Editorial

January 21 2026

Recognizing culture’s full value

Filming wrapped quietly in Sherbrooke last week. Trucks came and went. Cast and crew packed up. The community returned to its winter rhythm. Beyond the community itself, though, you might have missed it.

That, in a way, is the point.

The Great Amherst Haunting was not a small undertaking. It was a full professional production – crews, actors, extras, logistics, accommodations, meals, long days and longer nights – brought together by Nova Scotian filmmakers working with a historic site that already knows how to tell stories. It was tourism, heritage and modern industry braided together, without fuss or fanfare.

It also arrived at a moment when this region is being asked to think seriously about opportunity. We are no longer focused solely on what we can afford to fix or maintain. We are weighing what we might choose to pursue.

This is not speculation. It is a documented change in capacity.

What often goes unremarked is how naturally these developments expand our field of vision. They encourage us to look farther ahead, to think in longer arcs, to imagine economic futures that are broader and more durable than we once imagined.

The question worth asking, then, is whether our lens has widened enough.

When opportunity arrives as infrastructure or industry, we tend to recognize it immediately. We know how to measure it. We know how to discuss it. We understand what jobs look like, what spin-off effects look like, what success might resemble.

When opportunity arrives as culture, we are less certain.

Yet at the national level, cultural industries account for a meaningful share of economic activity and employment. Far from marginal to the economy, they are integral to it. In Nova Scotia, provincial data shows culture contributing well over a billion dollars annually and supporting thousands of jobs – a footprint comparable to several sectors we are accustomed to treating as “real” economic drivers.

That reality is not abstract. It played out last week in Sherbrooke.

It plays out in places like Mulgrave Road Theatre, which has spent years building a professional operation that creates work, attracts outside dollars and carries local stories well beyond local borders. It plays out through organizations such as ArtsWorks East, which has matured into a body capable of marketing its members’ work and competing successfully for grants – the behaviours we associate with economic development elsewhere.

None of this is to suggest that culture should displace other priorities, or that it deserves special treatment. The argument is simpler, and perhaps more unsettling than that.

At a moment when our economic horizons are demonstrably expanding, there is a quiet risk that we continue to see only what we are accustomed to seeing. Opportunity loss does not always announce itself as failure. Sometimes it looks like activity we don’t quite know how to name and therefore don’t fully count.

The work underway across our communities invites us to be clear-eyed about where we stand. It also invites us to be curious about what else might already be working in our midst.

If we are learning to see farther, now may be a good time to look more closely as well.