NEWS

1. The offensive RCMP’s offensive

“As a longtime Halifax Mooseheads fan, I’ve spent some time this spring inside a downtown arena named after a bank watching our Quebec Major Junior Hockey League team compete for the Gilles Courteau trophy as their league’s best,” writes Stephen Kimber:

The games on the ice have been excellent, but I often find myself drawn to what’s happening above ice level on the giant, fancy-dancy, four-sided video scoreboard. 

There, you can not only check out the latest score and time remaining in the period but also — for reasons that are not exactly clear to me — watch the same live action happening on the ice before you on the screen above you, see instant replays, scan that night’s collection of smiling fans sharing their Instagram photos using the hashtag #gomoosego, and — inevitably — endure the many and various ads that scroll past or fill the big screen.

The most intriguingly stone-cold, tone-deaf advertisement by far is the one for — wait for it — the Nova Scotia RCMP. Its commercial offers a series of reassuring vignettes depicting Mounties doing good, being helpful, serving and protecting… and blah blah blah.

Click here to read “The RCMP’s offensive PR offensive continues.”

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2. Rents

“According to a national rental report, Nova Scotia’s largest city is seeing a 25 per cent increase in rent compared to this time last year,” reports Hafsa Arif for CTV:

One bedroom apartments in Halifax are on average going for more than $2,000 a month, while two bedroom units are averaging more than $2,500.

Arif doesn’t name the national report, so I can’t judge how reliable it is, but those numbers seem about right for new rentals not regulated by rent control.

Arif interviews Kevin Russell with the Investment Property Owners Association of Nova Scotia’s (IPOANS), who in part blames “higher mortgage rates” for the increases.

Again:

The higher interest rates didn’t just drop from the sky. They are a conscious policy decision to induce a recession, specifically in order to cut wages to working people…

Besides depressing wages, higher interest rates make it more expensive for people to get home loans, so we can expect a further downturn in new home construction. And higher interest rates make it harder for builders to finance new construction of residential buildings, so new housing supply will decrease. Together, these factors are setting up an even tighter housing crunch in the years ahead.

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3. Criminal records checks for bouncers

On Friday, the province announced that bouncers at cabarets will be required to have criminal record checks and security training.

In December, a man named Ryan Sawyer died outside the Alehouse, and the medical examiner ruled his death a homicide. People on social media said Sawyer had been beaten by a bouncer, and police later said they had a man in custody related to Sawyer’s death, but that man was never charged.

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4. Stabbing

Friday evening, an 18-year-old man was stabbed while at the East Coast Amusement fair on Main Street in Dartmouth. He has life-threatening injuries. On Saturday afternoon, police said they had a suspect in custody but they didn’t know yet if charges would be laid.

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5. Wind turbines

“I was listening to a podcast the other day during which the interviewee mentioned in passing that the Port of Albany, on the Hudson River in upstate New York, was in the process of building an offshore wind tower manufacturing and storage facility, the first of its kind in the United States,” writes Mary Campbell of the Cape Breton Spectator.

Hey, I heard that, too. Campbell and I listened to the same podcast, David A. Banks being interviewed by Paris Marx on Tech Won’t Save Us, in an episode titled “How Cities Sell Themselves to the Tech Industry.” Banks, author of The City Authentic, explained why mid- and small-sized cities like Halifax will never be the tech hubs that dream of Amazon headquarters and the like, albeit they might snag some back-end tech stuff.

Anyway, when Banks offhandedly mentioned wind turbine manufacturing in his small city of Albany, I knew that Campbell would be all over it, as in March she wrote a piece titled “Who has seen the wind?,” in which she looked at supposed Sydney port developer Albert Barbusci’s plan to turn Sydney into a storage and marshalling port for the offshore wind industry.

Long story short: it’s nonsense.

With Bank’s prompt, on Friday Campbell reviewed Albany’s effort to do the same:

I looked into it and while I haven’t been able to find an update more recent than February of this year, I think there’s a lot in this story that should interest us, given our port developer Albert Barbusci’s recent pivot to wind.

The Port of Albany project is more ambitious than Barbusci’s — it involves wind turbine manufacturing as well as storage and assembly. It will be operated by Empire Wind (a joint venture of Equinor, a state-owned Norwegian energy company and BP) in conjunction with Marmen of Quebec (“one of the largest wind tower manufacturers in North America”) and Welcon of Denmark (“the world’s leading manufacturer of offshore wind towers”). The turbines will be shipped to Equinor’s projects off the East Coast of the United States.

But despite the funding and the existence of actual contracts with actual wind energy companies, the Albany project is currently not much closer to reality than is Albert’s.

Campbell gets into the environmental and cost factors facing the Albany project, which suggest that it’s highly unlikely tiny Sydney can overcome the same.

Click here to read “Wind City.”

As with the Examiner, the Cape Breton Spectator is subscriber supported, and so this article is behind the Spectator’s paywall. Click here to purchase a subscription to the Spectator.

Also in March, Campbell looked at the port of Argentia, Newfoundland and Labrador, which is already performing the turbine marshalling work that Sydney is supposedly chasing.

This marshalling port business started in April 2022 when two University of Delaware of the university’s researchers, Sara Parkison and Willett Kempton, put out a rather technical paper discussing the need for infrastructure to support offshore wind. I wrote about it here, but the short of it is that right now there aren’t enough U.S. ports to handle offshore wind projects along the U.S.’s east coast.

Here’s the thing, tho: This is not a problem.

As I see it, Parkison and Kempton and Barbusci and whoever is behind the Albany thing are all making the same mistake that port promoters everywhere make: they think proximity is important. But mostly, it’s not.

I’ve discussed this before, when Nova Scotia megaport backers shilled their projects as ideal because they’re the North American ports “closest to Europe”:

No shipper wants to use the North American port that is closest to Europe. That makes no sense at all.

Think about it. You are the manager of a German manufacturing firm, and you want to export to North America. You’re not going to sell many widgets in Canso or in Eastport. Instead, your primary market is going to be places like New York City, or Chicago, where there are millions of people and lots of industry to buy your widgets.

So how do you get your widgets to Chicago? Expensive and light stuff, you can fly directly there. Everything else has two legs: one by sea, and one by land.

The sea part of the voyage is relatively inexpensive. You can stack a gazillion of your widgets in the new post-Panamax ships. A small, underpaid crew from the Philippines steering a ship flying the flag of a lightly regulated country like Liberia doesn’t cost much.

The land part of the journey, however, is expensive. You’ve got to divide up your gigantic cargo and divvy it into a thousand trucks, each driven by a highly paid (relative to the shiphands) driver, using lots of fuel to get to Chicago. Or, if you’re lucky, you can use rail, which, while cheaper than the trucks, is still much more expensive than the sea voyage, per unit transported per distance.

The guy sitting in Germany isn’t looking for the North American port closest to Germany, but rather the North American port closest to Chicago, or wherever his widgets are going. If that means a longer sea journey, the cost is more than made up for with the huge savings of a shorter land journey. I’m not sure why megaport boosters get this so wrong.

“To underscore Tim’s point about the low cost of ocean shipping,” Parker Donham wrote, “John ‘Johnny Nova; Chisholm, former owner of the massive harbourside gravel quarry at Cape Porcupine on the Canso Strait, once told me he could ship gravel to Galveston, Texas, cheaper than he could truck it to Antigonish.”

And what about storing and transporting wind turbines?

If I walk down the street to the Dartmouth waterfront, I can catch a glimpse of the crane ship Orion, which this morning is being moved from IEL out to an anchorage point in the harbour. Peter Ziobrowski explains why the Orion is here:

The [Orion] is here to install Piles and Transition pieces for the Vineyard Wind 1 project off Martha’s Vineyard. The Piles and Transition pieces were manufactured in Spain by Windar Renovables. The pieces were then moved to the Port of Avilés, where they were loaded aboard the GPO Grace for Transport to Halifax. The Pieces are due on May 11th or 12th. [they’ll evidently be a few days late]

Vineyard 1 will consist of 62 GE wind turbines spaced 1 nautical mile apart. The surrounding area has also been leased to other Offshore wind developers who will be deploying Additional GE as well as Siemens turbines.

Orion will also be deployed for the installation of 176 foundations at the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Farm in the US. That project installed two trial turbines in 2020, and was staged out of Halifax. Bigroll Beaufort , arrived with components for 2 complete wind turbines. the Installation vessel Vole au Vent completed the installation off the Virginia Coast. The Fall Pipe vessel Adhemar De Saint-Venant also took part in the project.

These are gigantic offshore wind projects, and U.S. ports can’t handle them. So what? The cost difference between using U.S. and Spanish ports is negligible to the point of not mattering at all. They could use African ports, or Asian ports, same thing.

I’m not saying that there’s not a need for more marshalling ports servicing offshore wind. I’m saying that it doesn’t matter where those ports are, and there’s no particular reason why Sydney should be preferred over Albany or Avilés or Cape Town, or for that matter, Phuket.

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6. Peggy Amirault 

A couple of weeks ago, Joan Baxter recounted her experiences with the recently deceased Peggy Amirault, and I lamented that I could find no photo of Amirault. Thankfully, the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia has found one (above) and attached it to its own lovely tribute to Amirault.

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VIEWS

Passport porn: assessing the erotic potential of U.S. and Canadian passports

I’m a dual citizen, so I have two passports — one for the United States, one for Canada. To be honest, while I value these documents, I never paid much attention to them. My “international travel” consists mostly of crossing the U.S.-Canada border, so entering the U.S., I hand the border guard my U.S. passport, and when I come back to Canada I hand the border guard my Canadian passport. Neither stamps the passport, but each welcomes me home as they hand the passport back to me; I shove it back in the console between the seats, forget about it, and travel on my merry way.

When I’ve thought about my passports at all, I thought it would make fishing the correct passport out of the console slightly easier if they weren’t the same colour, so I was very mildly pleased (come on, this is not important) to learn that Canada was thinking of making its passports red. That’d make it easy peasy to distinguish it from the blue U.S. passport without taking the 0.2 nanosecond required to read the front covers.

But then, when the new (blue, alas) Canadian passport design was released, there was outrage! that the interior graphics were changed.

I didn’t even know the passports had interior graphics — I’ve never looked. But evidently there are people very, very endeared to the images within, to the point of condemning the passport designer un-Canadian and calling for the prime minister’s head.

These people are not well. I can only imagine them fondling their passports lovingly, lustfully, as means to satisfying some unmet psychic and emotional need: passport porn.

You know how you have to google something and you fear the perverted results that might get returned? This happened to me the other day when the pilotage authority said the crane ship was moving to an anchorage site in the harbour in “DP mode.” Note to readers: do not google “DP.” (In this case, it meant dynamic positioning.)

Anyway, given the pornish affection that some have for their passports, it’s with great hesitancy that I will inspect the interior images of each.

U.S. passport

The first image in my U.S. passport is of that giant scary eagle Stephen Colbert used to open his show with. Then comes some cacti, and next a nondescript mountain range I can’t identify. And here comes the mountain, the scary eagle, and a couple of bison are all together:

Oh, next is a boat on a river. Maybe that’s the Hudson River? I don’t know. There are some geese flying above it.

There are a bunch of pastoral scenes like this:

Cowboys. A train.

This is cool: a bear eating the last remaining salmon right next to a totem pole! What are the chances?! (I see someone has stamped this page; that must be from before the pandemic when I traveled to interesting places.)

The Statue of Liberty, of course. Mount Rushmore. A palm tree. The Liberty Bell and Constitution Hall. But now we’re back to the mountain scene because I guess they ran out of graphics and have to repeat them all again: boat on the maybe Hudson, pastoral scenes, train, bear eating last remaining salmon, etc.

On the very back inside cover is an image of a spaceship between the Earth and the Moon; I’m not going to show you that because my passport number is stamped across it.

You know what’s not in the passport? Scenes of war or war remembrances. You’d think that with seemingly everything in the U.S. glorifying the military (have you seen the Super Bowl?), they’d sneak a mushroom cloud or something in there, but they didn’t.

People: There’s nothing sexy about the U.S. passport. It’s terrible porn!

Canadian passport

Unlike the U.S. passport, the Canadian passport labels the graphics to explain what they are. I guess Americans are expected to have learned all that stuff in school, but Canadians are so ill-informed that they have to be told, ‘hey, these men sitting around a table with an inebriated man standing up holding some paper — they’re the Fathers of Confederation.’ (When I went to elementary school in the U.S., they made us watch 1776, so I know exactly what Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson look like, without it being explained to me.)

Hey, the Canadians have a train, too. Wait… two trains! The second train is passing a grain silo and some oil wells; the image is helpfully labeled “Canada’s Prairies”:

Because I live in Halifax, I know what Pier 21 is even without reading the caption. And because I live in Canada, I know what Parliament is, too. Oh, here’s some falls labeled “Niagara Falls,” but I think it’s more correctly Horseshoe Falls.

And here it is, folks, the graphic that has the passport porn enthusiasts all worked up, the Money Shot:

After that, everything is, er, anti-climatic. Quebec City. Mounties (ha!). Hockey. Nellie McClung. Terry Fox.

Oh, the refractory period has passed, and we’re back to a whole set of war images collected together:

Then there’s a boat.

Whatever turns you on, I guess.

But I find it super strange that the Canadian passport is full of war and militaristic images while the U.S. passport has none. I was told that because the U.S. was born of war and Canada was born of negotiation and compromise, Canada was a less angry and to stereotype politer country than the U.S., but here are these two representations that show just the opposite.

I’m a little sad that I learned this, and think maybe it would’ve been better to remain ignorant about the interior passport images.

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Government

City

Today

No meetings

Tomorrow

Halifax and West Community Council (Tuesday, 8pm, City Hall and online) — agenda

Province

Today

No meetings

Tomorrow

Veterans Affairs (Tuesday, 2pm, One Government Place and online) — overview of The Warm Amps, with Tim Verney

On campus

No events

In the harbour

Halifax
06:00: Tropic Hope, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Philipsburg, Saint Croix
08:00: GPO Grace, heavy lift ship, and Orion, crane ship, move from IEL to Anchorage #3
15:30: One Eagle, container ship (145,251 tonnes), arrives at Pier 41 from Colombo, Sri Lanka
17:00: Tropic Hope sails for Palm Beach, Florida
18:00: IT Integrity, supply vessel, sails from Pier 9 for sea
Cruise ships this week
Tuesday: Norwegian Prima (3,950 passengers)
Thursday: Zaandam, (1,718 passengers)

Cape Breton
10:30: Seven Seas Navigator, cruise ship with up to 550 passengers, arrives at Sydney Marine Terminals from Halifax, on a 15-day cruise from Miami to Montreal 
18:30: Seven Seas Navigator sails for Corner Brook
Cruise ships this week
Wednesday: Zaandam, (1,718 passengers)

Footnotes

Now that I’ve used “Phuket” in an article, I can retire.