Let us count up just a few of the reasons Premier Stephen McNeil will call a provincial election before the end of 2020. Start in the counting house itself. Last week, during his annual State of the Province address at — where else? — the Halifax Chamber of Commerce, McNeil announced tax cuts for corporations...
Northern Pulp: planning the future five years too late
I don’t want to criticize Stephen McNeil’s announcement Friday. It was hard to watch without feeling just how emotionally wrenching and personally difficult it had been for him. He was genuinely caught between the rock of an important and necessary promise he had made to the Pictou Landing First Nation and the hard place of knowing keeping his promise would mean the end of vital jobs for workers at Northern Pulp and beyond in the province’s forest industry. But the thing is… Should it really have come to this?
When it comes to identifying all its political, social and economic consequences and parsing the larger meaning of Friday’s history-making, future-shaking decision by Premier Stephen McNeil to order Northern Pulp to finally “stop pumping effluent in Boat Harbour,” I am grateful to defer to my smarters. Joan Baxter, Linda Pannozzo, Jennifer Henderson and Tim Bousquet […]
Coming to terms with the complicated legacy of Gerald Regan
How do you reconcile the contradictory facts of our 19th premier's life? You probably can’t. No matter what you write, you’re either rinsing Regan’s black heart in the cleansing stream of his passing or dancing gleefully on his grave. Most news reports I saw got it about as right as those complicated realities — and our changing times — allowed. Premier Stephen McNeil didn't.
“I think you know every Canadian knows you’re guilty. And you can take that to your grave!” Court spectator Mark Iich Shouted at Gerald Regan following his acquittal December 1998 As the author of “that book about”… I spent much of last week being interviewed by journalists, all of whom — like me — were […]
Stephen McNeil and the Crowns: Magic realism meets reality
After a crazy week of blind-siding legislation, insults, distortions, bluster, meaningless committee hearings and more fact-free moments than you'd find in a Trumpian White House, the province and its Crown attorneys are right back where they began — at the bargaining table. Well, not exactly as illustrated...
So let us review. On Mar. 31, 2019, the collective agreement between Crown prosecutors and the Nova Scotia government expired. As part of the previous contract, signed in June 2016, the prosecutors had agreed to accept a draconian wage package the government was imposing on all other public servants. At the same time, however, the...
Stephen McNeil’s Collective Bargaining Game
The thing about this game — as the government demonstrated last week when it changed the law to take away Crown prosecutors' collective bargaining rights — is that McNeil always wins. That's the way the game works. Always.
Let’s play a game. A shell game. You say it’s not a game to you. I say it’s always a game, and I always win. That’s the game. You say no one told you we were even playing. That’s part of the game too. I get to decide when it’s game on. So take that...
If we build it, will they come?
The stadium that refuses to die has returned. Last week, HRM released most of its private sector proposer's pitch for public sector funding to make its dream of a CFL team reality. But it's worth asking ourselves: what else could/should we spend that $180 million over the next 30 years on?
“Premier Stephen McNeil reiterated Thursday that no money from general revenue will go toward a stadium.” Uh-oh. Not “uh-oh” that our premier told the Chronicle Herald he didn’t intend to pluck any money out of our general revenue and dump it into the latest $110-million stadium-in-the-sky scheme, but “uh-oh” that he qualified his no with...
The McNeil government is going for the secrecy gold medal
Is Nova Scotia Canada’s most secretive jurisdiction? Or does it just act that way? Consider a few especially egregious, not-at-all-transparent episodes from just the last week.
Is Nova Scotia Canada’s most secretive jurisdiction? Or does it just act that way? Consider a few especially egregious, not-at-all-transparent episodes from just the last week. Let’s start with the latest on plans to build a new 126,000-sq. ft. community outpatient healthcare facility in Bayers Lake Business Park. Though the facility is ostensibly going to...
The Sackville-Cobequid byelection: seeking meaning in the meaningless
It is way too early to read anything of significance from a single constituency byelection in the muddling middle of any government’s mandate. But let's give it a shot...
“Steve Craig won the byelection for MLA in Sackville-Cobequid… The district has long been solidly NDP, so a PC victory is notable, but I wouldn’t read too much into it.” —Tim Bousquet June 19, 2019 Tim is right, of course. It is way too early to read anything of significance from the political leavings in...
Ka-ching. Ka-ching. Your tax dollars at work covering government butt
As Justice David Farrar summed up the appeal court ruling in the Alex Cameron case: “It would be manifestly unfair to allow the province to hide behind solicitor-client privilege while at the same time impugning the conduct of its solicitor.” But that didn't stop the McNeil government from trying. And trying.
Last week, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal instructed the McNeil government to stop hiding behind the skirts of solicitor-client privilege in order to hobble a lawsuit brought against it by a former government lawyer who claims the government impugned his conduct and attacked his character and reputation. Alex Cameron, a 26-year veteran of the...
Street checks: Who’s sorry now? Not the premier, not the justice minister, not the police
No one in authority seems willing to apologize for the decades of "disproportionate and negative" impact street checks have had on Nova Scotia's black community. Worse, no one seems to be committed to finally ending them once and for all.
Our question for today: why is it so hard for the people in charge of policing in Nova Scotia to say, I’m sorry? Last week… nearly three weeks after a damning 180-page report by an independent outside consultant confirmed that black males are nine times more likely than whites to be stopped in “random” police...
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