by John Demont
As part of his new duties, Vessey was also handed responsibility for the PEI Liquor Commission, an under-achieving profit making centre. It generates approximately $20 million in annual profit, a figure that could be considerably higher with little effort. The problem is every Island government uses the commission as a patronage play land rather than maximizing its potential.
As an example, Commission Chairman Brooke MacMillan floated the idea of opening a liquor store in Cavendish.
It’s a good idea. The majority of tourists travel there. Opening a liquor store in Cavendish is a no-brainer.
But PEI being PEI, we force tourists to travel 7 km to North Rustico to buy booze in an Island liquor store. We call that customer service. Tourists call it annoying. It’s typical. Political considerations always trump common sense.
These are not the words of comfort. These are not the words of a man whose goal is to get along. Who knows what’s good for him. Who knows how his proverbial bread is buttered. If a census taker showed up at the door of his comfortable aubergine bungalow in 2010, then Paul might describe himself as a widowed father of two preteens, a small-town businessman who wants to keep the girls in braces and ensure that the twenty people who work for him have bread on the table and a roof over their head. Technically that would be true. That just wasn’t why I was here.
Winter on Prince Edward Island: I had been better organized in my day. Time just seemed to be of the essence. Magazines and newspapers were dying. Newsrooms merged, slimmed down, sometimes just vanished. Everywhere, on-the-ground reporting—the minutiae and intangible essence of a place and its people—was disappearing. “The news” was being replaced by the continuous loop of the Net, the mediocrity of the blogosphere and the conflicted windbags from the left and right that I heard on satellite radio as I drove over the Confederation Bridge from the New Brunswick mainland. “Real journalism” was something old-timers jawed about sitting by themselves over their soup in the seniors residence.
I know, I know: name an industry that isn’t facing some life-or-death challenge in this digital age. Except this is my business. Work that seemed both worthy and assured when I graduated middle of the pack from journalism school at the University of King’s College in 1981. Halifax back then was a vital enough news town to support two dailies and ensure that an aspirant kid reporter could land three decent job offers without leaving the city limits. Now there’s only a single paper, the one where I work, which is one of the last two independent dailies in the entire country. Every journalism outlet I know of is scrambling, trying this and that, desperate to make sense of it all. In time a new order will undoubtedly take shape. Maybe Wikipedia and citizen journalism will write the first draft of history and become the caretaker of our collective memory. For now, this cannot be a good thing for any democracy. During the summer of 2009 I wrote some speeches for the man who would became premier of Nova Scotia. One morning I was putting the last-minute touches on a statement to be made at campaign headquarters. A couple of decades earlier—when I started covering provincial elections in this province—a campaign press conference would have been attended by some forty journalists who pored over every word the campaigner had to say. This time I hit send and peeked outside my door. Precisely one newspaper correspondent, a single TV reporter and a writer for an online outlet stood there. Après Google, it seemed, the void.
The demise of journalism hasn’t been as stark in Prince Edward Island, where the entire press corps—some private radio stations, the CBC and two dailies, including the Guardian in Charlottetown, which boasts that it “covers the island like the dew”—isn’t much changed over time. One day in 2010 I ran a thumb down the list of Atlantic Journalism Award winners. Of the roughly nine hundred different winners since the awards began in 1981, by my count around fifty came from Prince Edward Island. Paul MacNeill is on the list. He’s won awards as the best community newspaper columnist in the country. He’s also the most honoured editor in the fifty-seven-year history of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, from whom he’s won a raft of awards for his opinion writing over competitors in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
His dad, Jim, the founder of the Eastern Graphic, was also feted by the same organization, and is the only person to win both the Golden Quill for editorial writing and the Eugene Cervi Award for lifetime achievement in the same year. A little research also reveals this interesting fact: in 1987 the Michener Award for excellence in public service journalism in Canada, one of the industry’s highest honours, went to CBC News and Southam News, which between them would have had a couple of million viewers and readers. The runner-up was the Montague Eastern Graphic, with a total readership of 5,989.
As an on-again, off-again reader for a couple of decades, I wasn’t remotely surprised. I have always loved newspapers. But I adore community papers, most of them weeklies, which I devour wherever I travel. Who seriously can resist picking up a copy of the Mile Zero News or the Oktotoks Western Wheel, both from Alberta, the Squamish Chief or the Gabriola Sounder—published in British Columbia—Saskatchewan’s Watrous Manitou, World-Spectator and Prairie Post, the Bugle Observer (Woodstock, New Brunswick) or the Packet (Clarenville, Newfoundland) or the Northern Pen (St. Anthony, Newfoundland). My home province not only has such inspirational-sounding publications as the Light, Vanguard, Queen’s County Advance and Progress Enterprise, but also a community paper called the Casket, along with the Inverness Oran—part of which, wonderfully, is written in Scottish Gaelic.
Reporters from the Globe and Mail and the CBC seldom go to off-the-beaten-track places like Saguenay, Estevan, Petrolia, Kamsack or Hay River unless a mine caves in, a fishing boat goes down or a vacationing cabinet minister strangles his mistress. Sure, these locales might warrant a dateline when politicians hit the campaign trail during elections. Sometimes stories magically appear when the weather turns nice and reporters from bigger places can expense their fly-fishing trip by filing a “colour” piece that fits some editor in Toronto’s preconceptions about the quaint rural life. But let me let you in on a little secret: there’s only one place to find out the truth about existence in those rural areas where most of us once lived: in the pages of a weekly paper like the Eastern Graphic.
Potato farmers, hardware store clerks and gas station owners spread the Eastern Graphic out on the counter and read it front to back. Seniors—pensions dwindling, options narrowing—push back the dishes and, with a snap, unfurl it at the dinner table. Bureaucrats in cramped Charlottetown offices lay down the paper with a sigh, knowing that the phone will soon ring and on the other end will be a politician all lathered up over something Paul has written.
To them a real newspaper printed with real ink by people who really care still matters. Paul—with his independent streak and his insistence on telling their one-of-a-kind stories—gives their ordinary lives meaning. In this Internet-dependent day and age, it is easy to forget that a Google search is not necessarily knowledge. That someone somewhere must draw straight from the source. And that the powers that be must always be held accountable. My question is, a century from now, who will the historians consult? Where will a person turn to learn what these towns, which once made up most of this country, were like? A blog? A tweet? A podcast? Or will they stand in the bowels of a library somewhere, wet an index finger on the tip of a tongue and begin to turn the pages of a paper like the Eastern Graphic? That’s why I was here.
BY 8:30 a.m. Paul MacNeill has been up for three hours. He’s packed Erin, twelve, and Katie, nine, off to school. He’s been to the gym. Now he’s back home. He logs on, checks and sends some emails and peruses his usual websites. Then he throws on his dark Harry Rosen overcoat and yellow, grey and white scarf, locks up the house and gets into his new-looking Ford Explorer, black with a sunroof top. Paul is about six feet two, although the “MacNeill hunch” makes him look shorter, and lean enough, with surprisingly small hands. At forty-three he’s got dark hair that’s gone grey on the sides, alert eyes an
d a neatly trimmed goatee. With the height, the hair and the duds he exudes the kind of regal presence that wouldn’t look out of place in a Starbucks lineup in any metropolitan centre. Except this is Montague—population 1,800—which means that he wheels into the Main Street Tim Hortons for his morning blast of caffeine.
Paul grew up a few blocks from here in the century-old house where his dad, Jim, and mom, Shirley, first began putting out the Eastern Graphic. People always said, “He’s Jim’s son—he’ll work for the paper.” Yet there was never pressure to join the family business. Growing up around ideas and in an environment that engaged the mind just rubbed off. After high school Paul enrolled in the journalism program at a local community college. His first job, working for his dad, was startlingly short-lived. “I’m not really sure of the specific issue,” he recalls. “I’m guessing it had something to do with a younger son being a goof and a father calling him on it. Long story short is we ended up in the dark room yelling at each other. Whether he got ‘You’re fired’ out before I said ‘I quit’ is a matter of historical debate. Suffice to say there was just cause.”
Paul headed to the mainland, where he landed a job at a feisty weekly on the edge of Cape Breton Island, until the lure of better pay and bigger stories drew him to the Truro, Nova Scotia, bureau of Halifax’s Chronicle Herald, the biggest daily in Atlantic Canada. His big break was one of those fluky things that tend to energize journalism careers. The Herald’s assignment desk was short of hands on May 9, 1992, when a fireball shot through the Westray coal mine, trapping twenty-six men underground. Paul grabbed a notebook, jumped in his Honda Accord and headed east. I met him for the first time at the disaster site—a tall, focused guy who seemed to know he finally had a story to ride. He didn’t get home from Pictou County, Nova Scotia, until nine days later. But his coverage of the Westray disaster and its aftermath earned him a National Newspaper Award nomination.
Three years later he was back in Montague, a married father of one, working at the family paper. That was fortuitous: in 1998 Jim suffered a massive coronary while on the ferry from Nova Scotia after getting an honorary university degree. The kind of owner who flew by the seat of his pants, he had no succession plan. The finances were a joke. Paul, however, had cheque-signing authority. He was thirty-one. He may not have known it at the time, but he was already the person he would grow to be.
It is, therefore, worth noting that being editor of the Eastern Graphic holds little sway inside a Tim Hortons where old guys in tractor dealership hats carry on a conversation that has been going for decades and the girls behind the counter call everyone—the cleanly scrubbed folk in their Sunday best and the hungover-looking lads in the coveralls—“dear.” Paul lines up like everyone else for his customary black coffee and bagel with cream cheese. “Hi, Jim,” he says to a local worthy. “Scott” … “ ’Morning, Theresa” … “Helllooo, Smooth Guy” … “Good morning, Martin … Doug.”
People bend his ear. They want to talk about the old photo in the latest edition of the Eastern Graphic. They ask about the cabinet shuffle. Someone wants the real scoop on the identity of the mysterious benefactor funding the area’s new wellness centre. Paul doles out some gossip and info, but it’s a two-way street. There’s a watchfulness—that slight remoteness that all good reporters seem to have—that goes along with the easy Island way. “I don’t know if I’d call the way I work a process as much as a way of life,” he says. “I’m forever scanning the news, talking to folks. I don’t really look for ideas. They just tend to naturally flow based on what I’ve read and who I’ve talked to. Tidbits fall into a column when appropriate. Could be weeks later, months later or more.”
It isn’t like working for the Toronto Star, writing a weeper about a homeless guy and knowing you’ll never see him again in this lifetime. The subjects of Eastern Graphic stories buttonhole Paul at receptions, in restaurants and coffee shops. The people he writes about have children who play with his kids. They’re in the next foursome at the golf club. If Paul writes a column calling for the firing of the deputy minister of tourism, well, he just may run into her on the way to the washroom at the pub. If he sneaks into the visitors’ gallery at the provincial legislature, the premier might just halt proceedings, point toward him and, voice dripping with sarcasm, welcome “the number one fan in the Robert Ghiz fan club.”
Life here can be pretty claustrophobic. For all that, what a sweet little town Montague is. Located at the locus of three rivers and a nice, natural harbour, it was founded as a fishing and commercial centre in the early 1700s when Prince Edward Island was still the French-ruled Île-Saint-Jean. In the early days it suffered its share of odd misfortunes: a plague of field mice; a looting by a British warship on the way to the French stronghold of Louisbourg; near bankruptcy after the kidnapping of one of the town’s commercial leaders by an American privateer.
Now Montague—with its great sunsets, its lazy Saturday-afternoon vibe, its “how-ya-doings” from complete strangers—seems, in many ways, in synch with the longings of the times. It oozes the ease and comfort that come from feeling anchored to a place and its people. It offers wide-open spaces when everyone else lives in cramped high-rises, and freedom from smog, crime and urban blight. There’s also the kind of humanity missing in bigger centres, which comes from living in a place where people and community matter.
The question is plain: for how much longer? Anyone who travels a bit in this country has seen lots of betwixt-and-between places like Montague. Its big industries, shipbuilding and fishing, on the wane. Its homes overwhelmingly populated by long-ago Scottish families. Its population getting older by the minute, as the young and ambitious leave for opportunities elsewhere.
Paul drives across the bridge over the Montague River. Past the old sandstone museum, the tanning salon, the real estate office, the restaurant, the small nest of government offices and the pub. Inside the post office, which is housed in a fifty-six-year-old brick building, he opens mailbox 790, pulls out a handful of envelopes, flyers and brochures and rifles through them. “Any day where there are more cheques than bills is a good day,” he says. Paul gets back into the car. Four blocks east he takes a left, climbs an incline and pulls into the parking lot at the Eastern Graphic offices, which inhabit the second floor of a former fire hall, with the old fire truck bays below to prove it.
PAUL walks through an entrance that is without fanfare: a wooden sign, peeling green paint, a two-by-four seemingly holding the roof in place. Newsrooms, it has been my experience, are what we have instead of asylums. My first one—at a daily in Sydney, Nova Scotia—smelled of vile vending machine coffee and industrial cleaner. A few weeks into the job a colleague in the sports department turned on his tape recorder. Instead of an interview with a journeyman NHL player on summer vacation, we were treated to the unexpected sounds of the reporter and his girlfriend in flagrante. At my next paper in Halifax, typewriters flew out windows, angry desk men punched holes in the wall or, in a Captain Morgan haze, ran from across the room at a booze-up and head-butted the managing editor in the belly.
This newsroom is chilly and about the size of an elementary school classroom. It’s early on a Wednesday, just hours after the week’s paper went to bed. Everything has that post-coital feel common to all newsrooms after a deadline has miraculously again been met. Some twenty hours earlier Heather Moore, the paper’s managing editor, sent the last story zipping electronically to a File Transfer Protocol site for download at an offset printing plant in an industrial park sixty kilometres away. Photographic images of the pages appeared on thin aluminum plates. The plates were mounted to the press. The inked images were transferred to a rubber roller that in turn printed the page on reams of newsprint winding through the press. Then, at some point in the early evening, the January 13, 2010, copy of the Eastern Graphic—“Bell Aliant meets with concerned Eastern Kings residents about high-speed internet,” the banner headline screamed—came rolling off the press and into the waiting delivery vans.
At midnight, back in Montague, commercial flyers were stuffed inside the papers and address labels attached for mailing before drivers threw bundles of Eastern Graphics into the backs of their cars. By now, the paper is on sale at grocery and corner stores. People are fishing coins out of their pockets at gas stations. Tourists on the ferry to the mainland are dipping their French fries in gravy, squinting into the morning light and scanning the front page.
Standing in the newsroom, with only a disembodied voice somewhere breaking the silence, I have no sense of the scramble that putting out a paper necessitates. The howler misspellings caught at the last minute. The mangled syntax discovered after the last story has already headed to the plant. Some years ago, Paul’s father walked into the office just after a bundle of papers arrived and opened one. The front page carried a story about a land developer who had sold some land to the province for a nice profit. Unfortunately, that story occupied the same real estate as a story about a major drug bust in the area. Somehow, the headlines got mixed up. “SELLS LAND FOR MEGADRUGS” blared the sixty-point headline about the businessman.
Which was problematic: the developer, who was convinced that the Eastern Graphic was carrying on a personal vendetta against him, had already threatened the paper with legal action. Jim considered his options for precisely three seconds, then in his Scottish burr croaked, “Get every paper, every jeaselly one of them,” and sprinted on bandy legs for the door.
Paul’s door is adorned with two nameplates: the bottom one reads “Paul MacNeill, publisher,” the title he’s held since May 1998. The top one says “Jim MacNeill, editor and publisher.” “Dad wanted out of Scotland,” Paul says of his father, who was born in Castlebay, on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides. “He was a restive spirit who always wanted to see what was on the other side.” I met the legendary James MacNeill once, in a Halifax coffee shop a night after he had been on a bit of a toot. So I have an inkling of what Paul means. Thicker of beard and body than his son, he told me how, after serving a stint in the Royal Navy, he landed in Toronto, where he met and married Shirley Nicholson, a Prince Edward Island girl. They planned to move to British Columbia to become missionaries, but the priest who recruited them died. Instead, they headed to Charlottetown, where Jim landed a job selling ads for the Summerside Journal Pioneer, half an hour away. Soon he had moved over to news because he was bringing in more stories than the people out there on the beat.