Editorial

November 26 2025

The art of the possible

There’s something quietly radical about trying to build big things in small places. It’s not the projects themselves that stand out – whether rockets in Canso or a proposed whale sanctuary in Port Hilford – but the instinct behind them: the decision to attempt something that did not exist here yesterday and to see if it can exist tomorrow.

That instinct matters. And it’s worth paying attention to now more than ever.

This week’s launch demonstration at Spaceport Nova Scotia was, depending on where you stand, either a technical achievement or an unresolved question mark. Many see long-term potential. Some remain unconvinced. That’s fine. Healthy, even. But the underlying story isn’t about the machinery. It’s about what happens when a community becomes a place where impossible ideas are allowed to take shape.

The same holds for the Whale Sanctuary Project – a concept that inspires support in many quarters and deep concern in a few others. The disagreements are sincere. But again, the significance lies less in the specifics and more in the fact that people here are being asked to wrestle with ideas that stretch the familiar boundaries of rural life.

Across Canada right now, we’re being called – sometimes gently, sometimes abruptly – to rethink what we are capable of building. We’re signing trade agreements with partners who once barely noticed us. We’re asserting our economic and technological position on the world stage. We’re trying, fitfully at times, to rediscover a sense of national self-reliance that had dulled over the decades.

That doesn’t happen through caution. It happens because we’re willing to push into uncertainty, accept disagreement, and move an idea from the realm of “unlikely” into the realm of “possible.” It happens because communities agree, implicitly or explicitly, that complacency is no longer just unwise – it’s unaffordable.

Innovation doesn’t slip quietly into a neighbourhood. It knocks loudly, asks people to reconsider long-held assumptions, and arrives trailing both excitement and anxiety. Rural communities understand this as well as anyone. They have lived through it in the form of changing industries, shifting demographics, and the endless tension between preserving what is and imagining what could be.

So, when a rocket lifts off from the edge of Guysborough County – whether you celebrate it, question it, or simply watch the sky with curiosity – it represents more than a launch. It represents the willingness to attempt something uncommon in a place better known for modesty than spectacle. And whether a whale sanctuary ultimately proves feasible or not, the very fact that it has been proposed here reflects the same impulse: to create something new where nothing like it had existed before.

Communities, provinces, and countries move forward not by avoiding disagreement, but by engaging with ambition. They grow stronger when they contend with big ideas – not because every idea will succeed, but because the act of trying demands clarity, discipline, and imagination that applies to all the little decisions we have to make every day.

We need that now, and not just in rural Nova Scotia.

If Canada is entering a moment when self-belief, adaptability, and boldness are becoming national imperatives, then regions like ours – long accustomed to making much out of little – could have something important to teach.