As Canada Post prepares issue a new stamp next month to celebrate the life of Viola Desmond, our own government seems about to quietly take a pass on the opportunity to honour the Halifax woman whose personal courage remains a symbolic inspiration in the fight for human rights in Canada.

Viola Desmond Won't Be Budged

In 1946—nine years before Rosa Parks’ refusal to get off a Montgomery, Alabama, bus helped trigger the U.S. civil rights movement—Desmond refused to give up her seat in the “whites-only” section of New Glasgow’s Roseland Theatre. She was hauled out of the theatre, thrown in jail, charged, convicted and fined $20. She fought her conviction and lost, but the embarrassing publicity helped galvanize the fight against Nova Scotia’s state-sanctioned segregation and led to changes in the law.

Nova Scotians have only recently begun to acknowledge Desmond’s significance—and suffering. Two years ago, Premier Darrell Dexter publicly apologized for the “injustice” she’d suffered and his government issued a rare posthumous pardon.

In 2010, Tory MLA Alfie MacLeod introduced a resolution in the House of Assembly calling on the province to declare Nov. 8—the day of her arrest—Viola Desmond Day.

Some in the black community argued that date was inappropriate; others complained they hadn’t been consulted.

Fair enough.

The Dexter government consulted, but the question it asked— “how to establish a lasting form of recognition that would honour the contributions and experiences of African Nova Scotians”—seemed blandly beside the point of Macleod’s original motion.

No surprise its final report doesn’t even mention Desmond. Or that the idea for the Day now seems dead. “People,” explains a government spokesperson, “have been saying they want something that recognizes the broad scope of African-Nova Scotian accomplishments.”

Is there some reason we can’t have both?

As Desmond’s sister Wanda wrote in a recent letter to the government: “Naming a day after a popular and iconic figure does not lessen the larger ambitions of creating such a day… In fact they give the day an identity and create an entry point into an issue that otherwise may be ignored with a more generic title.”

It’s time we celebrated Viola Desmond Day.

Related links:

• Viola Desmond Will Not Be Budged Facebook page
• Sister to Courage: Stories from the World of Viola Desmond, Canada's Rosa Parks
• "Past Time for Nova Scotians to Honour Viola Desmond"
•  "Community Consultations Report," Office of African Nova Scotian Affairs

The lesson from last week’s reversal of council’s decision to sell the former St. Patrick’s-Alexandra school to a private developer? Even when our councillors finally, belatedly get it right, they bungle the process so badly everyone walks away more than slightly soiled and embarrassed by the whole exercise.

In December, over angry objections of north-end residents—who already believed they were being squeezed out of their own community by urban redevelopment and gentrification—council voted to peddle a local community school site to a private developer.

The problem—as quickly became apparent and should have been clear before the vote—was that council hadn’t followed city policy for disposing of surplus property. They were supposed to consult the community first.

Not that it mattered. City staff had stacked the evaluation process to make it virtually impossible for proposals from non-profit community groups to compete with those from private developers.

There were rallies. Hundreds protested. There was a petition. Close to a thousand people signed.

Last week, the issue made its way back to council. After four-and-a-half hours of “other business”—before a packed gallery present only for the school issue—councillors finally got around to debating a motion to rescind.

Coun. Jennifer Watts had barely moved her motion when city manager Richard Butts advised councillors to go into secret session to talk the motion over with city legal staff. Another secret meeting to discuss public business? Where was this city manager when Occupy Nova Scotia protestors got turfed? Oh, right. He was home in Toronto.

Council voted down the secret meeting, then voted down a motion to adjourn, then met in secret anyway, then—it’s now closing in on one in the morning—finally voted 17-5 to rescind their original decision. And they asked city staff, who, of course, had devised the flawed process in the first place, to report back on whether the process had been correctly followed.

As usual, nothing is settled.

Once again, Council has managed to alienate the community, the developers who submitted bids in good faith and average citizens who expect better.

Let’s hope there’s a lesson in that too.

My assignment: “Explain the Occupy Wherever Movement in 15 Minutes.”

The occasion was a recent luncheon at the Halifax Club to mark Global Ivey Day, an annual opportunity for alumni of the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business to come together to celebrate their Iveyness. I’d been invited as the post-lunch speaker, even though I’m neither an Ivey graduate nor a business person. (I did once pile-drive a business into the ground, but I’m sure that’s not why they invited me. Besides, that’s a story for another day.)

My guess is the organizer, a thoughtful Windsor, N.S., lawyer-politician-businessman named Jim White, had been reading about the Occupy movement, fretting those Wall Street tenters were on to something important and wanted someone else—me—to jolt his fellow Iveys into confronting the question too.

I was happy to oblige. But I wasn’t sure I would require 15 minutes.

Just as Bill Clinton had used his it’s-the-economy-stupid mantra to become U.S. President in 1992, the essence of Occupy boils down to four words: It’s the Inequality, Stupid.

Thanks to the three g’s—go-go globalization, government de-regulation and corporate greed—the traditional gulf between rich and poor is becoming an unbridgeable chasm.

Consider. The Conference Board of Canada—hardly a hotbed of socialist radicalism—reports the top 10 per cent of the world’s population now gobble up 42 per cent of its income, leaving the bottom 10 per cent with one per cent of their crumbs. That gap has widened dramatically since the mid-1980s. In Canada, the divide is growing even faster than in the United States.

If you made $3 million in 2005—lucky you!—you paid, on average, 25 per cent less in taxes than you did in 1990. Luckier you! The poorest 20 per cent of Canadians, by contrast, paid a higher percentage of their income in tax in 2005 than they did in 1990. Unlucky them.

Luck, in fact, has little to do with it. Capital gains, the mother’s milk of the better-off, is taxed at just 50-cents on the dollar. Why is a dollar earned speculating on the stock market taxed less than income earned educating children or caring for the sick? A hint. Child care workers and nurses don’t have powerful lobbyists to write tax rules for them.

Governments tell us we’re in a fiscal mess. We can no longer afford basic, opportunity-leveling services like health and education.

Meanwhile, those same governments slashed corporate taxes from 28 per cent to 15 per cent between 2000 and 2012, and promise more to come.

No wonder we can’t afford public services. The rich can pay for their own health and education, thanks. And their legacies.

A few days before I spoke at Ivey Day—the business school is named for Richard Ivey, who was rich enough to give enough to get the place named after him—Nova Scotia businessman Ken Rowe donated $15 million to Dalhousie University’s business school.

I respect Rowe. He’s a business builder and signifcant employment generator. But let’s look at his generosity through other lenses.

How many years would it take the average Nova Scotia worker to earn what Ken Rowe chose to give away in an instant?

Three-hundred-and-nineteen plus!

How much of that $15 million—thanks to tax benefits the giver gets—will ultimately be paid by the rest of us?

More than you’d probably guess.

So why does Rowe alone get to choose which good is greater? There are 59, mostly generously endowed business schools in Canada. Why a Ken Rowe School of Management, but no Ken Rowe School of Social Work, or Education, or Child Care?

No wonder people are frustrated and angry—and not just the Occupy tenters. Look around. At the race to the bottom that only benefits those at the top. At skyrocketing education debts and youth unemployment that is robbing the next generation of a future...

Even if the Occupy Movement’s tents get flattened, the issue they raise will not go away. And the consequences of not righting that balance will only get worse.

It really is the inequality, stupid.

(From the January-February 2012 issue of Atlantic Business Magazine.)

On Wednesday, local radio personality Bobby Mac launched a new Facebook group “for those of us who are tired of those whining people who don't want any progress in this great city of Halifax.” Its name? SCREW THE VIEW!!

By Saturday morning, STV had 163 members.

“We are tired of the groups that stop progress in this great city of Halifax,” he explained. “We want new buildings. No one goes up Citadel hill for the view. They go for the fort, and for sex at night.”

Acknowledging Bobby Mac probably knows more about sex on Citadel Hill than I do, and even accepting his dubious proposition no one goes there for the view, let’s analyze his most serious argument: whining, save-the-view-of-the-harbour-flotables crazies are preventing “progress”—by which I assume he means a forest of high rise office towers on the slopes of the Citadel.

Really?

Last year, Dalhousie’s Planning and Design Centre released a map showing 23 major downtown development projects, all of them approved, but almost none built or under construction. Who’s to blame for that? Heritage groups? Developers? Or perhaps the economy, stupid?

The convention centre? Despite the whinging from the all-things-ancient lovers, the city and province eagerly approved the proposed project and shoveled buckets of our cash in its direction. The first real delay came because Ottawa took its time to say yes.

By the time it did, the economy had gone to hell in a handcart. The developer is still scrambling to find financing and tenants to make the project viable.

Speaking of which, the whiners—who also raised Economics 101 questions about the convention centre—appear to have been right about that.

Consider this from the Dec. 31 Wall Street Journal, hardly a preserve of loony preservationists. There’s “a nationwide surplus of empty meeting facilities, struggling convention halls and vacant hotel rooms,” the paper notes. “How have governments responded to this glut? By building more convention centers, of course, financed by debt backed by new taxes and fees on already struggling taxpayers.”

Uh… Perhaps Bobby Mac’s next Facebook group will be to whinge about how all our tax dollars are being wasted on a white elephant.

Now that would be progress.

Rev. Rhonda Britten may have been guilty of hyperbole when she compared last week’s city council decision to sell the former St. Patrick’s-Alexandra School to a local developer to “the rape... of a community… Africville all over again!”

But she is not entirely canary-in-the-coal-mine wrong.

In 2009, Halifax Regional School Board—over the ongoing objections of the north-end community—decided to shutter St.Pat’s-Alexandra after the 2010-11 school year.

That suddenly freed up a tantalizing 3.85-acre chunk of valuable, edge-of-downtown real estate in a rapidly gentrifying poor neighbourhood.

Last summer, the city issued a call for proposals. Six groups—three for-profit and three non-profit—responded. After evaluating them, staff last week recommended a private developer’s proposal to tear down the school and replace it with a mixed residential/affordable housing/community space development.

But Britten, who is the well-connected pastor of Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, says she didn’t even learn about the call for proposals until 12 days before the deadline.

That’s interesting. Municipal policies call for residents to be consulted before the city invites proposals if surplus schools might have community uses.

Britten’s group did quickly manage to cobble together a plan to transform the former school into spaces for community. But staff scored that pitch—along with the two other non-profit community-based proposals—at the bottom of its evaluation sheet.

No wonder. “Community interest” wasn’t one of the criteria considered. Close to 50 per cent of the final score, in fact, was made up of the bidder’s financial capability and financial offer. Not easy hills for cash-strapped community groups to climb.

To add insult to injury, councillors—who routinely debate cat bylaws more times than Fluffy has lives, and who just put off a decision on a municipal stadium again—refused Coun. Dawn Sloane’s motion to defer a final decision on the school sale for a month because of alleged flaws in the process.

St. Pat’s-Alexandra isn’t, by itself, the new Africville.

But the community is clearly under siege.

Pushing out the poor in the interests of progress.

Where have we heard that before?

One hopes Nova Scotia’s prosecution service will find compelling legal grounds to appeal last week’s Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decision overturning Fenwick MacIntosh’s conviction for sexually abusing children.

The accusations are too serious and the legal issues too important not to appeal.

But whatever the outcome of the legal process—and, indeed, without waiting for its results—Ottawa needs to launch a public inquiry into what went so horribly wrong in this case. To make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The allegations against MacIntosh date back to Port Hawkesbury in the 1970s but the complainants—some as young as 10 at the time of the incidents—understandably didn’t come forward until the mid-1990s.

The RCMP formally began investigating in January 1995, five months after MacIntosh left Nova Scotia for a job in India. It’s not clear whether his departure was related to those accusations then-bubbling in the community.

In December 1995, the RCMP filed the first charges against MacIntosh.

Even though they knew he was in India, it took the Mounties a year and a half to alert Canada Customs to watch for him, and Passport Canada another year to notify MacIntosh it intended to revoke his passport, which would have made it difficult for him to work and live in India.

But a federal court judge then “temporarily” overturned Passport Canada’s decision, in part because no one but MacIntosh presented evidence at his hearing. Where was the RCMP? And why didn’t Ottawa follow up on what was supposed to be  just a temporary court order?

In April 1998, Nova Scotia’s Director of Public Prosecutions asked Ottawa to ask India to send MacIntosh back to Canada for trial.

At that point, the case disappeared into yet another diplomatic and bureaucratic black hole. It took Ottawa more than five years to prepare its extradition request and another three to deliver the request the 11,000 km from Ottawa to New Delhi. Why?

While all of this was not going on, there are reports MacIntosh got his passport renewed three times and traveled on at least two occasions between India and Montreal.

An inquiry? Absolutely. Regardless of what happens with the court case, there are larger questions we need answers to. Before something similar happens again.