Editorial

December 10 2025

When opportunity knocks

A couple of weeks ago, in this space, we made the case that ambition is not a dirty word. That it is the engine of every meaningful chapter this part of Nova Scotia has ever written. It was a philosophical argument, rooted in the fact that nothing good arrives here by chance.

Flash forward to this week, and we have hard evidence that the argument is no mere abstraction – it’s alive and well and living in communities like Canso, Black Point, Lazy Head, Goldboro, Melford and Aulds Cove, where ambition, it turns out, is not only justified, it’s got legs.

The departure report of the Municipality of the District of Guysborough’s retiring CAO Barry Carroll quietly confirms what many here sensed but rarely said aloud: This place is no longer operating from scarcity. It is operating from accumulation.

Of capital, of infrastructure, of development exposure, of institutional confidence, of financial coherence. Forty-six million dollars in investments and reserves worth of coherence to be exact. Meanwhile, there are 11 major projects carrying a combined capital value of roughly $18 billion, and a theoretical tax base that could one day exceed $30 million a year.

If everything works out as planned, these aren’t ambitions so much as ledger entries. Which brings us to the more difficult question – the one ambition, alone, cannot answer.

How do we want our emergent economic capacity to work for us? And we do mean for us.

It is tempting, at moments like this, to treat momentum as a virtue in itself. To assume that because change is happening, it must be good; because money is arriving, it must be progress; because outsiders are paying attention, we must be winning.

But this region still cherishes the same things it always has – woods that feel endless, neighbours who still notice when someone’s driveway goes unplowed, an instinct to help first and argue later, a social safety net made not of policy but of people. These are not sentimental ornaments. They are the infrastructure beneath the infrastructure.

The good news, perhaps, is that none of this momentum yet feels like the sort of overnight boom that erases old places. There has been no sudden gold-rush hysteria. No speculative frenzy ripping the social fabric loose. What has unfolded instead is something slower, stranger and arguably rarer: sustained forward motion without civic collapse.

That’s good, because it suggests we understand that prosperity is not self-justifying. It depends entirely on what it protects while it grows. It is one thing to prove that a place can grow. It is another thing to grow without losing the reasons people loved it in the first place.

Right now, this region is doing something rare. It is expanding its economic reach without erasing its communitarian footprint. That balance is not guaranteed. It is chosen, again and again, in council chambers, in planning offices, and in everyday conversations about what matters and what does not.

Most of all, it’s chosen by the people when they become involved in the democratic processes and institutions that exist to both represent and exercise their interests.

If all this promise ever hardens into reality, it will shape not just budgets and skylines, but daily life. What kind of municipality, county and region we become is not a technical one, but a community one. And it belongs to everyone who calls this place home.

When opportunity knocks, it’s how we answer the door that matters.