Kimber’s Nova Scotia (April 29, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
What’s that I smell?
Last spring, in the lead-up to the election, then freshly-minted wind-up-doll premier Rodney MacDonald gleefully played handout hopscotch, announcing a multitude of multi-million-dollar projects, expansions, upgrades, grants and good times from Yarmouth to Sydney.
This spring in the follow-up to his less-than-spectacular budget, our no-longer new but still on-message (revised message) premier and his cabinet minions are currently criss-crossing the same territory, trying to convince skeptical voters they really meant what they promised last year (and will undoubtedly promise again before the next election).
On Thursday morning, Education Minister Karen Casey showed up at Middleton High School to, in the genteel words of the Annapolis County Spectator, “compliment students for their exemplary behaviour during their march on the Legislature April 2, and reconfirm her department’s promise that the school's new gym and music room would be delayed by only six months.”
Oh, yes, that delay.
Last year, the Tories promised — and failed to deliver on — a $2.2 million expansion and upgrade for the school.
The same day in Cape Breton, Premier Rodney announced the government was committing… er, re-committing $1.5 million this year for renovations to the East Richmond Education Centre in St. Peter’s. No kidding.
That project was first announced — wait for it — in 2002. And then announced and re-announced. But somehow, it still got left out of this spring’s provincial budget.
And it ain’t over ’til it’s over. MacDonald promises that Education Minister Casey will be back in Sydney this week with more “good news.”
Perhaps there really is an ‘I’ in Team
You may recall last week’s item on the kerfuffle in Shelburne over what to do with the site of the former Shelburne Youth Detention Centre.
Team Shelburne, the committee set up to hear proposals for what is now grandly called Shelburne Place, has apparently approved a project more prosaically called “Proposal A.” But no one knows what it is, or who exactly is behind it.
Well, you can now officially count the ex-chair of Team Shelburne, Darian Huskilson among the know-nothings.
Huskilson, who is also mayor of Lockeport, resigned this week, complaining he is as in the dark as anyone about the deal. “As, Chair I do not know who we are dealing with. I cannot tell you if the Youth Centre is sold or when the closing date is…The reality is that the public knows as much as I do, and my participation has little or no impact on a deal that apparently has already been determined by other players.”
Huskilson claims Shelburne Municipal Warden Paulette Scott has been meeting regularly and without Team Shelburne’s approval with the unnamed someone who wants to buy the land to build the unnamed something. When he wrote Scott to say he was uncomfortable with the secret meetings, she ignored him. So he quit.
Stay tuned.
Now that’s the question
At first blush, it all seemed innocuous enough. Certainly uncontroversial. On Wednesday, the Cape Breton Post published a photo of a local Pentacostal minister and some members of his congregation greeting wheelchair-bound Winnie MacKay and her grandchildren as they arrived at the local airport “to move home after living in Alberta.”
But when the photo was published on the paper’s website, a reader in Brantford, ON, was quick to snipe: “What is the big deal about this? It is nice that people return home to Cape Breton, but to have it in the paper for the arrival?”
And then the Calgary hit the Cape Breton… er, the fan.
By Friday morning, there were nearly two dozen responses on the web site, many from reluctant Cape Breton gone-aways in Ontario and Alberta. Many expressed bafflement at Brantford Man; more expressed the wish to join those in the photo.
“More power to the family who moved home,” wrote Lorraine Crawford from Toronto. “I have been away about 44 years and I still call the place home.”
Declared a “Proud Caper” from Whitney Pier: “It is the people that make our Island, and that is why we make a big deal out of welcoming our former residents home.”
While agreeing such stories are “very heartwarming,” one astute reader had a suggestion for the paper’s editors the next time they published such a photo. “It would help if the story mentioned whether or not the parents were fully employed upon their return to Cape Breton.”
Kiss me, I’m a doctor…
Memo to Prime Minister Stephen “when-a-government-makes-an-investment-in-the-health-of-people-it’s-making-an-investment-in-the-country’s-future” Harper: the doctor shortage has become so acute in Digby county that the local hospital’s emergency room was shut down for 19 days so far this year.
The town and the municipality are so concerned they’re considering pooling resources to help the local health board attract new physicians.
Earlier this month, the municipal council discussed hiring a professional recruiter — they charge $8-10,000 for every doctor they land — or even offering “signing bonuses” to new doctors.
“It is too bad we have to do this, too bad the government doesn’t provide packages in rural areas,” lamented Digby mayor Frank Mackintosh, “but if this is what it takes, we’ll do whatever we have to get a doctor in town.”
South West Health, which runs the hospitals in the region, does have its own fulltime recruiter, but Shirley Watson-Poole says it isn’t easy convincing doctors to locate there. “We kiss a lot of frogs,” she concedes, “but we don’t get them all.”
Dim bulbs
Someone must have more faith in Nova Scotia Power than I do.
Two weeks ago, “a perpetrator or perpetrators” cut the copper ground wires from eight power poles in New Minas. The would-be copper thieves did the deed in the middle of the night in “blustering wind and rain.”
If the messy weather had resulted in a power outage followed by a surge, local RCMP officer Cst. Les Kakonyi deadpanned to a reporter from the Kentville Advertiser, they might have had the robbers “dead in their tracks.”
Though they don’t have any suspects, Kakonyu suggested anyone noticing people carrying tools around power poles should give them a call.
Chances are they aren’t NSP maintenance workers!
Slapshot
Louise Lorifice may have already been relegated to irrelevancy by the national media, but … Louise Lorifice? Oh, right, Louise Lorifice, the NDPer many believe is campaigning to be the answer to the Trivial Pursuit question: Name the other major party candidate who ran in the Battle of the Central Nova Media Megastars?
While jet-setting Conservative cabinet minister Peter MacKay — he of Belinda, Condi and the dog who may or may not have been Belinda — and bus-hopping Green Party leader Elizabeth May — she of the spruce budworm battles, the Sierra Club and all that hugging that may or may not have been Stephane — duke it out in the national media, Lorifice is quietly getting in a few shots back home.
In an interview with the New Glasgow News last week, Lorifice was asked what she thought of Dion’s decision not to run a candidate against May in Central Nova.
“If you have a hockey tournament [and] one team withdraws because they want a weaker team to win,” Lorifice jabbed, “you lose your fans pretty fast, to say nothing of team morale. I think you could apply that comparison to political maneuvering.”
Ouch.
Not as welcome as the flowers in…
Speaking of the Green Party leader, Elizabeth May is drawing fire from proponents of the Keltic Petrochemicals-Maple LNG project at the Strait of Canso.
May wants the federal government to undertake a full environmental panel review of the $4.5-billion project instead of the current but less rigorous “comprehensive study process.”
Allan Murphy, the Conservative candidate in the neighbouring riding of Cape Breton-Canso, has accused May of trying to delay the project and claimed her criticisms were “politically driven to gain support from the environmental lobby.” The project is expected to employ 3,500 during construction, and create 400 fulltime jobs. “The last thing Cape Breton-Canso needs is the job-killing combination of Stephane Dion and Elizabeth May,” Murphy declared
Countered May: “What are they afraid of?” She says that in her 30-year involvement with environmental assessments, “those projects that are subjected to panel reviews tend to be improved through the process. Think of it as a planning tool. So there is not a case to be made, other than as a scare tactic, that it would slow things down.”
Back at ya, Allan.
By the way…
A recent press release from the companies behind the Keltic petrochemical plant included the thanks of a grateful corporate entity to all the fine folks who’d supported them in their hour of application.
“Keltic and Maple are grateful to the people of Guysborough County, in
particular, the Honourable Ronnie Chisholm, Minister of Agriculture and
Fisheries…”
Ronnie? Not Ron? Or Ronald? Or even the Honourable Ronnie?
Was that how the “person of interest” who hitched a ride with Chisholm outside a Tim Horton’s on a cold night in March referred to him.
“A ride, Ronnie?”
Of course.
SOURCES:
ANNAPOLIS COUNTY SPECTATOR, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, KENTVILLE ADVERTISER, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD.
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (April 22, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
Judging letters by the numbers
The South Shore Regional Library is facing an “immediate funding problem [and] a gloomy future,” thanks to a combination of provincial funding formulas and the results of the 2006 census.
Statistics Canada’s latest head count shows the population of Queens and Lunenburg counties has dropped by 3,500 people since the last time the numbers were tallied in 2001. The province, which provides most funding for local libraries, doles out the money on a per capita basis
What that means, says board chair Marie Hogan Loker, is that the library is staring into the face of a $67,000 budget shortfall in 2008.
The South Shore library operates branches in Liverpool, Bridgewater and Lunenburg, as well as two bookmobiles that serve rural 61 communities.
Because the board is already being hit by increased prices for items like insurance and fuel, Hogan Loker says, “a decrease in funding means a decrease in books or services. There are no more areas to cut.”
The board is encouraging users to urge their local MLAs to urge the Minister of Education to either change the funding formula or come with more money for the library.
A new kind of N-I-M-B-Y
Gary Lunn can’t understand it. “We offer free garbage pick-up,” the Hants County bylaw enforcement officer points out, “but people don’t seem to care where they leave their garbage.”
They don’t. Last week, eight local residents were fined more than $200 each for illegally depositing their trash in the Vaughn’s area of the county, which he says has become a notorious dumping ground.
“In some places, two and three hundred bags are being dumped either in the woods or on someone else’s driveway… If [people] don’t leave their trash at another property for pick-up, they just dump it roadside or in the woods.”
Lunn isn’t sure what the attraction is. If people have more trash than the county’s six-bag limit, he notes, they can always go to the local landfill, which only charges $5.75 to take up to 900 pounds worth of junk off their hands. “That’s a good-sized half-ton truck load of garbage,” he says, “but people would rather pay the gas to drive around leaving their garbage anywhere else.”
The investigation continues. More charges are expected.
Not your usual parliamentary junket
Ottawa’s Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans usually doesn’t get much closer to real water than the water in their drinking glasses, or to real fish than what is being served that day in the parliamentary dining room.
So when members of the American Humane Society asked during the committee’s recent hearings on the seal hunt whether members had ever actually seen a hunt, the answer was a resounding… not yet.
Which explains how South Shore MP Gerald Keddy, the committee’s chair, and other members of his committee found themselves earlier this month bobbing in the ocean on a boat 45 kilometres off the Newfoundland coast, watching the controversial hunt unfold in front of them.
After watching the hunt, Keddy says “we’re very satisfied that it is [humane].”
No word on whether any of the committee members got seasick.
Peace for our time… and place
Proponents of the Pugwash Peace Exchange, “an important new facility that will celebrate Pugwash’s peace history while actively promoting peace around the world,” is facing some flak on the home front.
Some locals fear the proposed $6-million tourism development opposite the town’s famous Thinker’s Lodge will not only create traffic congestion in the middle of downtown but may interfere with water quality and, worse, end up looking like an unattractive “bunker.”
The project, which will include restoration of industrialist Cyrus Eaton’s original lodge where 22 of the world’s leading scientists met in 1957 to discuss what to do about the threat of nuclear war, is expected to attract 18,000 visitors a year and generate a $25-million economic spinoff for the region.
Perhaps not surprisingly — peace being the theme here — Peace Exchange board chair Stephen Leahy is eager to maintain peaceful relations with the neighbours. His group has agreed to a third-party evaluation of the project’s impact on the town.
Mystery under the letter A
Team Shelburne, the south shore group charged with figuring out what to do with the former Shelburne boys school in the town, has decided to go with “Proposal A.” The problem is that no one is saying what Proposal A is, and even the committee apparently doesn’t know who’s behind it.
That doesn’t sit well with Yarmouth developer Bernie Dockrill, who submitted “Proposal B,” which called for turning the school into a $527,000 seniors’ facility while giving the old gym back to the community for one dollar.
Dockrill says he’s concerned their may have been “favouritism” in consideration of his competitor’s bid. He says a committee official went to Halifax to pick up the mysterious Proposal A from a consultant there. To make matters worse, Dockrill says, he now can’t even get to talk to the committee about his plans.
“I’m not here to get notoriety,” he told the Coast Guard. “I’m just mad. A lot of my time has been wasted.”
A spokesperson for Team Shelburne insists the process was fair. “Two proposals came in and they accepted one unanimous[ly]. Bottom line is [Dockrill] wasn’t the successful candidate.”
Waiting by the phone
Bill Fielding understands there are long waiting lists for medical procedures these days. He’d just like to know he’s at least on a list.
The 83-year-old World War II veteran — he suffered shrapnel injuries to his knee and shoulder when the ambulance he was driving was hit by enemy fire — injured his knee again in a fall nearly a year ago.
After getting the knee X-rayed, Fielding’s doctor referred the Bible Hill man to a specialist in New Glasgow. But before he could get an appointment with him, the specialist relocated and all Fielding’s paperwork, including his X-rays, got lost.”
“We’ll have to start over again,” his doctor informed him.
More X-rays. Another referral, this time to a specialist in Halifax.
Since then… nothing.
“I’m fed up to the neck,” Fielding complains. “If they had come and told me, ‘Bill, you have to wait’ or something like that ...”
His wife Lillion worries the health care system may not be taking Bill’s problems seriously “because of his age.”
For now, Fielding sits and waits by the phone. “I’d like to go out. I like to fish but I’ve done nothing ... I’ve stayed here now everyday, expecting a phone call… I mean, I haven’t got much time left. I’d like to get out around a little bit.”
Who knew?
Did you know that last Thursday was National Hanging Out Day? Neither did I. But it was. And it wasn’t for celebrating hanging out at the mall.
The day is set aside to celebrate the lowly clothesline — and to educate communities about energy conservation. According to American statistics, six to 10 per cent of our energy consumption is consumed running clothes dryers. Who knew?
There’s even a website — laundrylist.org — with its own list of top five reasons to use “natural solar and wind power” to dry your clothes, ranging from the fact that clothes smell better and last longer to the important reality you can save money doing it.
Lorraine Blakeney of MacPhersons Mills celebrated National Hanging Out Day the way she usually does — hanging out a load of washing. “I try to use it all year-round,” she told the New Glasgow News, adding that another benefit of using the clothesline is that it gives her “a little bit of exercise. The motion of picking up the basket, taking them outside and pinning them up — it burns a few calories.”
The good news is…
With the money you save hanging out your laundry, you might be able to buy a lobster… leg.
Fishermen along the Gulf Shore and Cape Breton got their traps ready for their two-month lobster season this week, buoyed by reports from the other end of the province that the tasty crustacean was fetching $15 a pound in Southwest Nova.
But that may be a mixed blessing, explains Leroy MacEachern, a DFO resource management officer. “Lobster prices are very high [but] I hear the supply of lobster is very low.”
Internet horse sex… er, sense
Soon after Judy Bateman’s mare, Twobit, gave birth to a foal on the evening of April 2, the operator of High Meadow Quarter Horses in Prospect got a phone call congratulating her on the joyful occasion. It was from a man in Montreal she’d never met. He just wanted to thank Bateman for “letting him watch.”
This winter, Bateman and her husband began 24-hour live broadcasts from their barn over the Internet using a service called marestare.com. The service hosts webcams from barns around the world.
Though they’ve had a camera in their barn for five years so they could observe their horses from a TV in the house, Bateman says sharing that view on the Internet offers “convenience and security. With all the time zones of people watching, I can go to bed and know there are still people watching.”
She adds that a lot of people check in to the website “just watching for the miracle of birth.”
How many? When their last foal was born, she says, “we had 10 calls before we got out to the barn asking us, ‘Did we know the foal was coming’?”
SOURCES:
Amherst Daily News, Bridgewater Bulletin, Cape Breton Post, King’s County Register, Liverpool Advance, New Glasgow News, Shelburne Coast Guard, Truro Daily News.
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (April 15, 2007)
Workers counting on union to deflate Michelin
Emplyoees put out call for CAW after company decides to slash pay for new workers by $3 an hourSTEPHEN KIMBER
The Daily News
Editor's note: Beginning today, veteran journalist, author and King's College professor Stephen Kimber gives his unique perspective on news events from around the province every Sunday.
Operator, get me the CAW...
One of Nova Scotia's largest employers is slashing the rate it pays new employees by $3 an hour, and threatening to cut wages for existing workers who switch to lower-wage-rate jobs within the company.
Michelin, which employs 3,500 at plants in Bridgewater, Granton and Waterville, says it decided to implement the changes after reviewing the province's "market-based pay structure."
But one unidentified veteran Granton employee - who told the New Glasgow Evening News workers there are "stunned and flabbergasted" - says "the company's doing this because they think they know a union won't come here, and they can get away with it."
The giant French tiremaker is almost as well known for its anti-union attitudes as for the quality of its tires.
Since setting up shop in Nova Scotia in the 1970s, Michelin has survived numerous union organizing drives, occasionally with the help of pliant provincial governments. Both Liberal and Conservative administrations have introduced "Michelin bills" specifically to make it more difficult for unions to organize the company's workers.
The Granton worker told the paper some disgruntled employees recently phoned Canadian Auto Workers' headquarters to see if it would consider another membership drive here.
There's no word on whether the CAW, which has been burned in past efforts at Michelin, will answer that call.
What if they passed a law... then changed their mind
When the MacDonald government brought in new rules last year to force all ATV drivers to take safety training courses, Howard Rhyno and Ralph Winchester saw it as a golden business opportunity.
The Yarmouth ATV enthusiasts invested close to $20,000 to set up an ATV rider safety training program. And why not? With more than 250 members in their own club and lots of non-member ATV enthusiasts in the area, they did some calculating. If they charged $85 dollars for adult courses and $50 for kids, they could make...
Not so fast.
Last month, the province, under pressure from other ATV owners, suddenly loosened the rules. Now only new drivers and kids will have be trained.
Meaning, says Rhyno, they'll have to at least quadruple their fees to survive.
As an ATVer, he concedes he's happy the government's backing off regulating the industry, but as a businessman, well, he's not amused.
"By year's end," he notes, "we should have started making money."
A 'weekend of hell'
Rick Allen of Westfield in Queen's County wasn't the only Nova Scotia parent of soldiers in Afghanistan who greeted last weekend's news that six more Canadian soldiers had been killed there with a complex mix of fear, relief, sadness and guilt.
His 22-year-old son Kyle is a LAV-3 gunner with the Canadian forces in Kandahar. Though Cpl. Allen has only been in Afghanistan for 10 weeks, he'd already been near where one suicide bombing occurred.
And his father knew Kyle, a member of the same company as those killed this time, was deployed in the area of this latest bombing.
So when Kyle didn't phone home as expected Easter weekend, his anxious parents immediately called a military support line. They discovered, to their relief, that he was not among the casualties.
"I feel guilty about this," his father told the Advance. "Because it wasn't him, great... But here you've got six other families that are going through pure torture."
Kyle finally managed to contact his family at 11 p.m. that night. He was standing, he explained, just 200 metres from the accident site.
He and his fellow soldiers were taking turns calling their families to let them know they were OK.
"This weekend has been a weekend of hell for his mom and I," Rick Allen told the newspaper.
Next time, go for eight minutes
Cape Breton municipal councillors say they're trying to "do the right thing" after embarrassing disclosures last month that one of their number collected a "local" travel allowance while working in the Alberta oil sands and another pocketed more than $8,000 worth of taxpayers' money to take courses in (what else?) public administration at Dalhousie University.
The municipality's audit committee is asking staff to develop a training program to help councillors make sense of the huge number of huge - and not so huge - numbers tossed around chambers during audit sessions and budget deliberations.
Cape Breton University political science professor Tom Urbaniak, who concedes the audit committee hasn't provided much financial scrutiny in the past, is hopeful things may be changing. "Even at this meeting we saw a report on capital borrowing," he notes, adding, "and we saw a four-minute debate on that."
Perhaps they could use an auditor, too
The Cape Breton District Health Authority spent $1 million in overtime costs for emergency room care last year - and is on target to spend at least as much again this year. That's double the budgeted amount.
CEO John Malcolm blames a lack of available beds in other hospital units as well as a shortage of nursing home spaces for many of the problems.
While waiting for the province to provide a promised 64 more local long-term care spaces, he says he's trying innovative ways to get people out of the hospital faster, including releasing patients in the
morning instead of later in the day. "It'll be like a hotel in that regard," Malcolm told the Post.
Uh, OK.
"We know we're not finished," he added.
Agreed.
'Look Martha, the inside of a tunnel'
Mulgrave town councillors say bad weather forces officials to close the Canso Causeway way too often - three times in one recent two-week period, in fact. Since they can't do anything about the weather, councillors want to change the causeway.
Deputy Mayor George Freer says the long-term solution to the problem is to build another bridge between Cape Breton and the mainland, or at least cover the existing crossing.
Freer has been touting a covered causeway idea since 1988.
"You can twin all the highways you want," he says, "but when you get to Cape Breton, there's a bottleneck."
Not everyone thought Freer's idea was a good one, however. A reporter from the Guysborough Journal heard one spectator at the meeting grumble aloud that a covered causeway would be "pretty scenic, eh? A goddamn tunnel!"
It's all a matter of scale
If you think overheated condo markets and controversies over surveillance cameras are solely urban issues, think again.
Earlier this month, Liverpool town council debated a motion to install security cameras in its downtown area.
While conceding the town does have a vandalism problem, Mayor John Leefe argued cameras don't work.
He favours the kinder, gentler approach of educating miscreants, or - if sweet reason fails - encouraging witnesses to report offenders to police. Leefe's smalltown solution carried the day. Council voted down the cameras - for now.
Meanwhile, businessman Ken Anthony has announced he is temporarily shelving his high-end Privateer Landing condominium project on Liverpool's waterfront after a rival company announced plans to build a similar project nearby.
"Our market feasibility study," Anthony explained, "indicated there was a demand for one luxury condo project in the town of Liverpool, but not two."
The numbers?
Anthony had planned to develop a 20-unit project; his competitor's project calls for 30.
We're not in Halifax yet.
Not in my back ... two kilometres
Cumberland County Council is expected to vote this week on a controversial new bylaw to regulate local wind farms.
Atlantic Wind Power Corporation wants to erect 20 to 27 windmills on a site along the Gulf Shore east of Pugwash in order to generate what it enthusiastically describes as "an abundant, clean and renewable supply of energy from our windy weather."
But some residents suggest living next door to all those clean, green turbines might be bad for their health - and their property values.
Real estate agent Peter Finley, who says selling "cottage country" is a major industry in the region, predicts property values will "drop 30 to 50 per cent as soon as this project is approved."
And Lisa Betts, who lives near the proposed farm, frets the turbines will produce not only "a noise that never goes away" but may also generate harmful health effects for those living so close to high voltage power lines.
The proposed bylaw requires the windmills be situated at least three times as far from existing residences as the height of the turbines - about 300 metres - but Betts believes the setback should be at least two kilometres. The company says that would kill the project.
Cumberland County - already the site of two smaller windmill projects, and with at least one other proposal in the works - would be the first county in the province to regulate wind farms.
Party poopers
Despite last week's deal between the Liberals and the Greens and public calls for other political parties to stay out of the next federal election so Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay and Green Party leader Elizabeth May can duke it out one-on-one, eye-to-eye, toe-to-toe, mano-to-womano, the NDP has decided not to play along.
Party supporters will meet this afternoon at two o'clock in the Plymouth Fire Hall to choose their candidate for Central Nova in the still uncalled - not to mention uncalled for - federal election.
Louise Lorefice, a retired teacher who's worked for the party for 25 years, is seeking the opportunity to be the ignored third candidate in what will almost certainly be (at least in the national media) a two-way race.
Solicitor-client privilege (April 8, 2007)
An Open Letter to Capital Health
To Chris Power,
CEO,
Capital District Health Authority
Dear Ms Power:
As you may be aware, the Capital District Health Authority turned down my recent freedom-of-information request for the names of all private law firms providing advice to the authority in the Gabrielle Horne case “and the amounts billed by each.”
I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that Dr. Horne — in the feel-good language the CDHA favoured back in the day when Dr. Horne was still in favour — is a “globally pioneering” heart researcher whose multi-million dollar research program was effectively shut down in October 2002. That was when CDHA officials varied her hospital privileges on an “emergency” basis, ostensibly to protect patient safety. Four years — and many legal delays, and even more legal bills later — the CDHA’s board finally acknowledged last fall it had no legitimate cause to vary her privileges. Horne — as you also can’t help but know — is currently suing the CDHA over all this.
Given that the health authority is a public — and supposedly publicly accountable — body providing health care services to 40 per cent of the province’s population, I thought it would be useful to look at whether our scarce health care tax dollars were well spent fighting the Horne case.
The first step, of course, was to find out just how much the authority spent.
Which is where I ran into the first roadblock.
CDHA’s official rationale for refusing my request is that the information is protected by solicitor-client privilege. Under Section 16 of Nova Scotia’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, “the head of a public body” (which is to say you) “may
” (the italics are mine; we’ll come back to “may” later) “refuse to disclose to an applicant information that is subject to solicitor-client privilege.”
The courts have ruled that “all communications made within the framework of the solicitor-client relationship” are confidential. I don’t quibble with the intent of that. Solicitor-client privilege is designed to protect clients —note clients, not lawyers and not publicly accountable institutions — from being forced to disclose confidential information they tell their lawyer or legal advice their lawyer gives them.
Lawyers, of course, being lawyers, have done their best to stretch this legitimate privilege into an unfettered right to conceal everything and anything — from actual legal advice, to stock tips, to… well, the legal bills incurred by otherwise accountable public agencies such as yours.
I’m confident the courts would ultimately rule — as they have in other cases — that un-itemized legal bills incurred by a public body don’t by themselves constitute “a communication between solicitor and client given in confidence.”
But taking the CDHA to court will cost me more money than I have — and the taxpayers, through the CDHA, more than we’ve already spent on this fiasco.
I’m guessing you didn’t spend a lot of time — perhaps you weren’t even consulted — considering whether the Horne case is truly a legitimate exercise of the solicitor-client privilege claim. But I’d urge you to do so now. Because the reality is that you are the client. You can choose to waive this privilege and release the information I asked for — at no additional legal cost to the taxpayer.
I’d ask you to ask yourself — and not your lawyers — precisely what it is about the total dollar amount of these private legal bills that make them a state secret. The answer is common sense.
Do you honestly believe knowing how much you spent on private lawyers — no one is asking what you told them, or what they advised you — will give Dr. Horne’s lawyers some nefarious advantage in her upcoming court case?
Or is invoking this privilege more about protecting the Capital District Health Authority from legitimate public scrutiny — and perhaps embarrassment — over how it has spent public money?
In a recent speech to members of Halifax Regional Council, you made the point that CDHA spends each day “about one-and-a-half-million dollars on behalf of taxpayers
.” That’s a lot of money. Public money. Spent, as you say, on behalf of taxpayers. Which means we should have the right to judge for ourselves whether you’re spending it wisely.
That’s why I’m asking you to waive this spurious claim of solicitor-client privilege and release the legitimate public information I’ve asked for.
I look forward to a public response to this public request.
Sincerely,
Stephen Kimber
Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College, is an award-winning author of five nonfiction books and a novel, Reparations.
Related stories:
- "The Trials of Dr. Horne" from The Coast.
- "Horne case isn't over" from The Daily News
.
- "When is a legal bill legal advice" from The Daily News.
Reading the entrails (April 1, 2007)
Polls are for dogs
“With a provincial election call possibly a week away,” the Montreal Gazette breathlessly reported on Feb. 13, “the Liberals have pulled farther ahead of the Parti Quebecois while the Action democratique du Quebec party's support may be slipping… The survey, conducted between Feb. 7 and 10 by Leger Marketing and made public today, indicates support for Jean Charest's Liberals was at 36 per cent, up from 34 per cent in a Leger poll two weeks earlier. Andre Boisclair's PQ was at 31 per cent, down from 32 per cent. Mario Dumont's ADQ was at 21 per cent, down from 24 per cent…. Forty per cent are satisfied with the Liberal government, up from 34 per cent a year ago… Leger said Quebecers have warmed to Charest in the past year… ”
Uh…
While that report was full of all the usual pollster caveats — a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20… “We don't know what the campaign issues will be…” and Leger’s own don’t-hold-me-to-anything-I-say-today-tomorrow cautions — the reality is that that newspaper report represented a kind of consensus among the country’s pundit cognoscenti in the lead-up to the calling of last week’s Quebec election.
On the day the election was called, the race was Charest’s to win. And Stephen Harper could only help grease the wheels of his friend’s victory ride with a late-campaign federal budget that would “fix” the fiscal imbalance — and the electoral outcome — by pouring millions into Quebec’s treasury. With Quebec in friendly federalist hands, the argument went, Harper could then find an excuse — almost any would do — to pull the plug on parliament and win the majority government those same pollsters kept suggesting he was currently flirting with.
April Fool’s came early this year.
It could come late too if Harper listens to the punditi, who still seem to believe the time is as ripe as it will ever be for his Tories to transform themselves into a majority government.
The problem is that somewhere between the pollster’s telephone polls — which, as John Diefenbaker once famously put, “are for dogs” — and the actual this-counts, election-day polls, the voters get to make up their own minds. And voters these days seem notoriously cranky and, worse, unpredictable.
Let’s consider some of the election-triggering scenarios currently being bandied about in Ottawa.
Although the BQ effectively undercut Harper’s prospects for using the budget to engineer his own defeat by voting for it — damn them — some Tories still suggest a campaign based on the budget would be popular enough with middle class voters in Ontario to help the Tories win seats there.
But that same budget, for other reasons, could cost the Conservatives, more of their few seats in Atlantic Canada, especially in Newfoundland. To achieve a majority, the Tories can’t really afford to lose seats, even in unfriendly Atlantic Canada.
And there could still be a backlash, especially in Ontario, if the notion hardens that Ottawa used its budget — and our tax dollars — to buy votes in Quebec.
Some senior Tories have hinted the party might try to turn an upcoming vote on the Opposition’s rewriting of its environmental legislation into a confidence issue, triggering its defeat and a June election campaign.
Really? At a time when the environment appears to trump other issues in voters’ minds, the notion of Harper — who didn’t even acknowledge climate change until his recent Saul-like conversion on the road to re-election, and whose own clean air legislation was roundly and rightly criticized by almost everyone — attempting to campaign as Enviro Boy is… laughable.
A more promising scenario for the Tories might be to run on a tough-on-crime agenda, but that would probably play more to its electoral base than expand it.
Afghanistan? Who knows how that would play out duing an election campaign in the middle of a volatile war season?
The Tories seem to think they have an ace in the hole in Liberal leader Stephane Dion. They’ve already run a series of apparently successful campaign-style ads mocking his leadership, and are planning more. But Harper’s own mean-spirited personal, partisan attacks on his opponents offer fodder for Liberal counter attacks. That could make the race nastier and even more unpredictable.
And Dion himself, it is worth remembering, has made a successful career out of being under-estimated by his opponents.
The election hasn’t begun. But it’s far from over. No matter what the polls say.
Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College, is an award-winning author of five nonfiction books and a novel, Reparations.
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STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.