Small-town strong

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This article was published 14/03/2022 (1428 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Despite the challenges of filming during a pandemic Still Standing is, indeed, still standing.

The CBC program — which highlights the trials, tribulations and triumphs of embattled small towns across Canada — is back for a seventh season and features a visit to St. Laurent next week.

Production was grounded for nearly a year and cross-country travel looked a lot different when host Jonny Harris and crew were able to get back on the road. Each Still Standing episode includes conversations with locals and a standup show by Harris, a comedian by trade.

Filming had to take place outdoors or under tents and comedy shows happened with limited capacity. Navigating different restrictions from province-to-province, and even day-to-day, was a fun extra challenge.

“Shooting changed continuously,” Harris says during a Zoom interview. At one point in Nova Scotia, for example, they were cleared to host a maskless indoor show until COVID-19 numbers started rising. “Protocols got reintroduced and we were left swinging. So we had to move one of the shows from the hockey arena at the last minute to the hockey arena parking lot.”

Thankfully, when the crew arrived in Manitoba in early December 2021 it was during a lull between the Delta and Omicron waves.

“The first sort of real, back-to-normal live show we had was in St. Laurent,” Harris said. “It was just nice to be indoors during the wintertime, especially there because… the first couple of days were like -35 C with the windchill.”

St. Laurent is a historically Métis community located on the eastern shore of Lake Manitoba, roughly 80 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. In 2011, the municipality was hit hard by flooding that damaged more than 700 properties and displaced residents for months. Recovery over the last decade has been slow.

During his visit, Harris was struck by the deep connections between people and place. For many, trust in the lake, which has been an important fishing site for generations of Métis families, has been damaged, but not altogether broken.

“Fishing, farming and hunting and trapping, all these things the Métis have done for hundreds and hundreds of years, are still a way of life there,” Harris said. “A couple of the younger people who I spoke to who… did a stint in Winnipeg and then moved back, it was just because that was where they felt home was.

“I think our show is still trying to explore what home means to certain people, but it’s important to be there, even if it’s not the most economically advantageous place to be.”

The resilience of small-town Canada is a running theme throughout the series.

‘There’s all these similarities where people have resilience and pride and a lot of people just don’t want to up and move and find work somewhere else — they want to help their town recover,” Harris said. “And then, on the other side, they’re all so different from each other… every town really has its own story to tell.”

This season of Still Standing also includes stops in Port Stanley, Ont.; Middleton, N.S.; and Hope, B.C., which was devastated by major flooding shortly after filming wrapped. Episode 9 featuring St. Laurent airs on Mar.ch 23 at 8 p.m. on CBC TV. Past episodes can be streamed on CBC Gem.

eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @evawasney