Hard to believe, given recent blazing temperatures, that two weeks ago I was standing ankle-deep in nature’s cruel final paroxysm of winter—a freak blizzard that in one hour piled half a foot of snow onto a campground in Sylvan Lake where I was working as a cook at a 10-day meditation course. Just goes to show that even in the most serene rustication, reality has a way of coming and finding you. 

Contemporary propaganda has it that alcohol and other drugs (pot, TV, shopping) are nothing more than escapes from reality—as though reality were intrinsically more noble—but I’m here to tell you that coming home from two weeks of cultivating inner stillness to news about Myanmar’s cyclone (and its thoroughly despicable government’s resistance to international aid), China’s earthquake, and Austrian monster-dad Josef Fritzl left me feeling like reality could go fuck itself.

The logical solution upon glimpsing reality was to run screaming in the other direction, into the welcoming arms of the city of my birth: beautiful, intermittently rainy Halifax, Nova Scotia. Bereft as it is of professional sports franchises, you may not have much reason to think on Halifax. 

Perhaps you’re aware of it through its two great historical explosions: the first the result of a collision between French and Norwegian munitions ships in its harbour in 1917; the second a pop-music confluence created mostly by young men with guitars who looked like they had just ransacked the boys’ department of Sears in 1979. (The former took the lives of more than 2,000 people and reduced much of Halifax’s harbourfront to cinders and shattered glass; the latter led to me paying good money to watch Sloan—at the height of their popularity—stop their sold-out show at The Bronx in order to self-indulgently air-guitar along with Duran Duran’s Planet Earth. Fortunately no lives were lost that night in the Edmonton club, but a lot of Sloan albums turned up shortly thereafter in the alt-rock bins of the city’s finer second-hand music shops.)

Humble Halifax, however, with its population topping out just under 400,000, feels more metropolitan in some ways than our own big, bluff boomtown. With more than 250 years of history behind it, Nova Scotia’s capital may have a few lessons to offer a big, bluff boomtown like ours when it comes to quality of life. These observations are based on a superficial, somewhat muddled view of what the town has to offer, but I pass them along in the interest of greater east-west understanding:

(1) Have a walkable downtown. 

Though Edmonton has recently made great strides with the opening of its first grocery store on Jasper Avenue in decades, we still have a long way to go toward making downtown a desirable place to spent the non-business hours. A ritzy harbourfront might have something to do with it, but Halifax’s city centre actually seems as populous at night as it does during the day. Gentrified though it may be in some places, Halifax’s downtown doesn’t merely resemble a shopping mall turned inside-out, and its grid of narrow, low-capacity roads seems to encourage people to walk along, rather than drive past, its colourful storefronts. 

(2) Have a sense of history. 

Halifax trumps our fair city by having a history that stretches back to the 18th century, but, more importantly, Halifax manages to integrate historical and contemporary development. There’s some beautiful architecture alongside the gleaming glass towers and the feeling that they don’t just use up one neighbourhood, turn all the heritage buildings into tourist attractions for old people, and move on to the next tract of land.

(3) Have entirely ornamental public amenities. 

There’s no cycling allowed in Halifax’s gorgeous public gardens, no jogging within its wrought-iron-fenced, duck-and-tulip-intensive sprawl, no walking or lying on its bounding emerald lawns. Perhaps city planners realized that if they ripped out all the trees and paved the park (à la Churchill Square or Beaver Hills Park), skateboarders and stunt BMXers would be sure to follow.

(4) Admit you were wrong. 

In the late 1960s, Halifax evicted the residents of Africville, a predominantly black community that had stood for more than 150 years, to make way for freeway development and a big bridge. Recently the provincial NDP and Mayor Pete Kelly have made some gestures toward apology and restitution for the displaced community and the history that was effaced by its dissolution. Can anyone think of a disenfranchised cultural group in Edmonton that might benefit from official recognition of their importance to local history?

(5) For the love of God, someone open a decent brewpub. 

The Granite Brewery, a quiet, atmospherically dank little watering hole operated by a family in downtown Halifax, offers six varieties of British-style ale, unfiltered and cask-conditioned, brewed right on the premises. Certainly a city with Edmonton’s discretionary wealth and pitiless thirst for suds could sustain a similar enterprise. Please?