Overview:
Canadian Affairs has been taking a critical look at five Canadian cities to see how they stack up as Blue Zones. Simply put, Blue Zones are places where people eat simple food, move a lot during their days and live close to loved ones with whom they eat, laugh and perhaps pray.
Philip Brown has just a minute to chat. He’s dashing out the door to Grace Swan’s house to bring the 103-year-old woman a calendar. Mrs. Swan is making plans for next year.
Given that, I figure it won’t take long for the Charlottetown mayor to tell me what the Prince Edward Island capital needs to be more like a Blue Zone. The list can’t be very long. You know the Blue Zones, those five sites around the globe where people routinely live to 100, healthy to their last days.
Methinks Canada’s golden island has cracked the Blue Zone secret, with Charlottetown leading the way.
Canadian Affairs has taken a look at Canadian cities through a Blue Zone lens. This article is the last of the five. The others looked at Vancouver, Airdrie, Alberta, Toronto and Guelph, Ontario, all of which fared well. But I didn’t come across any 103-year-olds in my research. Until now.
“We have a small province, but small is mighty,” Brown tells me. “And I think that’s the collective attitude that we take as not only resident citizens of Charlottetown but as a province as a whole.”
Let’s back up for a minute and look at what a Blue Zone is. Dan Buettner, an explorer on a bicycle and National Geographic Fellow, studied longevity hotspots around the world. He found the original five Blue Zones: Ikaria, Greece; Loma Linda, California; Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; and Nicoya, Costa Rica. Look at that list, vastly different cultures from all around the globe. Yet, the people in each one live long, healthy lives. What could they have in common?
It’s simple. Their environments make it easy to make good decisions about how to live. Blue Zone residents live very naturally, eating simple food they often grow or raise themselves and moving naturally with exercise embedded in their days. They stick close to loved ones with whom they eat and laugh and sometimes pray. They find a purpose to their lives.
For some Blue Zones, such as the 9,000 Seventh Day Adventists who make up the Loma Linda Blue Zone, the simple life is an easy choice because tending to their health is central to their faith. They are surrounded by like-minded people, all choosing the simple way. Together, they embrace a life of vegetarianism and regular exercise and shun smoking and alcohol.
For others, like Sardinia and Ikaria, that life is easy to choose because they are physically isolated and still live a traditional lifestyle of hunting, fishing and harvesting their food.
PEI is not isolated, although it is of course an island. A beautiful island as Brown points out. And Charlottetown aims to make the most of its environment by giving denizens every opportunity to be outdoors. That means movement, natural movement, embedded in everyday life — just like a Blue Zone.
“I can tell you I’m moving naturally. Just in the city of Charlottetown we have over 50 kilometres of active transportation pathways, 400 acres of parkland, 158 parks and open spaces, 47-plus kilometres of trails. And 11 of those kilometres are the Confederation Trail and the old… remnant after the railway was taken out of Prince Edward Island, I believe it’s called the Trans Canada Trail.”
And beaches, oh the beaches. Brown sings the praises of the beaches. Twenty-three supervised beaches, more than 1,100 kilometres of coastline. Like an endless vacation, but it is not a vacation. It is the simple life on PEI.
Lots of gardening goes on here too, just like in some of the original Blue Zones. In the heart of Charlottetown is the Farm Centre’s Legacy Garden, which includes the two-acre Goodwill Garden that supplies naturally-grown produce to local charities and homeless people. Beside that are the 150 community garden plots tended to by locals. As they say at the centre, grow the garden and grow the community.
I’m surprised at the mention of homeless people. Brown said it is a national epidemic; all communities have homeless people, even Charlottetown. Addictions, housing shortages, newcomers to the island, it all adds up to homelessness. But Charlottetown has a plan.
In some areas, the city has simplified the process of creating basement suites and secondary apartments so families can live multi-generationally under one roof or create a space for newcomers to the island.
The plan is reminiscent of a step Singapore took when it decided to adopt many of the ways of Blue Zones. Singaporeans who have their parents live with them get a tax break. Spending time with loved ones is a major pillar to Blue Zone life.
“And that is also helping by increasing that net residential density. Because as, you know, we need more of it to accommodate new Canadians that are coming to this great country to live, work, play and raise a family. So I think we’re doing our part to create that place.”
Speaking of new Canadians, PEI, is not the homogeneous place it once was.
“When I was growing up here in Charlottetown, it was Irish Catholic. It was Scottish Protestants. It was the First Nations and our Acadia population,” says Brown. “Our population today is now Nigerians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshi, Indians again from India, Vietnamese, Bahamian, Jamaicans, Ukrainians. Just at the University of Prince Edward Island, there are over 100 nationalities as part of their foreign student population and at the high school that I went to… there are 57 nationalities.”
No question PEI is a healthy place to live on so many levels. It draws newcomers from around the world and celebrates the locals passing their 100th birthdays. Brown would love to expand on that with me, whether to look back to the city’s creation in 1765 or look forward to the public consultations about a new official plan. But Mrs. Swan awaits, and he must get that calendar to her.
