A Bittersweet Trip to Mabou, Cape Breton

Reporter’s Notebook
by Stephen Henn
12/11/03

“A decade ago, international trade played a pivotal role in Canadian politics -- but that is no longer true. For the 90 percent of Canadians who live within 150 miles of the U.S. border, NAFTA has been an unqualified boon: Nearly 88 percent of Canada’s exports now head to the United States.

But in rural areas, the picture is much more complicated. Rural Canada is one of the largest and most sparsely populated expanses of land on the planet. Most public services in Northern Canada are only possible because of an elaborate system of subsidies.

The challenge facing Canada today is how to reconcile a global trading system designed to root out subsidies and a social contract with rural Canadians that promises them equal access to basic services in some of the most remote and isolated spots on earth.

NAFTA and the new rules of a global economy are slowly transforming communities like Mabou, Cape Breton, where I went to report this story. By Canada’s standards, Mabou isn’t all that isolated, but it is gorgeous -- and in the last few years, it has been "discovered" by Americans.

The flat light of fall in the far north illuminates buildings from the side, it lights up the birch trees, and it transforms the tiny town of Mabou into a little movie set.

Low clouds skim the horizon over coves, crags and the sea.

This village was built by coalminers and farmers, decedents of Scotch-Irish immigrants who were driven from their land 200 years ago. The village survived its own potato famine, the villagers watched the coalmines close, and there is a deep sense of pride among those who never left.

Some folks in town still speak Gaelic, and the words Tigh Litrichean, which means “house of letters,” grace the post office door. A sign across the street reads Ciad Mile Failte, “a thousand welcomes” -- but for Americans, at least, the welcome maybe wearing thin. Why? Mabou has recently been discovered. Today, refugees here are young professionals fleeing southern Manhattan, wealthy retirees from Boston, and of course, the summer people.

The town’s economic future may be tourism, but the fishermen, farmers and loggers who stayed on here after the coalmines closed are not universally happy about that. A month ago, a new summerhouse high on a ridge overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence was burned to the ground -- rumor has it, it was arson.

It’s remote here, and some like it that way.

But most of the folks who remain recognize that, even with tourism, the economic future of Mabou is bleak. Mad Cow Disease has devastated cattle prices. It has even hit Mabou’s few remaining dairy farmers -- hard. The salmon fishery here is gone , and eking out a living on crab and lobster is getting tougher. The coalmines that transformed sleepy farming communities like Mabou into boomtowns 100 years ago have been shuttered for a generation. And, the railroads that shipped the coal to Halifax have been torn up.

Every year, families move away -- and every year, the schools get smaller and smaller.