How this Nova Scotia fishing hamlet is facing one possible future as the world’s next Cape Canaveral
by Alec Bruce
The village of Canso—perched near Cape Breton on the eastern edge of mainland Nova Scotia—is not exactly the end of world, but on a clear day you can see it from there. Locals are fond of this quip, especially when explaining to befuddled come-from-aways in an RV why the only way out of this place is by the road they came in on. “We’re here,” it seems to say. “Why are you?”
Like most jokes, it’s only lightly faithful to the truth. The area in which the community resides is actually the ancestral, unceded land of the M’kmaq First Nations, whose people lived here for thousands of years before European fishermen decided to claim and name it in the 17th century. For two weeks each summer, like clockwork, the town’s residential population of 600 jumps to more than 10,000, as people from all over the Atlantic region and beyond flock to the Stan Rogers Folk Festival, where lights, cameras, and stages occupy a plot of land—not in Canso, per se, but in Qamso’q, within the district of Eskikewa’kik.
Still, most of the time, this settlement waits quietly for something unexpected to happen. Steve Matier likes that about Canso. Over the past three years, he’s come to know the area almost as well as he does his native Albuquerque, New Mexico. He’s surveyed its maps, walked its streets, strolled down its shores, and talked with its people. To residents, he’s the come-from-away who won’t go away. He’s the something unexpected that’s waiting to happen.
In June, Matier’s Halifax-based company, Maritime Launch Services Ltd. (MLS), won environmental approval from the Nova Scotia government to build a commercial spaceport here, the first in Canada. By 2021, he expects to launch as many as eight Ukrainian-made, Cyclone-4M rockets—carrying privately-owned satellites from around the world—from a 40-acre plot of Crown land about two kilometres due south of the town. He’ll have gantries, cranes, fuel depots, control centres, and, of course, a missile pad. With all of this, he says, he’ll bring new industry and employment.
For him, it will be the culmination of a multinational search for the appropriate, remote location—from Chiapas, Mexico, to Churchill, Manitoba; from Alaska and Virginia to California—where the chances of harming large numbers of hapless civilians are thankfully miniscule.
About this spit of land at the rim of the continent, the astropreneur-cum-engineer who once worked for NASA says simply: “There will be no flights over populated areas; Canso is perfect precisely because it is so far from everywhere. This will happen. There will be growth. It’s only a question of when.”
For the community, though, the prospect of becoming the Cape Canaveral of the North is, at the very least, disconcerting—increasingly so since Matier started taking giant leaps forward towards his goal. Those who have supported him are more than happy to extend the benefit of their doubts now; jobs are jobs, after all. Those who once dismissed him—or worse, thought he was a good-natured lunatic—worry that his success won’t necessarily improve the local economic climate; meanwhile, they say, the harm to human health, safety and the environment could be grave. At the heart of the debate, which has just begun to roil, is a key question that many rural areas across Atlantic Canada must face: How do they meet the challenges, and embrace the opportunities, of the 21st century without losing sight of who they are; their quintessential rusticity?
To be sure, Canso is about as rustic as it gets in Nova Scotia or, in fact, just about anywhere else in Atlantic Canada. Getting there requires a driver’s manual. If you’re coming from Halifax, you take Highway 102 to Truro, then turn on to Highway 104 and head towards Cape Breton. At Exit 37, you turn on to Route 4, pass a Petro-Canada gas station and the East Antigonish Education Centre, then turn right on to Route 16. From there, you drive through Lincolnville, Boylston, Guysborough, Halfway Cove, Queensport, Half Island Cove, Fox Island, and Hazel Hill. Finally, literally at the end of the road, you’re in Canso.
Formally established in 1604, the community was, predominantly, a fishing village. That industry’s overwhelming influence ended in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery and the departure of National Sea Products Ltd., whose closure threw 700 people out of work. Today, the local economy is somewhat more mixed—if that is the word for an area that has, over the past three decades, lost at least half its population, its town status, and durable employment opportunities (the jobless rate hovers at 14 per cent in a good year).
Still, according to Statistics Canada, the village manages to sustain agricultural, fishing, forestry, hunting, construction, light manufacturing, retail, transportation, educational, and health care operations. It sports a recreation centre, a Lions club and a Legion hall, several churches, a library and a pharmacy, a wharf and a marina, a gas station, and A.J.’s Dining Room and Lounge, which recently began to offer a four-meat pizza called the “Cyclone 4M.”
All of which is to say that Canso is as far from the global space economy as almost any place on Earth, where, almost everywhere else, that particular business is booming. Space Foundation, a think tank based in Colorado Springs, says private investment in the industry now approaches $340 billion US annually, which represents a yearly growth of about 15 per cent since 2004. New York venture capital firm Space Angels says corporate spending on the sector, mostly satellites, is up nearly 80 per cent since Elon Musk launched his first commercial payload in 2009, just two years before NASA scuttled its shuttle program.
Numbers like these make people like Lloyd Hines—a former Nova Scotia Minister of Natural Resources, and the current Minister of Transportation and MLA for Guysborough-Eastern Shore-Tracadie (the provincial electoral district into which Canso falls)—almost salivate. He points out that while MLS anticipates creating dozens of jobs connected directly to the spaceport, the longer-term economic benefits to the area could be incalculable.
“Here we are striving to keep our youth at home,” he says. “We’re striving to bring back the young people who have moved away. Why shouldn’t we also strive to be part of the new, vibrant economy that a project like this represents? There’s nothing like this in Canada. It’s cutting edge. Here we are: I’m speaking on Bluetooth in my car; you have me on your smart phone speaker. Cast your mind back 30 years. The technological changes since then have been amazing. Yes, there would be quite a few jobs in the local area as a result of this spaceport going forward, but also the opportunities for the long term are very attractive.”
Cyclone-4M rocket: Maritime Launch Services hopes to deploy this from Canso.
One of those opportunities is tourism, says Ray White—a former Nova Scotia Minister of Housing and Municipal Affairs, local MLA, and five-term mayor of Canso. He thinks as long as the proper environmental safeguards are in place, the spaceport could be a vital, new economic stimulus to the area. “Jobs are going to come during the construction phase, and there will be maintenance and ongoing upkeep,” he says. “But you have to look at the other industries, like tourism, a site like this could draw to the area. That’s the indirect spinoffs that will be the most beneficial. You have to remember that the people here are very determined to secure for the community the very amenities that other communities have. There are a lot of small business that are hoping the spaceport will make them more viable. We have to find something other than the Stan Rogers Festival to expand the town.”
In fact, when the musical extravaganza began in 1997, it was, itself, the bold, new experiment in local economic diversification. According to Rural Tourism Development: Localism and Cultural Change by E. Wanda George, Heather Main and Donald G. Reid (Channel View Publications, 2009), “Canso did not purposely position itself as a tourism destination area; rather, it focussed on a quick, short-term economic strategy. Initially, the [Stan Rogers] festival was a one-day event but quickly grew into a three-day tourism boon. Canso’s tourism development strategy involved creating an attraction based on a particular cultural aspect, but, ironically, one that had very little relevance to the community’s history or tradition.” The authors refer to the fact that the late Hamilton, Ontario-born singer, after whom the festival was named, did not officially hail from Canso, but claimed deep family connections to, and in the 1970s wrote hit songs about, the area. Does the provenance actually matter? Nowadays, StanFest rakes in an estimated $1 million for the local economy each year.
On the other hand, Matier’s critics point out, there’s a big difference between a boy brandishing a blues harp and a man bearing a container of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH). That’s the stuff that’ll be used to fuel the rockets’ second stage after blast off. Says Michael Byers, a Canada Research Chair on global politics and international law at the University of British Columbia, who has studied the use of this material elsewhere in the world: “It’s incredibly toxic. Handlers have to wear “hazmat” suits just to be around it. It was originally chosen for ICBMs during the Cold War because you could store it for a long time and never have to touch it. Countries, everywhere, are backing away from it, finding alternatives to it. The Russians call it ‘devil’s breath’.”
This naturally worries people like Marie Lumsden, a resident and local community worker who speaks for the ad-hoc group, Action Against Canso Spaceport, which emerged over the summer. She says the environmental assessment prior to the provincial government’s greenlight in June was not convincing. And her laundry list of questions remains, to say the least, comprehensive.
“There are the negative effects on human health (air, land and water contamination), and a lack of clear modelling for all worse case scenarios, including the storage of hydrazine and other extremely toxic chemicals on site in close vicinity to local lakes,” she says. There’s also “the potential use of taxpayer’s money for this project (which would be better spent on healthcare, education and greener sustainable industry), and a lack of any sustainable employment locally.” Then, she continues, there are concerns regarding property values and “the fact that we’ve contacted our insurance companies and have been told we will not be covered for rocket launch-related damage to our homes.”
In fact, it’s not yet clear whether public money will find its way to the project. Matier says he has finalized $210-million in private financing (“a cross cut of equity and non-dilutive debt”) to get to the first launch. As for tax dollars, he says, “Well, you know, it’s certainly possible. But I’m not anticipating outright grants or anything like that.”
The normally genial American come-from-away also becomes quite brittle when quizzed about the safety of his endeavour. “Continuing discussions about this are, I think, very healthy,” he says. “The frustration comes in when the questions being asked are the same ones we’ve answered four or five or six times already. We’ve followed all the processes, submitted everything to environmental assessment once, then twice. It’s been reviewed by provincial and federal agencies… it is frustrating. Some people have preconceived notions and there’s no way to make them consider otherwise.”
On this score alone, Garnet Rogers—folk singer, songwriter, and Stan’s younger brother, who owns a home in Canso and is a regular at the summertime festival—might agree for different reasons. “Lookit,” he says, “I’d be willing to take one for the team if I thought the spaceport would be good for the community. I don’t want to be too damn sceptical, but there’s nothing in that [environmental assessment] which proves to me that they are serious about protecting the populace. They keep saying it’s absolutely safe. But if it’s so safe why don’t they build it outside Halifax airport? They found the most deserted piece of Nova Scotia with the lowest population. And they are counting on the fact that the populace is not going to be able to fight. It just breaks my heart.”
Rogers mourns. Others cheer. And still others wait patiently, as usual, for something unexpected to happen.
One thing seems certain: As Canso grapples with its unique set of 21th-century opportunities and challenges, it may remain the end of the road; but few will ever call it the end of the world.