NEWS
1. Bass River deaths
“On the morning of April 17, the bodies of two dead women were found on a beach near Wharf Road in Bass River,” reports Jennifer Henderson:
It was the eve of the fourth anniversary of mass shootings and fires that began 10 kilometres away in Portapique.
For people in the surrounding communities, this discovery came as a shocking reminder their trauma is not over.
This may be a distressing article for some readers. Please take care.
Click or tap here to read “Residents say officials’ silence on Bass River deaths show lessons have not been learned from Portapique.”
The harm from the 2020 murders keeps reverberating.
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2. Stephen Kimber on government message control
In 1994, if a reporter had questions for then premier John Savage, they walked across Granville Street from Province House in downtown Halifax, entered One Government Place, rode the elevator to the seventh floor and asked the receptionist if Savage had a few minutes to spare.
More often than not, the premier would come out, answer questions and then both he and the reporter would carry on with their day.
That’s also the way longtime journalism professor Stephen Kimber remembers his time covering the House as a young reporter in the early 1970s.
“If I wanted to talk to Garnie Brown, who was the minister of tourism, I would pick up the phone and I would call,” Kimber recalled.
Laroche details how government after government have tightened their grips on bureaucrats and MLAs alike, have centralized “communications” through Communications Nova Scotia, and have generally pushed reporters out of the information exchange. He concludes:
Kimber said all this control by governments makes it harder for members of the public to know what the party in power is really up to.
“If you don’t have that, then it’s very easy for governments, for individual politicians, to make decisions to do things that have consequences for all of us as individuals, with no accountability,” he said.
As we were discussing this article this morning, Joan Baxter reminded me of her 2021 article, “Miscommunication: how government’s PR gatekeepers are increasingly controlling the message,” which makes many of the same points.
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3. Why can’t we just hire more ferry captains?
As Halifax Transit regularly cuts back ferry service due to staffing issues, I see a lot of people saying something along the lines of, ‘why don’t they hire more captains? How hard can it be? You point the boat that way, you sit in the big chair, look out for dolphins, and wave at the tourists. Surely anyone can do it.’
Or not. The most recent Halifax Transit employment ad I could find (I’m sure there have been more since) is from January 2023, for a ferry relief mate, not even the captain. Here are the necessary qualifications for that position:
QUALIFICATIONS
Education and Experience:
• Completion of Grade XII or equivalent.
• Experience with marine electronic equipment.
• Experience and demonstrated expertise with Voith-Schneider propulsion.
• Experience with general deck maintenance.
• Minimum (2) two years’ experience in a marine operation.Technical / Job Specific Knowledge and Abilities:
Please note: All certificates must be recognized by Transport Canada
• Transport Canada Chief Mate, 500 Gross Tonnage, Domestic.
• Current Marine Medical.
• Current First Aid.
• Restricted Operator Certificate.Security Clearance Requirements: Criminal Record Check with Local indices check.
I then looked up the educational opportunities to obtain just one of those certificates, the Transport Canada Chief Mate, 500 Gross Tonnage, Domestic. There’s an “accelerated” course program offered by Western Maritime Institute. It takes eight months to complete, at a cost of $19,200. Students have to additionally have the money to pay their living expenses while taking the courses.
So maybe not as simple as it might seem.
I for one am glad that the requirements for sailing the ferry are more than pointing the boat that way and waving at tourists. Those requirements are there for a reason, and that reason is that when the unusual happens, we want people who know what they’re doing to be in charge.
So cut Halifax Transit a little slack on the hiring ferry captains front. But I think it’s entirely legitimate to wonder if the current recruiting troubles might presage similar problems for the proposed Bedford ferry.
Given the apparent shortage of ferry captains, and the need to dump slate in the harbour, I’m increasingly thinking that instead of a new ferry, it makes more sense to fill in the western end of the Bedford Basin and build a light rail line there for people travelling to and from Bedford. How hard can it be to drive a train? You don’t even have to steer it; you just push the lever (I’ve seen movies, folks), pull on the chain to make the horn blow, watch out for cows, and wave at the hoboes. Easy peasy.
That is of course a joke. There’s a lack of appreciation for the professionalism required of the jobs that make our society work. We see it with the denigration of teachers, the often vile under-appreciation of servers, and complaints that seemingly everyone is overpaid. Turns out, running a complex civilization requires a workforce that is educated, talented, and hard working, and developing and maintaining that workforce requires real money.
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VIEWS
Diagolonism
Richard Starr points to Pierre Poilievre’s recent visit to our provincial border:
Last Tuesday, as he headed east across the New Brunswick/Nova Scotia border Pierre Poilievre stopped to chat with a gaggle of carbon tax protesters parked alongside the highway. He told the group – some of whom brandished flags defaced with “F—k Trudeau” along with their “Axe the Tax” placards – what they wanted to hear. According to the Leader of His Majesty’s Official Opposition, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lies and everything he has said about the carbon tax “was bullshit from top to bottom.”
It was subsequently reported that some of the participants in the convoy camp were against more than the carbon tax – vaccine mandates and trans rights for example.
Starr uses that as a jumping off point to details Poilievre’s outright lies about the pharmacare and dental care programs. If you at all care about the truth, please read it.
And while Starr doesn’t further comment on the crew at the border, they’re worth another look. In particular, the association of the protesters with the so-called “Diagolon” group, founded by Jeremy Mackenzie. The RCMP described the group as follows:
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies view Diagolon as a militia-like extremist organization. Mr. Mackenzie described Diagolon as a community of his fans and explained that law enforcement has labelled it an extremist organization because he has been critical of the RCMP. He also attributed the negative perception of Diagolon to work done by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which he described as not credible. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, on hearing his testimony, responded with an affidavit in which it described Diagolon as an extremist organization with antisemitic and Islamophobic tendencies.
As I understand it, Mackenzie says he came up with the word “Diagolon” as a sort of inside joke. Under this telling, it refers to a distribution of like-minded thinkers across the geography of North America, from the U.S. south to the American midwest to the far-right enclaves in Idaho and Alberta. I have no reason to doubt this creation story.
But I’m struck with the resemblance to the German far-right movement called Querdenken, which is often translated as “lateral thinking” or “thinking outside the box,” but sometimes as “diagonal.” Querdenken and Diagolon share the same general political viewpoint, although Diagolon hasn’t become involved in electoral politics. (I don’t know if Poilievre’s visit amounts to an endorsement in one direction or the other.)
In her new book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein dives deeply into the strategies of what she describes as Querdenken-inspired diagonalist appeals from Steve Bannon, a strategy that attempts to pull into the movement people formerly associated with the left, counter-culture types, anti-vaxxers, and the like.
The Diagolon name itself could be completely coincidental, but whether the association with Querdenken and Bannon is explicit or not, it is helpful to think of them as of a kind.
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NOTICED
Klamath reborn
Last year, I wrote about how after decades of hard work, environmentalists and Indigenous people had succeeded in their efforts to get dams removed from the Klamath River.
While I was on vacation, word came that fish are now returning to the river:
By the end of the week, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife will have released 90,000 yearling coho as well as 400,000 Chinook salmon fry into the Klamath River.
Deconstruction of three dams on the Klamath River is just weeks away, and this Tuesday, a small crowd gathered just below Iron Gate dam to celebrate another milestone: the first release of threatened coho salmon since three massive reservoirs were drained in January.
Here and there, good things happen.
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Government
No meetings
On campus
Dalhousie
Sticky Opportunities for Non-canonical Amino Acids in Proteins (Monday, 2:30pm, Theatre A, Tupper Building, Halifax; Room 102 DMNB, Saint John) — Alexander Baker will talk
In the harbour
Halifax
05:00: Atlantic Sea, ro-ro container Fairview Cove from Liverpool, England
05:30: Norwegian Prima, cruise ship with up to 3,950 passengers, arrives at Pier 20 from New York, on a 15-day cruise from New York to Southampton, England
06:00: Tropic Hope, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Philipsburg, St. Croix
07:30: One Blue Jay, container ship (145,251 tonnes), sails from Pier 41 for Dubai
16:30: Norwegian Prima sails for Reykjavik, Iceland
16:30: Atlantic Sea sails for New York
17:00: One Wren, container ship (146,409 tonnes), arrives at Pier 41 from Colombo, Sri Lanka
21:00: Tropic Hope sails for West Palm Beach, Florida
Cape Breton
11:00: Lillesand, oil tanker, arrives at EverWind from Teesport, England
14:00: Maersk Teesport, oil tanker, sails from EverWind for sea
15:00: Maetiga, oil tanker, arrives at EverWind from Port Arthur, Texas
Footnotes
Rough night last night. Kept waking up worrying about stuff, fretting about other stuff.
“There’s a lack of appreciation for the professionalism required of the jobs that make our society work.” Too true. Many people work very hard at challenging jobs and get no respect or hostility. An interesting book that touches on this problem is The Tyranny of Merit, by Michael Sandel.
“Communications” departments or professionals today is an Orwellian description of the purpose of that professional or department. The aim is to communicate something that is not informative of the issue at best but also often to communicate something that will mislead. As long as, for example, RCMP communications are dictated by a “communications” policy they will be misleading and often harmful. The federal government, the provincial government, and HRM are prime examples of the real purpose of these departments and professionals.
As someone who worked in both the media and Government communications for well over 40 years, Stephen Kimber’s observations are precise and accurate. He of course is only relating to the Provincial government, but it is just as bad, maybe worse, at the federal level. Armies of communications staff work diligently to prevent journalists from speaking directly to subject matter experts under the false guise of ensuring that clear information is passed on. It doesn’t work. The greates loss comes from the total absence of dialogue between a journalist and an information provider whether it be an official or elected person. Questions must be submitted in writing and in a few days (if the journalist is lucky) a response is offered which has been crafted and sanitized and rendered free of useful information. This firewall of obfuscation detracts from both the media who in the vast, vast majority of cases are simply looking to get basic information or understandable explanations and the government which has the information sought by the journalist. This is a lasting legacy of the Harper government which closed the doors of communication between Governments and the people whom they are supposed to serve.