What Nova Scotia Can Learn from the Poorest State in the Union
Let’s talk about Mississippi
Mississippi is the hardest word to spell. Can you spell it?
My grandmother loved this joke sooo much. It loses something in writing, of course, but as a kid, even hearing it a hundred times, it tickled that part of the brain that likes clever things.
Anyone can spell ‘it’, but I still spell Mississippi the way I spell Musquodoboit. Not by sound or rote, but with a little bit of song and rhythm.
I can spell it, and I also think that if we compare Nova Scotia to Mississippi, we can learn a lot. As Ingamar, the main character in my favourite movie of all time, says… you always have to compare. “In fact, I’ve been kind of lucky. I mean compared to others.”
Mississippi
William Faulkner’s 1931 novel Sanctuary is set deep in the Southern Gothic. Fictional Yoknapatawpha County (Faulkner’s stand-in for Lafayette County, MS) is dark, violent, and disturbing. It introduced the world to the deeply damaged Mississippi archetypes that Faulkner would refine over decades—bootleggers, fallen aristocrats, and corrupt sheriffs. This novel shocked readers and critics alike and put Mississippi on the literary map as a place where the past hangs over the present in a painful, sad way.
It’s no wonder it compares to Nova Scotia’s sea-barren coast in my mind’s dark corners.
In books, movies, and media, Mississippi is shorthand for everything broken—poverty, racism, ignorance, sweltering dysfunction. From To Kill a Mockingbird to Mississippi Burning to the endless parade of gritty crime dramas set on sweat-soaked porches, Mississippi rarely catches a break. It’s often painted in broad, tragic strokes: haunted by history, left behind by progress, and populated by characters who speak in drawls and metaphors.
But that image, while evocative, masks a more complicated truth—of resilience, industry, and a hard-earned kind of modernity that doesn’t always fit the narrative of what progress looks like.
This is why I think it’s worth trying to understand. Not just contrasting and comparing, but to help see how — as many readers pointed out in the comments to previous posts about Nova Scotia’s economics — the numbers don’t tell the whole story, and there are things about Nova Scotia that we wouldn’t want to trade for a higher GDP Per Capita rating.
Mississippi is a place so synonymous with poverty that it has practically locked the bottom of every U.S. economic chart. Lowest per capita income. Worst health outcomes. Lagging education. It’s the place that other states—and more prosperous Canadian provinces—thank God they’re not.
Take a roadside tour of Mississippi. Or not. If you’ve ever been to Pictou County, Guysborough, or Digby County, all these “tragic” scenes will be very familiar to you in summer… and might look pretty appealing from January to May.
Mississippi, one of the interviewees says, is not so much a state but a state of mind.
You always have to compare.
And yet.
Mississippi, for all its troubles, manages to do something Nova Scotia doesn’t.
It builds things.
It makes things.
It moves things.
And it grows things. God could have made better dirt than Mississippi Delta dirt, says our video guide from his rocker, but he figured he didn’t need to.
Despite being the poorest state in America, Mississippi exported over $13 billion worth of goods in 2023—everything from farm-raised catfish to cars and warships. That’s right: warships. The state is home to Ingalls Shipbuilding, the largest supplier of ships to the U.S. Navy. Nissan has a massive plant there. So does Toyota. It has a thriving furniture-making industry. It produces oil, poultry, soybeans, and timber.
Mississippi may be poor, but it's productive.
Nova Scotia? We are, as ever, rich in beauty and bureaucracy.
Our exports in 2023? About $6 billion, less than half of Mississippi’s, with a fraction of the manufacturing base, no car factories, and exactly zero destroyers being built on our coasts that were historically, culturally, economically, and geopolitically defined by shipbuilding. Our biggest export is lobster. Which we send to China… er, used to send China… and the USA. Who send us back dollar-store junk and a heavy mix of cars and trucks, farm equipment, consumer electronics, and services from Netflix to Visa. But America’s main import to Nova Scotia is extractive multinational corporations from Walmart to Amazon. What do they take? All the wealth we produce and them some facilitated by massive commercial and consumer credit.
We’re poor and unproductive.
How did we get here?
Nova Scotia, like Mississippi, was born into a plantation economy. Robber baron resource extraction, seasonal work, and a deeply divided society—those were our ancestral gifts. Both places share a legacy of cultural richness, musical brilliance, and a knack for storytelling that outpaces the GDP.
But sometime in the last half-century, the roads diverged.
Mississippi embraced something Nova Scotia rebuffs: industrial development.
Yes, Mississippi is still poor. But it’s not afraid to get its hands dirty. It builds stuff. It welcomes capital. It trains tradespeople. It offers economic development zones with low taxes, cheap land, and business-friendly politics. It's not afraid to make deals. And while it may lack Ivy League polish or Canadian self-regard, it has one thing that Nova Scotia has not seen since confederation: a working economy.
Here, our loudest voices — mostly university-educated Halifax elites or Green Acres country versions of the same — treat every development proposal like a suspected war crime. Build a road? Consultations. Build a house? Public outcry. Build a port? Environmental review. Build a shipyard? Who do you think you are? And after all that, we ask: why aren’t the young people staying?
Bureaucracy comforts the rich and educated more than it helps the poor.
We’ve come to believe that poverty is inevitable and that productivity is optional. We believe in managing decline with virtue. Mississippi, for all its shortcomings, still believes in not ‘growth’ the way we talk about it but meaningful productive work for regular people—even if it’s messy, uneven, and politically incorrect.
They’ll build you a factory.
We’ll build you a committee.
And that’s the quiet truth: Mississippi is building a future. Nova Scotia is building a process.
So what can we learn from the poorest state in America?
What could we do to be as rich as Mississippi?
First, poverty isn't the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the hustle. You don’t need to be rich to be productive. In fact, productivity is often how the poor become rich.
Second, we can’t policy our way out of economic stagnation. We have to build. We need to make more things here—houses, ships, trucks, tools, tech, turbines. Real stuff. Exportable stuff. Mississippi-level stuff.
Third, we need courage. Courage to fail. Courage to get criticized. Courage to do deals with the devil (or at least with entrepreneurs and risk-takers). Courage to act.
Because if Mississippi can launch destroyers while dragging fifty states behind it, then Nova Scotia, perched on a rock in the North Atlantic with all the quiet grace of a Tom Thomson painting, ought to be able to build something more than just another plan to consult the public on maybe someday building a thing.
We can do more than just hope that one day we’ll be as wealthy as Mississippi.
We can let go of the Mississippi state of mind.
We can be grateful for our dirt — also among God’s finest.
If Nova Scotia wants to be as wealthy—or more to the point, as productive—as Mississippi, it doesn’t need to reinvent itself. It just needs to stop doing a few key things wrong. Because while Mississippi gets poorly portrayed in movies and media, it quietly outperforms us in the economy that matters most: the one that builds things, moves things, and pays people to make more of both.
Here are some of the things Nova Scotia could stop doing if it wants to rise from “Canada’s Mississippi” to a high-functioning, high-output economy:
1. Stop over-relying on government as an employer.
Nova Scotia’s biggest employer isn’t Michelin or Irving—it’s the public sector. A third of our workforce is employed by government or government-adjacent institutions. That’s not an economy; that’s a negative feedback loop cycling off the very people we need most in industry and innovation.
Mississippi, by contrast, leans harder on private manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and logistics. Public sector jobs are still there—but they aren’t the main dish.
2. Stop confusing economic activity with economic progress.
Tourism is lovely. So are grants, social programs, and federal transfers. But none of these are engines of productivity. They’re passengers.
Nova Scotia needs to stop polishing the chrome and start fixing the engine. Real economic progress means making things of value and exporting them.
3. Stop strangling housing with red tape.
Want more babies? You want happy workers.
Want happy workers? You need beautiful, affordable homes.
Want homes? You need permits.
Want permits? You need patience, political connections, and a minor miracle.
Mississippi is one of the cheapest places in the U.S. to buy a home because they allow people to build them. Nova Scotia’s housing crisis isn’t just a supply problem—it’s fundamentally a bureaucratic philosophy problem.
4. Stop rejecting industrial investment unless it’s perfect.
In Nova Scotia, if a project isn’t “green,” “inclusive,” “culturally respectful,” “consulted,” and “intersectionally aware,” it gets blocked.
Mississippi asks: Is it legal? Is it safe? Will it employ people?
They’re not aiming for utopia. They’re aiming for jobs.
The trick is to take on more smaller projects and judge them by results. It’s the ridiculously ‘easy way’, ‘quick fix’, ‘this solves everything’ solutions offered by the biggest and worst hucksters and grifters that have caused all our industrial sorrows.
5. Stop measuring success by how little we offend people.
Progress in Nova Scotia is often measured by how few people complained. In Mississippi, it’s measured by how many people got hired.
That difference in mindset is everything.
Nova Scotia doesn’t have to become Mississippi. It just needs to become a place where productivity is encouraged, not buried under process.
Stop saying no so much. Start building yes in small bets.
Local ownership. Lots of wealth creators. A system that gives good ideas and good people a chance. Not in a pick-a-winner government lottery but in a place everyone believes they could get their chance.
Most of all, we need to increase the quantity and quality of the most productive wealth-creating jobs in our economy. This is where the real opportunities. And this is what this whole series of essays has been leading up to.
In the final essay in this series, we’ll explore where Nova Scotia’s wealth really comes from and where it goes to reveal how possible it is to create more prosperity and progress in our economy with fewer changes than we ever imagined possible.
Next Up in THE BEE