 | By Max Strasser International Editor, Opinion |
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I never really expected to feel this way — much less write it in an email to who knows how many Times readers — but … I kind of wish I lived in Halifax. |
Don’t get me wrong. London is still my favorite city in the world. But we’re two weeks into our second lockdown and without the museums and theaters, the pubs and restaurants, the street life and my social life, London mostly just seems damp and dark. My friends and family in the United States seem to be having similar experiences. (Though Los Angeles, where my in-laws live, remains as infuriatingly sunny as ever.) |
But in Halifax, Nova Scotia, life is going on pretty much as normal. That’s what Stephanie Nolen writes about in her Op-Ed today. |
Stephanie goes to the gym and sends her kids to school; she can go shopping at a mall and have friends over for a dinner party. The number of Covid-19 cases in the province remains astoundingly low. The discovery of two new cases earlier this week was deemed newsworthy. |
Compare that to the rest of North America: “The horrific pandemic news from south of the border feels like a looming shadow these days,” she writes. “The numbers coming from the United States are almost ungraspable: 120,000, 140,000, 180,000 new cases a day.” |
Of course, Nova Scotia and Canada’s other Atlantic provinces are geographically fortunate, as Stephanie admits. It’s much easier to create a Covid-less bubble with a small population and relative isolation from the rest of Canada, and, really, the world. |
But there’s something else at play. As Stephanie writes of her neighbors, “We have a sense here in Halifax of what has kept us safe and we know that those things are deeply controversial in the United States: public health care; public media; a social safety net. It’s baffling to watch the epidemic in the United States spin wildly out of control, knowing it could easily be different.” |
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