A Good Day's Work (20 page)

In the pages of the
Eastern Graphic
you get a good sense of what people do with their free time: attend the Rollo Bay fiddle festival, visit the gathering of Clow Millar–Miller
descendants at Murray Harbour north, play duplicate bridge in Souris, attend the 145
^th
annual Highland games and Scottish festival in Lord Selkirk Provincial Park. Turn some more pages and you see pictures of the competitors for Miss Northumberland 2009 and a Taiwanese cyclist who recently biked through the community. You glimpse beaming kid soccer players and potatoes that look like the baby Jesus. You see the thoughtful faces of people on the street—“What do you think of the name change from CDP [Charlottetown Driving Park] to Red Shores Racetrack and Casino?”—and ancient black-and-white shots of sawmill workers, emblazoned with the query Who Are We?

Even the want ads illuminate. There you discover it is possible to buy a mussel declumper, a “female bunny rabbit lionhead” and a size ten three-quarter-length mink coat. You see exhortations to “get paid to shop,” or for “cheap phone reconnect,” a “debt consolidation program” and “discount timeshares.” You learn that a two-bedroom duplex rents for $565 a month, and a “1977 mint, never-driven-in-winter Cadillac” sells for $7,500. You'd find that a lobster licence goes for a whopping $250,000, while a scallop licence garners a mere $20,000. You'd see jobs for blueberry rakers, aerospace techs, carpenters, farm labourers and short-order cooks. You'd learn that it has been ten years to the day since Artemas D. Macdonald passed away. And that Joe and Nora Macdonald invite you to an open house to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary from two to four at their home in Cardigan.

TO anyone used to the buzz of a twenty-four-hour news cycle obsessed with gore, sex and celebrity the paper reads like a dispatch from some whimsical place, where time stands stubbornly still. I asked Paul if that was how Montague looked to his father, Jim, when he arrived, filled with expectation, in 1963. The son wasn't quite sure. It was now lunchtime. Throughout the morning Paul had received six phone calls—receiver cradled between chin and right shoulder as he typed notes into his Mac—and made four. He thrice walked out into the newsroom to talk with Moore or somebody else. He had written a couple of lines of his column. Now, through the bumpy back roads of Montague we bounced, listening to CBC Radio, slaking our thirst with coffee sucked from plastic-lidded Tim Hortons cups.

Nothing had really changed since his father arrived. Except everything had. In his lifetime Paul had seen it happen: the old family businesses disappearing; the traditional industries waning; the necessities of life, like schools and decent health care, moving farther away. Anyone looking for a symbol of the quandary facing Canada's towns need only set the GPS for Montague. A few years ago Paul had one of the most frightening experiences of his professional life: at a newspaper conference David Foot, the demographer, spoke about the challenges facing rural Canada—and, by extension, the papers that serve them. The area he chose to illustrate the trend was Alberton, home of the
Graphic'
s sister paper, the
West Prince Graphic
.

Foot laid a chart of
West Prince'
s demographic makeup over one for Canada as a whole. They were moving in completely different directions. “There's a reason you're having a hard time recruiting nurses,” he said. “There aren't as many young
women.” Foot showed that this once-thriving fishing and farming community was on an inexorable path: soon there would only be old people left. The most it could hope for, if nothing changed, was the second-rung status of a Charlottetown bedroom community. Otherwise, in time the last person will die, move into a nursing home or leave. Forests will reclaim the once-cleared land. Only abandoned farms and homesteads rotting in the damp will remain of their long-gone owner's dreams.

“The issue is do we matter?” Paul wonders. “Do rural communities matter?” It's a legitimate question that's being asked not just in Canada, but also everywhere in the civilized world. In principle everyone seems to like the “concept” of the rural life. Yet growth remains the goal of the moment, expansion the clarion call of the hour. Before the Second World War, just over half of Canadians lived in cities. By 2011, eight out of ten people lived in urban areas—with most of the growth occurring in endless suburbs and exurbs that materialize where farmland once rolled.

As we drive around Paul points out the collateral damage in the push for progress: the boarded-up houses, the now vacant sites where the family-owned store stood for generations. Between 2001 and 2006—when Canada's overall population rose by 5.4 percent—Montague shrunk by 7.4 percent. He knows big global economic forces are behind the exodus. He still blames governments in Ottawa and the provincial capital of Charlottetown for abandoning rural places like Montague. “The problem is government pays lip service. No real money. No real plan for immigration or repopulation. No real plan to change the economy.”

A panicky businessman watching his market disappear before his very eyes? Rather than fearing Google and the other things supposedly killing journalism, he thinks publications like the
Eastern Graphic
are about to enter a golden age. “It's a period of transition that may take twenty years, but we will figure out a way to make money in this changing environment.” In the meantime, revenues are up 4 percent from a year ago. Raises have kept pace with the cost of living. He hasn't had to lay off staff. Journalistic integrity hasn't been sacrificed to keep shareholders, or business partners, happy.

With his big hopes for his paper and his community Paul MacNeill may seem like a guy with his head in the clouds. A dreamer who, some might say, doesn't even realize his moment has forever passed. I see him differently: a guy who understands that a newspaper is more than a “profit centre.” Who knows that Arthur Miller, the playwright, was right when he wrote that a good paper “is a nation talking to itself.” Who grasps that when he tools around in his big-city ride with timeless river on one side of him and raw farmland on the other, he is bearing witness. When he sits down in his office, boots up his laptop and begins to type what he has seen and heard, he is not simply fulfilling the family legacy of comforting the weak and afflicting the powerful. By telling people's stories he is writing lives into being. Otherwise—with the kids gone and the grandkids not even bothering to visit anymore—someday soon only some gravestones in a forgotten cemetery might exist to mark the people of King's County's tread on this earth.

It is a lot of responsibility for one man to shoulder. And time is marching on. “I was always destined for the paper,” he
says. “But it's a big wide world out there and I'm not sure I can say the same for my girls.”

That strikes me as a nice spin on a bad situation. I'm afraid that if my kids professed an interest in journalism, I might, in a weak moment, be tempted to put them in a room and lock the door until that thought went away. But happy, they say, is the man with purpose. If Paul can't survive, maybe all papers everywhere are doomed. What I'm trying to say is that Paul fights, for all of us against the silence. For this reason, wish him luck.

CHAPTER
SIX

IRON MAN

W
ITH
a glad heart Pierre Bedard stretches in the mid-morning heat in the Quebec countryside. Mint, parsley, tarragon and strawberry infuse the air. Hens and roosters cluck, quail and rabbits doze, a donkey brays, a dog—either Edgar, a mix of beagle and golden retriever, or King Arthur, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel—woofs. Pierre's rectangle of farmland is longer than Rue Saint-Denis, where he once lived in Montreal's Latin Quarter. Back then, the pinprick of homesickness nestled beneath his breastbone, Pierre didn't think about how lucky he was to live in one of the continent's funkiest neighbourhoods. He thought instead about the big mistake he had made by leaving his hometown of Rigaud, Quebec, at eighteen. Mostly he thought about how he had never taken to
the big city. And about how much he missed the countryside's peace, clean air and quiet.

“Here is my ancestral land,” he says with a vast gesture that takes in the tumbledown ski chateau in the hamlet of Sainte-Justine-de-Newton that he shares with his wife, Marie-Josée Lessard, as well as the animals, the woods, the hills and the delicate light. Pierre removes a semi-smoked, hand-rolled cigarette from his mouth, lights it and takes a deep pull. He's thirty-four, living in the shadow of one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities. To the eye, though, he reminds me of someone transported from a bygone age: he's got oval features, stout dark sideburns and eyebrows and a sportive half beard. Round granny glasses make his eyes look opaque. Though a thick tuft of hair peeks out of the top of his shirt, I have no idea what is hidden under the Afghan headgear, called a “pakoul”—kind of a cross between a welder's cap and a Shriner's fez—that his wife made him. He smells faintly of sweat. His hands—long fingers, cuticles caked with grime—have a pre-industrial nineteenth-century starkness. Pierre can't weigh more than 180 pounds, which, spread across six feet or so, makes him look quick more than dangerous. But his wide-shouldered leanness does not rule out power. Nor do those Popeye forearms, singed of any hair and corded with muscle.