NEWS

1. RCMP update

“On Wednesday morning in Millbrook, commissioner Mike Duheme and assistant commissioner Dennis Daley provided an update on the RCMP’s progress on recommendations in the Mass Casualty Commission’s final report, which was released in March 2023. That report included 130 recommendations, including many about the police response during and after the tragedy,” Suzanne Rent reports.

The RCMP says it is working on 33 of the 130 recommendations, saying those are the ones under its “direct control.”

Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia RCMP release strategy, update on progress since MCC report.”

Any kind of update is better than none, although it is important to remember the timelines leading up to even this modest progress.

Here is what Stephen Kimber wrote in the Examiner on Jan. 14 of this year:

When the Mass Casualty Commission report was released last March, the RCMP brass seemed woefully unprepared to address its sweeping recommendations. Senior Mounties hadn’t even cracked the report’s executive summary or thumbed through its summary of recommendations.

The RCMP soon promised it would release what it called “an implementation strategy” and a progress report on its actions to date before the end of 2023.

It didn’t.

January 1, 2024.

January 2.

January 3.

January 4.

January 5.

January 6.

January 7.

January 8.

Finally, on January 9, 2024, the RCMP…

… issued a brief statement confirming it “was not in a position to release its action plan and strategy by the end of the calendar year as it had previously intended.”

The statement went on to say the plan would be released as soon as possible, though a deadline was not specified.

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2. Cape Breton doctor reprimanded

Yvette d’Entremont reports on the case of a Cape Breton doctor reprimanded by the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Nova Scotia (CPSNS) over his handling of a patient with lymphoma.

The doctor is Venkata Karthik Rao Puppala, and the complainant is a woman who filed on behalf of her son, a man in his 20s who is autistic. (The reprimand notes that he is a vulnerable patient).

d’Entremont writes:

Following an initial appointment and examination in February 2021, the doctor noted a lump but suspected the man had asthma. Without any past medical history or records to refer to, Puppala gave him an inhaler with instructions to return if it didn’t help. 

When the patient’s condition hadn’t improved, the family friend brought the patient back to Puppala in early May 2021. Noting the patient’s hard lump and lymph node swelling on the side of his neck, Puppala ordered bloodwork and a CT scan, which took place in June 2021. 

Results of that CT scan and bloodwork were received by Puppala. The CT results showed what could be a sign of lymphoma…

The family said they were never told about the June 2021 CT results, despite calling and asking for “almost a year.” 

Prior to the reprimand, Puppala had received four cautions from CPSNS.

Click or tap here to read “Cape Breton doctor reprimanded by provincial College of Physicians and Surgeons.”

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3. SaltWire previously turned down by 158 potential buyers

Tim Bousquet has the latest on the SaltWire story:

In October 2023, SaltWire hired a firm named FIT Consulting to look for potential purchasers of either SaltWire as a company or of SaltWire’s debt, in order to refinance it.

In a process called a Sale and Investment Solicitation Process (SISP), FTI contacted 158 potential buyers, including “Alternative Credit Funds, institutional banks, Private Equity firms across Canadian and U.S. markets, and [undefined] Strategic Parties…

Forty of the 158 potential buyers expressed enough interest to sign non-disclosure agreements so they could receive confidential financial information about SaltWire and have access to a website that held company data. But none of the potential buyers met a Jan. 31, 2024 deadline for presenting letters of intent.

A couple of things jumped out at me while reading this article. First, that some time after Toronto-based KSV was hired to analyze SaltWire’s finances, the SaltWire team simply stopped communicating with them. And second, this paragraph from the report KSV ultimately produced, last March:

 For several months, the Media Companies have been funding their businesses by deferring payment of HST and certain pension and benefit amounts deducted from employees but not remitted on a timely basis. As of January 2, 2024, the Media Companies owed Canada Revenue Agency (“CRA”) approximately $7 million, which has been a primary source of capital from which the Media Companies have funded their businesses. If not for this source of liquidity, the Media Companies would not have had sufficient cash to fund their operations, as their businesses do not generate positive cash flow and they do not have access to an operating line of credit; the Media companies do not have an operating loan facility.

Click or tap here to read “SaltWire was offered to 158 potential buyers; all of them turned it down.”

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4. Bear hunt and Paper Excellence stories out from behind the paywall

We have released some of Joan Baxter’s stories into the wild. These pieces appeared last month. Subscribers get to read them first. For those who don’t subscribe, the stories become available later. Some items are paywalled for a week, while longer investigative pieces generally come out a month later.

Recently out from behind the paywall are Baxter’s story on Paper Excellence terminating pension recall rights for workers, as well as her article on the proposed spring bear hunt, titled “Houston government proposes a spring bear hunt in Nova Scotia, reversing decades of policy. Why? And who is the government responding to?”

In that story, Baxter writes:

The only rationale offered for the new bear season was a quote from DNRR Minister Tory Rushton saying Nova Scotia is the only province in Canada with a black bear population and no spring bear hunt.

Other than that, there was no context at all.

There was no mention that only eight U.S. states allow any kind of spring bear hunt, and only three of those permit bear baiting. Baiting bears is the norm in Nova Scotia.

British Columbia has a spring bear hunt, but it also prohibits bear baiting and the killing of any black bear less than two years old. In Nova Scotia, by far the highest number of bears that are hunted and snared are one and two years old.

Baxter messaged me this morning with a quick update to the bear hunt story. She asked DNRR if people are allowed to bait bears now, even though the hunt has not been approved. Spokesperson Erin Lynch replied:

There aren’t rules about when bear baiting can happen, other than that bait stations must be cleaned up after hunting season… However, we’ve reviewed literature on the topic and found no evidence of increases in human-wildlife interactions resulting from the practice.

Baxter notes that this means “bears coming out of hibernation now can already be baited, even though the hunt has not been approved and the summary of the survey results has not been made public yet.”

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5. Houston asked about proposing carbon tax alternative

At CBC, Michael Gorman reports on Premier Tim Houston’s response to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s challenge that provinces who don’t want to be subject to the federal carbon tax should go ahead and propose alternatives.

Gorman quotes Houston, who disingenuously says, “I don’t know how genuine that offer is.”

From Gorman’s story:

Opposition leaders called on Houston to take the prime minister up on the offer to find an alternative consumer pricing plan for carbon that would have less of an impact on people than the federal carbon tax.

But Liberal Leader Zach Churchill speculated that Houston and his government will not act on the offer because they benefit from the tax in its current form both politically and financially. Houston routinely refers to the federal tax as a way to attack the provincial Liberals.

“It’s been a significant political benefit to [the premier] and he’s charging HST on top of the carbon tax and collecting $32 million a year off the carbon tax,” Churchill told reporters.

It’s kind of hard to argue with Churchill’s reasoning here.

Recall that Nova Scotia did have a cap and trade system in place that would have exempted it from the federal carbon tax. After being elected, the Progressive Conservative government killed that system, then ran ads blaming the federal government for subjecting Nova Scotians to the federal carbon tax, even though it was their own actions that made the carbon tax inevitable here. Then, the provincial government was either taken by surprise or feigned surprise when the feds said they would not extend the deadline to come up with an alternative.

But blaming Trudeau is much more politically expedient and effective.

I read an article (I can’t remember where!) last week, during which attendees at a Pierre Poilievre “Axe the Tax”/”Spike the Hike” rally were asked what the slogans meant to them. Those quoted didn’t talk about the specifics of the carbon tax at all, but about a more general sense that things are not affordable anymore, and that Poilievre cares about that. You can argue the specifics of the tax all you want, but I don’t think that will make any difference.

Houston is not a stupid man. I imagine he recognizes that coming up with a credible alternative is not as politically expedient as railing against the tax.

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6. New exhibit revisits the ‘Sir George Williams affair’

This item in the Events listings, below, caught my eye:

Artist Talk | Protests and Pedagogy: Archival Afterlives and the Sir George Williams University Affair (Thursday, 6pm, Dalhousie Arts Centre, Lower Level, and online) — OmiSoore Dryden talks to Christiana Abraham and Ronald Cumming about their exhibit installed in the Tupper Link.

I’m always interested in how events are perceived at the time and later, and how initial framing persists for years.

Sir George Williams University is one of two very different Montreal universities that merged to become Concordia. Sir George was the grittier downtown school that made a point of catering to what we now call mature students and part-timers. It made a university education possible for many to whom it would have been inaccessible. It offered classes that started in the evening, for instance, some running to 10pm. You could go to them if you had a regular job. Sir George Williams also provided opportunities for people to finish their high school classes.

My father dropped out of high school when fees increased, and his family could no longer afford it. (This was public school; my dad helped lead an unsuccessful strike against the fees). He eventually went to Sir George Williams and finished his high school courses there.

But while Sir George Williams claimed to cater to otherwise marginalized students, the university did not take seriously complaints of racism by Black students, ultimately leading to the occupation of the university’s computer centre, in the campus’s Hall Building.

When I was a student at Concordia, two decades later, this event was casually known as “the computer riot.”

But, as the event listing for the artist talk on the new exhibit at Dal notes:

By revisiting these events over fifty years later, we ask: what do these archival materials say to us now about scientific education and pedagogy? Many of the existing accounts of the “Sir George Williams affair” have focused on violence: labeling the protest as a riot or emphasizing material damages, and have ignored the cost of racism in science practices and education.

A riot is violent. Sometimes it’s unprovoked. It brings to mind images of chaos, rather than students exasperated that their legitimate concerns about injustice are not being heard. We need to interrogate history and how it’s been presented, and I hope to make it out to this exhibit while it’s on. Full details on the artist talk (which is virtual) are in the listings below.

For those interested, there is also a National Film Board documentary, directed by Mina Shum, that takes a deep dive into the affair. You can watch it here.

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NOTICED

Letters to the editor

For years, I have unironically loved the letters page of the Charlottetown Guardian. It often has the feel of a small-town weekly in the 1960s. The kind of publication that would note that Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So enjoyed a three-week trip to France. It is also clear that a number of the letters continue to be sent in by mail. Take this recent exchange.

Here is a letter from March 16, which I will quote in its entirety:

Be careful what you do when you are young. It will come back to haunt you at old age. I know. I am 82 years old.

Kenneth Biso,
Charlottetown, P.E.I.

Six days later, on March 22, the Guardian published this letter in reply:

To Kenneth Biso: you wrote (March 16) that what you do when you are young will come back to haunt you at old age. Do I still have this to look forward to?  I am 85 years old. 

Carl Mathis,
Charlottetown, P.E.I.

What is haunting Kenneth Biso? Also, good for Carl Mathis for living without regrets. Also, note the six days: the reply was mailed.

The most unintentionally hilarious letter I’ve read recently was published March 14, in the Guardian, under the heading, “We need a local voice.” Here it is, in part. All misspellings are in the original:

I have always wondered why The Guardian would highlight a local story like the lady and her dog that was attacked on the trail by another dog that had broken its leash. Now I know more than ever before each Saltwire paper is a ground roots voice of the people.

When I taught high school English, I tried to infuse my students with the latter theme. I used a text “Servant or Master?” which deliniated the power of the media, including newspapers, on us. We just need to look to the south to see how the abuse of social media is enroding the voice for democracy in America. The pushback against this incidious misuse, even locally, has to be the local newspaper because it has professional editing, compared to social media, legitimate in itself, but has only the user as “editor.”

I do not claim to tell Saltwire how to deal with their heavy debt. But I strongly echo Paul MacNeill’s impassioned voice that in some way through print or digital (or a hybrid) medium, Saltwire should preserve as many local papers as it can. We still live in a demorcracy where every voice must be heard. Thank you.

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Government

City

Transportation Standing Committee (Thursday, 1pm, City Hall and online) — agenda

Province

No meetings

On campus

Dalhousie

Artist Talk | Protests and Pedagogy: Archival Afterlives and the Sir George Williams University Affair (Thursday, 6pm, Dalhousie Arts Centre, Lower Level, and online) — OmiSoore Dryden talks to Christiana Abraham and Ronald Cumming about their exhibit installed in the Tupper Link; from the listing:

This exhibition offers a rare glimpse into the archival records related to the 1969 biology students protest at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University). Between January 29 and February 11, 1969, Canada’s largest student occupation took place in the Henry Hall building, when students took over the seventh and ninth floor computer Centre to protest anti-black racism in science education and pedagogy. By revisiting these events over fifty years later, we ask: what do these archival materials say to us now about scientific education and pedagogy? Many of the existing accounts of the “Sir George Williams affair” have focused on violence: labeling the protest as a riot or emphasizing material damages, and have ignored the cost of racism in science practices and education.

This exhibit offers a re-reading of the protest from Black-centric, grounded-decolonial perspectives that take us on a journey to 1969, where representation meets communal memory as the neglected complexities of the protest come into view.

Saint Mary’s

The Merit of Meat: Politics of Vegetarianism among Buddhist Charities in Vietnam Ideology (Thursday, 12pm, MM227) — Sara Swenson will talk; lunch provided

In the harbour

Halifax
06:30: CMA CGM Brazil, container ship (149,314 tonnes), arrives at Pier 41 from Tanger Med, Morocco
15:00: NYK Romulus, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Antwerp, Belgium
15:30: One Ibis, container ship (144,285 tonnes), arrives at Pier 41 from New York 
17:00: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, sails from Fairview Cove for St. John’s
21:00: Atlantic Sky, ro-ro container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Norfolk, Virginia 
22:30: CMA CGM Brazil sails for New York

Cape Breton
13:00: Algoma Value, bulker, sails from Aulds Cove quarry for sea
15:00: Algoma Verity, bulker, arrives at Aulds Cove quarry from Tampa, Florida
16:30: AlgoScotia, oil tanker, sails from Government Wharf (Sydney) for sea

Footnotes

I was out walking my dogs in the woods when I realized I was supposed to be writing today’s Morning File. So that’s why it is shorter than usual. And late. It’s all my fault today.