Editorial

December 31 2025

And away we go...

A meme circulating online these days neatly captures the prevailing mood as we prepare to say goodbye to 2025. “I’m going to stay up not to welcome the new year,” it reads. “I just want to make sure this one leaves.”

We get it. Most people in this part of Nova Scotia do. Drought. Wildfires. $50 T-bone steaks. Donald Trump. The question is: can we get beyond all of this and move forward?

The good news is that we already are. Not because the past year suddenly looks better in the rearview mirror, and not because any future would look good by comparison, but because even as 2025 winds down, things are moving again – despite the fear that they wouldn’t ever again.

You can see it in things that carry both symbolic weight and clear rules and real-time consequences. Take the World Junior Hockey Championship now underway. Canada isn’t owed a result. Nothing is guaranteed. As of this writing, the team is playing well under pressure against capable opponents and earning what it gets. Preparation meets circumstance.

The same posture is showing up elsewhere at the national level. How has Canada responded to the trade insanity of Donald Trump? Not with panic. Not with bluster. Almost to its own surprise, the country has rediscovered its national character. Elbows may be up, but its back is straight and its stride is long. And the world outside the ‘orange zone’ seems to like what it sees.

In Canso, a community that went years without licensed childcare now has its first centre. It was a long process, finally crossing from intention to operation.

Outside town, a small team at Spaceport Nova Scotia reached a long-delayed milestone this fall, sending a rocket skyward not as spectacle, but as proof of concept.

In Sherbrooke, a decision that didn’t sit right was reconsidered and reversed, restoring free admission to Christmas at the Village without drama or self-congratulation.

In Antigonish, a volunteer-run community fridge quietly expanded its reach this year, adding a second downtown location to meet demand without waiting for conditions to improve.

Of course, none of this fixes everything. It isn’t meant to. These aren’t triumphs so much as signs of traction – evidence that even in a year that felt stalled, brittle, bruising, scandalous, iniquitous and idiocratic, people continued to move and – astonishingly, perhaps – in the right direction.

So yes, 2025 is a year we’d rather see exiled to the footnotes of history. But the work of getting beyond it is already underway, not because anyone said so, but because momentum has a way of asserting itself all by itself.

Sometimes that’s enough to start a new year: to get on with things without constantly checking over our shoulder before moving forward.