On November 1, 2018, a year after Atlantic Gold produced its first gold bar at its Touquoy open pit mine in Moose River, 11 provincial public servants gathered for a two-hour meeting with four high-level representatives of the gold mining company. Two were with Nova Scotia Environment, six with Lands and Forestry, and three with […]
Watching deer while Black: Lynn Jones says she was racially profiled for looking at wildlife
Morning File, Tuesday, September 3, 2019
News 1. Yarmouth ferry “Monty Python was funnier,” writes Stephen Kimber: No. Check that. Monty Python is funny. Lloyd Hines? Not so much. Still, one can understand Tory MLA Tom Halman’s description of the latest twists, turns, twirls and top-this folly from the ongoing, never-ending Yarmouth-to-somewhere-in-Maine ferry fandango as “like a skit out of Monty […]
Province House is becoming an information black hole
Morning File, Thursday, February 7, 2019
News 1. The province’s secrecy regime When mining companies set up operations in Nova Scotia, there is a requirement that they pay surety bonds that will cover the costs of clean up of the mining site after mining is complete. So Joan Baxter had a simple question: How much money are the companies paying, and where […]
Fixing freedom of information in NS (and jails), pulp mill politics, and plastics – all that, and more.
Morning File, Wednesday, January 16, 2019
I’m Joan Baxter, filling in for Tim today. News 1. Freedom of Information in Nova Scotia – the failure and the fix As Tim wrote, yesterday Nova Scotia privacy commissioner Catherine Tully and auditor general Michael Pickup released their reports on the FOIPOP website security failure. Both painted damning pictures of how the government handled […]
Assault on democracy: Stephen McNeil is ruling as an autocrat, answerable to no one and beyond question
Morning File, Thursday, September 27, 2018
News 1. Stephen McNeil’s assault on democracy Reports Jean Laroche for the CBC: The committee at Nova Scotia’s Province House that’s been most effective at holding governments to account and squeezing information out of high-ranking officials will no longer be as freewheeling or topical as it has traditionally been. The Liberal members on the powerful public accounts […]