Kimber’s Nova Scotia (July 29, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
July 29, 2007
On your mark, get set, munch
The Hants Journal is reporting this week that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency lab failed to properly identify a sample collected near Halifax in 1990 as the dangerous-to-our-forest-industry brown longhorn spruce beetle. That gave the critter an eight-year head-start on its ongoing devastating munching march through our woodlands. The sample, in fact, remained in a sealed container in Ottawa for nearly a decade before it was finally hauled out again and compared to suspicious samples gathered around Point Pleasant Park in 1998. The comparison made it clear we’d been under foreign attack for many years.
”We were under the assumption that our trees were being killed by a native beetle,” explains Greg Cunningham, a forest pest management specialist at the agency in Fredericton.
With at least 13 infestation sites now confirmed in Nova Scotia, Cunningham says scientists are playing catch up to contain the pest. They’re considering all options — including introducing a genetically modified synthetic pheromone to “confuse the beetle during its sexually active state,” massive aerial spray programs and/or intensively logging likely target forests to at least make commercial use of trees before they become infested.
That last option has some, like Hants County woodlot owner Bernard Curry, suspecting “this is just another way for the American companies to keep on stripping everything in sight. What these people are doing to our forests shouldn't be allowed,” he complains. “They’re taking everything.”
In fact, local residents say they’ve noticed more logging trucks hauling loads 24 hours a day over the past several weeks.
Concedes Cunningham: “It could be that some companies knew the quarantine area was going to expanded and had cut logs ahead of time.”
Uh…
What me, worry?
Given his boss’s very public and messy spat with the premier of his province over the Atlantic Accord, the closure of one of his constituency’s most important employers and, oh yes, Green Party leader Elizabeth May’s persistent nipping at his electoral heels, it’s no surprise Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay has managed to carve a little time away from international globe-trotting to try to mend some political fences closer to home.
Last week, MacKay was in Pictou for a whirlwind cheque presentation — $20,000 to the Pictou Waterfront Development Committee to develop a five-year business plan because “strengthening the tourism industry in rural ports contributes significantly to the economy of communities like Pictou” — and an upbeat luncheon speech to the local Chamber of Commerce.
Pumping up the positive volume, MacKay predicted that, thanks to Ottawa’s new Atlantic Canada gateway strategy, Pictou County is poised to become the next Fort McMurray (if you consider that a positive development).
“I truly believe this is bigger than the offshore,” MacKay gushed, piling on the images. “We can be the through-ramp to the NAFTA highway if we do it right.”
What’s in that for Pictou County?
MacKay talked vaguely about all the money — the amount “to be determined in the very near future” and depending, perhaps, on who you vote for in the next election — Ottawa has set aside for the gateway project in its most recent federal budget…
Oh yes, that budget, the one that gutted the Atlantic Accord and triggered the collapse of federal Tory support in Nova Scotia. “I sometimes worry that we become a little too fixated on one subject,” MacKay mused. He preferred to stress his “very good working relationship” with Premier Rodney MacDonald, and — say it one more time — the cash that is coming to Nova Scotia as a result of the budget.
It isn’t, he acknowledged, an easy sell. “I don't think we could have got more negativity had we completely cut off equalization.”
Please, Peter, don’t suggest that to Stephen Harper.
Oops
In advance of a planned visit to Lunenburg’s Fishermen’s Memorial Hospital last week, NDP MP Alexa McDonough’s office issued a press release expressing her concerns over the lack of progress in completing the Dr. Arthur H. Patterson Centre for Restorative Care there.
“I'm confident we’ll do what we always do,” the release quoted McDonough as saying. “Roll up our sleeves, band together and get this project off the ground ourselves.”
Oops… it turns out the locals are already beginning to roll down their sleeves. As the Bridgewater Bulletin helpfully pointed out, the centre, in fact, “is nearly completed and patients are expected to be admitted in early August.
To add embarrassment to misstep, the Bulletin’s online edition includes a video of McDonough — http://www.southshorenow.ca/source/woodenboat_feature/index3.php — trying to explain away the error. The clip ends with an unflattering freeze frame of the former NDP leader looking like she is ready to swear at someone back in her office.
And well she might.
Next exit to nowhere
Speaking of summer sightings of vote-seeking politicians — we just did — and highway signage — we will — this just in from new Liberal leader Stephen McNeil’s let-me-introduce myself tour of community newspaper editorial boards.
McNeil popped up at least two newspapers last week, including the Truro Daily News, where he was asked about his strategies for boosting tourism in the province.
Among other dreams — better marketing in Europe, more focus on getting other Canadians to visit us and, of course, paving highways (he says we need tourists to “remember the sights, instead of the road they have been driving on”) — McNeil claimed credit for the erection of a new highway marker.
“I was also very pleased to be part of the new sign on the 104 that directs people to the Annapolis Valley, rather than just, ‘last exit to Halifax.’” He told the newspaper.
Hmmm. “Next Exit to the Home of Stephen McNeil” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Home of Sidney Crosby,” but I guess the Annapolis Valley will just have to make do.
Signs of the times
In Queen’s County, the latest summertime amusement for idle — or addled — minds seems to be stealing warning signs from local construction sites. About a dozen have disappeared in the past month, most from a water and sewer project construction site in Brooklyn.
Mayor John Leefe isn’t happy with the fact his municipality will have to shell out close to a thousand dollars to replace the pilfered signs but he says he’s more concerned the lack of signage could lead to an accident.
If it did, he says, the thief could be charged not just with theft but with criminal negligence.
In the meantime, he’d rather get the signs back. If anyone happens to have one of the scalped signs sitting around in their backyard, the mayor cordially invites them to drop it off at a construction site, in front of the municipal office or outside the public works department garage.
Not in my back bay…
When the Friends of Port Mouton Bay staged a community meeting recently to discuss a proposal for a second fish farm in their area, they knew it would be well attended. Organizers set out 385 chairs to accommodate the expected crowd but, by the time meeting began, it was already standing-room only.
Aqua Fish Farms, a New Brunswick-based company that operates a small salmon farm near Port Mouton, has applied to set up a second, much larger 70-acre farm on the western side of Port Mouton island, directly across from the community’s best beach.
Ron Loucks, a member of the Friends’ scientific committee, told those attending the session that the existing fish farm is already causing the growth of algae, which may be affecting wild fish stocks.
The bay is considered a prime molting area for lobster and a spawning ground for herring, as well as a rich source of other shellfish.
Loucks says records from local fishermen this spring show fewer lobsters in fishing grounds closest to the current farm.
“It’s a great concern,” he says. “The body of scientific information establishes that the proposed fish farm should be withdrawn for consideration.”
Ottawa and the province are both still considering the proposal, with no decision expected until the fall.
Counting crows, counting damage
Berwick’s crows have developed a rubber fetish, more particularly a thing for the rubbers on automobile windshield wipers, and most especially — and perhaps dangerously — a fixation on the ones to be found on cars in the local RCMP detachment parking lot.
“I just don’t think it’s funny,” Const. Colleen Fequet, who has already had to replace two sets of wiper blades on her own car, told a local reporter. In the past month alone, the crows have eaten through four sets of wiper rubbers on one Mountie car and two sets on each of the detachment’s other two patrol vehicles. Some local staff now refuse to park their cars in the lot; others, like Fequet, are using beach towels or lengths of PVC pipe over the wipers to discourage the vandals.
“It’s damage to property, mischief,” complains a still unamused Fequet, who adds that — unlike human miscreants — “we can’t control them. At first it was funny, but it’s frustrating and expensive.”
As for what’s caused this outbreak of deviant behaviour, Fred Mills, a 32-year veteran with the Department of Natural Resources, says he’s never heard of it before. “We’ve found lots of odd things in their nests over the years, but you generally think of crows and ravens going after shiny things.”
But Mills, who suggested the high-tech “shoo away method” may be the best if most time-consuming way to keep the creatures away, seemed more amused than alarmed by the curious crow attacks.
“It always amazes me the things we learn about wildlife,” he told the King’s County Register. “They’re truly sentient creatures — and we can’t explain or ask them whey they do what they do.”
Perhaps Mills can afford to be bemused because he lives in Bridgewater, and not Berwick.
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: BRIDGEWATER BULLETIN, HANTS JOURNAL, KING’S COUNTY REGISTER, LIVERPOOL ADVANCE, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, TRURO DAILY NEWS.
Still no school for Africville (July 26, 2007)
Another legacy of Africville
I had called Tom McInnis, Nova Scotia’s deputy premier during the last days of the Buchanan era, to ask him a question. In December 1991, McInnis had announced — to great fanfare and applause — that the province would rebuild Seaview United Baptist Church on the site of the former Africville. It appeared at the time to be an important symbolic step in righting the historic wrong done more than 20 years earlier in razing that poor-but-proud black community on the shores of Bedford Basin.
I wanted to ask McInnis what he thought about the reality that today — 16-and-a-half years later — the church still isn’t built.
The answer I got turned out to be less about the church — McInnis had understandable difficulties recalling the specifics of that long ago announcement — and much more about the profound effect the Africville experience had on other Nova Scotia black communities, not to mention on a neophyte politician named Tom McInnis.
When McInnis was first elected MLA for Halifax Eastern Shore in 1978, his sprawling riding included most of the Prestons, the largest indigenous black community in Canada. But McInnis — a country boy from Sheet Harbour at the other end of the constituency who had become a successful downtown lawyer — knew very little of the black districts in his riding. In fact, he says he was discouraged from even staging rallies there during his campaign. “There was a lot of anger, a lot of hostility,” he says now.
After he was elected, a number of key Preston leaders — including then-county councillor Arnold Johnson and local matriarchs Noreen Smith and Viola Cain — took the young white politician aside and informed him he needed to stop thinking of the Prestons as another election campaign-stop-photo-op and actually spend some time there to see for himself its strengths and its needs.
“So on a foggy Monday night, they put me in a car and drove me around.” McInnis laughs. “A wake up? I guess it was. Noreen really woke me up.”
During that first visit, McInnis discovered Preston had no municipal sewer and water services and, too often, open wells sat dangerously close to outdoor toilets in the rocky soil.
One of the ostensible reasons for wiping Africville off the map in the sixties, of course, had been that it didn’t have proper sewer and water services. The city claimed at the time that it would be too expensive to provide them, but the city ended up spending more relocating the community than it would have providing basic services the residents had been demanding for generations.
By the time McInnis was first elected, “Remember Africville” had become a rallying crying in black communities all over Nova Scotia. Including especially in the Prestons, where the same arguments were being made against providing its residents with water, even though, as McInnis himself says, “In North Preston, you could spit and hit watershed.
“Africville,” he recalls, “was mentioned a lot that night.”
It was the beginning. “Go to North Preston today and look at it,” McInnis suggests now. “It’s a wonderful community. And there’s water and sewer in every home.”
He is careful not to claim credit. “This wasn’t driven by Tom McInnis. It was driven by people in that community who made it happen.” People who were determined not to allow their community to be another Africville.
Their determination changed McInnis too. Even though he’s been out of politics for nearly 15 years, he says he still occasionally visits with friends back in the Prestons. And he says one of the many lessons he learned from his visits over the years is just how important the institution of the church is in Nova Scotia’s black communities.
So why does he think the church he promised the former residents of Africville has never been built?
“When was that again?” he asks me.
“Nineteen ninety one.”
“Let me think,” he pauses. “We were defeated in ’93…”
It isn’t clear, perhaps even to McInnis now, whether rebuilding the church was just one of those too-easy, vote-seeking promises made by a government already in desperate political trouble, or whether it was a genuine commitment that got derailed after the government was replaced.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter.
“The church was important,” McInnis says simply. “It should have been built.”
It should.
As the former residents of Africville come together at Seaview Park this week for their annual celebration and remembrance of their gone-but-never-forgotten community, we can only hope we’re not still talking about rebuilding the church 16 years from now.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His 2006 novel, Reparations, includes a fictionalized account of the Africville relocation and its reverberations today. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (July 22, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
July 22, 2007Quarry queries open ‘black hole’
Nobody, it seems, is happy with progress on a proposal to develop a quarry near North Mountain in the Annapolis Valley.
Granville Centre residents wrote a letter to Bruce Spicer, whose Bridgetown construction company is behind the project. While he did reply to their initial letter, they claim he didn’t answer all their questions. But that’s more satisfaction than they got from either the department of environment or local MLA Stephen McNeil, neither of whom responded at all.
“There’s this black hole,” says local resident Jacquie Martin.
But Bruce Spicer isn’t happy either. While he says his company wasn’t required to seek public input, it took out an ad in the local newspaper, inviting questions from residents. But many of the questions turned out to be “ridiculous,” he says. “They’re asking us about highway issues and, ‘what about the mailman?’”
Worse, he says, “we’re being lumped in with the Bilcons.” Bilcon is the American company behind a controversial 120-hectare quarry proposal for Digby Neck. It wants to scoop up two million tons of rock a year from the site for the next 50 years and ship it to rock-hungry New Jersey. “We’re talking about supporting the local economy,” Spicer insists of his less than 10-hectare project.
Spicer’s not much happier with the department of labour and environment — and not only because the approval process is now three-months-and-counting. He says he’s been trying to arrange a public meeting with officials from the department, but has gotten the impression the province would prefer to hold its own meeting with residents.
Residents like Fred Martin say they want Environment Minister Mark Parent to order a full site survey and environmental assessment to determine the quarry’s potential impact on everything from noise, to dust, to wetlands, to tourism.
“In a way, we don’t know what to be afraid of,” says Fred Martin.
Which may be why they’re afraid of everything.
This week’s ER closure alerts…
Nova Scotia’s ongoing rural doctor shortage has prompted yet more emergency room closures. Roseway Hospital in Shelburne was forced to close its ER for more than 24 hours beginning last Monday, while the Lillian Fraser ER in Tatamagouche shut down Thursday and Friday of last week — and will be closed on those same days again next week. They join the Digby Hospital, whose emergency room remains closed every weekday throughout July, and possibly longer.
In May, Liberal health critic Dave Wilson reported figures showing ERs in Nova Scotia had already been closed 1,947 hours to that point this year, compared to just 460 during the same period last year.
“If that’s not a crisis,” asked an editorial in the New Glasgow News at the time, “what is?”
Good question. Still no good answer from Health Minister Chris d’Entremont.
Critter alert
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has begun sending out
“Prohibition of Movement” notices to woodlot owners in parts of Hants County, restricting what they can do with all those spruce logs, wood, bark and chips on their land.
The CFIA is trying to regulate human behaviour, of course, because it has had absolutely no luck prohibiting beetle behaviour.
Since arriving in wood-packing materials from overseas in 1999, the spruce longhorn beetle, which has been declared a “serious risk” to all the forests in North America, has been eating its way through Nova Scotia woodland. After wreaking havoc on Point Pleasant Park, it began its current westward munch.
Last spring, the CFIA extended its quarantine to include other parts of Hants County, and the latest letters from the agency are considered a preventive measure while it figures out what to do next.
Some woodlot owners like Larry Eldridge are skeptical. “We knew from day one they can’t stop this infestation. It’s the same as coyotes; they’re here to stay.”
Colin Hughes, who owns a large trucking and cutting operation in the New Ross area, told the Hants Journal last week Nova Scotia should look to Europe for solutions. “In Scandinavia, they don’t have these problems because they manage all of the woodlots and at the end of the day they have a lot more return value.”
Critter alert, take two
What began as a complaint last fall that a Berwick resident was keeping horses on his town property quickly morphed into nearly a year of debate, discussion, public hearings, committee buck passing and, of course, the usual eventual decision not to decide.
Town council responded to the initial complaints by drafting a new bylaw restricting residents from raising non-domestic animals within town limits.
“Berwick is a town, not the country, and needs to be treated that way,” argued Mayor John Prall. “It is no longer appropriate to be raising these kinds of animals in the town limits. The onus is on (this committee) to protect people with a bylaw.”
But most of those who attended a public hearing this month opposed the proposed bylaw.
Which led Berwick Chief Administrative Officer Bob Ashley to suggest setting the matter aside for future consideration. “We need to agree on the true purpose of any new bylaw,” he explained. “Is it to protect residents who don’t want livestock in their neighbourhoods, or to accommodate those who want to engage in this activity?”
Motion to table? Agreed. Next…
Oh, that kind of bore…
The Department of Natural Resources has seized 10 wild boars and charged a West Bay farmer with keeping the exotic game animals without proper permits.
Allan Wheaton, who had planned to raise the animals on his wild game farm, says he’ll fight the charges in court. “A pig’s not exotic to me,” he says. “Unless we’re talking about Miss Piggy.” He believes the department stalled issuing him the necessary permits to import the boars because it wants to remove the animal from the list of approved wild game farm animals.
The problem, says conservation officer Chris Ball, who was part of the raid on Wheaton’s farm, is that boars can be aggressive, escape their pens and endanger other animals.
“They’re omnivores and will eat anything from ducks to wild bird’s nests, eggs, small animals like fawns and even domestic pets if they get hold of one,” he says. “They’re wild and opportunistic and will feed on anything they can get.”
Sounds like politicians to me.
Continuing our critter theme…
Peter Boyles of the Hillside-Trenton Environment Watch Association says his group wants to be “like that bad mosquito that just won’t go away.”
Which is why his association staged its annual environmental protest last weekend near Nova Scotia Power’s Trenton plant during Trenton’s Fun Fest. They hope to raise public awareness about NSP’s use of environmentally unfriendly coal while touting alternative energy sources like wind power. (Perhaps they should ask singer Anne Murray just how friendly wind can be.)
This year, protesters also used the protest occasion to rally support for 12 local unionized security guards recently fired by the owners of the now-closed TrentonWorks plant who — speaking of pests that won’t go away — are now occupying the plant.
“We've got to keep it in the public eye and keep it on their mind,” Boyles explained of the groups concerns about… well, everything.
On vacation
Mould in the basement… Asbestos in the walls… But no meetings “until August at the earliest.”
Members of Amherst’s West Highlands Elementary School’s advisory committee may want the province to replace their dilapidated 95-year-old school as soon as possible, but the local school board doesn’t seem to be rushing to judgment.
The school had been slated for a $3-million renovation, but those plans were put on the shelf last month after Deputy Education Minister Dennis Cochrane toured the school and advised against proceeding.
While that put the school’s future back in the board’s court, board spokesperson Terri Mingo-MacNeil told the Amherst Daily News last week that “the board hasn’t met since receiving the message from the deputy minister, and I don’t believe the operational services committee has met either.”
The board could ask the province to build a new school, or close West Highlands and move its students to already full-up Spring Street Academy or Cumberland North Academy in Brookdale.
Air quality testing this spring that showed mould levels still within acceptable limits, but the board was advised to tape over any cracks in the wall plaster.
“Safety is always our biggest concern,” says Ms Mingo-MacNeil.
Speed apparently is not.
What, me worry?
The special meeting of Canso’s town council was supposed to discuss a recent Utilities and Review Board recommendation that the town cut the number of councillors from six to four. But the 45 passionate residents who showed up at the meeting at the Shamrock Club were more interested in finding a future for their beleaguered and steadily shrinking town than in the number of councillors needed to preside over its demise.
When one man asked Mayor Ray White how his three-year plan to revitalize the town was going, the mayor had to concede… not well. “I’ve not been able to convince provincial, federal government for help,” he said. “I’ve sent letters to the four party leaders to try to get them here.”
The only hopeful moment in the meeting came when Coun. Joe Walsh, hinted a “private enterprise” may soon be headed to Canso. But he wouldn’t say more. “Loose lips sink ships,” he explained.
As for the number of ouncilors, don’t expect any fewer loose lips. Councillors voted 5-1 to maintain the status quo.
Steady as she goes.
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, HANTS JOURNAL, KING’S COUNTY REGISTER,
NEW GLASGOW NEWS, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, TRURO DAILY NEWS.
Considering Conrad (July 19, 2007)
On almost
feeling sorry for Conrad
I did try — for almost a second — to resist the temptation to gleefully pile on.
But how to follow all those happy headline writers? “CON-rad Black…” “Lord Greed…” “Lord Fraud...” Or one-up all those many other former ink stained wretches — all once also in the employ of the now “disgraced,” now “former” media baron —who wanted their space to gloat over Black’s Friday 13th comeuppance on fraud and obstruction of justice charges?
“Everyone who worked under the trying regime of Conrad Black is breathing a great sigh of relief,” sighed an editorialist at his former American flagship, the Chicago Sun-Times. Over in London, the folks at the Daily Telegraph, once the jewel in Lord Black’s crown, wanted it known publicly that, “since 2004, [Conrad Black] has had no connection with the paper.”
And so it has gone. The wonderfully witty Canadian journalist Linda McQuaig, whom Black once famously wished “horsewhipped” for her left-wing views, wrote in Britain’s Guardian of “the simple pleasure of watching one of the world's most pompous individuals publicly humiliated, perhaps forced to spend his remaining days in the Big House (the one full of guys in orange jumpsuits, not ermine robes and funny hats).”
Over at The Beaver, Canada’s history magazine, reports have leaked out that Conrad is very much in the running — along with fellow business hall of shamers Bernie Ebbers of World-Com infame and David Walsh of Bre-X mischief — for the dubious title of “Worst Canadian,” in spite of the fact he is no longer one of us (if, of course, he ever was).
There has been barely a pause for bated breath in the week between last week’s conviction and this afternoon’s bail hearing in Chicago which, as the Toronto Star’s Jennifer Wells so cheerfully opined, “will serve only to postpone the inevitable, just outcome… Conrad Black is headed to jail.”
It is almost enough to make one feel sorry for the embattled Black.
Almost.
The truth is that Black’s sycophants — and they are many and well-placed in Canada’s national media — have been doggedly doing their doggie best to right the wrongs done their hero last week.
They still claim he did nothing wrong (ignoring the reality he personally pick-pocketed $2.6 million of shareholders’ money in a tax dodge by agreeing not to compete with himself in a deal with himself); that he was the unlucky victim of an envious blue-collar jury and/or over-zealous prosecutors; that he was acquitted on all the major charges against him (failing to note that the “lesser” crime of obstruction of justice carries a 20-year penalty); and that — perhaps most importantly — this unjust conviction should do nothing to tarnish his reputation as one of the world’s great entrepreneurs.
The reality is that Conrad’s conviction is simply the logical end to a career that has careened ever upward — or downward, depending on your perspective — from one dodgy dodge to the next questionable deal. It is worth remembering the born-with-a-silver-spoon Black got his entrepreneurial start selling purloined exam papers to fellow students at Upper Canada College; that he later sweet-talked two widows out of control of one of Canada’s most important holding companies and then managed to mismanage most of its holdings out of existence; that the courts forced him to return $62 million he’d wrongly taken from the workers’ pension fund at Dominion Stores; and that he had to sign a consent decree with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1982 just to avoid prosecution on a charge of filing “misleading public statements” in connection with an American takeover deal.
There are those who will insist that, whatever else bad he may have done, Conrad Black, the media mogul, was good for journalism.
It is true Black’s 1998 launch of his vanity-press vehicle, National Post —the only business Black has ever actually created but, ironically, a flawed business idea from day one — did jack up salaries at the top of the journalistic pyramid. But that was temporary, and largely achieved at the expense of the bottom-line health of most of the rest of Black’s boonies-holdings, including this one.
No, the best that can be said of Conrad now is that the author of a number of justifiably best-selling biographies is still an entertaining writer, and that, thanks to events in Chicago, he will now have much to write about, and plenty of time to do it. As Joey Smallwood once said, stealing a line from Churchill: “History will be kind to me. I will write it myself.”
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.
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (July 15, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
July 15, 2007A roundhouse blow to history
A retired teacher and amateur historian says you can’t blame Kentville’s mayor or town council for the fact that one of the town’s last remaining links to Nova Scotia’s storied railway heritage is now rubble. Ivan Smith, who was on hand last week to document the demolition of the town’s former Dominion Atlantic Railway roundhouse, says its “loss… is merely a symptom of province-wide apathy,” and blames Nova Scotians “who don't care” about their history.
Built in the early 1900s, the roundhouse — the last of its kind in Nova Scotia — serviced and repaired up to 10 steam locomotives at a time during an era when the railway employed one-third of Kentville’s workforce, most in its roundhouse.
By the time town council voted to demolish the building this spring, however, the old structure had long since been reduced to little more than a warehouse for fruit juice.
Although there were some last-minute local efforts to save the building, Kentville mayor Dave Corkum says the time for action was probably 20 years ago when the roundhouse was in better shape and its fixtures still intact. “You have to look at these things with your head, not your heart.”
Except for the Cornwallis Inn, Kentville’s former Canadian Pacific railway hotel, which was built in the thirties and is now in private hands, nothing remains from the town’s railroad days. The wooden station was torn down nearly 20 years ago and potentially valuable museum pieces, such as a caboose and railway snowplow, were destroyed.
For his part, Smith says it’s “up to the people of Nova Scotia” to take back their heritage. The former school teacher thinks that’s not happening now because no one is instilling a sense in young people of just how interesting our history can be. Too few people, he says, are using the Internet to reach them.
Smith is.
Though probably best known as the man who, back in 2000, challenged Elections Canada’s ban on publishing election results online before all polls across the country had closed, Smith also runs his own wonderfully eclectic online web site devoted to “Novascotiaiana” — http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625/ — that’s definitely worth checking out.
If there were more Smiths, there’d still be more roundhouses. And a more interesting province.
Paving the water highway
Federal officials who set up shop in the Digby fire hall recently to hear what locals had to say about ferry service between Digby and Saint John walked away from the two-and-a-half hour meeting with one loud, clear message implanted in their brains — the service needs federal financial help to survive.
“Transport Canada has to realize rural Nova Scotia is just as important as Toronto or Montreal, or ferry service in B.C.,” declared local businessman Dean Kenley, who even missed his daughter’s graduation ceremony to make that case to the federal officials.
“This ferry used to be a service, not a business,” agreed Jimmy MacAlpine, deputy warden of the Municipality of Digby. “I treat it no differently than the Trans-Canada Highway.”
The federal working group is tasked with coming up with a plan for the ferry’s future to present to cabinet by the end of the year.
Last year, Bay Ferries had announced it was canceling its Bay of Fundy service Oct. 31, but local protests led to a deal to keep it operating until the beginning of 2009 while officials figure out a longer term solution.
The problem, agreed many of the speakers, is that Bay Ferries has done a lousy job — its scheduling is poor and, in the past three years, it’s raised rates for cars and passengers by 60 per cent. Complained one innkeeper: “the couple in the MG” could easily drive from Saint John to Digby for less than the $260 the ferry charges.
“If Bay Ferries is not willing [to operate the service],” Kenley told the feds, “perhaps someone else is.”
The feds perhaps?
And, by the way, we have this, uh, ferry service…
South West Health Authority officials will be wining and dining a potential new Digby doctor later this month, trying to show off what a great place their town is to live — and work. The authority is hoping the physician, who’s now living in another Canadian province, will move to Digby to offer much needed emergency room coverage.
Digby General Hospital’s ER is currently closed on weekdays because of a critical shortage of local doctors willing to do ER stints.
Recruiting a new doctor isn’t the only way the regional health authority is attempting to solve the mess.
South West Health says it’s also hoping “to hear good news” soon from the Department of Health on its request for funding for two nurse practitioners to help a local doctor cover off two weekday emergency shifts at the hospital.
Thanks to a recent close-to-home study demonstrating that the use of nurse practitioners can save lives — and dollars — the authority is optimistic the province will say yes.
That three-year study, which began in 2000, brought together a nurse practitioner, specially trained paramedics and a collaborating physician to provide health care services to residents on nearby Long and Brier islands.
Thanks to the program — which has since attracted interest from other communities in Nova Scotia as well as from as far away as Scotland, Japan and Australia — the number of local residents’ visits to emergency departments dropped 40 per cent while trips to family physicians fell 24–28 percent. Because the nurse practitioners conducted more frequent reviews of the drugs residents were taking, the cost of prescriptions fell too.
As Barbara Downe-Wamboldt of Dalhousie University, a co-author of the study, told a residents’ meeting recently, “If there’s anything government will listen to it is lower costs…”
If, indeed, there is anything this government will listen to…
Get in line
The Pictou County Health Authority has lost another doctor. Officials confirmed last week that family physician Sameea Benjamin has also tendered her resignation, effective Aug. 31.
She joins pediatricians Dr. Krys Lubkiewicz and Dr. Julie Clowater, as well as general surgeon Dr. Alex Gillis, who all left in June.
And so they go.
Funding formula, Round 2
Yarmouth’s Tri-County School Board is taking up Deputy Education Minister Dennis Cochrane’s offer to meet again to discuss their differences of opinion over how the province’s education funding formula works — or doesn’t.
The two sides met last month in a meeting that generated plenty of heat but very little light.
The board thinks it gets the shaft in a system in which the Strait Regional School Board receives $13 million more a year than it does. Cochrane counters that its circumstances are different, and insists the formula is equitable if the results aren’t always equal.
Not every school board member was eager to offer Cochrane an encore. They worry he’ll use the session to do more “spin” and possibly even try to show the board itself is mismanaging what the province sends.
Board vice-chair Ron Hines says he’d be happy to open the board’s books, which he believes would show the formula is inequitable as well as unequal. To buttress its case, the board passed a motion at its most recent meeting asking the education department to reevaluate how it doles out transition funding to boards facing dramatic enrolment declines. Under that part of the formula, the Strait board got nearly seven times as much as it did.
Equal? Inequitable? Anybody here know how to do math? Old? New?
Do not disturb
Plans to dredge the entrance to Sydney harbour are on hold while two pairs of endangered piping plovers raise their seven recently hatched plover nestlings.
According to a Natural Resources department biologist, it may take three more weeks before the babes leave the nest for good and, even then, they will likely continue to hang around on the beach.
That doesn’t sit well with a South Harbour oyster farmer. Alex Dunphy, Sr., who has been pressing for authorities to dredge the sandbar at the entrance to the harbour since 1999, says the entire harbour could face economic and environmental disaster if something isn’t done.
At least economic and environmental disaster is nothing new for Sydney.
Step right up and place your bids
Flushed with its success in selling off the former Shelburne youth centre property to controversial Halifax developer Ralston MacDonnell, the South West Shore Development Authority is now eager to peddle Shelburne Park, the site of a cold war military submarine “listening” post that closed its doors in 1995.
Since acquiring the 65-hectare property in 1999, the authority has been spending $300,000 a year to maintain it. Although it was once assessed at $18 million, the authority expects its call for proposals will net only a bargain basement $3–5 million.
“The board just wants to get rid of it,” explains Frank Anderson, chief executive officer of SWSDA. “They want to see it get into private sector hands and let them pay taxes and employ people.”
He expects to issue the call for proposals by the end of the month
“We have had it long enough,” he told the Shelburne Coast Guard.
I sense more fun and games ahead in Shelburne.
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:
CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, KENTVILLE ADVERTISER, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, YARMOUTH VANGUARD.
Horne legal costs top a million (July 12, 2007)
Feasting at the Horne of plenty
Capital District Health Authority has so far officially taken at least $1,024,649.90 out of this province’s badly under-funded health care system to pay for expensive private lawyers to fight the unwinnable, never-should-have-happened legal case against Dr. Gabrielle Horne.
I must qualify with so far… officially... at least…
because that million-plus figure tells only part of a bigger and much more alarming story; because some people familiar with the case question even the “totals only” numbers I finally received last week; and because the very expensive legal time clock is still ticking.
Dr. Horne, you will recall, is the “globally pioneering” heart researcher whose multimillion dollar research program the CHDA effectively shut down in October 2002 when it varied her hospital privileges on an “emergency basis,” ostensibly to protect patient safety.
It took almost four years and countless legal battles for the board to finally fess up last fall that there never was any basis to vary her privileges. (After all these years, in fact, the only illogically logical explanation is that this was a personality conflict that spiraled wildly out of control.)
Rather than apologize and cut its losses, the board has now chosen to accuse Horne of being the author of her own misfortune, thus prompting a law suit that will not only eat up millions more in outside legal fees as it wends its way through the courts but that will also ultimately be lost, costing the authority — us —more millions to settle.
Which may be good for the bottom line at Boyne Clarke and Wickwire Holm, the big two (of the five) local law firms feasting at the Horne trough.
As for the rest of us?
I filed a freedom of information request on Jan. 12, 2007, asking for details about the outside legal firms the authority had hired and how much it had paid each, as well as the number of hours its in-house counsel had chalked up on the case.
Instead of answering my questions, the authority did its best to avoid them, claiming it doesn’t keep track of the hours its own lawyers work on specific cases — which strikes me, at the very least, as lousy management — and hiding behind the ludicrous claim of lawyer-client privilege to keep me from finding out how much it had paid the outside lawyers.
In the end, I had to appeal to the province’s freedom of information review officer just to get CDHA to cough up the global amounts it had paid the outside lawyers for their work on the case.
Which may explain why some legal people I talked to who have followed the case closely question whether the figures are really complete.
In the larger sense, they certainly aren’t. Consider for a moment the massive iceberg on top of which even that one million-dollar legal expenditure sits: the countless (and uncounted) ka-chink hours the authority’s in-house lawyers spent on the case, the wasted time health care administrators and the authority board devoted to covering their bureaucratic butts instead of managing the province’s biggest, most complex regional health care system, the loss of millions in outside funding to support Horne’s research and the spinoffs that would almost certainly have come with it, etc., etc.
To make matters worse, the Horne case is not even the only dumb legal battle gobbling up precious health care dollars. The authority is also fighting an equally specious, equally unwinnable legal battle against another respected researcher, Dr. Michael Goodyear. That case is now headed to the Human Rights Commission. More lawyers. More dollars.
So what is the real total? Two million? Three million? Five million?
The answer is way too much. If the CDHA’s administrators and board won’t — or can’t — end this lunacy, then it is long past time for Health Minister Chris d’Entremont to step in and put them — and us — out of their misery.
I argued Wright was in a conflict of interest, and that he should “do the honourable thing and resign.”
This week he did.
In an email, Wright told me he had applied for the committee position before he landed his latest job as Executive Director of the department’s new Youth Strategy. “So I was actually appointed to the committee as ’Joe Citizen,’ who had both personal and professional experience,” he explained. But it was also clear he could not help but be seen to be representing the vested interests of the department on the committee, so he did the right thing and resigned.
For which I commend him.
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.
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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.