Nova Scotia ramps up efforts to attract newcomers
CBC
Sasha Raz and his husband, Sergei Sarnavsky, knew they wanted to move to Canada when they decided to leave Israel.
Choosing where to live was the harder decision.
"When you're looking at the Canada map, and you're just deciding where you are going, [it is a] huge, vast country," Raz said during an interview from his home in Bridgewater.
The couple moved to Nova Scotia's South Shore in June 2020 in large part because of the connection they made with Tina Hennigar. She had just been hired by the province as one of six navigators to try to attract people who had some interest in moving to Nova Scotia.
At the time, Hennigar worked with Now Lunenburg County, a group that promoted the county as a good place to call home.
"It looked very attractive for us," said Raz. "It looked like it [would] be an extremely successful choice for us."
The information Hennigar provided, and her encouragement to choose the region as their new home, played a big part in the couple's decision to settle down and eventually buy a home in Bridgewater.
"It was the major factor," said Raz. "That played a significant role of arriving at this decision to move to Nova Scotia."
Hennigar's new job with the Nova Scotia Department of Labour, Skills and Immigration is to promote the entire province and to try to match people who are interested in relocating to Nova Scotia to the communities in need of the skills the newcomers possess.
In Raz's case, he's working as a continuing care assistant at Harbour View Haven in Lunenburg.
Continuing care workers and other health workers are in high demand across Nova Scotia, which is why a $2.5-million campaign that specifically targets people with health-related experience or training, and workers with a skilled trade, has just been relaunched.
During a recent legislature committee hearing examining "strategies to attract and retain people to rural areas," the department's deputy minister, Ava Czapalay, singled out Raz in her opening address.
"We want newcomers to thrive, like Sasha Raz, who moved here from Israel in 2020 and chose Bridgewater to be his new home," Czapalay told members of the human resources committee.
She said the Population Growth Marketing Campaign, relaunched in December, would include navigators to reach out to people who responded to the ads.
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