The good news for need-to-always-be-even-more-shocked-and-yet-more-appalled columnists is that the Yarmouth ferry is the gift that keeps on giving. The bad news for taxpayers is that it is also the ferry that keeps on taking. I’ve been writing about the always-sinking-but-never-finally-sunk ferry service between Yarmouth and assorted ports in Maine since at least 2007. “Ferry Bad...
Now that the Fangless Five have become the Insensate Seven, it’s past time for…?
Stephen McNeil’s Liberals have made a mockery of the notion of public accountability. So the opposition parties need to step up and do their job. It is past time.
I have more than once described the Liberal members of the standing committee on public accounts — Vice Chair Gordon Wilson and MLAs Brendan Maguire, Suzanne Lohnes-Croft, Hugh MacKay and Ben Jessome — as the “Fangless Five” for their unfailingly fearless failure to do their job of holding the government to account. Someone on social...
Catherine Tully’s power to persuade vs government’s power to ignore
If you’re denied access to information even after the information and privacy commissioner has reviewed your request and deemed it legitimate, your only recourse is to take the government to court. At your own expense, of course. It doesn't have to be that way. It is because it's in the government's interest to keep you from knowing.
Nova Scotians deserve modern access and privacy protections including effective oversight of their rights. Our current laws are no longer up to the task. Consistent with my recommendations last year, I once again recommend that the laws be modernized to ensure that Nova Scotia and Nova Scotians are ready and able to meet the challenges...
Jen’s choice is no choice at all; why not?
Jen Powley is smart. She has four degrees. She’s a prize-winning author with an eclectic CV and a significant record of ongoing accomplishment. She’s still only 41. So why does she face a government-imposed Hobson’s life choice: go into a nursing home to be warehoused and “removed from society” for the rest of her life, or accept care that isn’t even adequate to meet her most basic needs?
Jen Powley is smart. She has four degrees: a BA in Social Sciences (with Distinction) from King’s University College in Edmonton in 2000, a one-year post-baccalaureate Bachelor of Journalism from the University of King’s College in Halifax in 2001, a Master of Planning degree from Dalhousie in 2008 and a Master of Fine Arts in […]
Containing Northern Pulp’s mess
A half century of toxic waste in Boat Harbour, a leaky pipeline, and what happens next in the mill saga.
The numbers are staggering. Over the past 51 years, the bleached kraft pulp mill on Abercrombie Point in Pictou County has piped about 1.25 trillion litres of toxic effluent into Boat Harbour.[1] That’s enough to fill about half a million Olympic-size swimming pools, or a pipeline one metre in diameter stretching about 1.6 million kilometres, […]
Do P3 hospitals offer value for money spent? None of your business, says Stephen McNeil
What does Deloitte — the company we paid $500,000 to analyze the wisdom of P3s for new hospital infrastructure — have to say in its report? We don't know. Why not? Because “your Liberal government,” which, since 2013, “has been dedicated to being the most open and transparent government in the country, tirelessly working to improve public trust, increase citizen engagement and enhance government services for you, the taxpayer,” won’t tell us.
The ever-expanding, ongoing plan to drag Nova Scotia’s healthcare infrastructure into the 21st century — by tearing down and replacing three well-past-their-best-before-date buildings in the QEII hospital complex, expanding the Dartmouth General Hospital and constructing new outpatient clinics in the Bayers Lake business park and on the site of the former CBC building on Bell...
Stephen McNeil: Read his lips. Just don’t believe a word he says
Here in Stephen McNeil’s Nova Scotia, we should mark Right to Know Week by lowering the flag to half-mast and lighting a mourning candle in honour of the quaint notion citizens have some fundamental right to know what its government is doing.
Happy “Right to Know Week!” It starts today in case you hadn’t noticed. Why would you? And, oh yes, in case you’re counting, this Friday, Sept. 28, will mark the 16th annual “International Right to Know Day,” a day set aside in 40 countries around the world, including Canada, “to raise global awareness of individuals’...
Mum’s the word: Stephen McNeil won’t take a position on the Lahey report and won’t provide the details of his cap-and-trade proposal
Nova Scotia Cabinet ministers met for 90 minutes today, the first meeting in two weeks. Premier Stephen McNeil said he has not yet read the Lahey Independent Review on Forestry received by his government on Tuesday morning. He refused to take a position on any specific recommendation. However, he did say “my sense is whatever...
Health care crisis? Check. Leadership to solve it? Another question…
“I want to assure you that I’ve heard you, and I’ve listened,” McNeil said of the health care crisis on election night. “We have a plan, and the opposition parties have a plan, and we can work together to make it better." So much for working together. With the opposition. Or, more importantly, with Nova Scotians.
Did you know that, as of Friday morning, the Nova Scotia Health Authority’s News website was reporting a full computer page — 10 different items — flagging current, ongoing, never-ending emergency room closures in Nova Scotia? From the Lillian Fraser Memorial in Tatamagouche, to the Eastern Shore Memorial in Sheet Harbour, to Guysborough Memorial, to […]
The Yarmouth ferry subsidy? Still? Still more? Always…
“Our goal, which I believe we have achieved,” Transportation Minister Geoff MacLellan said when he signed the latest ferry deal, “was to put a stable, long-term agreement in place.” How’s that working out?
I could say I told them so — and I did, way back when “them” was still Rodney Macdonald and his Tories, and from then on forward through Darrell Dexter and Stephen McNeil to whatever same-old-same-old will come next — but I’d have to stand in a too-long line behind all the other told-them-so nattering...
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