08/13/2026
Love this! We've gotten to know Dawna and Leslie since they came to Annapolis Royal and they are amazing!
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Maclean’s | Dawna Wade | August 4
In 2006, my wife, Leslie, and I moved from Georgia to Waynesville, North Carolina, a small, mostly rural town about 40 minutes from Asheville by car. The surrounding Haywood County has swung Republican in every federal election since 2000, but Waynesville has a sizable number of registered Democrats. As two out, left-wing le****ns, we always felt welcome: we flew a Pride flag on our second-floor balcony, attended a monthly q***r meetup group, wore clothes that revealed our rainbow tattoos and openly called each other “honey.”
Leslie and I briefly considered moving to Canada in 2016, during Trump’s first foray in office. I even went through the motions of securing dual citizenship through my father, who was born in Montreal. But, ignoring the experience of my Eastern European ancestors who didn’t escape the Holocaust, Leslie and I decided to wait and see in the States.
Every day, we’d go, “Oh my God, Trump can’t get any worse,” and then he would. It started in 2017, when his administration reversed the Obama-era bathroom protections for trans people, and it snowballed from there. It wasn’t just what Trump himself was saying or doing, about LGBTQ+ issues or otherwise; it was how that big orange cootie’s rhetoric gave bigoted people permission to be as ugly as they wanted, out in the open. In 2024, during Haywood County’s first sanctioned Pride festival, a crowd of religious folks protested with signs and megaphones, saying we were all damned to hell. After that, we knew it was time to go.
In the days following Trump’s second election that November, Leslie and I began the slow process of packing up our 3,600-square-foot Waynesville home and disengaging from our community. We passed on Pride and let our memberships to our favourite South Carolina theatre lapse. Pretty quickly, we realized we couldn’t afford a house near Montreal, so we eyed further east. We looked at places in Moncton and Fredericton, but nothing grabbed us. Then, later that winter, I posted a query on a page for Nova Scotia residents: “I’m one half of an older, q***r, Jewish, left-wing couple. Is that going to be a problem there?”
That’s where we connected with Jody Allen, a local realtor who helped several LGBTQ+ American families settle in the province last year. We became fast friends and hired him to scout properties for us. He found our perfect house: a centuries-old heritage home in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, previously owned by the family of Daurene Lewis, Canada’s first Black female mayor. I soon received my Canadian passport in the mail, and we filed the necessary paperwork for Leslie’s permanent residency.
Our house in Waynesville finally sold this past May. We left for Canada the next day with our cat and three dogs, towing a utility trailer behind us. If Leslie and I had any doubts about leaving the States, our border-crossing experience in Calais, Maine, made them disappear. The American agents chastised me for forgetting our 14-digit internal transaction number, required to export a vehicle from the U.S. into Canada. I didn’t question the rules, only their rudeness. The Canadian agent refused us entry for the same reason, but kindly explained the process to us; it was like night and day. We spent a couple of nights at a Calais motel before successfully crossing the border.
Like Waynesville, Annapolis Royal (population: 530) is teeny-tiny but vibrant. The downtown strip has a brewery, two bookstores, art galleries and even a natural-foods store—essential for a vegan like me. We’ve eaten at one of the restaurants, Brown Dog Kitchen Too, every week since we arrived. (When people from other countries eat there, they scratch off their portion of the map on the wall. We’re Nova Scotians now, so Leslie and I left North Carolina alone.) The woman who runs the Mad Hatter W**e Bar always asks us how the unpacking is going. I even volunteered to tell the story of our escape from the U.S. at this year’s Pride festival.
Leslie and I may not have had to learn a new language, but in every other way, we’ve completely started over. At 74, that can be exhausting. For instance, I still don’t totally understand the metric system. (What is a kilometre, anyway?) We had to apply for medical coverage, and we still don’t have a family doctor.
I recently saw a picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains on an American friend’s page and, I’ll admit, my heart skipped a beat. I still worry about the q***r friends we left behind in Waynesville, but the U.S. no longer feels like home. Leslie and I know our journey to Canada was the right thing to do. Down south, democracy is dying; here, we can take deep breaths again. Our shoulders have lowered. We’ll raise our rainbow Canada flag at the end of our driveway and not think twice.
