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NEWS

1. Mike Sack

Yesterday, I used a report by Maureen Googoo as a jumping off point:

“The former chief of the Sipekne’katik First Nation in Nova Scotia is facing assault charges in two separate cases,” reports Maureen Googoo for Ku’ku’kwes News:

Michael Patrick Sack, 42, is charged with aggravated assault for allegedly wounding another man at or near Saulnierville, N.S. on October 28, 2023.

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Sack and his son, 20-year-old Michael Patrick Sack, Jr., are also charged with allegedly assaulting three men in Halifax on April 16, 2023.

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Sack is also facing charges of mischief, theft under $5,000 and uttering threats of violence following an incident at a residence in Fort Ellis, N.S. on March 16, 2023.

No pleas have been entered related to the Saulnierville incident, nor has a court date been set. Sack and his son both entered not guilty pleas in the Halifax charge, and Sack has entered not guilty pleas related to the Fort Ellis charges; trials are scheduled for Oct. 15 in Halifax and June 5 in Truro, respectively.

Back in 2020, I had reason to look into Sack’s repeated run-ins with the law, and pulled his court records. The most significant incident was corruption by Sipekne’katik finance director Jeffrey Hayes, which I detailed yesterday:

Sipekne’katik had a long-standing deal with Loblaws, in which Loblaws would provide cigarettes to the band at a reduced price. But then, a change in the arrangement was made at Hayes’ request. [James] Dill, the detective, wrote that he interviewed a Loblaws employee named Ralph Davison, who worked with First Nations:

He [Davison] had several meetings with Jerry Sack and Jeffrey Hayes regarding cigarette sales. They informed Davison the Band was not making a profit from cigarette sales but they did not want to raise their prices because they were competing against cheaper illegal cigarettes and other First Nations were also selling cigarettes.

He [Davison] agreed to sell cigarettes at an inflated price and provide them with a monthly rebate, less an administration fee. He was under the impression the Band would use the rebate for future development projects.

For this observer anyway, none of this makes sense. How do you better compete by paying more for your product? Davison should have suspected something was amiss.

It’s a long complicated story that you can read in full here, but the gist of it is that Hayes used the cigarette rebate money to enrich himself and his family members, and to buy a Halibut Bay property to build a home for himself, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the band. The financial diversions were encapsulated in this chart created by forensic accountants:

Here’s where Mike Sack came into it:

Dill interviewed Hayes on July 29, 2010 and again on April 20, 2012. A day after the second interview, Hayes had sold the Halibut Bay property to Mike Sack — for $1. Dill wrote:

Michael Sack is a suspect in the investigation and we believe he committed a breach of trust in relation to [a] somewhat separate issue involving land in Wallace Hills. We believe he used his position as a Band Councillor to identify a piece of land of value to the Band. He then used his position to personally purchase the land for approximately $40,000 which he then sold for $65,000 to the Band. We are in the process of confirming the exact amounts of the purchase and sale. Furthermore, Michael Sack is the “M” in MRJJ, he was one of MRJJ’s directors, and Jeffrey Hayes advised that Michael Sack was aware of various payments going through MRJJ / Amcrest.

Dill obtained a restraining order from the court, which prohibited Sack from selling the Halibut Bay property and ordered him to maintain insurance payments on it.

Hayes was convicted of stealing $342,000 from the band, and was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $139,000.

Sack was not charged with any criminal wrongdoing related to Wallace Hills. He was, however, charged in relation to the corruption scheme. Prosecutors argued that Sack must have known about Hayes’ illicit proceeds, especially since Sack took possession of the Halibut Bay property, apparently in an (ultimately fruitless) bid to shield it from being seized by the courts. 

On that charge, Sack entered adult diversion, and was ordered to repay $132,000 to the band, in return for not having a criminal conviction.

Click or tap here to read “Former Sipekne’katik Chief Mike Sack faces criminal charges on three separate incidents. They aren’t his first brush with the law.”

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2. Transcontinental-SaltWire lawsuit heats up

The lawsuit between SaltWire and Transcontinental Media is heating up. I last reported on it in June, providing this recap:

• In 2017, just as its newsroom was on strike, the Chronicle Herald announced the creation of a new company, SaltWire, which purchased all 27 of Transcontinental’s newspapers in Atlantic Canada. The sale price was $35.5 million, with $25.5 million paid up front and the remaining $10 million to be paid over three years, at an interest rate of 3% compounded annually; reportedly, the sale was financed with junk bonds.

By any measure, this was a surprising and bold move, as the newspaper industry was and is in a tailspin. The Herald and the newly created SaltWire are private companies, so I have no detailed knowledge of their financial situation, but my guess is that the purchase of the Transcon papers provided an economy of scale for the Herald’s sales department and a market for its under-utilized printing press.

• In April 2019, SaltWire sued Transcontinental, saying Transcontinental had misrepresented the value of the properties it sold to SaltWire. The suit struck me as a stunning admission of the “apparent lack of even basic due diligence on the part of SaltWire” during the 2017 purchase.

• In October 2019, Transcontinental countersued for $10 million, saying that it had properly valued the properties and that SaltWire had defaulted on the three annual payments.

• Then the litigation stalled, or at least there were no significant court filings, although I presume the companies were in private discussions. But then suddenly, after four years, last week Transcontinental asked the court for security of costs.

Now, in a letter filed with the court on Tuesday, Jan. 2, Transcontinental is asking that the court “require SaltWire post security for costs in the amount of $500,000 by no later than February 23, 2024 as a condition precedent to proceeding with its claim.”

In short, Transcontinental is arguing that SaltWire’s suit for $10 million is so weak that it will likely fail, and in such a situation, Transcontinental will be awarded legal costs, which it says will be over a million dollars.

Transcontinental claims that:

• SaltWire still owes “most if not all of” the $23,325,000 it borrowed from Integrated Private Debt Fund VLP to buy out the TransCon papers. Integrated Private Debt Fund VLP has been renamed Fiera Private Debt Fund VLP.

• SaltWire has an outstanding debt to the CRA related to missed HST payments for $3,079,978.88 since January 22, 2020.

Countering those claims, Ian Scott, the Chief Operating Officer at SaltWire, filed an affidavit with the court. That affidavit doesn’t address the debt to the private debt fund, but it does say that the $3,079,978.88 CRA judgment has been reduced to $1,850,000

Scott then goes on to, in essence, say that SaltWire will be in a secure position financially thanks to the government’s tax subsidy and to Google money:

Moreover, and because of a recent change to Federal taxation legislation relating specifically to the newspaper publishing industry in Canada and known as the “Federal Journalism Labour Tax Credit”, the Plaintiff will receive an additional annual income tax refund of approximately $1Million, which the Plaintiff expects will be applied to the $1,850,000 balance to [the CRA judgment].

An Additional source of income which will soon be available to the Plaintiff, to further liquidate the HST balance… and for other purposes, will be the $100Million annually, which, through its negotiations with the Federal government pursuant ot the provisions of the On-Line News Act, Google has agreed to pay to members of the Canadian journalism industry, one of which is the Plaintiff.

According to the formula agreed between Google and the Federal government, the Plaintiff’s annual share of the annual $100Million … is expected to range between $2Million and $2.5Million.

Two million dollars and change might pay for half of the executive salaries for a year at SaltWire. The same money could run the entire Halifax Examiner operation for five years.

I of course will follow this closely, and will attend the February hearing.

Here is Transcontinental’s letter to the court.
Here is Ian Scott’s affidavit.
Here are the supporting documents submitted by Transcontinental.

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3. Paramedics

This item is written by Jennifer Henderson.

With emergency departments overcrowded and ambulances waiting on average one hour and 33 minutes to offload patients, the province has just announced a new program to train people to assist paramedics.

The new role is called an emergency medical responder and a news release from the Department of Health and Wellness this morning says the aim is to keep more ambulances available to respond to calls and reduce wait times at hospitals.

“The demands on our system and paramedics continue to grow and with emergency medical responders we are taking another step toward transforming emergency health services for Nova Scotians,” said Health and Wellness Minister Michelle Thompson.

The news release said “Emergency medical responders will receive three months of training, be licensed and regulated by the College of Paramedics of Nova Scotia and must pass a national exam administered by the Canadian Organization of Paramedic Regulators. To increase the number of paramedics working in Nova Scotia, a bridging program will be developed for emergency medical responders who want to become paramedics. Training will be offered in Nova Scotia by Medavie HealthEd starting in March, with the first graduating class working by summer.”

Emergency medical responders will be paired with fully trained paramedics. The assistants will be trained to assess, stabilize, and drive patients. Paramedics work in teams of two. Adding a paramedic assistant frees up one fully trained paramedic who can respond to emergency calls, increasing capacity on the ground.

According to the last data published on the Department of Health dashboard for the week of Dec. 17, 2023, ambulances were waiting two hours and 23 minutes to offload patients at the major hospitals in the Halifax-Dartmouth area.

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4. Robert Mailman and Walter Gillespie

“Four decades after they were convicted of murder, two elderly men walked out of a New Brunswick courthouse on Thursday acquitted of the grisly killing they had always insisted they never committed,” reports Lindsay Jones for the Canadian Press:

Walter Gillespie, 80, trembled and wiped tears, as he told reporters in Saint John that he didn’t think this day would ever come. “I just want to thank everybody,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion.

Robert Mailman, 76, who is terminally ill with cancer and expected to live only a few more months, walked stiffly towards a scrum of reporters. His voice was too weak to be heard so he listened intently as Ron Dalton, co-president of Innocence Canada, spoke on his behalf.

“He can finally say, ‘I told everyone I was innocent. No one listened and yet today here I am,’” said Mr. Dalton.

The men cast their eyes down as Mr. Dalton said it shouldn’t have taken almost 40 years for this day to come. “We all should be looking at what went wrong and how it stayed wrong for 40 years before we tried to fix it. It’s too late to fix a lot of it. These men will never get back their lost years. Mr. Leeman’s family will never get justice for his murder,” he said.

The two men were championed by Innocence Canada, which explains:

Innocence Canada is announcing that this afternoon, Justice Minister Arif Virani quashed the murder convictions of Robert (Bobby) Mailman and Walter (Wally) Gillespie 40 years after they were charged and convicted in the murder of George Leeman in Saint John, New Brunswick.

On November 30, 1983, Mr. Leeman’s body was found by a jogger in a wooded area in Rockwood Park, Saint John.  Mr. Leeman was the victim of a significant beating by one or more weapons and his body was partially burned.  Mr. Leeman was living in Saint John in a rooming house when he was murdered.

Between January 19 and 21, 1984, the Saint John Police Service charged Wally Gillespie and Bobby Mailman with the murder.  They also charged a third person, Janet Shatford, with the murder. Ms. Shatford subsequently pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

Mr. Gillespie and Mr. Mailman both had strong alibis with multiple witnesses placing them far from the crime scene on the day of the murder.  Nevertheless, they were convicted of the murder on May 11, 1984.  Both were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole eligibility for at least 18 years.  Not for one day have they wavered in insisting on their innocence.

Mr. Gillespie served 21 years of his life sentence in prison and is presently living in a halfway house in Saint John.  He is now 80 years of age.   Mr. Mailman who served 18 years in prison, sadly, is terminally ill.  He is 76 years of age.  He also lives in Saint John.

“We worked alongside Gary Dimmock, formerly a journalist with the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, now with the Ottawa Citizen,” adds Innocence Canada. “Mr. Dimmock investigated the case before Innocence Canada came to it and always believed in Mr. Mailman and Mr. Gillespie’s innocence. He deserves great credit for his work on their case.”

Unfortunately, much of Dimmock’s reporting from the 1990s is not readily available on the internet. A garbled (garbled because of the formatting, not by Dimmock) article from 1998 gives a taste of his reporting:

In yet another twist, a Saint John man claims he too witnessed the murder but, out of fear, never came forward. He says that the convicted men were not even there. He broke his silence earlier this year in an interview with Ken Fitch, a veteran Mountie-turned-private investigator who has been working on the case, off and on, for six years, largely at his own expense. The new witness, Allen Victor Jefferson, 27, said he happened by the murder while walking his motorbike through the housing project in Saint John’s north end. He told the investigator that he heard someone screaming and went for a closer look.

Mr. Jefferson said he saw a woman and a teenaged boy arguing with Mr. Leeman, who he knew from the neighbourhood. He said the boy struck the man, knocking him to the ground. Once he got to his feet, he said, the woman swung an axe at him.

Mr. Jefferson said he returned to his motorbike at the side of the house then followed a red car, driven by the woman, who was accompanied by the boy. He followed the car until it pulled into a park where, he said he watched them burn the body. The Jefferson affidavit helped spark the new investigation. The probe likely is to be completed by the end of this year and will be filed under the Criminal Code section known as the law of last resort.

Wrongful conviction cases are often convoluted. In this case, Mailman had a reputation:

He was one of the most feared men in Saint John at the time. He gained notoriety in the late 1970s and the early 1980s after being tried and acquitted for murder three times. He was also tried and acquitted for the attempted murder of a Saint John police officer.

But that reputation can, and apparently did, lead to police manipulation of witnesses:

Ms. Shatford has also changed her story. In taped conversations from November 1997, she says police “pounded” the story into her mind.

She says she told police detectives early on that she knew nothing about the murder. “I kept telling them I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it,” she said. “I heard it so much it was just planted there.” 

The literature on police pressuring and/or incentivizing witnesses to provide false testimony is extensive. It’s happened here, in both the Glen Assoun case and the Randy Riley case.

This isn’t just a problem for sketchy people living on the criminalized margins of society being imprisoned for crimes they didn’t commit. For one, someone else killed George Leeman, and that person very likely went on to commit more crimes, possibly more murders.

But beyond that, once we accept police misconduct and sloppy investigations leading to convictions, we have allowed it to happen to anyone. To pick just one example of many, Ron Dalton was the epitome of a hapless middle-class professional, just going about his life, but the police and justice systems targeted him for a murder that not only he didn’t commit but that didn’t happen in the first place. If it could happen to him, it could happen to any of us.

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5. Larry Rulison

Speaking of reporters doing good work, Jane Gottlieb at Poynter gives a shout-out to reporter Larry Rulison of the Albany Times Union:

Seventeen childhood friends from upstate New York expected to celebrate a 30th birthday at a popular brewery the fall morning they boarded a noisy white stretch limousine. The outing through small towns and winding farm roads instead turned deadly when the limo’s brakes failed on a steep hill, catapulting it at more than 100 mph into a ravine. 

Twenty people died in the Oct. 6, 2018 crash in Schoharie, New York; two recently married couples, four sisters, three of their husbands and the driver, among them, along with a man and his son-in-law in the limousine’s path. Babies lost both parents and parents were left childless in what federal transportation authorities called one of the nation’s worst road disasters. 

Within days, as the tragedy gained international attention, the Albany Times Union showed it was no fluke. Instead, business writer Larry Rulison and colleagues documented how Prestige Limousine avoided repairing the 2001 Ford Excursion, just as the family who ran it had long ignored health and safety regulations and drawn investors into questionable business ventures. Even in this case, for a while it appeared they would again get off lightly.  

Instead, Prestige Limousine operator Nauman Hussain began a hefty prison term this year, transportation laws are being rewritten, and the government is answering for huge gaps in oversight, due in no small part to Rulison’s exhaustive reporting. 

“It was a really bad intersection and there’d been a lot of accidents, but nothing as bad as that,” says Rulison, 52, who reviewed years of records. “Everything that could have gone wrong that day went wrong.” 

In 300-plus stories he documented repeated failures to keep a hulking, broken vehicle off the road. He captured the muddled response of state agencies, politicians and the courts — and kept families’ calls for answers in the public eye.

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Rulison’s multipronged investigation of a tragedy in rural New York stands out as thinly staffed local newspapers often struggle to do much more than respond to breaking news.

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“If we weren’t going to throw resources into this story, why keep doing this?” says [Casey] Seiler, the paper’s editor since 2020. 

For context, the Albany metropolitan area and surrounding counties — basically, the newspaper’s coverage area — has a population of about a million, which is also the population of Nova Scotia.

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6. Averill Baker

A colleague pointed me to this CBC article from reporter Elizabeth Whitten:

St. John’s lawyer Averill Baker has been disbarred by the Law Society of Newfoundland and Labrador after it found her deserving of sanctions over eight complaints.

My immediate response was ‘Why is this important?’ Lawyers, like every other profession, have problematic actors, and disbarment is a regular occurrence.

I kept reading, and learned that Baker had been evicted from her law office for not paying the rent, and in the process her clients’ files were made potentially available to people who shouldn’t have had access to them. So, OK, that’s the reason for disbarment. Makes sense. But then:

Baker had recently represented Dana Metcalfe, who is facing charges of criminal harassment and causing a disturbance over a “surprise convoy” protest on July 9 outside Premier Andrew Furey’s Portugal Cove-St. Philip’s home.

In early November Metcalfe was in provincial court — days after Baker had been suspended — and told a judge she was without a lawyer after being informed that Baker no longer intended to practice law.

Baker has found herself in hot water before.

In 2013, Baker was disciplined for an explosive and profanity-laced tirade against a provincial court clerk that took place in 2011.

In 2014, Baker was caught sharing what was described as a “passionate kiss” with then-client Philip Pynn, just moments before he was arrested in relation to a murder charge. Her apartment had been under Royal Newfoundland Constabulary surveillance on July 11, 2011, two days after Nick Winsor was shot to death on Portugal Cove Road.

Ooh boy.

Along the way, Whitten reports that during the disciplinary process, “Baker claimed to be too ill to attend a hearing, only to pop up on her YouTube channel, Prisca Theologia Tarot, for a live tarot card reading.”

On her YouTube channel, Baker provides astrological readings — but only for Aquarius. But she has nearly 10,000 subscribers. I’m assuming Baker herself is an Aquarius. It’s impossible for me to watch the videos without understanding that she’s talking about herself: the tarot cards, by Baker’s reading, speak of investigations, loss of a business, under-handed techniques being used by “a whole gang of people trying to cause you trouble,” etc.

Baker suggested she has mental health issues — I don’t know if that was serious, or just a fleeting thought. So I hope she is well.

But it strikes me that an increasingly large part of the population — I don’t know how large — is unhinged from, well, reality.

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7. Housing, old-school style

While trying to track something else down, I stumbled upon the minutes of a Halifax City Council meeting from Nov. 30, 1967.

There was a lot going on then, but the council made sure to establish some goals for public housing, and so passed this resolution:

It is recommended that:

1. City Council set a target of 750 housing unit starts in the City of Halifax for the year 1968 to be administered by the Housing Authority of Halifax;

2. City Council set a target of 300 housing unit completions in the City of Halifax for the year 1968 to be administered by the Housing Authority of Halifax.

This was a higher number than in most years because there was more federal money flowing through, but it wasn’t particularly unusual; the city regularly constructed and managed housing, and discussions of potential new development areas almost always included details about public housing.

Of course, 1967 Halifax was a lot less wealthy than 2024 Halifax. But starting 750 new public housing units this year is a non-starter; it simply is beyond the comprehensible possible universe of our political class.

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8. Post-game handshakes

There are a lot of things wrong kids’ sports — not so much the actual games and athleticism, but the stuff around it: the mismanagement of finances, the criminal sexual abuse of children by coaches and trainers, and parents pushing their kids to be the next star, or at least to be successful enough to get a university scholarship. Just plain fun seems to have been left by the wayside.

Just before Christmas, Hockey Newfoundland and Labrador announced that it was doing away with post-game handshakes, vaguely citing “incidents that have led to the suspension of players and coaches.”

So we’ve created this hyped-up world of confrontation and fighting as stand-ins for masculinity, poured gasoline on it with demands of forever winning and ever-increasing performance, and then when children act out as they’ve been trained and encouraged, we take away the one remaining vestige of sportsmanship.

Anyone who played sports knows the drill: give it all on the field, then shake hands after. It’s a game. It’s not life; it’s not even that important — more important is to be able to look your opponent in the eye and recognize them as another fucked-up kid awkwardly trying to find their way in the world despite adults making all these unrealistic demands on them, just like you.

They first started cancelling post-game handshakes during Swine Flu — remember that? — and then again when COVID showed up. I thought then, and think now, that that was stupid; if the virus was so contagious that it would be passed by a handshake, then it certainly would’ve been passed during all the incidental contact and heavy breathing that’s part of the game itself.

Well, cancelling the handshake for fear of virus transmission may have been stupid, but it wasn’t as stupid as cancelling it because some players and coaches use the ritual handshake as a vehicle for violence. Such cancellation reflects an organization that has lost control, that has let bullies win. It reflects a dysfunction in the governing body.

Mark my words: Hockey Newfoundland and Labrador will soon have a major scandal that has nothing to do with handshakes.

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NOTICED

Round 2

I have COVID again. I have some sniffles and a hint of a sore throat every now and again. And I’m really tired, napping most of the day. Overslept this morning, too. But otherwise fine!

Which is in stark contrast to my first round (Christmas 2022), when I could barely swallow for two days, was bed-ridden for four days, and tested positive for 13 days.

Who knows why one bout of COVID can be easier or harder than another, but I’m crediting the bivalent booster I got in October.

In any event, I’ve been staying home all week so as to not spread this thing around. Between not being able to get out and sleeping most of the time, I’m not getting a lot of work done.

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Government

No meetings

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On campus

No events

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In the harbour

Halifax

11:45: Nolhan Ava, ro-ro cargo, moves from Pier 41 to 42
12:00: Skogafoss, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Portland 
12:30: AlgoScotia, oil tanker, sails from Irving Oil 3 for sea
16:30: Skogafoss, container ship, sails from Pier 42 for sea
16:30: One Blue Jay, container ship, arrives at Pier 41 from Norfolk
17:00: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, sails from Fairview Cove for sea
17:00: Qikiqtaaluk W, oil tanker, arrives at Irving Oil from Montreal
18:30: Nolhan Ava, ro-ro cargo, sails from Pier 42 for sea
23:45: Augusta Luna, cargo ship, arrives at Pier 27 from Moa, Cuba
23:59: Athina III, yacht, moves from Pier 28 to inner anchorage

Cape Breton

13:15: Cobalt Sun, crude oil tanker, sails from Everwinds 1 for sea
14:00: SFL Trinity, oil tanker, arrives at Everwinds 1 from New York City

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Footnotes

Sorry so late.

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