The Last Best Place by John Demont Page A

than life. And of course it creates theatre—great, great theatre. I left Nova Scotia during the John Buchanan years. From afar I read about MLAs going to jail over expense account fraud, scandals involving mechanized toilet seats, a Halifax building known as the Green Toad and the premier’s own blossoming financial problems, which were so extreme that at one point he was living off his credit cards. Buchanan—who once while on the campaign trail declared that “elections should not be fought on issues”—barked like a dog in the historic legislature to silence opposition critics. Then an obscure deputy minister who felt he was the reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas—seriously!—sat down at a routine committee meeting and accused Buchanan of accepting kickbacks and directing government contracts to friends and political allies. The RCMP investigated and cleared Buchanan of any wrongdoing. But he was gone by that point anyway, rescued by a Senate appointment from Mulroney like one of the last out from the American embassy in Saigon.
    As an interim replacement the Tories chose dairy farmer Roger Bacon, the Yogi Berra of Nova Scotia politics. He was prone to calling life a “three-way street,” summing up the problem of unemployment by noting, “If those people weren’t unemployed, they’d be working today,” and standing before a national TV audience after Buchanan’s surprise resignation and saying “we was all shocked.” A sane man, he didn’t even run for the party leadership. For rebirth the Tories turned to Donald Cameron, a humourless dairy farmer from near Pictou who claimed he would do away with political patronage, then a couple of years later ended up taking, of all things, a Mulroney patronage position as Canada’s trade representative in New England.
    Which brings us to the here-and-now. In today’s Halifax
Chronicle-Herald
I read about the latest on the $200-million originally slated to improve a stretch of highway not far from New Glasgow, which federal public works minister Dave Dingwall and provincial transport minister Richie Mann have shifted to build some new roads in their own Cape Breton ridings. Then I saw the latest installment in the saga of the patronage-swilling grassroots provincial Grits, who are so despondent that Premier John Savage hasn’t handed over the usual paving jobs that they’re trying to run him out of office. As I put down the paper I was sure that right then somewhere in the province a political IOU was being called, a palm was being greased, a handful of men—and they are always men—were sitting in a quiet room, cigar smoke curling towards the ceiling, forever plotting.

    I’m into it now—the part of the province that makes Nova Scotia truly and forever New Scotland. Nova Scotia, as I’ve already stressed, is full of countless life forms. But, up here, along the Northumberland Strait, a kilt is still de rigueur and the pipes assault the senses in stores, malls, schools, just walking down the street. Here the story of the
Hector
, which arrived in 1773 with the first shipload of 180 Scots, carries the same resonance as the saga of the
Mayflower
does in Massachusetts. The destitute pioneers arrived, expecting a land of cleared farms. What they got was a spot with such impenetrable forest that when John MacLean, the most renowned Scottish bard to come to North America, settled at the tiny hamlet of Barney’s River in 1819 he called it “a place contrary to nature.” In his “Song of America: the Gloomy Forest” he poured out the sorrow and bitter disillusionment he felt at having succumbed to the “tempters” of emigration and their “fables” of life in Nova Scotia. Elsewhere he wrote:
    I’m not surprised that I’m sorrowful
As my habitation is behind the mountains
In the middle of the wilderness at Barney’s River
Without a thing better than bare potatoes,
Before I make a clearing and raise a crop there
I must uproot the savage forest
With the