Parrsboro’s Positive Thinker

*March 2009*

 

It’s been about five years since I last spoke with Doug Robinson.  He had more hair then, and fewer wrinkles.  We’re talking in the council chambers inside the Town Hall.  The room could easily double for a courtroom – it has a pair of raised chairs at one end that look as if a judge should be sitting there with a witness to a crime on his right.  In the center is a large table. 

 

Robinson is sitting at the table, telling me about Parrsboro.  His eyes light up as he talks about the town he’s been the mayor of for 13 years.  They’re still the same bright blue they’ve always been, the same as the waters of the Minas Basin that Parrsboro sits on.  He could, and does, talk for hours about his town with little prompting necessary.  He’s Parrsboro’s biggest fan, and he wasn’t even born there. 

 

He was born and raised on a farm outside of London, Ontario.  He spent 36 years in the navy, reaching the rank of Major before retiring and moving to Parrsboro with his wife, who is from the area.  Looking for something to do during retirement, he ran for town council and eventually became the mayor.  He’s now in the beginning of his fourth term as mayor, and is just as enthusiastic and optimistic as I remember. 

 

The realtors office is up for sale.

Parrsboro is looking older too.  Ten years ago, there were more businesses, and fewer for sale signs. Even Parrsboro’s most recognizable landmark, the old post office, has a for sale sign in front of it. There were more people then too.  According to census records, the population of the town drops a steady eight per cent between each survey.  I would say Parrsboro is in bad shape. 

 

“Things aren’t the best they’ve ever been, no, but it could definitely be worse,” says Robinson.

 

As we sit in the council chambers, Robinson tells me that all any town needs is some positivity.

 

 “Hopelessness will kill a town faster than anything else will, that’s for sure,” says Robinson.

 Doug Robinson is the mayor of Parrsboro

 But as he says this, I have to wonder: can a town survive on optimism alone?

 

I was born in Parrsboro. I spent my entire life there until I moved away to go to university. My older sister has moved and works in another town. My younger sister is in her last year of high school, and in September will be moving to Antigonish, to attend St. FX university.  My mother still lives in town, but commutes 50 km up and back to Amherst, where she works at a bank.   A lot of families in the town have a similar story.  There just aren’t enough jobs.

 

Parrsboro is a small Nova Scotia town situated on the Minas Basin, which is part of the Bay of Fundy.  For two centuries, its location made the settlement, and eventually the town, prosperous.  Its natural harbour made it ideal for shipping and ship building.  At one point, Parrsboro shipped as much tonnage as Halifax did. 

 

One could argue that Parrsboro has been a dying town since 1958.  That was the year of the last shipment of coal from the Springhill mines to Parrsboro.  The town used to be the port that all Springhill coal was shipped from, but when the mines closed, so did the related shipping industry in Parrsboro. 

 

The 1960’s didn’t get any better.  The highway through Nova Scotia had run straight through Parrsboro, making it a popular stop for people travelling through the province.  When the Trans-Canada highway was constructed, it bypassed Parrsboro, reducing most of the traffic to the town. In 1969, a bad fire spread through most of Main Street, burning down a number of businesses, including hotels and even a movie theatre.

 

More recently, large scale shipping out of Parrsboro stopped completely when the Scott lumber mill closed in the early nineties.  My father worked at that mill, and lost his job along with all the other workers when it shut down.  The mill used to move most of it’s product from the harbour on large ships.  I can still remember driving along the coast, watching the last ship leave the bay.  My father thought it was important for me to see that. 

 

The closing of the lumber mill left three main industries in the town: blueberries, metal fabrication, and tourism.  Parrsboro has a lot of blueberry fields around it. Not quite as many as nearby Oxford, which calls itself the blueberry capital of the world – and rightfully so – but still quite a few.  A lot of people in the town spend their summers either scooping berries, or working on the harvesters.  Often, they spend the rest of the year on unemployment.   

 

 

The Parrsboro town hall, located in the middle of town.

 

The biggest year round employer in town now is the metal fabrication plant, where they make heating furnaces. It employs maybe 30 people.

 

Blueberries and the metal fabrication plant have remained fairly stable, but tourism has dropped sharply since 9/11.  American tourists during the summer were a main source of income for most businesses in town, and when they stopped travelling following the terrorist attacks in 2001, a lot of money stopped coming with them. 

 

My summer job while I was at university was at the Fundy Geological Museum.  The curator, Ken Adams, keeps meticulous records of visitation.  He’s told me that Parrsboro has been pretty lucky that we’re closer to the border than the rest of the province.   I don’t have the exact figures, but I know that in order to stay afloat the museum needs at least 21,000 visitors a year, and for the last few years it’s been slightly above that. But visitation has still dropped sharply since 9/11.  

 

Since then, a local restaurant that had been in business for more than 30 years has closed, a small coffee and sandwich shop has closed, the second grocery store has gone out of business,  the second convenience store has opened and closed, then opened and closed again under new owners.  The population shrinks every year, and an even half of the people who do live in town are over the age of 45. 

 

Parrsboro is in decline.  It’s not alone though. Small towns everywhere are experiencing the same thing, often on a much worse scale.   Parrsboro at least still has some tourism.  How many towns in New Brunswick have been devastated by the decline of the forestry industry?

 

So what can Parrsboro, or any other small town, do to stay alive in a time where tourism is down, the economy is failing, businesses are closing, and young people are moving away? Is positivity really going to help? Mayor Robinson thinks so.  

 

“I don’t know that we’re keeping pace with the loss, but we are running short behind it.  People like to come along and say well that place has closed, that place has closed and that place has closed but then they don’t come right along and say well that place has opened, and that place has gotten bigger, and now we’ve got a Tim Horton’s.  That’s what you’ve got to be careful of. And that’s the very thing that will kill a town, is that negative feeling, that we’re not going anywhere. “

 

Robinson says there is a lot to Parrsboro.   Even with everything that has happened, he believes there is hope for the town. 

 

“You have to look under the covers to see the positive attitude, I think. But the people that do see it are people that come to town from away.  Unfortunately we do have this habit of looking at the negative side, as opposed to the positive side, because it could be an awful lot worse.”

 

What Parrsboro needs, Robinson says, is some hard work on the part of the townspeople, and the belief that they can change what is happening. 

 

“A good example of a town that is positive as it can be is Canso. Canso is a town that is in a dire situation, financially and everything like that. The citizens themselves just don’t want to give up. When they took a vote to lose their corporation they voted to keep it, so if you have people like that who say ‘no we’re going to make this work’ you can be pretty sure it’s going to work,” says Robinson.

 

Barbara Berry is my grandmother, and has lived in Parrsboro for most of her life.  She’s in her 70’s now, and is retired.  Until four years ago she owned and operated Berry’s Restaurant, one of four restaurants in town at the time.  The building is now a target of vandalism, with broken windows and spray-paint on the sides of it. Inside the roof is falling in and water damage is ruining the floors.  It can’t even be sold.   She’s understandably a little bitter that a business that was in the family since the 40’s, when it started as a coal and ice delivery service, is reduced to a rapidly degrading building that couldn’t be sold for enough money to pay for the repairs it needs to be sold in the first place.  

 

To say things have changed in the last few years for her would be an understatement.  Berry has seen first hand the effects of a fickle tourism industry, combined with a decline of other wood and coal based industries.

 

“Things have certainly changed around here.  Parrsboro used to be quite a busy spot. I can remember before they moved the highway there were hotels all along Main Street, and they were always full.  But then there were those fires that burnt down almost everything on Main Street, and then the highway was rebuilt further away and since then things have slowed down quite a bit.

 

“It all happened pretty slowly, you almost didn’t notice it. But if you look back now on how the town used to be, you can really see there have been major changes.  I really noticed around the time I had to close the restaurant.  There just wasn’t enough business, no matter what you did, to keep it open.  And now I can’t even find anyone to buy the building and it’s still costing me money,” says Berry.

 

Berry says she has always enjoyed living in Parrsboro, but understands why the younger generations more often than not have to move away to make a living. 

 

“It’s a real shame that the kids have to leave to make anything of themselves. I’m sure plenty of them would prefer to stay in town, but there just isn’t anything here for young people these days.”

 

Josh Paris is one such young person. We grew up together, and have been friends since our parents sent us to the same babysitter at the age of three.  He lived in town until he graduated from community college in Truro, and now he lives in Moncton and works at Kent’s building supplies.  He is just one of many young people from Parrsboro who have moved away to find work. 

 

“There just aren’t any jobs in Parrsboro, or even in [the nearby town of] Amherst.  If you don’t want to live on welfare, or spend your summer scooping blueberries, and the rest of the year on unemployment, then you really have to move away,” says Paris. 

 

Paris doesn’t think it’s as simple as remaining optimistic. 

 

“I like Parrsboro. It’s a nice place, and if I could live there I would. My family is there, I have a lot of friends that still live in the area.  But without jobs it just isn’t possible.  If I were to move home now, I would have nothing to do but mooch off of my parents,” says Paris.

 

 

 Partridge Island, just outside of Parrsboro.

 “Being optimistic is great, but it hasn’t really helped the town so far.  People were optimistic a few years ago, when Headz Games said they were going to build a factory in Parrsboro and employ 1500 people, and look where that got us,” says Paris.

 

 

Paris is referring to the summer of 2006.  Kerry Martens, then CEO of Headz Games, a sports-themed board game manufacturer, arrived in Parrsboro to announce that his company was planning to build a factory in the town to manufacture their product, and expected to have jobs for 1500 people. 

 

The townspeople swallowed it whole, most of them.   People quit their jobs to apply for what they expected to be a starting salary of $12.50/hour – good money in a town like this one.  Over the course of a few months, there was talk of improving the harbour, rebuilding the train tracks into Parrsboro, constructing apartment buildings, you name it.   People thought this was it, that here was their white knight, come to save the town from inevitable demise.

 

Martens even brought in CASCAR drivers to drag race down Main Street, as a promotional stunt.  The drivers remain unpaid for their appearance, and by the end of 2006 nothing more had happened, no construction had begun, and the few people who were earning paycheques hadn’t been paid in weeks.  News broke that the company had declared bankruptcy and Martens had quit just before that happened, sold his stock, and disappeared.  Police investigated, but were unable to find out what happened to him, or the investor money he had taken.  No charges have been laid.

 

“If people in town ever had any hope of things turning around, it all disappeared after Kerry Martens was done with them,” says Paris.  “For the most part, I think people have probably given up on the town being more than what it is now. I have.”

 

But Doug Robinson doesn’t believe that Parrsboro was hurt that badly by the Headz Games affair.

 

“Regardless of how it happened, Parrsboro was on the news, people were talking about Parrsboro and that’s what’s important.  For awhile, it put us back on the map.  I personally, I was called by two of my old friends that I hadn’t seen since my navy days, I had no idea where they had been living. They saw Parrsboro, and me, on the news nationally, and said ‘Hey, that’s Doug!’  The whole process didn’t hurt the town, it certainly was an interesting summer. A few people got work out of it, and I don’t know that anyone got stung too bad.” says Robinson.

 

Robinson says that if anything, it taught the town that it needs to better market itself. 

 

 Parrsboro's most recognizable landmark, the "old post office."

“We really have good potential here.  We’re looking at how we can better market ourselves. And I think one of the things we’ve done incorrectly is we’ve promoted ourselves, but not marketed ourselves. So we’ve got to start marketing us as a place where if you want to do business, then come here to Parrsboro.”

 

But for Robinson, it all comes back to the people of Parrsboro.  He says that it can’t just be up to him to make things better. If people want change, as they seem to want to, then it’s up to them to be willing to work to see things improve.

 

“With the election that happened in the U.S. this year, a big theme was change, as you know.  We also had local elections in Parrsboro last fall, and people seemed to really seize on the idea of change here too.  The entire town council got swapped, and I had a pretty close race myself.  And all these things are good things, that’s what democracy is based on.  But I think that shows that people here want something to happen. They want something to change, but to be honest I’m not sure they’re willing to do what it takes.

 

 

“It’s like I said before, it just takes some positive thinking, and a willingness to do the work to see a change.  If I’m honest, I’m not sure that enough people in Parrsboro think that way. But there are certain people who just keep plugging away and plugging away and sooner or later they’re going to drag everyone else up with them.”

 

 Is he right? I’m not so sure.  I admire Doug’s optimism, and I agree that the town needs more of it.  But I’m afraid I have to agree with my friend Josh. When it comes to saving a dying community, it takes more than positive thinking.  That said, Doug is still as optimistic as ever.  If there was anyone who could bring a town back from the edge with just the force of his will alone, I think this might be the man to do it.

 

 

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