Find a Tick

Toxopeus’s advice is calm and practical. If a tick has bitten you and you can remove it, use tweezers — not your fingers — and grip as close to the skin as possible to pull out the mouthparts intact. Do not squish it. This is important both because squishing can push pathogen-laden fluid into the bite site, and because an intact tick is one that can be identified. Pop it in a small container, and bring it to a pharmacist. Nova Scotia pharmacists can assess, identify, and prescribe antibiotics for Lyme disease — meaning you don’t need to wait for a doctor’s appointment if you’ve been bitten by what looks like a black-legged tick. Earlier treatment is meaningfully better.

The kill-it-in-a-hurry instinct is understandable but counterproductive. Alcohol — the 40% spirits kind, not rubbing alcohol — will eventually kill a tick without destroying it for identification purposes. Toxopeus’s preferred method, as anyone might predict from her research focus, is the freezer.

If in doubt about any of this, 811 is the number to call — not 911. Nova Scotia’s health line can walk you through exactly what to do if you’ve got a tick on you, or recently pulled one off of yourself, or a family member, or (furry) friend.

Note: Nova Scotia pharmacies can indeed provide immediate treatment for a tick bite! More info at this link

And more information on Lyme disease in general at this link

Myths, Debunked

Ticks do not fall from trees. They do not float on the wind. They are ground-level creatures, most comfortable in grass, that practice a behaviour called questing — holding their legs out, waiting for a warm-blooded animal to brush past so they can latch on. Walking on a gravel trail puts you at low risk; walking through long grass on a Cape George trail, or even through your own unmowed backyard, is a different calculation. They also do not die over winter — both the black-legged and dog tick overwinter comfortably under leaf litter and snow — and they do not always produce the famous bullseye rash when they transmit Lyme disease. Waiting for the rash before deciding to seek treatment is not a reliable strategy. If you have been bitten by a black-legged tick, there is a 50/50 chance you’ve been exposed to Lyme disease, so whether or not that rash appears, you should get treatment.

The seasonal pattern is worth knowing: black-legged ticks peak in spring and fall, while dog ticks are more common in the height of summer.

On the Lyme Vaccine

A Pfizer Lyme vaccine is in the final stages of human trials and may be available within the next year or two. This is unambiguously good news. Less well known is that an effective Lyme vaccine already existed in the late 1990s — it was pulled from the market not because it was unsafe (the FDA was clear it was not), but because a wave of vaccine skepticism driven by false claims about a link to arthritis killed public demand for it.

The Expert’s Own Approach

Asked how nervous she is about Lyme disease given that she spends significant time in tick-heavy environments collecting the creatures for research, Toxopeus is refreshingly unbothered. She tucks her pants into her socks, stays aware, flicks ticks off when she sees them crawling up her leg, and does tick checks after outdoor excursions. She hasn’t been bitten as an adult. She does not, notably, spray herself with DEET before heading into long grass — though she acknowledges it offers a layer of protection for those who want it.

The message she’d like people to take away is essentially the same: be sensible, not scared. Don’t let the ticks keep you indoors. Do check yourself when you come back. This jives with the Government of Canada’s public health advice on preventing ticks bites, which is as follows:

Before you go in areas where ticks can be found:

* wear closed-toe shoes

* tuck your shirt into your pants, and your pants into your socks

* wear permethrin-treated clothing (always follow label directions)

* wear light coloured, long-sleeved shirts and pants to spot ticks easily

* apply insect repellent containing DEET or Icaridin to clothing and exposed skin (always follow label directions)

Before you return indoors:

* check yourself and your clothing

* check your outdoor gear, such as backpacks

* inspect your pets as they can bring ticks into your home

When you’re indoors:

* do a full-body tick check on yourself, children, and persons in your care

* shower as soon as possible, as it can help wash off unattached ticks

* if you find an attached tick, remove it as soon as possible

* you may not notice ticks on your clothes, so either:

* put dry clothes in a dryer on high heat for at least 10 minutes

* If your clothes are damp, you will need to dry them for longer.

* wash your clothes in hot water and dry on high heat

* Ticks can survive a cold-warm wash cycle.

As the episode wraps up, Justin reveals his favourite bug is the dung beetle, Anuj diplomatically states that he loves all creatures equally on Jain principles, and Toxopeus nominates the springtail cricket — a species that survives extreme freezing — as her favourite. Naturally.

Thanks to Whidden Park Campground, a Community Sponsor of the Let’s Talk Antigonish Podcast.

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

If you’ve lived in Antigonish for any length of time, chances are someone has told you to go see the Ships of 1801. And if you’ve been, you already know why. And if you haven’t, this episode is your entry point.

Justin and Anuj sat down with Duncan MacDonald, the writer and producer behind one of the most beloved annual events in Antigonish, for a wide-ranging conversation about the show’s origins, its evolution over twelve years, what’s coming this summer, and why a community theatre production about 19th century Highland immigrants keeps selling out to crowds of 1,200 people year after year.

Where It All Started: A Shore in Scotland and a Good Idea

The Ships of 1801 began, as the best things often do, with two unrelated experiences colliding at exactly the right moment. About twelve years ago, Duncan MacDonald and his wife were standing on the shore near Fort William in Scotland, early in the morning, when the image struck him; ships leaving the harbour, filled with people. Around the same time, he’d seen a local production by Hector McIsaac called the Black Donnellys, in which performers dressed as their characters and the songs took on new meaning because of it. Put those two things together, add a conversation with Irene MacLeod of the Antigonish Highland Society about wanting a local concert, and the idea took shape.

In 1801, roughly five ships arrived at Pictou carrying Gaelic-speaking Highland Scots (many of them MacDonald’s own ancestors) who were fleeing desperate conditions and making for the promise of land in the new world. That journey—the courage, grief, music, and hope it contained—became the subject of the first three shows.

From the Ships to the Keppoch: Twelve Years of Stories

The first three shows told the immigration story directly, set aboard the ships themselves. The Highland Society agreed to include the show as part of the Highland Games, and 1,200 people showed up for that first production at the Millennium Centre.

After the ship trilogy, MacDonald shifted the setting to the Keppoch—the rural Antigonish County community where many of those settlers eventually made their homes—and the tone shifted with it. Less drama, more comedy, more celebration. The format became a ceilidh house: neighbours gathering in a community home, the way people actually gathered in those years, sharing songs and stories and the particular comedy of community life. The Keppoch shows have run for roughly nine years now, each one built around a real historical moment from the area’s past.

The range of subjects covered across those years is remarkable. The closure of one-room rural schools. The mass exodus to the “Boston States”. The Fall Fair, when Keppoch neighbours faced off against the people of Eigg Mountain in a rivalry over who got to entertain.

This year, the show brings Moses Coady and the Sisters of St. Martha to the Keppoch — dramatizing the movement that came out of StFX and changed the economic lives of rural Nova Scotians — a show requiring careful research and consultation with people who still remember Coady personally, including two sisters whose fathers were pallbearers at his funeral.

The show features many returning cast members and musicians, and brand new music. A song called Buttermilk Blues—written by the show’s longtime songwriter Kevin Gilfoy—features three frustrated young women forced to churn cream in the kitchen. “Giants of Men,” another Gilfoy composition, celebrates the extraordinary courage of the settlers who walked into the Keppoch with an axe and a saw and built a life from nothing.

How the Show Actually Works

The Ships of 1801 is roughly half music and half dialogue. It is not a musical in the conventional theatre sense; it’s closer to a ceilidh with a story running through it. The cast is a cooperative: everyone who participates gets a share of the ticket revenue. Performers include musicians of serious calibre some professional, many highly accomplished—alongside local actors and children who are taking fiddle or step-dancing lessons and don’t often get a chance to demonstrate what they know in front of a proper audience.

That last point is one MacDonald returns to with obvious feeling. Giving young performers a stage in front of 1,200 people is one of the show’s founding purposes. It reinforces the tradition from the inside, showing kids that what they’re learning has a living community around it.

Rehearsals run through the spring and the script, by MacDonald’s own admission, keeps getting adjusted until the last possible moment. The show has toured to the Gaelic College, to the Strathspey Performing Arts Centre in Mabou, to audiences beyond Antigonish — but the logistics of moving thirty-plus community members with full-time jobs are genuinely difficult.

The Upcoming Book

Alongside the show, MacDonald has been working on something that will outlast any single production: a book, commissioned through the Highland Society and currently at the printer, covering the customs and traditions of the Highland Scottish community in Antigonish. Individual chapters cover fiddling, step dancing, bagpiping, the ceilidh house, food, and more, each written by someone with deep knowledge of that tradition. The idea started as a primer for new members of the Highland Society—something to give people the background they’d need to understand what they were stewarding—and grew from there. The Highland Society is sponsoring it; copies should be available for sale in July.

A Future Show: Lochaber No More

MacDonald is already thinking about the next ship show — a return to the ships themselves, this time set around 1812. It would tell the story of Highland people who had already been forced off their inland farms to the coast, who tried to survive by fishing and harvesting kelp, and who found themselves destitute again when the Napoleonic wars ended and the kelp market collapsed. MacDonald wants to call it Lochaber No More, after the song of the same name, and to use real documented characters from the ships—people whose names and histories are actually recoverable—to tell the story of what it meant to make that choice. To go, or to stay in a place that had nothing left to offer.

Why It Works

The answer to why it works is simpler than it might seem: people like to see their own story. The one-room school. The family members who went to Boston and wrote home. The Fall Fair. Moses Coady showing up at someone’s kitchen table and telling them the way they’d always done things wasn’t going to get them anywhere. These aren’t abstract history lessons. They’re memories—direct or inherited—that people in this community still carry. The show puts those memories on a stage and celebrates them with music and comedy and a cast of neighbours, and the audience recognizes itself.

The shows run July 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th at Schwartz Auditorium. Maximum capacity is 312 per show. Tickets are $40 for adults. Get them soon.

If you’ve lived in Antigonish for any length of time, you’ve driven past the entrance to Whidden’s Park Campground at the corner of Main Street and Hawthorne — probably hundreds of times. You may have glanced down the lane and kept driving. Most people do. This episode is for everyone who never turned in and wondered what the heck goes on back there.

Justin and Anuj sat down with Andrew Whidden — third-generation owner of what is likely the only downtown campground in all of Nova Scotia — for a genuinely delightful conversation about a place that has been operating in plain sight for 65 years, that hundreds of families return to every summer, and that most Antigonishers know almost nothing about. It is, as Anuj puts it, a village inside our village — and it has its own pools, its own playground, its own live music, its own social calendar, and its own tight-knit community of regulars who come back year after year not because of the amenities but because of each other.

A Family Property With An Ancient Legacy

The Whidden family history in Antigonish is long enough to reframe how you think about the town itself. Loyalists of English origin, they arrived in Canada in the late 1700s, started in Isaac’s Harbour in Guysborough County, and eventually made their way to Antigonish where they bought a substantial tract of land for farming. The farmhouse at 1 Hawthorne — the one with the distinctive roofline right at the entrance to the property — dates to 1816 and carries a plaque identifying it as the oldest surviving house in Antigonish.

The farm itself, in its heyday, was enormous. It extended from the current campground location all the way back through what is now Braymore Avenue and the surrounding subdivisions — which means the Whidden family, over multiple generations, essentially sold off the land that became a significant chunk of downtown Antigonish. There was a grocery business attached, C.B. Whidden and Son, with photographs of the era available in Peggy Thompson’s book Antigonish: A History in Pictures.

From Hayfield to Campground: A Perfectly Organic Origin Story

The transition from farm to campground happened, as Andrew Whidden tells it, almost by accident. In the 1950s and 60s, tourism along the Cabot Trail was starting to boom, and travelers — mostly Americans — were making their way through Antigonish. Some of them knocked on Whidden’s grandfather’s door and asked if they could pitch a tent or park a camper in the field. He said yes. Then he kept saying yes. Then he started charging for it. Then it became a business.

This is, Whidden notes, pretty much how early campgrounds everywhere got started. The formalization came gradually — electricity, water hookups, sewer connections, proper facilities — and what began as tents on wheels has evolved into a 154-site campground with two swimming pools, a new playground, a mini home park, two apartment buildings, the original red barn (now used for storage and ice production), and a guest capacity that fills up almost immediately after reservations open in January. The campground once had up to 400 sites when the units were small tent trailers sharing power. Now, with 50-amp electrical service increasingly the standard for large RVs running multiple air conditioners, they run 154 dedicated full-hookup sites and do very well with them.

The Culture: It’s About the People, Not the Place

What makes Whidden’s Park work — and what keeps people coming back — isn’t the location, though the location is extraordinary. It’s the community. Regulars know each other. They gather around the same fire pits every summer. They play music, they talk, they watch each other’s kids grow up, and they age through the campground together — young families with toddlers at the playground, eventually teens who’d rather be anywhere else, and then eventually seniors who return once their own kids are grown, parking their campers for the summer and spending long evenings with the neighbours they’ve had for thirty years.

One of the most striking illustrations of this community dynamic: a woman named Darcy lives in the mini home park at the front of the property year-round. Every summer, she moves her camper through the gate into the campground — a journey of perhaps fifty feet — specifically to be part of that social world. She also organizes the campground’s annual live music events, fundraises to cover the costs, negotiates with the artists herself, and is apparently quite good at it. Local bands including Hammer Down have played the campground stage. A Cape Breton act is booked for this summer, whose accommodations Darcy is arranging personally. None of this is open to the public. This entire social universe exists just off Main Street and most of Antigonish has no idea.

The Urban Campground Paradox: Wilderness Feeling, Five Minutes from Dinner

What’s genuinely unusual about Whidden’s Park — Whidden believes it may be the only campground of its kind in Nova Scotia, with perhaps a handful of equivalents across Ontario and Alberta — is the combination of genuine campground atmosphere with immediate downtown access. Once you pass through the gate, the old trees close in, the noise of Main Street recedes, and it feels, by all accounts, like you’ve left town entirely. And yet you can walk out of your campsite and be at a restaurant or festival in five minutes.

This explains something that puzzles many Antigonishers: locals, including people who live nearby in the county, sometimes choose to spend their summer at Whidden’s rather than at home. Why? You get the campfire, the community, the pools, and the sense of a summer that’s marked off from the rest of the year.

Running a Small Town Inside a Small Town

The logistical realities of operating Whidden’s Park turn out to mirror many of the same challenges the Town of Antigonish grapples with. Last summer’s water restrictions hit the campground directly — not just through usage limits but through the pools, which naturally lose water to splashing and evaporation and need topping up. Unable to use town water, Whidden’s team borrowed a 1,000-litre jug, drove it out to James River Falls, filled it up, and used that to maintain the pool levels. The fire ban — which, for the first time last year, applied to private campgrounds that were previously exempt — was a damper in the most literal sense. Sitting around a campfire is, as Whidden puts it plainly, a central part of why people come.

Night security handles noise after 10pm. Visitor hours run until 9:30. The mini home park and campground are separated by a gate. Snow from the street gets hauled into the empty campground in winter as a dumping zone. It is, in every operational sense, its own small municipality.

65 Years and No Plans to Reinvent the Wheel

Whidden is clear-eyed about the business: the model works, and he isn’t planning to disrupt it. The main ongoing investment is keeping pace with the electrical demands of larger and larger RVs — about a third of hookup sites are already at 50 amps, with more conversions planned as demand requires. The campground markets itself almost entirely through word of mouth and a listing in the town map, which Whidden supports partly to help the map itself, not because he particularly needs the advertising. Reservations open in January and fill quickly.

Coming home to take over the business was, he says simply, the best decision he’s ever made. The campground runs on a combination of operational pragmatism and genuine hospitality — and after 65 years, that formula hasn’t needed much adjusting.

Sean Cameron is back. The Mayor of Antigonish returns for his second appearance on the podcast, this time fresh off the approval of the town’s 2026 budget to walk Justin and Anuj through what the town is spending, why, and what residents can expect this summer and beyond.

The Town-County Relationship: Better Than You Think

The episode opens where the recent episode with The Warden left off: the ongoing renegotiation of the sewer agreement between the town and county. Cameron offers the town’s perspective with characteristic directness. The existing agreement — which capped the county’s share of sewer treatment costs at one-third — has been expired for over a decade, during which time the fringe has grown enormously. County residents, Cameron reveals, currently consume 21% more water than town residents in total volume (if you exclude the town's biggest customers: StfX and the hospital). The county, he makes clear, should be paying more. The new county council under Warden MacInnis agrees that the county should be paying more for sewer, not water. The water rate is set by utility review board.

The tone here matters. Cameron is emphatic that the town-county relationship is not adversarial, despite what some residents might assume. “When people say town and county are fighting, I would kind of laugh in their face,” he says. The two municipal units now share a Housing Accelerator Fund coordinator, are investing jointly in infrastructure, and meet regularly at joint council. They may not always agree — like any partnership — but the default position is cooperation, not competition.

The Old RK MacDonald Building: It’s Going Up for Sale

This episode contains a significant piece of news that Let’s Talk Antigonish listeners will want to note. The board of the RK MacDonald Nursing Home Corporation — which includes town and county representatives and the Sisters of St. Martha — has made a motion to sell the current Pleasant Street building once the new facility on Church Street Extension opens. The motion now goes back to the town and county as owners for formal approval in open council.

Cameron clarifies a few important details. The proceeds from the sale would go back to the province, which is funding the $120+ million new build. The province holds first right of refusal on the old building. And Cameron is personally hoping the province will use the old facility to provide transitional care — housing patients being discharged from acute care who are waiting for permanent long-term care placement, a pressing issue as the baby boomer generation ages into the system. The building carries asbestos concerns typical of 1950s-60s construction, making conversion expensive, but the right buyer with the right purpose could make it work.

A New Road for the Hospital: St. Martha’s Way?

One of the more exciting — and expensive — items in the budget is $500,000 allocated to survey and plan a new permanent road connecting the hospital area via the Sisters’ property to Cloverville Road, with eventual access to Highway 337. The impetus is both practical and urgent: the current approach to St. Martha’s Regional Hospital is essentially a single-access choke point. During last summer’s construction, traffic was backed up past the Beech Hill turnoff. From an emergency management perspective, that’s a serious problem.

The full cost of a properly built road — asphalt, curb, gutter, sidewalk — is estimated at over $15 million. A bare-bones version comes in around $3.5 million. The town is already applying to the federal Build Canada Fund for support and has enlisted the help of local MP Jaime Batiste, MP Sean Fraser, and every mayor and warden across the tri-counties — all of whom have written letters of support. The Sisters of St. Martha’s land is being navigated carefully and respectfully. And Cameron has a proposed name: St. Martha’s Way.

The Budget: What’s In, What It Means

The approved capital budget sits at $19.5 million. The major line items Cameron walks through include:

$5.4 million toward the ongoing sewer treatment plant upgrade — the plant is currently operating at roughly 1.68 million gallons per day against a maximum capacity of 1.8 million, meaning rainy days push it over the edge. The upgrade, including new aeration and desludging that addresses the odour issues residents noticed, is being shared three ways between town, county, and the federal Housing Accelerator Fund.

New source wells that can supply up to 50% of the town’s current water needs, dramatically reducing drought vulnerability. Last summer the reservoir dropped to half capacity; with the new groundwater source, Cameron is confident a repeat won’t happen — once the wells are connected to the treatment plant, which is still underway.

A rain barrel subsidy program — $2,500 in the operating budget — offering residents a cash rebate on receipt for rain barrels purchased. Small but symbolic of a shift in how the town thinks about water.

Street patching funding doubled from $250,000 to $500,000. Given that the town must pay for all its own roadwork (unlike the county which receives provincial funding) it’s cost prohibitive to repave all the town roads to an asphalt depth standard that would slow the formation of potholes - a feat that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So pothole filling remains the best (and only) solution. Given the backlog of unfilled potholes at the moment, this increase in funding should help.

Planning funds for a full renewal of Hawthorne Street, where water pipes as old as the town itself were recently discovered — still working, but not for much longer. By doing the engineering study now, the town will be ready to move immediately when provincial or federal funding becomes available.

This Summer’s Construction: What to Expect

Cameron is clear that this summer will not be a repeat of last summer’s gridlock. The work currently underway on Main and West Street is expected to be complete by mid-June. After that, the remaining section of West Street from the traffic lights to the roundabout at Highway 7 will be finished — completing the entire corridor for what Cameron hopes will be twenty years. The Church Street roundabout, however, is a wildcard: the asphalt recently laid there by a provincial contractor did not pass inspection and may need to be redone, on a timeline outside the town’s control.

James Street, which many were expecting to see dug up this summer, has been deliberately deferred. Council wants a comprehensive engineering plan done properly over the winter, with an RFP out in January so contractors can plan for it — and construction beginning as soon as conditions allow next spring. Cameron is explicit about the lesson: rushing James Street would likely mean doing it twice.

One important operational change: the town will have a dedicated communications person for construction projects this summer to ensure businesses, residents, and people travelling from outside the area to use the hospital get adequate advance notice of disruptions. The lesson from last summer was heard loud and clear.

Housing: Density Is Coming

Prompted by the Housing Accelerator Fund, the town has already rezoned to allow significantly denser residential development — multi-unit buildings on lots previously zoned for single-family homes. The town itself has almost no vacant lots, meaning new housing supply can only come from increasing density on existing parcels. The three new four-unit buildings beside Curry’s Funeral Home are the kind of model Cameron points to as what that looks like in practice.

Moving forward, slowly but surely

Upgrading the town’s roads, water, and sewer is a daunting task. The constraints are real; limited revenue, aging infrastructure, a provincial funding system that doesn't have a lot of extra cash for small municipalities, and a to-do list that has been building for decades. But the pieces are moving. The sewer plant is being fixed. New water wells are coming online. A new road to the hospital is being planned. Potholes are being filled. Town and county are, by all accounts, actually working together. None of it is fast, none of it is cheap, but all of it is necessary for Antigonish to grow and thrive.