Conrad’s favourite lawyer (June 28, 2007)
Fast Eddie’s bullying ‘brilliance’
I don’t pretend to know whether a jury of his lessers will find our own British peer, the peerless Conrad Black, guilty of any or all of the many and various complicated crimes with which he is charged. I hope they do, not so much because I believe the evidence supports the verdict (like others who’ve followed his Chicago trial, I vacillate on the question of whether Conrad is criminal or merely crass), but because, if Black is found guilty, we will be spared yet another torrent of breathless stories about the “the brilliant cross-examiner with the deadly mouth” who is “one of the most famous criminal defence lawyers in Canada.”
Spare me.
OK, OK. Edward Greenspan, Conrad’s longtime buddy and chief courtroom blusterer, is definitely famous. Partly for his fascinating but long-ago CBC series, The Scales of Justice. But mostly for the litany of high-profile clients he’s defended. Wife murderers Helmuth Buxbaum and Peter Demeter, entertainment mogul Garth Drabinsky, German wheeler-dealer and former Mulroney confidant Karlheinz Schreiber and, of course, our own former premier and accused-but-acquitted serial sexual assaulter Gerald Regan.
But the reality is that Greenspan has not always been successful, even in those famous cases. Demeter and Buxbaum were both convicted, and Karlheinz Schreiber is currently awaiting extradition to Germany.
Brilliant?
I’ve only watched Greenspan up close once — during Regan’s 1998 trial on eight sex-related charges, including rape and attempted rape — and I came away with mixed feelings.
There is no question Greenspan is an indefatigable advocate, single-mindedly dedicated to his clients.
But he crosses lines.
During the early stages of the Regan investigation, for example, Greenspan falsely claimed publicly that one of Regan’s accusers — a 14-year-old girl who, in the arcane words of the old law under which he’d been charged, was “of previously chaste character” — “was known and seen to have been pregnant with an illegitimate child” before the alleged assault. Despite Greenspan’s later best efforts in court, the evidence showed the pregnancy occurred years after the assault. But it didn’t matter. The damage had been done. Which appears to have been the point.
Greenspan’s much touted brilliance in cross examination, in fact, often seemed to me to be little more than beside-the-point bullying. When the same now-middle-aged woman testified Regan had raped her in a gravel pit in 1956, Greenspan used the fact she couldn’t find the gravel pit — 43 years later —to relentlessly discredit all her allegations. (The jury never heard that, after her testimony, other people called police and prosecutors to point out the location of the pit.)
Greenspan’s attack on another complainant — a former Liberal secretary who claimed Regan tried to rape her in 1969 — was even more beside the point. Greenspan had discovered that, 30 years before, she had falsified a school document so she could enter Grade 10 with her friends instead of spending another year in junior high. He badgered her mercilessly. If she’d lied about that, Greenspan harangued, she’d lie about anything.
Greenspan, of course, won the Regan case.
But I was curious to see how well this blustering, take-no-prisoners style would play when the witness in front of him was not an otherwise unsophisticated woman trying to recall traumatic events from decades before but a savvy publishing executive who’d confessed to having been part of the very crime for which his client was also accused.
Soon after Greenspan’s cross-examination of David Radler began, Stephen Foley, covering the trial for Britain’s Independent newspaper, concluded “the tide [of jury sympathy] turned [against Black] after a shambolic start to the cross-examination of Mr. Radler by… Greenspan, whose nickname, ‘Fast Eddie,’ never appeared more inappropriate.” Ouch.
Worse, others doubted Greenspan’s strategy of basing Black’s defence on arguing Radler was not only a “serial liar” but also the only criminal involved.
“Which begs the question,” wrote the Toronto Star’s David Olive: “Why did Black see fit to confide in, rely upon as his chief business strategist and lavishly praise David Radler during the entirety of their 34-year business and social relationship?... Was it that Black was so heartily satisfied with Radler's role in building Black's own fortune over the decades that he couldn't imagine a more conducive corporate soulmate?”
Given that the judge this week offered jurors what’s known as the “ostrich instruction” — also used in the Enron and WorldCom fraud cases — allowing them to convict if they believe Black willfully blinded himself to the fact a crime was being committed, that may turn out to have been a strategic error of gargantuan proportions.
Hold your breath.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (June 24, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
June 24, 2007
Vince’s very bad week
Occasional Cape Breton regional municipal councilor — and more-time Halifax computer teacher — Vince Hall “visited” Sydney last week to testify at a Utility and Review Board hearing into whether the municipal council should be downsized.
Hall — who chaired a CBRM boundary review committee that two years ago self-interestedly recommended the municipality maintain its16-member council — spent four grueling hours on the witness stand Monday, two of them face-to-face with his nemesis, Mayor John Morgan, who was representing a citizens’ group that wants council downsized.
On several occasions, Hall complained to review board chair Roland Deveau about Morgan’s questions. Despite the chair’s admonishments, Morgan managed to slip in that Hall had a history of bullying municipal staff. And while Morgan didn’t mention Hall’s other recent missteps — like having the municipality underwrite his university education, for example, or missing budget meetings supposedly because he was ill but when he was actually teaching in Halifax — he didn’t have to.
After his testimony, reporters pressed Hall on whether he’d be returning to Halifax to teach this week. “No comment.”
But then Hall’s bad week got worse.
On Thursday, the Post reported he’d been charged with impaired driving in connection with an incident last month near his new, sort-of home in Halifax.
An emotional Hall, who was convicted in 2001 for an alcohol-related driving offence, confessed he’d been “rightfully stopped… I regret and am sorry for the embarrassment that this will cause my family and friends.”
With his track record, Hall should consider running for Halifax regional school board when that hallowed body is revivified next year.
You’ll learn to love it… no, really…
If you want to know how serious the doctor shortage is in Digby, consider this.
Late last month, town council met in special session to OK shelling out nearly $7,000 to lure an Australian husband-and-wife physician team to set up shop in Digby — even though town officials already knew the doctors were only prepared to commit to staying in the community for four months, and even though the husband is a palliative care specialist who didn’t want to do emergency room shifts or set up a general practice.
The town’s need for doctors is so acute — after this Thursday, there will be just one doctor in the Digby hospital’s ER rotation — councilors convinced themselves they could convince the couple to stay if they could only get them here for four months.
In the end, the deal fell through.
They didn’t get either doctor, but they saved $7,000.
‘Well, I was Grade 6 valedictorian…’
While Amherst residents post signs on utility poles singing the praises of Bill Casey — “Hurrah for Bill Casey, hero in parliament,” reads one poster on Main Street — the editor of the Bridgewater Bulletin is advising his local MP, Gerald Keddy, and Keddy’s fellow Atlantic Canadian Tory parliamentarians, to “dust off their résumés.”
The issue, of course, is the Atlantic Accord. While Casey broke ranks with his Conservative colleagues over the offshore deal, Keddy and the other regional Tory MPs decided to remain inside the Tory tent.
That makes Keddy, in the biting words of the Bulletin editorial, “one of those politicians who has forgotten who elected him.”
What makes the Bulletin’s blast so significant is the fact that, two years ago, the paper praised Keddy “for being a man of principles” for voting against his party and for same-sex marriage.
Now, it says he and the other Tories, who decided to “represent the hard line taken by his party” instead of the interests of their voters, “have collectively snubbed their noses at the voters from this region.”
No wonder Stephen Harper no longer seems quite so eager for an election.
Catch and release
Three Mile Plains residents are being terrorized by a gang of young thugs who steal, then vandalize or destroy “anything that can’t be pinned down.” Townsfolk are so “fed up,” says West Hants Warden Richard Dauphinee, they’re “ready to take back their community.”
The youths appear to take whatever they want — trucks, ATVs, bicycles, lawn mowers, chainsaws — and then systematically destroy them. The Hants Journal reports that one stolen truck was “found in the woods, gutted and burned, while another was left wedged against a door at the Three Mile Plains School with the accelerator left running.”
One resident, who owns a machine repair business, reports vandals stole three ATVs from his shop, which is located on his parents’ property. His mother is now “scared to death; she’s afraid to go to bed at night.” Though the man says he isn’t frightened, he didn’t want his name published.
Windsor RCMP are rumoured to be about to make some arrests, but the machine shop owner isn’t optimistic anything will change. “It’s not the RCMP at fault here,” he notes. “I can’t imagine how frustrating it is for them to finally catch the little buggers, arrest them, bring them to court and then see them out on the street doing whatever they want.”
Warden Dauphinee, who says he knows of at least one senior who sits on his porch with his rifle, is concerned that if residents decide to take action themselves, “the wrong people will be behind bars.”
Citizen journalism 101
For those of you who didn’t get to attend last week’s public hearings into the proposed Whites Point quarry project — you did plan to go, didn’t you? — the Digby Courier has published a helpful guide to what’s available on the web.
First, a quick primer: a company called Bilcon wants to develop a 120-hectare quarry on Digby Neck, from which it plans to ship two million tons of rock a year for the next 50 years to New Jersey, which is — apparently — rock-less. Some locals support the project and its promise of jobs. Many more do not, claiming it will destroy their property values and way of life.
The Courier reports that the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, which is conducting the environmental review of the project, is posting complete transcripts of every word from every witness — www.ceaa-acee.gc.ca — within 72 hours. The agency’s web site also includes more than 50 “advance summaries” of what presenters said they planned to say at the hearings.
For a shorter and more timely — if more biased — version of events, Courier reporter Jonathan Riley recommends former CBC producer (and area resident) Andy Moir’s Stop-the-Quarry blog — www.savedigbyneck.org.
Moir doesn’t claim to be even-handed, or even single-mindedly devoted to his task. “There is so much more,” he wrote at the end of the second day of hearings, “but I plan to get out to enjoy the sunset.”
Ah, the country life.
Ecology Action Centre has a quarry blog too — digbyquarry.blogspot.com
— but Riley says it’s only sporadically updated.
If you really want to know what’s going on, he adds, “the best way… is to show up in person.” If you go on Friday, you’ll see Green Party leader Elizabeth May, who’s scheduled to testify that day.
Facebooking the music
It’s an unsanctioned but tolerated tradition that dates back decades. On a sunny day in June, students at Park View Education Centre and Bridgewater High School skip classes for an afternoon of fun and frolic at Crescent Beach.
But this year, the fun got out of hand. A few students broke into a cottage, made a mess and then made off with the owners’ booze, munchies, plastic cups and toilet paper, not to forget a rubber dinghy.
This being the age of social networking, more than two dozen students not only photographed each other having their way with the stolen goods but also posted the pictures on Facebook, conveniently using the software to identify each individual in each photo, thus making it easy for police to track them down.
Though the students were initially charged with possessing stolen property, officials came up with what they say is a more meaningful punishment — the 30 students had to spend another day at the beach, this time cleaning up.
“It was a very good lesson learned,” suggests RCMP Const. Wendy Sparrow. And the lesson learned? “You really have to be careful who you hang out with.”
Funny, I thought the lesson was: be careful where you post the evidence.
Don’t call a call centre a… call centre
We’re sorry. Truly. Last week we said that global call centre giant Minacs was setting up shop in Port Hawkesbury, replacing disappearing global call centre giant EDS.
But Jeff Williams, vice president of marketing and sales with Minacs, takes “great umbrage” at having his firm referred to as a call centre. “I think we do a lot more than just call centre functions on behalf of our customers,” Williams whined in an interview with the Port Hawkesbury Reporter. “A call centre as a definition is a little too narrow for it.”
What name would he prefer? Well, in its story, the obviously chastened newspaper now describes Minacs as “an international business process outsourcing company.”
Uh, right… We’ll stick with call centre, thanks all the same.
And, by the way, we’re still holding.
SOURCES: AMHERST CITIZEN, AMHERST DAILY NEWS, BRIDGEWATER BULLETIN, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, HANTS JOURNAL, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (June 17, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
June 17, 2007Oh, that call centr
e
I think I may have finally figured out why our provincial politicians are so enamoured with the grant-sucking, low-wage, have-phone-will-travel call centre industry. Because the business is so footloose — opening up shop in one tax-forgiveness jurisdiction one day, shutting down and moving to an even more welcoming government giveaway location the next — politicians get to keep announcing new call centre “solutions” to the very same unemployment problem.
Take Rodney MacDonald, for example. On Friday, our premier was in Port Hawkesbury to proudly announce that Minacs Worldwide was setting up a “new” call centre at 24 Queen Street Extension, instantly creating 250 new jobs, and holding out the carrot that there’d be another hundred or so… somewhere down the yellow brick road.
But wait a minute. Wasn’t there already a call centre at that location?
Ah, yes. That one.
Back in 2002, Liberal MP Rodger Cuzner was just as delighted to announce that EDS, another global giant of the call centre biz, was going to open up shop in Port Hawkesbury, and would employ up to 600 people — with a little help, of course, from its friends in government.
Two years later, MacDonald, then tourism and culture minister, was in Port Hawkesbury to say that Nova Scotia was “proud to continue supporting EDS as the company grows and succeeds.” The occasion this time was that EDS was supposedly adding 300 jobs to its original 450 — no more talk of 600 — with the assistance of more than $4 million more in grants and payroll rebates.
Strangely, however, neither Rodney nor Roger was on hand earlier this year to grandly announce that EDS was leaving town.
But Rodney, of course, was front and centre again on Friday to declare once again just how proud he was to be supporting… what’s the name of this week’s call centre anyway?
Twinning’s “down the road’
Last month’s horrific crash on Highway 103 near Blockhouse has once again raised the question of whether the south shore highway from Halifax to Yarmouth should be completely twinned.
“Maybe [the accident] wouldn’t have happened” if the highway had been divided, a tearful Faye Robar told the Bridgewater Bulletin last week. Robar lost her son and granddaughter in the May 27 crash. They were among five people killed when a Halifax-bound Ford Taurus collided with two motorcycles heading the other way. Volunteer emergency responders called it one of the worst accident scenes they’d witnessed in 30 years.
A committee of south shore municipal councillors has been pressing the province’s transportation department to improve the highway, but “twinning is a ways down the road,” according to committee chair Don Zwicker. The committee’s priority is just getting funding to bring close to 80 km of the 300 km highway up to 100-series standards. Highway 103 still includes some sections of the old Highway 3.
That’s not to say the committee isn’t interested in highway twinning, Zwicker says. With a seemingly interminable twinning project on the 103 between Halifax and Tantallon finally completed last year and a next 20 km phase between Tantallon and Hubbards still just in the talking stage, the committee has “expressed its concern” about how long it will take to even reach the stretch of highway where the most recent accident occurred.
Zwicker, who’s also a Lunenburg municipal councillor, thinks it’s going to take some serious lobbying. “Unless we and the mayors and wardens of the South Shore all get together, we're not going to move ahead.”
Given that Highway 104 highway between Truro and New Glasgow, the home of former premier John Hamm, was completely twinned recently, perhaps the smarter solution is to elect a premier from the south shore.
‘Booming’ Brickton
The mood at last week’s open house at 401 Mt. Hanley Road near Highway 1 in the Annapolis Valley was almost as explosive as the mysterious white container that had recently materialized on the property in rural Brickton.
Most of the 30 residents of the community who showed up at the meeting hadn’t heard that the 48-foot-long container will be used to store smokeless gunpowder — and they weren’t happy when they found out.
Peter Dobson of Lake Echo-based Hirsh Precision Inc. — which owns the property and hosted the event at the suggestion of local MLA Stephen MacNeil — tried to reassure them the gunpowder, mostly used by target shooters, including Olympic athletes, is safer than propane and would simply burn like a flare if ignited. If that wasn’t enough, he added, the container is a Type 1 storage magazine made entirely of steel exceeding standards for its intended use, and is virtually impenetrable.
“Residents,” reported the Annapolis Spectator, “almost laughed at the idea that the container was impenetrable and within minutes had devised simple methods of break and enter.”
Since the open house was pro forma — the company has already met all government rules and regulations for storage — MLA McNeil suggested it was up to the locals to lobby the company to make the container even more secure than it now is. “It's your job to put pressure on them,” he said.
Funny. I thought that was his job.
You gave it away… now buy it back
Nova Scotia’s Fisheries Minister Ronnie Chisholm wants Ottawa to buy back the “deplorable” Digby wharf it privatized eight years ago and put its management back in local hands.
Chisholm wrote to his federal counterpart Loyola Hearn late last month, complaining “the state of the wharf today is hurting the fishing industry and the town,” adding “the time has come for the federal government to resolve this unfortunate situation.”
In 1999, Ottawa turned over the wharf and $3 million to a private company that was supposed to maintain it. But a Transport Canada inspection three years ago made it clear the wharf is still in sad shape. The situation became so bad this spring local fishermen had to chain a section of the wharf together just to keep it from falling apart.
Despite his moral support for the Digby fishermen, Chisholm isn’t offering to contribute any provincial money to make the buyback happen.
Meter-free parking… for now
The good news for Truro residents is that they still don’t have to pay to park downtown. The better news is that, even if they do over-stay their two-hour welcome, the fine is just five dollars if paid within seven days.
The less good news is that that may change, thanks to a few scofflaws.
Last week, town council accepted Police Chief Ken MacLean’s recommendation “to stay status quo” and keep downtown a meter-free zone, but it also asked for a report on better ways to enforce the time limit.
“It’s hard to believe the status quo is the right answer,” said Coun. Sharron Byers. “It’s not working.”
“There are not a lot who abuse the system, but some who do, abuse it often,” MacLean replied, pointing to business owners who use the street as a five-dollar-a-day parking lot. He will look into whether increasing fines or using the Motor Vehicle Act to deny licence renewals to those who owe parking fines might force the naughty to be nice.
Council will revisit the situation in six months.
Don’t hold your breath
Queen’s County has not one but two Stanley Cup connections. Anaheim Ducks goaltender Jean Sebastien Giguere, who once played for the Halifax Mooseheads, is married to the daughter of Doug Fawthrop, White Point Beach Resort’s managing director. Their wedding was held at White Point.
And defenceman Kent Huskins, it turns out, is the son of a long-gone Queen’s County resident who now — unfortunately — lives in Ontario but who once worked as a summer desk clerk at White Point.
So will Lord Stanley’s cup make it to the resort? Or Queen’s county? Don’t hold your breath. Each player gets the cup for a day, but Giguere, suggests his father-in-law, is more likely to show it off back in his own hometown of Blainesville, Quebec, while Huskins’ Queen’s county connection is sketchy at best. His grandparents are deceased and Kent… well, he hasn’t been back to the family homestead in “quite a few” years.
Peace… what peace
The Pugwash Peace Exchange is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the first famous thinkers’ gathering this July with a four-day conference “featuring the most influential gathering of experts on nuclear war since that first conference.”
Nova Scotia-born industrialist and philanthropist Cyrus Eaton staged the first of what would become 275 Pugwash-style conferences — bringing together the world’s most important thinkers on peace and nuclear disarmament to figure out how to save the world from itself — at his summer estate in Pugwash in the summer of 1957.
The highlight of this summer’s event will be a “peace dinner” in Pugwash featuring Foreign Affairs Minister Peter “I-can-do-more-from-the-inside” MacKay and Premier Rodney “just-say-no” MacDonald. Luckily, Senator and retired general Romeo Dallaire will be there to keep the peace. Or not.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News
SOURCES: AMHERST DAILY NEWS, ANNAPOLIS SPECTATOR, BRIDGEWATER BULLETIN, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, LIVERPOOL ADVANCE, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, TRURO DAILY NEWS.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Can Rodney recover? (June 14, 2007)
Can Rodney recover?
CBC Radio’s As It Happens was playing in the background in our kitchen Monday evening as my wife and I went about the clattering, chattering routine of preparing supper.
“Atlantic Accord…” the distractingly insistent, disembodied voice declared over the din. “Broken promise…” “Unfair…” “Nova Scotians expect...” “Get loud…”
“Who’s that speaking?” my wife asked.
”That’s our premier,” I answered. I almost didn’t recognize the new timber-like timbre in his voice either, but I’d heard the announcer introduce him.
“Rodney?” she said, surprised. “When did he find his backbone?”
She’s not the only one asking that question.
Although not as stunningly, shockingly surprising as the final scene of the last episode of the Sopranos Sunday night, Rodney MacDonald’s sudden, Saul-like conversion to reality that same weekend — on what had been his own smiley-faced, what-me-worry, on-message, autonomic path to political oblivion — was almost as dramatic. And it has the potential to change the province’s political dynamic.
It is true, of course, that MacDonald’s decision to publicly break off the going-nowhere negotiations with Ottawa over the Atlantic Accord qualifies as one of those barely-better-late-than-never buzzer-beater baskets.
And it is true too that MacDonald wasn’t actually leading when he lashed out at Ottawa. He was following the well-plowed — and praised — footsteps of newly independent federal MP Bill Casey. (As we bask in the warm glow of Rodney’s finest hour, don’t forget that a few days earlier Rodney had been pressuring Casey to vote for the budget that gutted the same Accord he now vows to defend.)
And it is — perhaps most importantly — true that there are all sorts of ways in which Rodney, being Rodney, can still blow it.
But…
Credit where it is due.
MacDonald’s more than creditable performance this week finally offers his beleaguered Tory supporters their first faint glimmer of hope in almost a year that they could, just possibly, win the next provincial election.
After the Liberals’ recent choice of Stephen MacNeil as their new leader, the Tories’ electoral hopes seemed to flip to black faster than Tony Soprano’s face. If MacNeil, who exudes a kind of calm competence and political sure-footedness, could not vault past the NDP to unseat the Tories, then surely the ever-patient, equally competent and politically astute Darrell Dexter and his no-longer socialist hordes would finally be rewarded for years of loyal opposition.
In either case, Rodney would be toast and the Tories possibly relegated to the third-party in Nova Scotia’s unpredictable three-party political circus.
The knock on Rodney, almost from the day he won the leadership, was that… well… he was just not up to the job. He’s an affable, glad-handing, fresh-faced good old boy, highway-paver type who’s not smart enough or even (a la John Buchanan) savvy enough to run a province.
Until recently, Rodney has lived down to that reputation. It wasn’t just the gaffes — Ernie Fage, Heather Foley Melvin, Sunday shopping et al — though they didn’t help. The real problem was that Rodney often seemed not to grasp the complexities of the issues he was dealing with, so he was forced to fall back on cliché and mindless message-track responses.
That hasn’t been the case with the Atlantic Accord, where our Rodney has more than held his intellectual, strategic own, not only with journalists but also with vicious, infighting feds like Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.
Some observers who read the political tea leaves more rigorously than me insist that Rodney’s handling of the Accord file isn’t quite as new as it seems to me, that Rodney has indeed been belatedly growing into his job.
They point to his handling of the health care workers’ right to strike. Even if you disagree with his plan to take it away (and I for one think it’s a facile attempt to divert attention from the real health care crises), the fact is he took the lead on that issue too. And sounded as if he’d actually read the file.
The irony in all of this is that Rodney’s best hope to solidify his political gains from the Accord issue now is to fail to win a deal with Ottawa. The only deal that will seem like victory is restoration of the pre-budget status quo. And that’s not going to happen, so whatever happens — except defeat itself — will smell like defeat. And Rodney’s brief spike in popularity will turn out to have been nothing more than that.
Sometimes you only win by losing.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communication Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (June 10, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
June 10, 2007They can’t say they weren’t warned
Federal Tories couldn’t have been surprised when Bill Casey stood in the House of Commons on principle — and against his party — in last week’s budget vote.
In truth, the veteran Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley MP has been out of step with Stephen Harper (and in touch with his own constituents) from the day the former Reformer was sworn in as prime minister.
That grand occasion also marked the first day Casey publicly questioned the PM’s wisdom — for welcoming yesterday’s Liberal, David Emerson, into his cabinet. In February, Casey was deep in the doo doo again after he criticized Harper for currying favour with Quebec voters by handing out aerospace contracts to firms in that province when companies in his own riding didn’t get a whiff of the lucrative work.
All of this, of course, has always played much better in Casey’s home riding — where he’s been re-elected in four straight elections — than it does inside the Conservative caucus in Ottawa where leader loyalty is the sine qua non of promotion.
“Our association to a person is supporting Bill,” local riding president Scott Armstrong told the Amherst Daily News after Casey was turfed from caucus. “He’s been a wonderful MP for our riding and we support him.”
Others in the riding agree — at least if you believe to reader responses on the Amherst paper’s website.
“The Tories don’t realize what they have lost,” wrote Shawna Richardson. “I know that [I and] a lot of others voted for Bill, and not necessarily the party… Whatever party is in power makes no difference to me. But who represents my interests in Ottawa is very important and, therefore, as long as he is in politics… Bill will always have my vote.”
“Mr. Casey remembers where he comes from and, more importantly, who put him in Ottawa,” explained Jennifer Boyce from Pictou. “It wasn't Stephen Haprer.”
Although he insists he’s made no decisions about his long term political future, Casey mused last week that “even I was surprised that I didn’t mind sitting as an independent.”
All of which raises an interesting question. How will Stephen Harper ever win his elusive majority if he keeps alienating his own supporters?
The answer. He won’t.
Mindlessly mind-boggling
Brian Cullen has a question. Why do people dump their garbage in the woods when they could place it roadside for free county pickup?
“It’s mind-boggling,” the Pictou County chief administrative officer marveled after county officials there discovered yet another illegal dump — filled with drywall, broken shelves, children’s toys, charred wood, burned papers, smashed computer monitors and enough junk to fill a house — in a forested area near Alma.
Although the site violates the county’s solid waste by-law, Cullen knows there’s little chance of identifying the culprits or prosecuting them. Last year, only one person was prosecuted for illegal dumping.
But he can’t help but wonder at the sheer stupidity of it all. “A lot of the material that is found in the woods or on sides of roads could be picked up at curbside,” he points out. “The landfill is open to the public. The programs are easily accessible, but people feel compelled to do this.”
Want to see what dumb-assed dumping looks like? The New Glasgow News has, as we say in the biz, film at 11: http://www.ngnews.ca/
But did they find my other sock?
A film crew from the reality TV series Rescue Mediums spent four days in Shelburne last week, prowling the third floor of the venerable Loyalist Inn for ghostly presences.
The quirky show, broadcast in Canada on the Women’s Network, follows two British (perhaps you guessed the British part already?), strangely psychic sisters-in-law as they travel from the world, meeting and interviewing other-worldly creatures, then “clearing” their spirits by “showing the spirit into the light.”
Jackie Dennison and Christine Hamlett — who claim to have helped the British police solve the “Moors murders” in the sixties and whose website offers such spirit-friendly advice as “Seven Ways to Cleanse Your Aura” — came to Shelburne at the invitation of the inn’s owner, Linda Deschamps, who says she’d sensed the existence of spirits that seemed to haunt the third floor.
While Deschamps would like to see the ghostbusters solve the mystery, she’s even more hopeful the show will create some this-world benefits by luring tourists to Shelburne.
The show’s producers were tight-lipped about what they discovered. “I’m not going to say what we found here because it will give the show away,” a producer told the Shelburne Coast Guard.
Cue the aura.
Dialing for docs in Digby
Digby residents are planning a “we-need-doctors” rally outside their general hospital next Tuesday (June 19) to draw attention to the health care crisis in their area. They’re hoping to put pressure on municipal leaders to apply pressure to Health Minister Chris d’Entremont to provide the funding necessary to keep the hospital’s emergency room open round the clock. Last month, the province said no to the hospital’s request.
Since last fall, the ER has had to shutter its doors on Fridays because of a lack of local doctors to do emergency room rotations.
That acute situation is set to get even more desperate at the end of this month when Dr. Roy Harding closes his 2,300-patient family practice.
His departure will put even more pressure on the system because many of his patients, who will suddenly find themselves without a family doctor — there are reports the closest town where physicians are taking new patients is nearly two hours away in Windsor — will end up going to the local emergency room for treatment or, worse, delaying treatment until their condition is so serious they too end up in the ER.
But which ER? Overcrowding and Friday closures in the under-staffed Digby emergency room could force patients to make the hour-long journey to Yarmouth to seek treatment there. But that might not solve the problem either. Shelburne is also losing one of its physicians, meaning patients there will be heading to Yarmouth’s ER for treatment too.
All of which prompted Harding — wearing his other hat as the hospital’s deputy chief of medical staff — to write to the mayor and warden, asking them to arrange a meeting with the health minister. In his letter, Harding suggested the province’s recent decision to turn down the hospital’s request for funding might have been different if d’Entremont himself had attended an April meeting between local officials and the health department.
It might also have been different if d’Entremont had had to spend a day or two waiting for service in an over-crowded emergency room.
‘Getting bombed at the prom’ no joke
Although bomb hoaxes may have become this spring’s prank pastime of choice for bored Nova Scotia students, police in Cape Breton are taking a detailed email threat to bomb Memorial High’s senior prom next week very seriously.
The person claims to be a former student at the school who was “mistreated when I was there.” In addition to planting a bomb, the emailer suggests other potential ways he or she could create havoc at the Sydney Mines school, including using a “concealed knife, gun, stuff like that,” or unleashing a lethal poison cocktail made from household cleaning solutions.
While school officials try to decide whether to go ahead with the always eagerly anticipated grad dance June 23, police are scrambling to get a handle on who the person could be. They’ve brought in psychologists and information technology experts to help them identity whoever emailed the warning to local media outlets and police.
“We have no profile on the subject yet,” Staff Sgt. Paul Jobe told a news conference Tuesday. “That’s what we’re currently working on.”
He conceded police officials are torn between alerting the public to the threat and encouraging copycats.
No kidding.
Smart bomb, dumb parents
Meanwhile, the principal of a Yarmouth junior high school managed to turn his school’s “Grove-will-blow-up-on-May-30-and-all-of-the-students-will-die” prank threat into a teachable moment.
Two weeks ago, someone found a threatening note in a school desk at Maple Grove Educational Centre. Before calling police, principal Svein Ravlo did a little sleuthing of his own. He checked to find out who’d been sitting at the desk that day and quickly narrowed the suspects to one. The boy “’fessed up” — “I just wanted the day off school” — after Ravlo asked for a writing sample but well before he brought out the rubber truncheons.
Last Tuesday, the school held an assembly at which the student — accompanied by his mother, school administrators and an RCMP officer — apologized to everyone for what he had done and officials talked with the students about the seriousness of the “joke.”
“We know students at this age are very impressionable and I think it’s important that they see the process play out,” Ravlo explained.
Though he didn’t want to get into specifics, Ravlo added that the student had been “dealt with severely,” in addition to his assembly humiliation/teaching moment.
Ironically, however, even though school officials quickly determined the threat was a prank and dealt with it transparently — even sending a letter home to parents explain to what had happened — the Yarmouth Vanguard reports that many parents still kept their kids home from school on the day the supposed threat was supposed to be carried out.
Go figure.
But can… er, will they read it?
The Western counties regional library is forwarding petitions from its patrons urging the province to increase library funding to all its local MLAs. And municipal councils in the region are writing their own similar letters to the provincial government.
The province’s rural libraries have been whacked with a double whammy this year — StatsCan reports of declining rural populations coupled with a provincial library funding formula directly tied to the numbers of people in a district. So the libraries’ operating costs continue to increase while funds fall, creating a crunch when it comes to buying new books for its shelves. Which, after all, is what libraries do.
The Western counties library system had decided to take money from its reserve fund — which is supposed to finance new branches and cover contingencies — to get them through this year’s crisis.
But that’s a one-time-only solution, says library chair Gary Anderson. “It is not large enough to do this again.”
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: AMHERST DAILY NEWS, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, YARMOUTH VANGUARD
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Capital Health does it again
The high cost of refusing to say ‘sorry’
June 7, 2007
The war of attrition the Capital District Healthy Authority seems so eager to wage against some of its best and brightest has now opened on yet another front with the opening salvo in another nasty, pointless — and expensive — skirmish.
Last week, Dr. Michael Goodyear, a medical oncologist and ethics researcher, filed a formal complaint with the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, alleging the CDHA discriminated against him on the basis of the “perception of a mental disability.” He filed his complaint after four-and-a-half years of unsuccessfully trying to convince the CDHA to restore his hospital privileges, which the health authority revoked on the basis of what appears to have been little more than a personality conflict with his boss.
If the outlines of Goodyear’s story sound eerily similar to the still ongoing case of Dr. Gabrielle Horne — the globally pioneering heart researcher whose multimillion dollar research program was scuttled when her hospital privileges were varied for unrelated issues of “collegiality,” and who is now suing the CDHA for what will likely be millions in damages — that’s because they are.
For a variety of reasons, Goodyear’s case has gotten less media attention. But it is no less troubling.
According to his complaint, Goodyear’s problems started in September 1999 when Dr. Leonard Reyno took over as his division head. By October 2002, their disagreements over Goodyear’s “communication… availability and judgment” had escalated to the point where the chief of medicine, Dr. Elizabeth Anne Cowden, ordered Goodyear’s hospital privileges varied and “suggested” he check himself in, at his own expense, to the Professional Renewal Center in Kansas — which deals with professionals suffering from “disruptive behaviour, career burnout and psychiatric illness” —to “undergo a ‘fitness to practise’” and
“competence assessment.”
When Goodyear refused, he says he was relieved of his responsibilities, restricted from “clinical practice, research, teaching, administrative duties and publication and presentation of my work.” At the same time, a complaint was filed against him with the College of Physicians and Surgeons — he says he was never given details of the allegations — but, according to Goodyear’s human rights complaint, Cowden claimed he was experiencing a “mental health crisis.”
The District Medical Advisory Committee spent three months investigating Cowden’s allegation and found no substance to it. Two years after that, the College of Physicians and Surgeons withdrew its complaint as well.
In his own defence, Goodyear did undergo an independent psychological assessment conducted by the chair of the province’s psychology board of examiners. According to Goodyear, the assessment showed he was “well adjusted,” “warm,” “considerate” and “caring of others and alert to their feelings.”
Dartmouth Liberal MP Michael Savage agrees. Goodyear was his late father’s oncologist when the former Nova Scotia premier — a physician himself — was undergoing cancer treatment. Goodyear, Savage says, was “very compassionate without providing false hope, very competent and responsive… He and Dad got along very well. [Goodyear] provided unvarnished factual info, which Dad craved, and yet provided a sense that there were things that could be done when that was indeed the case.”
Despite that — and despite the fact the health authority has failed for four years to show how Goodyear endangered or harmed his patients in any way (the only legal grounds for revoking his privileges) — Goodyear still doesn’t have his hospital privileges back.
Goodyear’s ordeal, in fact, continues. In 2003, the CDHA removed him from his position as the CDHA’s research ethics chair over the objections of other members of the committee and several former chairs. In December 2003, he was locked out of his office. Eventually, he was forced to declare bankruptcy.
These days, his office is a small, windowless closet of a room in a far corner of the Victoria General Hospital that the hospital only reluctantly opened up for him.
Accept the usual caveats — the CDHA hasn’t yet offered its defence, and Goodyear’s allegations haven’t been tested by formal investigation or hearing — but they more than pass the smell test, especially given what we already know about what happened in the Horne case.
In each case, the CDHA has probably spent millions on outside lawyers — the authority refuses to provide me with information on exactly how much it spent on the Horne case — simply because it refuses to acknowledge its mistakes.
Those lawyers’ dollars, it’s worth noting, are not only coming out of our tax dollars, they’re coming out of a health care budget that desperatle needs every dollar it can get for patient care.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communication Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
More text goes here.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Subscribe
About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of 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 seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.