NEWS
1. Plow tracker goes downhill
On February 3, as the snow kept falling and falling and falling, my partner and I were trying to decide whether or not we should pull the plug on our weekend plans — which included going to the city for a concert and a night in a hotel. I was kind of assuming the concert would be cancelled, and our decision thereby made for us. But no, it was going ahead. So the next question was: Are the roads passable?
We can’t see the road from our house, but after going down to take a look at it, it was pretty apparent that either it had not been plowed, or hadn’t been plowed for a while. Now what? Oh! I remembered the plowtracker map. (Why is “plowtracker” one word? I don’t know.) But when I opened my phone, I was surprised the tool seemed, well, I don’t want to say useless, but a lot less useful than it had been in the past. I chalked it up to it not being mobile-friendly, like so many municipal and provincial government resources. (Hello transit schedule pdfs.)
It turns out I was far from the only one to wonder what the heck was up with the plowtracker.
Yvette d’Entremont reports on the state of the tracker, speaking to several rural residents who tell her “a recent upgrade has resulted in a less useful tool.”
d’Entremont writes:
Meaghers Grant resident Joe Pay has used the plow tracker for the last three years. While he no longer works as a power engineer, when he did, he depended on the map to determine in advance whether or not he could get to work…
Pay said he’d like to see the plow tracker return to showing the specific types of equipment that are in operation. He also wants it to go back to showing the location of all equipment in real time while the vehicles are in motion.
“Even last year it was showing not only the type of equipment, but the direction of travel so you could make at least an educated guess as to when to expect to be cleared out,” Pay said.
He believes all pieces of equipment, including those operated by contractors, should be equipped with tracking devices. He’d also like to see the site regularly updated to show exactly where equipment is located, including the direction of travel in real time.
“Although the site is working it’s still painfully slow to load and the equipment that is showing will disappear,” Pay said.
Click or tap here to read “Rural Nova Scotia residents say province’s plow tracker tool gone downhill.”
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2. Teacher shortage
Nova Scotia Teachers Union (NSTU) president Ryan Lutes tells Yvette d’Entremont he was “extremely surprised” by the province’s announcement that it will lower education requirements for new teachers.
From the story:
Lutes said the best way to tackle the problem is by creating and implementing a comprehensive teacher recruitment and retention strategy. As reported here, in late November the NSTU described the ongoing teacher shortage as a crisis that has reached a “tipping point.”
In order to address the problem, Lutes said the province needs to focus on teacher retention, not just recruitment.
“When I’m trying to get a barometer of how the system is doing, I always look to the teachers in front of the room. And when they reach out to me or I reach out to them, oftentimes they’re saying the career right now is unsustainable,” Lutes said.
Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia Teachers Union says province ignoring root causes of teacher shortage crisis.”
I have written before that one of the things I appreciate about Examiner readers is the commentary you provide on the stories. The comments on the last few articles about the teacher shortage have been a great example of this: thoughtful, interesting, engaging with some of the many possible ways to deal with the issues involved.
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3. Cities and climate change
“David Miller thinks cities like Halifax can deal with both the housing and climate crises at once. But they’d better hurry up,” Jennifer Henderson reports.
Miller is a former mayor of Toronto, who is now a director with the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. He was speaking in Halifax last week, in connection with work done by the Dalhousie Climate Action Research Transportation network (CART) team.
Henderson writes:
A bird’s-eye view of HRM housing developments would reveal a degree of outward expansion that most Haligonians can’t imagine.
Instead of continuing to push and pave into the wilderness, Miller suggested the city and/or province build public housing (with rent geared to income) and co-op housing situated near and around transit hubs. Since people wouldn’t need to own a car to get to work or to shop, these actions would improve equity while also reducing carbon pollution.
The land regained in downtown Halifax by ripping down the tangle of overpasses that had been the Cogswell Street Interchange since 1970 could have been a prime candidate for centrally located housing with good public transportation links.
Instead, the city will develop a series of green spaces and pedestrian walkways that will connect neighbourhoods, which isn’t a bad consolation prize.
Miller says every municipality, regardless of its size, can assist slowing down the rate of climate change by considering how they manage their waste, generate electricity, heat/cool their buildings, and manage their transportation systems.
It’s an interesting story that offers specific examples from other cities around the world (Shenzhen, London) along with Nova Scotia communities (Berwick, Bridgewater) working to fight climate change.
Click or tap here to read “Former Toronto Mayor David Miller: to address climate change, Halifax must address housing and transportation together.”
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4. Tents in public parks
Taryn Grant reports for CBC that some encampment residents are packing up and leaving in advance of the February 26 eviction deadline.
Grant writes:
Matthew Grant, who volunteers at Grand Parade, cleared out and deconstructed one of the red fishing huts in the public square on Thursday after the couple living in it left for an apartment.
“It’s a wonderful thing,” he said. “It makes me happy.”…
By Sunday, a total of four red tents at Grand Parade had been taken down.
Those supporting people living at the ballfield in Sackville say they have started moving out of there too.
On Mastodon, Andrew Wright shared the above photo of a sign saying Victoria Park is closed to the public. When is a public park not a public park? When the public is not allowed to use it, I guess. See Meagher Park, aka People’s Park in the West End. Sure, it will eventually reopen, after months and months and months of being surrounded by a chain link fence.
Obviously, living in tents in parks is not ideal. But it strikes me that much of the discourse around why these encampments are dangerous could just as easily apply to countless other places: people are overdosing, a propane tank exploded. Then there are the baseless accusations on social media that the camps are full of pedophiles, or that the people helping those in the encampments are somehow just doing it for the money. (I think there are easier ways to make money.)
A Nova Scotia woman living in a Sydney seniors’ complex died this week after being injured in an explosion caused by a damaged propane line. More than 30,000 Canadians have died of opioid-related overdoses since 2016. Two dozen people in Belleville, Ontario overdosed in just 48 hours last week.
We celebrate people who do things just for the money all the time in our culture, and we take out our fears and frustrations on the most powerless, by acting as though they are somehow entitled and getting something for nothing.
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5. Colon cancer screening
I am not sure what the impetus is for this CBC story urging Nova Scotians to complete the colon cancer screening tests they get in the mail. But, knowing people whose lives have likely been saved by these tests, I’ll share the message too.
Back in 2017, I wrote a magazine article about the colon cancer screening program. At that time, the province was mailing out 175,000 kits a year, and only 30% of the recipients were completing them and sending them back. I quoted a colon cancer survivor in the story who had previously put off doing the test because, “The whole thing is gross, let’s face it.” But you do it, it’s over with, and then you don’t have to worry about it for another couple of years.
One thing that strikes me about test instructions and other Nova Scotia Health information sheets is that they are well-written, in clear language. For instance, they use the word poop: “Use the kit to collect a small sample of stool (poop).” Nice, clear, easy to understand.
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6. ArriveCan
I haven’t had time to read the full thing, but I’m looking at the Auditor General of Canada’s report on the ArriveCAN app, which cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of $60 million.
There is a lot in the report, and here are a few interesting things that caught my eye:
- “We estimated that the average per diem cost for the ArriveCAN external resources was $1,090, whereas the average daily cost for equivalent IT positions in the Government of Canada was $675.” On the one hand, so much for the crowd who think outsourcing is always more efficient and cost-effective. On the other hand, this is in part because Canada Border Services insisted on using more expensive senior people for jobs that did not require their level of expertise.
- Non-competitive contracts and bypassing normal procurement regulations (ie, cutting red tape) led to opaque decision-making (no paper trail to indicate why certain vendors were selected) and the potential for corruption (“We found situations where agency employees who were involved in the ArriveCAN project were invited by vendors to dinners and other activities. The agency’s Code of Conduct requires employees to advise their supervisors of all offers of gifts or hospitality regardless of whether the offer or gift was accepted. We found no evidence that these employees informed their supervisors as required.”)
- If you used the ArriveCan app, it will not surprise you to find that testing was not adequate. In a two and a half year period, 177 versions of ArriveCan were released, and the auditors “found little documentation showing that the Canada Border Services Agency completed testing prior to releasing new versions of ArriveCAN.”
The best first-person story ArriveCAN story remains this one, by Ethan Lycan-Lang for the Examiner, in 2022:
ArriveCAN is just an app. All the information we would have uploaded to it, we had right there at the ready. Yet we almost emptied our bank accounts (and then some) and spent two weeks in quarantine — longer than is necessary if you actually contract COVID, because we didn’t give that information to the Canadian Borders Service Agency (CBSA) through an app.
For those who haven’t used ArriveCAN, let me walk you through it.
You first upload your passport information — we had our passports on us. Then upload proof of vaccination. We had that on us, too. Then answer a few quick questions. You know, questions. Things that can be asked by a person. Like say, I don’t know, a border guard. Maybe they’re too time-consuming to be asked in person, you might be thinking. Judge for yourself:
- What’s the reason for your entering Canada?
- What’s the address where you’ll be staying?
- Did you travel outside of Canada and the USA in the last two weeks?
- Do you have any COVID symptoms?
That’s it. We had all the information ready for this guy and he nearly bankrupted us on a Jeopardy! technicality. All information must be given in the form of an app.
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VIEWS
More accountability, less blame
I listened to the New York Times Daily podcast yesterday. I used to listen, well, daily, but there is only so much I can take of a) the New York Times and b) American politics. So now I limit my consumption to once or maybe twice a week.
Yesterday’s episode was called Why Boeing’s Top Airplanes Keep Failing, and the guest was reporter Sydney Ember. Early in the podcast, after describing the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 failure, in which a door plug blew off the plane, Ember says:
The question immediately is who is to blame? Is it Alaska Airlines? Is it Boeing? Is it Spirit AeroSystems, who built the body of the plane and then shipped it to Boeing’s factory?… Is it the FAA and federal regulators? No one really knows in the immediate aftermath.
A few minutes later, host Sabrina Tavernise says:
At this point, a lot of fingers are pointing at Boeing, but at this point we still don’t know who is responsible for this door blowout.
Ember replies:
That’s right. We still don’t know who’s at fault.
Ember details what happened, but after saying the National Transporation Safety Board has been carefully in not saying who is responsible, then adds that the fact the door was pulled out and then replaced without the bolts “pins the blame on Boeing.”
The Times has not yet released a transcript of the episode. I heard “pins the blame” but it’s possible Ember said “puts the blame” or something similar.
I have mentioned the book There Are No Accidents, by Jessie Singer, in a few Morning Files, but I finally finished reading it over the weekend, so it was on my mind when I listened to The Daily.
One of the key points Singer tries to drive home is that we are desperate to assign personal blame when terrible things happen, but we must resist that urge. That’s not to say Boeing or other corporate actors should not be held responsible when terrible things that could have been prevented happen. On the contrary, we should hold them to account, we should build regulatory systems that prevent “accidents” from happening, and we should refuse to accept that preventable accidental death is just a normal thing and shrug, well, what can be done about it. In fact, Singer uses the example of airlines to show that we are much more responsive when hundreds of people die in a crash, than when thousands die individually in crashes every day of the week.
Still, it was striking just how much of the conversation on the Daily and elsewhere was about blame. The most important question is who is to blame. And the “who” is one of the keys here, because when we find the error, the one thing that was done wrong, the person who forgot to put in the bolts and the inspector who failed to notice, then we can say it was just human error and we don’t have to interrogate deeper questions like why shareholder profits might matter more than safety.
There is a difference between accountability and blame. We look for the latter, but fall down on the former.
Singer devotes a whole chapter to blame. She writes:
Blame is how we control the terror stirred up by the seeming randomness of accidental tragedy. There is nothing productive in this process… Laying blame makes a terrifying, unfamiliar event less frightening and more familiar. Blame produces not just a sense of relief but also a sense of power. When we blame someone for an accident, we condense all the world’s complexity… to one kernel of cause: a single villain.
I am sorry to say, I do not know my aircraft. I hope that’s not actually an Airbus plane or something. If it is blame me. Or blame the photographer for not adequately identifying it. Or blame the stock photo company for not insisting on more accurate captions. Or…
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NOTICED
Mapping the historic movements of Black Canadians
The Conversation has an interesting article by three researchers at the University of Western Ontario who are part of the Black Londoners of Canada project.
The article looks at what we can learn by mapping the movements of Black Canadians, and how that reveals “connections within communities and to other places.” And it’s got a Halifax connection.
The authors write:
Aurelia Jones was a prominent member of the Black community in mid-19th century London, Ontario, Canada, and the spouse of Abel Bedford Jones, a Black entrepreneur and religious and political leader.
After A.B.’s death, Aurelia moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The archival traces of her life tell the story of a migration from one Black community with British and American affiliations to another with strong Caribbean influences.
The story what it can of Aurelia Jones’s life:
Following A. B.’s death around 1860, there are few records of Aurelia living in London.
Aurelia’s case shows how peripheral Black women are in the archive. In the words of African American Studies professor Ula Taylor, “the clues to their experiences are limited, heavily tainted, or virtually nonexistent.” A public record of Aurelia exists because of her husband: after she inherited his property, she appears as “Mrs. A.B. Jones” in tax records.
However, Aurelia reappears in Hutchinson’s Nova Scotia Directory of 1867 and in the 1881 Canada census for Nova Scotia, living in Halifax. There, Aurelia lived on Creighton Street with a Black couple from Antigua and Jamaica…
As researchers, we explore circumstances behind Aurelia’s migration to Halifax.
What potential factors led her to leave London? How did she meet her Halifax roommates? Had she established a social network with Black peoples from inside and outside Canada? These questions have remained unanswered because of her erasure and the lack of historical documentation on the lives of Black Canadian women from the 19th century.
Tracing out these intersections of Black communities leads us to visualize history in a way that acknowledges, in the words of Africana and American studies professor Rinaldo Walcott, how Black people “redraw and rechart the places/spaces that they occupy.”
The piece links us to other digital projects, including A Black People’s History of Canada, headed by Afua Cooper. I look forward to spending more time with these projects.
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Government
City
Today
Budget Committee (Tuesday, 9:30am, City Hall and online) — agenda
Special Regional Council (Tuesday, 6pm, City Hall and online) — agenda
Tomorrow
Budget Committee (Wednesday, 9:30am, City Hall and online) — agenda
Province
No meetings
On campus
Dalhousie
Today
Storytelling as Transformative Pedagogy (Tuesday, 1pm, online) — with Rachelle McKay and Janet Pothier; registration required.
Tomorrow
Noon Hour Recital: Voice (Wednesday, 11:45am, Strug Concert Hall)
Anti-oppressive practice in medicine (Wednesday, 7pm, online) — Gaynor Watson-Creed will talk.
Saint Mary’s
Marx and Global Imperialisms: Coloniality, Eurocentrism, Decolonization (Tuesday, 7-8:30 pm, Loyola 171) — Terrell Carver, from the University of Bristol will talk.
In the harbour
Halifax
07:00: Morning Pilot, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from Southampton, England
10:00: Sheila Ann, bulker, sails from Gold Bond for sea
10:30: One Grus, container ship (146,694 tonnes), arrives at Pier 41 from Colombo, Sri Lanka
11:00: Sonderborg, container ship, sails from Pier 42 for Palm Beach, Florida
11:00: Eagle II, container ship, arrives at Pier 27 from Mariel, Cuba
12:00: Acadian, oil tanker, sails from Irving Oil for sea
14:00: CB Pacific, oil tanker, arrives at Irving Oil from New York
15:30: Morning Pilot moves to Pier 9
15:30: Atlantic Sky, ro-ro container ship, sails from Fairview Cove for Baltimore
18:30: One Grus sails for New York
19:30: Morning Pilot sails for sea
Cape Breton
16:30: Indigo Sun, oil tanker, sails from EverWind for sea
Footnotes
The good: It was delightful to have the opportunity meet some of you at the Examiner party on the weekend. I wish I could have stayed longer and met more of you.
The bad: More shovelling on the way.
The ugly: The Parks Canada camping reservation system. One of the worst I have ever seen or used.
All the nonsense and waste surrounding ArriveCAN should make me even more furious, but honestly, as someone who had to use it, I just feel vindicated
Regarding ArriveCan – as a CBC article notes, successive governments have both shrunk the public sector and under-invested in public service jobs, a short-term gain that means more work must be outsourced. As noted here, that ends up being more expensive, and also lines the pockets of a few private companies. Almost like those who promote the cliche of lazy government workers have an ulterior motive. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/arrivecan-trudeau-poilievre-pandemic-1.7113057
Re: Colon cancer screening
My daughter is at high risk of colon cancer because of family history. She is supposed to have a colonoscopy every year. She waited over two years before she went to the US and had it done within days. Almost a year after that, she finally got in to see her specialist who berated her for going to the US instead of apologizing for putting her life at risk. IMHO, the reason the once venerated Canadian health care has become worse than many 3rd world countries is because “they” want a privatized American style health care system. So, by not doing what should be done to fix it, they can say, “See, socialist medicine doesn’t work. Let’s sell out to the corporations.”
I visited a for-profit hospital in the United States, explained my situation (no insurance). The whole affair, which included some bureaucratic stuff like getting my height and weight took less than 90 minutes and cost about $180 Canadian, including the medication they gave me, which worked.
A Nova Scotian making 50k a year pays 370 dollars a month in provincial taxes, about half of which go to healthcare. That is 66 thousand dollars over a 30 year working life. My “adult career” started a decade ago. I am still youngish, but so far I have paid north of $25,000 dollars (half of my provincial taxes for the decade) for the following:
1 round of bloodwork (five tests)
2 incidents with about 15 stitches each
I estimate the cost of the services actually received, based on what a vet would charge, to be less than 1500 dollars. Humans are easier to do medicine on than animals, because we can explain our symptoms and cooperate during unpleasant procedures, so it should be cheaper to do simple procedures like stiches to us. Invested at 4%, the taxes I paid just towards healthcare alone would be worth $30,000 today.
And sure, I’m fortunate that I’ve been healthy, and if I had needed major interventions I might have only paid $25,000 for $75,000 worth of care, but that is what insurance is for. And of course there needs to be a safety net so that everyone can get healthcare.
People will say that I will get that money back in the form of “free” care when I am older, but with wait times what they are that is looking less likely. Cancer can go from treatable to untreatable very quickly, in particular.
Paying taxes for healthcare is essentially insurance, using the largest possible risk pool and the most efficient operation, lowering health care costs for everyone.
Younger and healthier people love ‘pay-as-you-go’ healthcare because it seems cheap compared to health insurance or taxes. And any insurance seems like a poor gamble until the day you suddenly need it. Of course, some people never need it and end up paying in more than they receive in healthcare services. That is the price you pay for never needing to fear a costly surgery (or not being able to afford one). It’s not a bad deal.
I’m among the lucky people who have probably received far more in healthcare services than I have paid in taxes, but I’d much rather be in the position of benefiting less from the healthcare system.
Sure, and I have no problem in principle with a socialized system – I like the idea of rich and poor getting the same level of care, even if in practice the rich just go abroad.
However, the downside of a socialized system is the single point of failure for everyone who can’t afford to cross the border for care. I would much rather see the government stick to carefully regulating a genuinely free market, while using taxation, ideally more focused on land value and excess wealth than income, to provide a social safety net.
We need more doctors – the lack of seats available at universities is a travesty. I know an incredibly smart and hardworking person who couldn’t get into med school despite completely devoting himself to it from when he was a teenager. Where is the justice here? Who is stopping the schools from adding more seats, even as the program we were in together a decade ago has expanded by 250% since we started university?
Hi, Nick. I had to think several times about commenting on your reply, but I decided to do so. Oh, and this is not an attack in any way. If I read your comment correctly, you are saying we have a “genuinely free market”. I would say that we patently do not have this unicorn. As Noam Chomsky and others have highlighted in their writings for decades…and longer…, “the existing free market system” would require many changes to be a genuine “free market”, including the elimination of all government support in terms of subsidies, grants, and loans.
We’re past the reply limit, so this in response to Ken Kohler’s comment.
No, I am not saying we have a genuinely free market – we have the opposite in Canada. Healthcare and other key services are state run, and every other service of note is a monopoly or oligopoly. I see our government as slow, inefficient and terrified of new ideas.
We actually have a relatively free market for healthcare in Canada, for our pets.
Philip Moscovitch, Did you get to the concert or not? 😉
We did not.
When I read this my first reaction was the report cost $60 million. I know that is not the case, the app cost $60 million. I doubt the grammar is wrong.
“I haven’t had time to read the full thing, but I’m looking at the Auditor General of Canada’s report on the ArriveCAN app, which cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of $60 million.”