The East Coast Takes Off

The promise of a private spaceport fuels hope for a Nova Scotia community

- Matthew Halliday

The tiny community of Canso sits at the easternmost tip of Nova Scotia’s mainland — the farthest end of a rocky finger-pointing forty kilometres into the North Atlantic. Its claim to fame is folk singer Stan Rogers, who, after visiting family here during the summers in the 1970s, drew inspiration for songs about hard-luck communities enduring against the odds. And Canso today is about as hard-luck as it gets. In the 1990s, the Atlantic cod fishery — the area’s economic backbone since the seventeenth-century — collapsed, and the town’s population followed, falling from 1,200 to just over 700. According to the latest census, the median age was fifty-four, the median income under $24,000.

In the years since, the promise of economic salvation has appeared every so often in the form of ambitious — though un certain — megaproject proposals. There’s been talk of a gold mine, a liquid– natural gas terminal, and a granite quarry, though none have come to pass. Then, in October 2016, a company called Maritime Launch Services (MLS) appeared in Halifax with an idea that sounded like the longest Hail Mary of them all: Canso, it said, is the ideal site for Canada’s first commercial spaceport.