In 2017, my partner and I drove to Prince Edward Island to lead a late-summer writing and yoga retreat. During our visit, a dear friend—then recently divorced—was looking at real estate. She had viewed a charming country home perched alongside a slow-moving river. It wasn’t a good fit for her young family, but she thought it was ideal for us.
We had full lives back in Toronto and weren’t looking to buy property. But we fell in love with the light-filled rooms and tangled gardens and the wide-open sense of possibility rural life represented. Suddenly we were dreaming of growing garlic, falling asleep listening to the sound of frogs, and biking to the beach at sunset. As self-employed Torontonians (I’m a writer, Joshua a psychotherapist), we knew it would be a stretch to afford property in the Toronto area. So, despite the fact that we were then in the process of moving into our first apartment there as a couple, we put in an offer on the PEI house.
In hindsight, it all sounds a little naive. But property prices in Atlantic Canada were low enough back then that we could spend our summers on PEI and winters back in the city. In March 2020, as the rest of the world was sheltering in place, we loaded up our Outback and made a beeline for PEI to ride out the pandemic, arriving on the very day strict border blockades were set up at the Confederation Bridge. When we gave up our Toronto apartment for good a few months later to become full-time Islanders, we joined tens of thousands of Canadians who swapped hectic realities in Ontario and Alberta for the promise of a more affordable or idyllic life out east.
We didn’t realize then that we’d become part of a historic wave of newcomers who inadvertently drove up local housing prices and overheated the economy. Over the past four years, I’ve seen up close how much Atlantic Canada’s identity has changed amidst its population boom, as demographics have skewed younger and more diverse.
For some, that’s cause for celebration. The sharp rise in both interprovincial and international migration has dramatically reversed downward demographic spirals that previously forced many communities to close schools and reduce services. Chronic unemployment has given way to record economic growth and a burgeoning demand for workers in the skilled trades and health care sectors. Policymakers who warned for decades about a ticking demographic time bomb—one where there may not be enough working adults to finance vital services or fund pensions—are suddenly dealing with housing shortages, infrastructure deficits, and an unprecedented demand for government supports.
As housing prices soar, Atlantic Canadians are feeling squeezed economically. Many blame the influx of newcomers for their struggles to find affordable shelter. At least some new residents, meanwhile, are realizing too late that East Coast living is not the utopia they imagined. With frustrations rising, the federal Conservatives sense an opportunity to breach one of the staunchest Liberal fortresses in the country.
Aggregate polling now suggests the Conservatives are on track to win a large majority of seats in the region, including several—like my own largely rural PEI riding—that have elected Liberals without fail since the mid-1980s. As record population growth reshapes its culture and outlook, Atlantic Canada may be on the cusp of a major political earthquake.
At first glance, numbers paint a rosy picture of boundless prosperity in the eastern provinces. PEI has steadily demonstrated some of Canada’s highest rates of per capita immigration and population growth for much of the past few years, and as of January 2024, it had the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country. About one in six residents of Charlottetown now reports a mother tongue other than English or French, up from one in fifteen just a decade earlier. In short order, Halifax and Moncton have become two of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. In 2022 alone, Moncton added nearly 9,000 new residents, to bring its total population to over 171,000. Nova Scotia’s population recently surged well past a million people, and Premier Tim Houston hopes to double that number by 2060. It’s perhaps not surprising that median home prices in Halifax skyrocketed 67 percent between 2019 and 2022.
Population growth is also reshaping smaller Atlantic communities. Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, is a regional service centre an hour south of Halifax and twenty-five minutes from Lunenburg, within spitting distance of the province’s rugged South Shore coast. After a period of slow but steady growth over the past two decades, the town’s population has shot up much more rapidly since the pandemic, according to David Mitchell, the town’s mayor. He says a lot of the new arrivals are from Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. Among them are young professionals who work remotely, savouring a vibrant coastal lifestyle while drawing healthy salaries.
A number of recent arrivals, however, seemed unprepared for what life would really be like out east. Emily Smith, a fifty-six-year-old product manager in IT security, gladly gave up $5,000 monthly rent in Vancouver to buy a sprawling rural property in Fall River, Nova Scotia, to be closer to her son, who’d just moved there. She dreamed of having more time to garden, kayak, and ride horses. (She asked to use a pseudonym.)
She made the move in 2021 with little research and without having visited. She wasn’t prepared for the long winters, frequent power outages, and the costs of maintaining a rural home. Higher taxes, inflated energy bills, and more expensive groceries have all dealt a blow to her bottom line. While she’s formed a supportive circle of friends living in Halifax and Dartmouth—mostly transplants from Ontario and abroad—she now regrets her decision to leave British Columbia. “I had romantic notions about rural living,” she says. “I was so wrong.”
Smith plans to return to BC to retire. Among her friends, the lure of leaving is a frequent topic of conversation. They’re far from alone. Facebook groups like “Moving to Nova Scotia” and “Moving to Nova Scotia from Ontario!” have become digital hangouts for weary Canadians considering radical life changes. In the relative safety of these forums, potential newcomers seek answers from those who have already made the move—though the feedback may not always be what they’re anticipating. In response to one family’s plan to relocate to Nova Scotia from BC earlier this year, someone who recently made the same choice advises strongly against it. “One hundred per cent would not do it again. . . . People are a lot less friendly, school feels subpar, food is a LOT worse. . . . I am yet to find a single positive, but since moving cost so much, now we’re stuck here until we recover.”
Meanwhile, a subreddit devoted to Ontarians hoping to move to Nova Scotia advises prospective East Coasters to do their homework before taking the plunge—or they might find themselves dealing with the exact problems they were trying to escape. For many, leaving Ontario for Nova Scotia may not make financial sense.
With the demand for housing so desperately high, the number of folks sleeping rough each night has increased sharply. One lesser-known consequence of interprovincial mobility, Bridgewater mayor Mitchell has observed, is the number of new residents who have left Ontario because of the cost-of-living crisis there, only to arrive in Nova Scotia to find things aren’t any better.
During my time in Atlantic Canada, I’ve witnessed remarkable acts of kindness. When my partner and I moved to the Island, we weren’t sure how we’d be greeted as a gay couple in a rural community but were reassured to learn that our home had been owned by a well-respected lesbian family for nearly two decades. Our neighbours are mostly farmers, and one by one, in those first few weeks, people arrived at our house to introduce themselves and welcome us, including eighty-eight-year-old Vernon, who drove his tractor up to our driveway and shimmied down from his seat to shake our hands.
The stories aren’t all warm hearted. On PEI, the 2022 pride season was marred by the burning of a pride flag in Charlottetown. In both Halifax and St. John’s, young Muslim women have been attacked. Reported hate crimes have spiked around the region, just as they have around the country. When Adam Mohammed, a queer refugee from Damascus, Syria, arrived in St. John’s in March 2022, he was dazzled by the warmth and authenticity of Newfoundlanders, whose gossiping and boundless curiosity reminded him of life back home. (He also asked to use a pseudonym.) While he’s enjoyed a feeling of relative safety about being openly gay within his community in St. John’s, Mohammed has occasionally been threatened on the street when walking with his partner.
There’s no way to know for certain if these incidents are directly related to increasing diversity in the region or part of a larger global trend. Amanda Bittner, a professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, researches the political psychology of voters. She says it’s hard not to see growing acts of hate around the country as connected to the fury of anti-elite protest movements like the 2022 “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa, where a backlash against vaccine mandates grew to include open expressions of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. A general climate of fear created by global political trends and economic conditions can also be amplified by dog-whistle politics. Since the convoy, Bittner has witnessed an increasing tendency among some politicians to use anti-immigrant or anti-outsider tropes in coded terms. She points to the example of a recent Newfoundland Progressive Conservative candidate in a local by-election who said in a debate that the province should favour recruiting German doctors over those from Pakistan and India. That candidate won the by-election in a landslide.
Karly Kehoe, a historian who studies Atlantic migration and is the Canada research chair in Atlantic Canada communities at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, says that, throughout history, in times of economic distress, it’s always minorities—immigrants, in particular—who are on the front lines of any backlash. She contends that pockets of discontent are driven by economic desperation and a failure of government policy to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. Some Atlantic Canadians, Kehoe believes, feel abandoned. They worry that local and regional politicians aren’t taking seriously their daily struggles to make ends meet.
The federal Conservatives seem to be channelling this existential fear about a declining standard of life. Party leader Pierre Poilievre has made repeated visits to Atlantic Canada, leading boisterous rallies against the federal carbon tax, a vital issue in a region dependent on expensive home heating oil and gasoline for long commutes to work. In late April, Poilievre visited an “Axe the Tax” rally at the border between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and spoke in support of protesters, at least one of whom appeared to be affiliated with a far-right organization. His appearance was criticized by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who accused the Conservative leader of cozying up to conspiracy theorists and extremists.
While Poilievre has been careful to avoid demonizing immigrants, he has worked hard to link the national housing crisis with the Liberal government’s immigration policies. At a press conference in February, he laid the blame for housing shortages squarely on Trudeau’s unwillingness to limit the number of immigrants arriving in Canada. “Trudeau, through total incompetence, opened the floodgates in a way that was disconnected from the number of homes needed to house people,” Poilievre said.
Kehoe believes that the language used by politicians when describing immigration—terminology like “floodgates”—is the kind that can stoke fears around immigrants themselves. And while many voters may be feeling economically disenfranchised, Bittner says, political parties play a role in either directing voters toward solutions or identifying scapegoats for those fears. She says the Conservatives are raising problems like housing and the cost of living without pointing to concrete solutions. Because most voters are not always attuned to the intricacies of policy debates, they take what they hear at face value. If a voter hears a message that speaks to their frustration, they will be tempted to absorb it without questioning its truth. In the United States, politicians like Donald Trump routinely blame immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere for stealing “American” jobs. For Bittner, this vitriol—across the airwaves and social media—seeps into Canadian political discourse. “We can say we are different from the US, and that’s true on some level. But we get the same media, and we see the same news. We’re not all that different.”
Don Desserud, a political scientist at the University of Prince Edward Island, does not believe the rise in Conservative support in Atlantic Canada reflects a propensity for right-wing populism or anti-immigrant sentiment. Like Bittner, he says Poilievre and the Conservatives are harnessing the anger of those who feel left behind economically.
While Desserud has worried in the past about the impacts of Poilievre’s populist rhetoric, he now feels that federal Conservatives are moderating their message, perhaps taking note of recent political developments in other parts of the world. He points to the election of Labour’s Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom and the inability of the far right to win recent French parliamentary elections to suggest that the appetite for far-right populism might be on the decline. Desserud believes that Poilievre and the federal Conservatives seem to be moving away from their flirtation with the more radical elements of the right in the lead up to the next federal election. “I’ve noticed that the CPC, and Poilievre himself, seems to have pulled back the rhetoric a bit,” he says. “There’s a little more of a soberness that we haven’t seen before.”
On the ground, however, there’s no denying that tensions remain—and that those perceived as outsiders are often the targets of local frustration. In one Facebook group called “Ask PEI,” where Island residents seek answers for everything from where to find a decent plumber to who can help identify a particular insect or weed, those hoping to relocate to PEI often pose innocent questions about housing, education, or health care. While the majority of Islanders respond thoughtfully, discussions sometimes devolve into outright hostility toward newcomers, with some Islanders blaming new arrivals for higher housing prices and health care shortages. In one recent argument—ignoring the reality that the whole of PEI is unceded Mi’kmaq territory—one Islander wrote, “What’s going on isn’t fair at all to the people who have spent their entire lives here. You are making it sound like foreigners are more entitled to our land just because they have money to throw around.”
My partner and I don’t miss living in Toronto. We’ve built strong friendships on PEI and feel content with our quiet lives beside the ocean. While we may never be viewed as “true Islanders” by some, that’s not an issue for us, as rapidly changing demographics make this label less and less important. We don’t mind being tagged as “from away” when we are joined by thousands of new folks from all corners of the world who have decided to make the Island home.
Change can be a scary proposition. Atlantic Canada is at an inflection point, poised between its storied past and a still unwritten future, between who we have been and who we are becoming. That’s always been the case, even if it now feels more pronounced. For newcomers like Adam Mohammed, recently married, there’s nowhere else in Canada he can imagine living. Others arrive full of hope, only to discover the windswept Atlantic is no escape from reality.
Trevor Corkum’s story “Lost Boys” was shortlisted for the 2023 Commonwealth Prize. His debut novel will be published by Knopf Canada.
