The federal election had not yet been called when Wade and Ronelda Aylward came to dine at the Fleur-de-Lis restaurant in Port Hawkesbury, N.S., earlier this month. But it was on their minds, as it is for many in the trade-dependent communities of Cape Breton.
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Sitting in the front window of the Fleur-de-Lis diner at lunchtime on a sunny weekday, Wade and Ronelda Aylward are worried. The spring lobster fishery is poised to start soon on the west coast of Cape Breton and Mr. Aylward is counting on the seasonal work transporting live lobsters to a holding pound for a company that then trucks the shellfish south to Boston.
With U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs set to take effect next week, and levies from China on seafood already in place, tension and anxiety over livelihoods in the fishing, forestry and industrial communities are mounting. It’s particularly true here in rural Northern Nova Scotia, where snow crab and lobster fishermen will soon hit the water.
Port Hawkesbury lies in a newly redrawn riding, Cape Breton-Canso-Antigonish, whose predecessors have been represented by Liberals for more than 20 years.
Who is best positioned to protect these jobs is the talk of the town among the lunch crowd dining on corned beef hash and fish cakes at the popular diner along the main commercial strip of the southern Cape Breton town of Port Hawkesbury. “We’re the ones that are going to have to pay the price,” said Mr. Aylward, who also drives tuna to Halifax Stanfield International Airport during other months of the year. “Not the big companies.”
A shipbuilding community in the early- to mid-19th century, today Port Hawkesbury, population 3,200, is a hardscrabble service centre – the place where people from the surrounding Gaelic, Mi’kmaq and French rural coastal communities come for medical appointments, like the Aylwards, or to get their winter tires changed. Jobs are scarce, with most working in the service sector, but also at the nearby Strait of Canso Port, a major throughput for cargo in the province, and Port Hawkesbury Paper, which exports most of its products to the U.S.
Allan MacMaster, formerly Nova Scotia's finance minister, is hoping to break through for the Conservatives in this region.Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press
In recent months, before tariffs became the word of the day, all eyes were on Allan MacMaster, the star local Conservative candidate for the newly redrawn federal riding of Cape Breton-Canso-Antigonish. A former deputy premier and finance minister, he resigned from the provincial cabinet in October, when the Conservatives were sky-high in the polls and Justin Trudeau’s popularity had hit rock bottom.
But then Mr. Trump came into power and ignited a trade war, launching a stunning reversal of fortunes in the polls for Liberals and Conservatives, both nationally and in this corner of Atlantic Canada – which chief data scientist Nik Nanos of Nanos Research identified as one of the region’s bellwether ridings that predicts which party might form government.
This particular riding, a vast swath of forested coastal hamlets and towns in Northern Nova Scotia, includes many small-business owners – something that favours Conservative values. But it also has a well-established Liberal incumbency.
The riding also now includes Antigonish County, which has in the past been prominent Conservative ground held by Peter MacKay, his father Elmer MacKay and Brian Mulroney. And for six months prior to Mr. Trudeau’s resignation, it appeared the riding was poised to swing blue.
But now the polls have see-sawed – showcasing a volatility that at this early stage means people’s opinions are in flux, Mr. Nanos said. “Today’s trend is not tomorrow’s trend,” he said. “A lot of this has to do with Donald Trump, that day to day, people don’t know, whatever Donald Trump says or does, what that might mean for the Canadian economy.”
A lighthouse lawn ornament and buoys attest to the maritime culture of Port Hawkesbury. Fishing and forestry are major employers in this part of Nova Scotia.
What’s most important to people now is which federal leader can protect the country, and their local jobs, from Mr. Trump. It feels as if the stakes have never been higher – something the Aylwards from Mr. MacMaster’s base in Mabou are hyper focused on as the uncertainty of the trade war weighs on them.
“As much as I like Allan, I’m watching to see what this Carney does,” Ronelda Aylward said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know until voting time what I’ll do. I’m just listening.”
She said that while Mr. MacMaster is a “great guy who would do whatever he could for you” as their former legislative representative in Mabou, she dislikes Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his attack-dog tone. (On the weekend, after this story was reported, former Liberal MP for Sydney-Victoria Jaime Battiste, who was elected the first Mi’kmaq MP in 2019, announced that he will run against Mr. MacMaster.)
Like thousands of others who live in this largely blue-collar area of the province, Brenda Chisholm-Beaton, the owner of Fleur-de-Lis and the town’s third-term mayor, is worried about the possibility of a trade war-induced economic downturn – especially in a place where the unemployment rate is persistently higher than in mainland Nova Scotia.
“What keeps people up at night, though, is the uncertainty of the current situation,” she said, taking a break from scooping bowls of seafood chowder at her restaurant on a recent sunny weekday afternoon to chat.
Without those jobs, or if there’s prolonged economic hardship, she notes, no one will be springing for fish cakes and pan-fried haddock at the 22-year-old family business, nestled between a tattoo shop and a bank in a bustling downtown strip mall. It’s a looming possibility that to her feels like the second coming of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Andrea Boyd-White, another diner at the Fleur-de-Lis, is a registered nurse and former U.S. citizen married to Hamilton White, a Canadian veteran.
But one small silver lining – and Ms. Chisholm-Beaton emphasizes it’s really small – is that Mr. Trump’s trade war has incited people to engage in national and international politics like never before.
It’s what prompted Andrea Boyd-White, who lives in Antigonish County but is originally from Massachusetts, to give up her American citizenship and become a Canadian after living and working here as a registered nurse for 40 years.
“I just never had reason to before,” she said. “The only thing I couldn’t do was vote and that was okay because of the way the Canadian system went, it didn’t really matter all that much.”
But after Mr. Trump’s repeated references to Canada as the prospective 51st state and his treatment of Ukraine, she decided enough was enough. “Oh yeah, I’ll never be moving back,” she said.
Over a plate of corned beef hash, her husband, Hamilton White of Antigonish County, an Inuit veteran from Happy Valley-Goose Bay in Labrador, added that Mr. Trump’s persistent threats to Canada’s sovereignty have fuelled him with a new sense of identity.
“I feel more Canadian than ever,” he said, adding that people are putting their patriotism on display in ways they’ve never felt the need to before. “Now we do.”
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