Start with this from Page 173 of the federal budget Finance Minister Bill Morneau tabled in the House of Commons last week: “Support for Journalism.” No one — certainly not I — would argue “a strong and independent news media” isn’t “crucial to a well-functioning democracy,” or that the news media doesn’t play a “vitally important...
Clearwater wins. Again. Still. Always. And forever
What began as an act of reconciliation with Canada's Indigenous peoples will likely end up as yet another "landmark" in the continuing process of corporate co-opting and colonialism.
Last week, Clearwater Seafoods Inc. released a triumphant joint statement, announcing a 50-year partnership agreement with 14 Nova Scotia and Newfoundland First Nations to benefit together from the $100-million-a-year surf clam fishery. The announcement was full of the usual bluff and bonhomie, including the requisite thank you, thank you, no, really, thank you from a...
What would Andrew do? Jagmeet?
The SNC-Lavalin affair offered a stark choice for our prime minister. We know which door he chose. But what about the opposition leaders. Shouldn't we know what they would have done with the same choice?
There is an unanswered, barely whispered question at the heart-attack centre of the SNC-Lavalin scandal now dumping buckets of freezing rain on Justin Trudeau’s sunny ways/sunny days parade. And that question is this: what would Andrew Scheer or Jagmeet Singh have done differently? In our system of government, opposition parties are expected to oppose, not […]
Bobbleheaded Zach joins the Public Accounts follies
Education Minister Zach Churchill was just filling in on the Public Accounts Committee last week, filling in Liberal-interest spin in the usual please-the-premier way. And so it went. Funny, but...
I’m almost certain Nova Scotia Education Minister Zach Churchill is not really a Bobblehead. He was just playing one in the legislature’s Public Accounts Committee last week. Last week, Churchill joined the Fangless Five and the Insensate Seven as he moved his head up and down in time with his premier on the issue of...
Councillor Lindell Smith: Proud of? Not is. Will be proud…
As he begins the second half of his first term as a city councilor, Lindell Smith reflects on what's been accomplished. And what's still to do before he moves on. He is not, he says again/still, a career politician.
What are you most proud of, I asked District 8 Coun. Lindell Smith? He didn’t answer right away. We are seated at a quiet table in Alteregos, the Gottingen Street café he jokingly refers to as his “satellite office.” In fact, Halifax councillors don’t have offices of their own, so this is as close to...
Alex Richman: R.I.P.
When Alex Richman's son "did not survive" the 1991 crash of US Air Flight 1493, his and his wife's grief turned to frustration, then anger and finally resolve as they set out to make flight safer for all of us.
“Alex was laid to rest beside his son David in Shaarey Zedek Cemetery, Winnipeg on Sunday, February 3rd.” —Obituary, Alex Richman Halifax Chronicle-Herald, February 8, 2019 While researching Flight 111, my book about the 1998 Swissair crash off Nova Scotia, I first stumbled across the story of Alex Richman. At first blush, there wasn’t much...
The Cat can’t come back… to Portland
But the money-sucking ferry service will continue to suck Nova Scotia tax dollars. That's good news for columnists, bad news for taxpayers.
The good news for need-to-always-be-even-more-shocked-and-yet-more-appalled columnists is that the Yarmouth ferry is the gift that keeps on giving. The bad news for taxpayers is that it is also the ferry that keeps on taking. I’ve been writing about the always-sinking-but-never-finally-sunk ferry service between Yarmouth and assorted ports in Maine since at least 2007. “Ferry Bad...
Now that the Fangless Five have become the Insensate Seven, it’s past time for…?
Stephen McNeil’s Liberals have made a mockery of the notion of public accountability. So the opposition parties need to step up and do their job. It is past time.
I have more than once described the Liberal members of the standing committee on public accounts — Vice Chair Gordon Wilson and MLAs Brendan Maguire, Suzanne Lohnes-Croft, Hugh MacKay and Ben Jessome — as the “Fangless Five” for their unfailingly fearless failure to do their job of holding the government to account. Someone on social...
Encounter re-encountered, with lessons for today
In 1970, a dozen outside experts came to Halifax for a week to turn the city 'upside down.' This week, you can see excerpts from 'Encounter on Urban Environment,' the NFB's documentary on that cataclysmic week in Halifax, and discuss whether it's time for another upside-downing.
I must admit I was surprised — and delighted — to Facebook-find a group I’d never heard of that is staging an event this Thursday to sit around, watch excerpts from a 50-year-old NFB documentary and then discuss, with Councillor Lindell Smith, HRM planners, and others, “parallels between the development happening in the 1970s and the...
Health minister promises to fix long-term care, but offers no money to actually fix it
Last week’s expert-panel report into the province’s flat-lining long-term care system offered a clarion call for the government to finally fix our ailing long-term care system. But the panel didn’t provide a clear, costed pathway to do that, in part because the government didn’t provide it with enough useful data about the existing problems and in part because the government wrote the panel’s job description precisely to make it difficult for them to talk about the only issue that will ultimately matter: money.
Health Minister Randy Delorey says his government “will pursue and act upon” the five recommendations and 22 action items in last week’s expert-panel report into the province’s flat-lining long-term care system. The backdrop: in September, a woman with untreated, infected bedsores died in a long-term care facility. She wasn’t the first. And questionable patient deaths...
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