Why I Run Toward Hard Problems

The first hard problem I remember was a pair of skates I didn't have.

I grew up in New Waterford, Nova Scotia, a Cape Breton coal town with a wharf, a fishing business and mines working all around us. The pay from the mine barely covered the mortgage, and there were eight kids to feed. New clothes were never on the list. I wore hand-me-downs until I was nine, and haircuts happened in the kitchen with a pair of shears, not scissors. Come summer, I was back to peach fuzz. Our house, like a lot of houses on our street, also took in kids who needed a place to stay. Some were with us for months, a few for years. The door was always turning.

I had no money, but I was never poor. Nobody tells a child that poverty runs much deeper than money. It's about survival. I learned to walk with purpose and watch everyone and everything, because you never knew what was coming next, and often no grown-up was watching.

Then one day a neighbour dropped off a used pair of skates, and they fit. That was the day I found out I could do whatever I wished, as long as I was willing to work at it. Nobody told me I was too small, too weak or not smart enough. What I got instead was the freedom to use my own mind. My parents had a sixth-grade education, so the one lesson I took from it was to keep an open mind. I was too young to understand what that meant. I only knew my life was in my hands, and I could choose the direction.

My first bike came from the dump. The forks were broken, so it took two trips to make one good wheel, and I built the front end myself, for free. I could see a thing in my head and then make it. I put it down to lucky thoughts. It turned out to be a habit that has followed me all my life. That bike made it into a song I wrote about those years, "I Wore My Brother's Coat to School."

The air was a hard problem too. Coal ash went down on the driveways for grip in winter. Coal smoke hung over the township every fall and winter, and the coke smoke from the steel mill in Sydney drifted in on top of it. I didn't know a home without some kind of illness. I lost a sister who lived beside the tar ponds near the old steel mill. I wouldn't call myself an environmental activist. I didn't study it. I lived it. That is why clean water and healthy lakes are personal to me.

When I was nine, a man adopted me and took me across the border to Westwood, Massachusetts, outside Boston. He became my dad, and he was the happiest man I ever knew. He taught me that a positive attitude is the one thing you can always give yourself, and that the truth is closer than it looks, if you don't let negativity block the view. On Father's Day this year I wrote him a poem, and its last lines say it better than I can:

Where many people see the pain, I look for the path out. I got that from him.

By eleven I had my first lawn business. At twelve, my first senior customer was a neighbour whose health had slipped and who couldn't keep up his property. I cut his grass, took on the small chores and painted his place, and it kept a good man out of a retirement home he didn't want. I got paid, but that wasn't the point. I had watched helping others make my father the happiest man I knew, and I wanted that for myself and, someday, for my children.

When I was thirteen, on a visit home to New Waterford, I was out riding with my brother and a friend when three older local kids, known for bullying, came at us fast. My brother and our friend rode off to get help. I stayed. I knew that day that fear was not going to stop me. They put me in the hospital, and I never stopped swinging.

Then a brown Pacer came across the dry field at what looked like a hundred miles an hour, kicking up a dust cloud like the devil himself had come to referee. It was my older cousin, who had a reputation for standing up to the gangs that ran the township. The three of them scattered. My cousin loaded me and my bike into the car, took me home, and then to the hospital.

Those three never bothered me again. But the fight wasn't the lesson. Standing up was the test. The real battle was fear, and the trouble with fear isn't having it. The trouble is letting it steer.

By fifteen, I was hiring my friends, and I had added house painting and small repairs for seniors and people with disabilities, because they needed it most. At sixteen I came back to Cape Breton, lived with the man who raised me and then with other family, and went back to school. I earned my journeyman papers in cabinetmaking and carpentry. But the work was drying up, and I watched friends drift toward trouble with no way forward. I learned where decisions like that get made, and how little say a small town has in them. The choices that hollowed out our area were made in offices far from our kitchen tables. That was when I understood how dangerous politics can be for someone without an education, and I decided to get one.

In October 1983 I joined the military. I volunteered for every course they would let me take, and I learned when to act on my own and when to work as a team. It taught me that loyalty is the most important thing two people can share. After about two and a half years, an injury ended my service, and I had to pivot. I went back to school for a business degree in Toronto, then went to work building businesses close to home. Through my own holding company I ran The Video Corner, with stores in Perth, Smiths Falls and Brockville, and PPS, a satellite installation and electronics repair company based in Perth, with a second location in Brockville and 70 drop-off centres across Eastern Ontario. I was VP at Telefficiency, a publicly traded tech company that lost its capital almost overnight in the 1999 tech market turmoil. Later I was director of new business at Storm Internet, which was owned at the time by a public company, IDC. When I left, I sold my IDC shares, and I've watched Storm change hands several times since.

Being right and being heard turned out to be two different things. Years ago I told some friends something I was certain of, and I picked the wrong way to say it. The message was sound. The method was not. Some of them pulled away. When I stepped back and let things unfold in their own time, the same people came back with real questions. Nobody changes their mind because they were pushed. They change it when they feel safe. That is why I listen first.

Not every hard problem ends well. I once tried to help a friend who was being worn down by someone close to him. I showed him a way out. I couldn't make him take it, and in the end I had to step back from the friendship. It still bothers me. I've learned I can hold the door open, but I can't walk through it for someone else.

I run at problems, not at people. I keep my distance from anyone who does harm on purpose, and from those who stir things up for attention, because they have never made anyone's life better, mine included. My energy goes where it can actually help.

I've lived in Ontario since 1984 and called the North Frontenac area home since 1992, and I've foraged these woods for more than thirty years. It's the closest place to Cape Breton I ever found without the poverty, and it's so close it's a little scary. In Snow Road, I've spent years helping local seniors stay in their homes, the same thing I started at twelve with one neighbour and a lawn mower. I've written songs most of my life, and after decades here I wrote "Open Skies" as a tribute to this place. A full album of Frontenac songs is coming next year, built with software and production tools rather than a live band, which is how a lot of independent music gets made now. Music isn't decoration. It keeps us connected, and it can put a whole room of people on the same line at the same time.

So when people ask why I run toward hard problems, the short answer is that I learned early they aren't going away. The only thing that changes is whether fear decides what I do next. If you've got a hard one of your own, find me around the township and tell me about it. I'd like to hear it.

Art Hannigan
Candidate for Mayor, Township of North Frontenac

Updated October 1, 2026: An earlier version said I sold Storm Internet. I was Storm's director of new business and sold my shares in its public parent company, IDC. Thanks to the reader who asked.