Mount Saint Vincent University grappled this month with a complex web of issues that will feel uncomfortably familiar to academics at plenty of other Canadian universities: how to (belatedly but quickly) increase the numbers of professors from traditionally under-represented Indigenous and other marginalized communities; how to (belatedly but quickly) add academically rigorous course offerings on...
From who me to #metoo
In which Stephen McNeil continues to be Stephen McNeil, dismissing calls to apologize to a young man for the province's own security failure. But there is also some small hint of change in the #metoo air. We take our good news where we find it.
Why am I not surprised? Last Monday, Halifax police dropped all charges against the 19-year-old they’d arrested less than a month before for “unauthorized use of a computer with fraudulent intent.” The fact is this case has been a cock-up from the beginning. Even before the beginning. Perhaps especially before the beginning. Let’s review. On...
Politicians’ snake oil hopes and dreams meet economic, environmental reality
"Many international companies believe we have resources off our coast that we have not tapped into," says Premier Stephen McNeil, "and we want the ability to do so." Forget the reality. And damn the consequences.
You can draw a neat, straight line. Start with the October 5, 1971, front page of the Halifax Chronicle Herald, with its photo of a beaming Premier Gerald Regan holding a tiny vial of oil supposedly sucked to the surface during offshore drilling off Nova Scotia. Above the photo across the entire top of the...
The Liberals’ Fang-less Five ‘pre-empt’ public interest
There's a clear public interest in knowing how well the province is protecting our personal data. So why are Liberal MLAs refusing to let the public accounts committee question witnesses about the latest data breaches?
Really? Of course, really. Last Wednesday, five Liberal MLAs — Gordon Wilson, Suzanne Lohnes-Croft, Ben Jessome, Brendan Maguire, and Hugh MacKay — voted, not with their minds, or their hearts, or their common sense, or even in the interests of the taxpayers who put them there, but in the craven service of their self-interested my-way-or-no-way...
Progress isn’t easy. Sometimes it just isn’t.
You know the way progress traditionally happens in politics: slowly, incrementally. And then you wake up one morning to the latest news from the Ontario provincial election campaign trail... or the White House. Progress, as Barack Obama once said, may not always be a straight line or a smooth path. But is there still a line? A path?
“We need to go forward, but progress isn’t always a straight line or a smooth path.” Barack Obama victory speech, November 7, 2012 How to explain our current political whipsaw? You go to sleep one night knowing 6,000 delegates to this weekend’s federal Liberal party convention will debate progressive resolutions to de-criminalize possession of small...
United Way poverty report: “the system needs to change”
The irony, the report points out, is that most of those who live in poverty are actually employed, but 28 per cent earn well below a living wage. Their poverty — are you listening, Mr. Premier? — costs the province $1.5–2.2-billion a year.
Halifax’s United Way has done it again. Traditionally, the do-good organization has been best known for turning your $5.4 million in yearly giving into a gamut of good grants to an alphabet soup of good-doing local organizations — from the Adsum Association for Women & Children to the Youth Voices of Nova Scotia Society —...
The judge and the complaints: finding the balance between judicial independence and public confidence
As the review committee’s decision demonstrates, we need to know more than can be communicated in a 140-character tweet before leaping off the ledge to firing-offence conclusions. The problem, too often, is that’s all reasonably informed people have to go on.
“In the Matter of Complaints Against Judge Gregory Lenehan, made pursuant to the Provincial Court Act, R.S.N.S. 1989, c. 238 …” If nothing else, last week’s decision by the review committee looking into allegations of “misogynistic reasoning” and “gender bias” by Nova Scotia Provincial Court Justice Gregory Lenehan inadvertently made a compelling argument for cameras...
Peter Munk, Clairtone, and the Nova Scotia disconnection
“Everything I’ve been able to achieve," Peter Munk once said, "is because of Clairtone." So why did his benevolence bypass us?
When Peter Munk died last week at the age of 90, the paeans of praise from the national media were so effusive as to seem over the top. The Globe and Mail’s 3,300-word tribute appeared under the gushing headline: “The Extraordinary Life of a Business Legend, Philanthropist and National Champion.” In The Financial Post, he was...
City council, the developer, and the deal that isn’t quite
APL promises 10 affordable housing units in exchange for being allowed to add five storeys to its Willow Tree project. Who benefits? Hint: not the city...
Halifax City Council can be — even at its best of times — confusing, contradictory, confounding. Last week, council was not, even by its own modest standards, at its best. Councillors were considering again/still/always a proposal from APL, an Armoyan development company, to erect a commercial-residential tower at the corner of Robie Street and Quinpool...
Stephen McNeil, the offshore windfall, and the royal ‘we’
Last week’s seemingly out-of-the-blue government announcements re: the offshore windfall and the bottomless ferry pit share the same dated father-knows-best worldview of political decision-making in which we, the voters, get to cast our ballots for a myriad of unconnected, disconnected reasons once every four years and then shut up for the next four while the government claims to act in our name.
Stephen McNeil says “we” — and by we the premier certainly doesn’t mean thee or me — “had a healthy discussion” about how to spend a could-be $250-million windfall to the Nova Scotia treasury, thanks to a one-time recalculation of offshore royalties, thanks to a one-time arbitration decision that happened to fall in our favour....
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