High School Confidential (Aug. 30, 2007)
Whatever Happened to the Class of '67? With Queen Elizabeth High School about to become history, Coast Senior Feature Writer Stephen Kimber — QE Class of ’67 — set out to rediscover some of his own. Whatever happened to his classmates? Did high school change their lives? Did it even matter?
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Address to the Graduates
Queen Elizabeth High School
June 1967
My first memory from my high school days isn’t mine — or at least it isn’t from my high school days. It is from September of 1967, three months after I graduated from Queen Elizabeth High School. I was a freshman at Dalhousie University. One bright fall afternoon, I drove the few blocks north in my battered, puke-green, ’61 VW Beetle to visit my alma mater. Ostensibly, I had come to meet my then-girlfriend, Martha MacDonald, who was a year younger and still attending Grade 12. But I was there too to lord my newly acquired college-boy sophistication over those I had left behind. Did I really wear my new black-and-gold Dal jacket? Of course. Did I tell anyone how out of place I felt at university? Probably not.
It didn’t take more than a glance to realize this was no longer my Queen Elizabeth High School. In my high school, the boys wore ties. If you could not afford, or forgot, or chose not wear one, one would be provided for you from the hideous collection the principal, Len Hannon, kept in his desk drawer for anyone who failed to obey rules that needed — and received — no explanation. The height of rebellion in my high school was to wear a cowboy string tie — proof not only of our lack of political sophistication but also, unfortunately, of our fashion sense.
In this new school I did not recognize, no one wore ties. Many boys sported previously-verboten facial hair, some wore jeans. So did a few girls! In my high school, Miss Blois, the vice principal, trolled the hallways with her measuring tape, checking girls’ hemlines and ordering any girl who showed too much feminine flesh to go home and change into something more appropriate. Not pants. Certainly not jeans.
On that fine Fall day in 1967, however, all those girlish legs that were not encased in some marvelously form-fitting denim were on glorious, fading-summer-tan display in the hallways of a school that bore only bricks-and-mortar resemblance to the one I’d so recently left.
That, at least, is how I remember it.
Tonight, when I remind my then-girlfriend-and-still-friend, Dr. Martha MacDonald, now Professor of Economics at Saint Mary’s University, about all of that, her recollection is not quite the same. “Girls still weren’t allowed to wear pants,” she tells me.
She could be right. I sometimes think I spent so much of my youth making up my life I’m no longer sure which memories are real and which imagined. Or else, I’m just getting old.
We are standing tonight at the edge of the dance floor in a cavernous room that has been tarted up to resemble the generic school gym of a thousand dances past. Legendary radio deejay Frank Cameron is off to one side, spinning Beach Boys and Beatles songs like it really is 1967.
But the actual backdrop for this mental meander through memory lane is a drab, concrete-and-steel multipurpose room at the north end of the Halifax Forum complex. This room did not exist in 1967.
But the Forum did. QE used to play hockey here on winter Friday nights. The most anticipated games were always between QE, the peninsular “Protestant-and-other” high school, and St. Pat’s, our Catholic cross-street rivals. QE lost most of those on-ice encounters. But not necessarily the ones in the stands. I remember the night Peter Udle — QE football star and chair of a newly formed school spirit committee — handed me his false teeth so he could wade into a melee in the stands. I was proud to have been asked to do my small part for school spirit.
Peter’s name is not on the list of those attending this weekend’s Last Chance QE Reunion. This open casting-call reunion is for everyone who attended the school, an opportunity for the 50,000 or so Halifax teenagers who played out their personal coming-of-age rituals in its hallways from 1943 to 2007 to say one final, fond farewell to their school — and their youth — before it is bulldozed into history.
Though more than 800 alumni have traveled from as far away as Turkey, Australia and China, Peter is not the only grad from my era missing. Just 20 members of my 323-strong Class of ’67 have signed up, even though 2007 is, technically, the 40th anniversary of our graduation.
Shouldn’t that have been an occasion?
Is that my fault?
In 1966-67, I was QE’s Head Boy, that strange British-sounding euphemism the school used to describe the president of its students’ council. In those days, at least if you believe the Elizabethan, the school yearbook, I was the “school’s hardest worker.” Should I have organized our reunion? But that same yearbook also says my goal was “to eventually become an active politician.” Did I really say that? Did I mean it? No matter. I am no longer that person — if I ever was — and I take no responsibility for his failure of alumni spirit.
Most of us did not become the people we imagined we would back then.
Our Class of 1967 includes teachers, social workers, entrepreneurs, doctors and, of course, lawyers. Even disgraced lawyers. Cameron Rhindress, a guitarist in a garage band I briefly mismanaged back in high school, was suspended from practicing law for a year in 2003 for professional misconduct.
There is at least one dentist, a navy captain, a former lieutenant-governor’s consort, some secretaries, lots of bureaucrats, a couple of journalists and insurance salesmen, Nova Scotia’s Senior Representative in Ottawa, a diplomat, a real estate developer, random real estate agents and even a software developer.
John McFetridge, a self-described “dork” in high school when there was still no such thing as software to develop, ended up making his fortune and fame as one of the original creators of the hugely successful Corel Draw program.
Our class can even lay claim to having produced both a professional rock musician and a professional opera singer.
Pam Marsh, whose stated goal in the yearbook was “to get to a surf board on Virginia Beach,” and whose backup plan involved studying “lab technology at the Institute of Technology,” ended up as a member of Everyday People, a popular Canadian seventies rock group. Pam still performs regularly.
Greg Servant — now Dr. Gregory Servant, opera singer and Chair of the Music Department at Dalhousie University — was another a member of that nameless Grade 10 garage band I mismanaged. Mismanaged? At one point, I suggested Greg not sing lead because his voice wasn’t… well, good enough… Greg now says the fact he stopped pushing his voice singing rock and roll — he did play organ in another much more successful high school rock band — probably saved his voice for when he discovered his passion for opera in university a few years later. I like to believe I played my small part in his career.
Greg isn’t at the reunion tonight. “My daughter, who’s very big into Facebook, thinks it strange I don’t have any interest in reconnecting with people I went to high school with,” Greg told me before the reunion, “but I don’t.”
Pam Marsh isn’t either either. Neither is Cam Rhindress. Or John McFetridge, though he tells me later he would have flown up from his home in Florida if he’d realized it was happening.
Jimmy Spatz — aka Jim Spatz, president of Southwest Properties Limited, developer of the award-winning Bishop’s Landing and over $100 million worth of other real estate projects, winner of the 2002 Atlantic Canada Entrepreneur of the Year Award, member of the Nova Scotia Business Hall of Fame and, of course, the Class of 1967 — says he thought briefly about attending, but the reunion happened to coincide with visiting day at the Quebec summer camp one of his children is attending, “so that took the decision out of my hands.” He doesn’t sound disappointed.
Nick Pittas, now Director of the Nova Scotia Securities Commission and another Class of ’67 grad — who remembers high school as the “the first and only time I was a somebody” — told me he would be on vacation with his family.
Hetty Van Gurp, the President of Peaceful Schools International, an anti-bullying organization she founded in 2001 (Time Magazine named her one of its Canadian heroes of the year in 2006, as did Reader’s Digest in 2007) won’t be coming either. “The closure of QE does stir up some memories,” she’d emailed me, “but I can’t really say they are too wonderful.”
So why am I here? I guess I am at this reunion for all sorts of reasons. Nostalgia, for starters. I have mostly good memories of my high school years. Curiosity. I’d like to know what happened to the members of my Class of ’67 (though it is clear I’ll have do more than attend this reunion to discover that). And, of course, that inexplicable, ill-advised desire — after 40 years — to understand what it all meant in the greater scheme of things.
Did — does — high school matter?
“I’m not sure,” Martha says finally. She has been thinking, not about the cosmic questions in my head, but about whether girls were allowed to wear pants. “I don’t think so, but it’s hard to remember. It was a long time ago.”
It was.
“It is astonishing to realize that 1967 is as far away in time to 17-year-olds today as 1927 was to me back then.”
— Margaret Wente
I used to believe there was something unique about the total transformation I experienced returning to QE in that fall of 1967. Halifax was then such a backwater in the North American cultural mainstream I just assumed the sixties simply arrived here later than elsewhere. I’m no longer so sure. My wife, who grew up on the outskirts of New York City and completed high school the same year I did, had a similar experience. So did Margaret Wente, the Globe and Mail columnist who graduated from a Toronto high school in 1967. She wrote recently about that summer as a “watershed” in her life.
Even after it dawned on me that my experience probably wasn’t just a Halifax phenomenon, I still assumed — in my admittedly, annoyingly, we-were-more-special, baby-boomer way — that it must have had to do with the tumultuously transformative sixties, specifically with that seminal year of 1967, which was so important because… well, because I was there.
But that, in a way, is the point.
High school — everyone’s — seems unique and uniquely important when you’re inside it. High school is a strange and mysterious time. When you’re in the muddling middle of it all, you feel like you must be the only person who has ever — could ever — experience the excruciatingly, sweetly painful joy, tears, fears, horrors, loves, lusts, secrets, surprises, doubts of it all. You imagine — and, Lord knows, popular culture reinforces the notion — that high school must bend, twist, spin, shape and change you, that it will matter in the cosmic arc of your life.
But does it?
When I leaf through my high school yearbook now and look at all the faded-ink greetings — “Friends Forever!!” — from people I haven’t seen since graduation, I wonder: Whatever happened to that person? Or worse. Who is that person?
I thought I knew everyone back then. I was, after all, the Head Boy. If I had come from the north end of Halifax — in those days, QE was divided along geographic fault lines, which also reflected seismic economic, class and race divisions — my first cousin, Nancy Kimber, the Head Girl, had grown up in the south end. Her younger sister, Trish, was a cheerleader and member of the student council. Our other cousin, David, from Westmount school in the west end, was the editor of Beth’s News and Views, the school newspaper. How could I not know everyone worth knowing?
Flipping through the pages of the yearbook now, I realize what a conceit that was. I look at the names and accompanying scrubbed-face photographs, and read the grad class write-ups. Everyone, it seemed, was “lively,” “good-humoured,” “fun-loving.” Or else they were “serious,” “conscientious,” “one of the quieter members of the class.” Even the quiet types, of course, “enjoyed a good joke now and then.” Even staring, I find it difficult to connect some of the photos with … well, anything at all.
Michael Leir? I should have some memory of him. The yearbook says he was one of the “leading pre-class conversationalists” and that he had “endless wit.” Michael Leir’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention those traits. It begins: “Michael Leir (born 1949) is the current Canadian High Commissioner to Australia.” How could I not remember someone who grew up to become not only a diplomat but also the “lead Canadian lawyer” in the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement?
The truth is I didn’t really know much more about even those I thought I knew well at the time. I didn’t know, for example, that one of the reasons Hetty Van Gurp never seemed to participate in extra-curricular activities in high school was that she was being abused — physically and emotionally — by her father. “I was always frightened of getting into trouble with my father, of saying the wrong thing,” she says now. “He didn’t allow us to play sports or join any groups.”
I also didn’t know that Hetty had been born in Holland, and that she didn’t know a word of English when she started school. I only learned those facts many years later when I interviewed her in 1994 for a story about the League of Peaceful Schools.
My lack of knowledge about Hetty’s personal history reflects, in part, the reality that when you’re young, there is no past or future, there is only the present. But there was probably more to it then. If I remember correctly, none of those few students who had come from elsewhere — from Estonia, Cyprus, Greece, Germany or wherever — talked about their cultural heritage. In those days — before multiculturalism and diversity and differently-abled — the goal was to fit in, to keep any differences to yourself, and hope no one noticed.
Ironically, most of us didn’t; we all were too busy trying to fit in too.
Today, John McFetridge, who still does computer consulting, describes himself as “outgoing. I talk to groups, I love partying.” When he was the president of the Ottawa Tennis Club a few years back, the Ottawa Citizen described him as a “bon vivant. ”But back in high school, “I classified myself as a dork socially, compared to everyone else.” McFetridge found nothing about high school — not even being on the hockey and football teams — could make up for his sometimes painful stutter. “You can imagine what it was like asking a girl to go out with you,” he says. He pauses. “High school wasn’t one of the highlights of my life.”
Perhaps to compensate, McFetridge, who did very well academically, hung out with what he politely calls a “less studious crowd.” Which is to say me and my cousin David and our friends. I think I bought my first car — that puke-green VW — from John. (Or did he buy it from me? Funny, the things you can’t remember.) I do remember we teased John unmercifully about his speech impediment; we thought we were funny. “It wasn’t so bad,” he reassures me now. I wish.
Jim Spatz didn’t quite fit in either. “I was sort of a nerdy kid. In the social pecking order of high school, one of the best things to be is a great athlete. And I wasn’t.” Jim compensated by skipping classes and hanging out at the Cue and Cushion, or another pool hall on Fenwick Street with a bunch of guys who also weren’t focused on getting good marks. “In high school,” he jokes, “I improved my skills at playing pool.”
Fitting in was harder if you were black, of course. There were only a half dozen black faces in the sea of white at my 1967 graduation, and I will confess to having had little more than a hallway-hello, nodding acquaintance with any of them.
For others, fitting in may have appeared easier, but must have been at least as hard.
Hetty Van Gurp says her “only fond memory” of high school involved Grade 12 Biology when the teacher allowed her and two other bright students, Marija Dambergs and Paul Coulstring, “to go off somewhere in the bowels of the school and read Scientific American instead of going to class. That was fun,” she says. “I remember I always admired the way Paul Coulstring dressed. He wore these nice pink shirts.”
Ah, yes, Paul Coulstring… I remember Paul too. He was funny, fun-loving, a better dresser than most of us, a good dancer too. There was invariably a gaggle of girls around him.
It isn’t just that I didn’t realize he was gay at the time; the thought didn’t occur to me. I clearly knew there were homosexuals, I just never imagined I actually knew someone who was gay. I can’t imagine now how difficult it must have been for Paul — and for others too — to hide that part of themselves from the world.
Although Paul went on to serve as a Halifax school teacher for 18 years — since he was one of my older son’s favourite teachers, inspiring his love of English, I probably exchanged pleasantries with him at occasional parent-teacher functions — I only finally realized Paul was gay when I read his obituary in the newspaper. It was 1991. The newspaper didn’t mention homosexuality or AIDs, of course, but by then I could read between the lines of his “longtime companion Ron” and the fact that donations could be made to the VG Hospital’s hospice memorial fund. Paul was 42.
He was not the only one to die before his time, not even the only member of my Class of ’67 to die of AIDS-related causes.
Death even happened back in high school.
Kathie Beeston (née Kent) remembers meeting a “cool guy” named Alfie Wilson on the school’s New York trip in Grade 10. They dated on and off through Grade 11. Alfie was “a fun person with a great sense of humour. He was also a great dancer.” Even today, she tells me from her home in Ottawa — she isn’t at this reunion either — she can’t listen to Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” without remembering how she danced to it with Alfie at Twixteen, the popular Friday night dances at the YMCA.
But Alfie was also a guy’s guy, a little wild, more fond in the end of hanging out with his friends than in having a girlfriend. In the summer between Grade 11 and 12, he and Kathie were no longer dating.
On August 17, 1966 Alfie and three friends were driving in a daddy’s-new-1996-car to Prince Edward Island, a popular teenaged getaway that summer, when their car missed a curve, plunged down an embankment and struck a rock. Three of them, including Alfie —Alfred Flemming Wilson, now forever 17 — were killed.
For many of us, that was the first time we’d smacked up against the sudden death of one of our own. We still remember it.
When you look back, you begin to understand how predictable it was; how even the senseless death of someone like Alfie makes a strange kind of sense — a warning shot across the bow of youth, the message that none of us is really invulnerable.
Is that what high school was all about? A tantalizing glimpse of the possibilities. A sobering dose of the limitations.
Nick Pittas remembers the possibilities. His one year at Queen Elizabeth High was “the best year of my life.”
He’d spent the previous four boarding with a conservative Greek-Cypriot family and going to a school in London, where outsiders were barely tolerated. He’d come to Halifax for his final year of high school in order to live with an older brother who’d just begun grad school at Dal because “I knew I’d be freer.”
He was. Nick was bright, handsome, outgoing. He got involved in the school’s popular model parliament, became the leader of the NDP and — unthinkable then — won a school-wide election to become prime minister. He was also a member of the School’s Reach for the Top team, which won the provincial championship and competed at a nationally televised tournament that summer in Montreal during Expo ’67.
“QEH,” he says now, “was an ego boost.”
When he left high school, he remembers, he thought university would be an extension of high school. His ambition was nothing less than to change the world. “We were going to overturn all that stuff — poverty, racism, sexism — sweep away the debris of society and…” He laughs. “That balloon popped quite quickly.”
It did for a lot of us. We discovered sex, drugs, truth — including the truth that high school was not the world.
Neither was Halifax. In those days, Halifax was comfortable, cosseting and claustrophobically self-contained: it was still possible — probable — to be born, raised, schooled, careered, married, live and die in the same place without ever passing Go or discovering the existence of a world beyond its borders.
Jim Spatz says that, for him, that realization didn’t finally dawn until a few years after he’d started at Dalhousie. He went on a road trip in the summer of 1971 and found himself in Harvard Square in Boston. “I remember standing there looking around and thinking, ‘Fuck, I could have gone here. I should have gone here.”
In the end, Jim doesn’t think high school was significant in what he’s become.
Neither does Nick Pittas. “I do look back on it in a very positive way,” he tells me, “but in the longer term, it was not a huge influence on my life.”
Perhaps that explains why there are so few of us at the reunion.
“I liked high school,” Greg Servant says, “but I have no strong sense of it as having a pivotal place in my life, like university.” After Dal — he was one of the music department’s first graduates — he left for grad school in the United States. Over the next 20 years, his musical career took him to New York, Connecticut, the Amercian Midwest, Switzerland. He returned to Halifax in 1992 when a job came up in the Dal music department. “Our daughter was 10 or 11 at the time, and I wanted to set down roots.”
After he returned, he tells me, he did think briefly about trying to reconnect with some of the people he’d grown up with. “I even got Cameron’s [Rhindress] email address, but I never did anything with it.” He pauses. “The truth is I’m not the same person I was then. That part of my life belongs to someone else.”
Which brings us back to memory.
It has been nearly a month since the reunion. Martha MacDonald and I are having lunch in a small north-end bistro, still reminiscing about high school. She is telling me I don’t remember what I remember. Or at least I misremember it.
She looked it up in her own 1968 Grad yearbook, she says. In the pictures, the boys still wore ties and the girls didn’t wear pants, even in the informal photos.
“Maybe you’re thinking of another year, and another high school girlfriend,” she offers unhelpfully.
Maybe. But it’s my memory and I’m holding on to it. It’s all that’s left of high school.
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In 1994-95, Stephen Kimber’s older son Matthew — aka hip hop musician Josh Martinez — was QE’s head boy. His younger son Michael was head boy in 2001-02. His daughter Emily was smart enough to attend St. Pat’s and stay far away from student politics.
Hetty Van Gurp: The shy girl
Hetty Van Gurp, a pretty blonde girl from Richmond, a north-end junior high, remembers arriving at Queen Elizabeth High School in the fall of 1964, “excited at the idea I was going to meet new kids from all parts of the city. It was a very Shangri-la-ish view, I suppose.”
And it was dashed very quickly.
“Early in September, I went to one or two football games. I felt completely out of synch with everyone else. I’d see the cheerleaders and wish I could be one of them; I’d see the kids who knew the football players and I wished I could be one of them. But I knew I couldn’t and so, after a few games, I just gave up. After that, I just went to class, did my lessons, went home, did my homework… I felt alone among a thousand other kids.” She pauses. “I don’t have very good memories of high school.”
She is quick to concede her jaundiced view may be, in part, a result of the fact “I was painfully shy then.” Born in Holland, she’d come to Canada with her family as a child and recalls not knowing a single word of English when she started elementary school in Halifax.
But there was more to her unhappiness in high school than simply shyness. Her father was a volatile, unpredictable man who could “one minute be jolly and then the next ranting and raving.” His violence was both physical and emotional. “I was always on edge, frightened of getting into trouble with my father, of saying the wrong thing.”
He regularly railed against those who belonged to high-falutin’ clubs like the Waeg or went on winter ski trips to Wentworth, and wouldn’t allow his children to join school groups or take part in extra-curricular activities.
Hetty wasn’t sure she could fit in anyway. “I knew [my father] was brainwashing,” she says now, “But then I’d look around and I’d think, ‘He’s right.’ It was very blatant then. You knew who was from the north end and who was from the south.” And rarely did the twain ever meet.
He father did allow her to attend her graduation dance, “but I had to be home at midnight. It wasn’t much fun. My dad took all the fun out of everything.”
No wonder she married soon after graduation, to a boy she’d met in high school. No wonder it didn’t last. She married again a few years later, eventually became an elementary school teacher and took the extra time to do what no one had done for her — “finding out about my students and their home life. No teacher ever talked to me about anything even remotely personal. They would look at us and see this idyllic group of siblings who didn’t cause any trouble and that was all they saw. The teachers,” she says now, ”needed to be better trained to know what to pay attention to.”
In 1991, her own adult world was transformed forever — unspeakably tragically and yet, ironically, inspirationally too — when her 14-year-old son Ben was killed by a bully at his Bedford School.
Deciding that “my choice was to make something good of this,” Hetty began small. In her Halifax kindergarten, she created innovative ways to help her students learn that “hands are for helping, not hurting.” The movement slowly spread as other teachers in Nova Scotia and beyond began asking her to conduct workshops to make their classrooms more peaceful.
Today, Hetty van Gurp is the head of Peaceful Schools International, a global anti-bullying organization she founded in 2001. She’s written three books and traveled the world, taking her message to schools from Nova Scotia to Northern Ireland, Serbia to Sierra Leone. Time Magazine named her one of its Canadian heroes of the year in 2006, as did Reader’s Digest in 2007.
Talking with me now on the telephone from a second-floor bedroom office overlooking the river at Annapolis Royal in the house she shares with her third husband, Hetty tries to connect the dots from “feeling alone among a thousand other people my age” in high school to her current life today. She is — “very consciously,” she says — no longer shy nor lacking in self confidence. “I talk to people from all walks of life, rich, poor, doesn’t matter.”
High school? “High school seems like a long time ago.”
“I wish someone had told me the reunion was happening,” John McFetridge says into the phone. In the past few years, he tells me, his connections to Halifax have become more tenuous. He now lives year-round in Gainesville, Florida, as does his younger brother, Ted. In May, they moved their mother from Halifax to a seniors’ home in Ottawa, where John still owns a house.
So he hadn’t heard the news that his old alma mater, Queen Elizabeth High School, was closing its doors forever, or that there was to be a Last Chance Reunion in July.
By the time I track him down, the weekend is already over.
John sounds wistful. “I’ve always enjoyed reunions,” he says.
And well he might.
In high school, John remembers himself as a “dork,” a guy who liked to study and get good marks. He got “some grief for that” from his less academically inclined friends, including me. Worse, he stuttered. We teased him for that too. I can remember one day a bunch of us were cruising along the highway in his old VW — John was driving — when one of the guys in the backseat reached his hands around and clamped them over John’s eyes just for the sport of listening to John stammer out his protests.
To his credit, not ours, John seems not to hold that against any of us. But when I ask him about his overall memories of high school, he answers: “That’s a really interesting question. It definitely isn’t one of the highlights of my life.”
There definitely have been plenty of those since he graduated from QE in 1967. After studying math and chemistry at Dalhousie, he applied and was accepted into med school twice without actually going and even toyed briefly with the idea of taking a master’s degree — “I couldn’t make up my mind” — before moving to Ottawa where he soon landed a job at the University of Ottawa as a systems programmer working on huge IBM mainframe computers. “I loved the feeling of control, of understanding how it worked,” he says now.
When the personal computers made its appearance in the early eighties, “I bought one of the first in Ottawa. It cost me $5,000, had 16K of RAM and a monochrome display.”
Playing around with it, however, he developed software to “fool it into thinking the PC was a mainframe.”
The university — still feeling its way in the relatively new area of technology transfer — allowed him to sell his software, which later created problems for his boss and left his dean “red-faced. But in the end they let me leave — with the software.”
In 1982, John started a business, Simware Incorporated, which became one of Canada’s largest software companies. He soon had 100 employees and sales nudging $20 million a year. “But you remember me?” he says with a laugh. “Not the most structured guy in the world.” By 1987, he’d been bought out of his own company.
Two years later, he joined another fledgling Ottawa software company, Corel, as Director of Technical Development. He is listed as “Developer #5” of Corel Draw, the most successful drawing program in the world. “That was the pinnacle of my career.”
He quit a few years later. “My goal,” he tells me, “was to become a snowbird,” flitting between homes in Ottawa and Florida. But he was still in his early forties and — though he now had the time and money to indulge his “jock” side; he played tennis, skied, windsurfed, rollerbladed and bicycled — he missed the software side of his life.
So he began working with a number of Ottawa computer startups that almost inevitably seemed to get bought out — for a lot of money — and John would move on to the next one. “I’m still involved in the latest dot-Net stuff,” he tells me over the phone, “still on the bleeding edge.”
John, who has been married twice but has no children, says he still has a slight stammer, but notes it’s mostly under control now. “By the time I was in my mid-twenties, it had gotten pretty old. So I sought out some therapies, and they worked.” He laughs. “My brother asks how can someone who was so introverted become so outgoing? Now I love to talk to groups, I love partying.”
Which is one reason he wishes he’d known about the reunion.
Another might simply be that going back might serve as a reminder of how far he’d come.
It was at Queen Elizabeth High School that Greg Servant’s life took one of its most critical turns. But he wasn’t a student at the time.
In fact, it happened a year after his 1967 graduation when Greg, then a freshman at Dalhousie University, won the role of a German soldier in the Dal Glee and Dramatic Society’s production of Oh! What A Lovely War. Since the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium was still just a gleam in its architect’s eye then, the society rented the QE auditorium to stage the annual show.
“In the Christmas Eve scene,” Greg recalls, “I got to sing ‘Silent Night’ in German. And Phil May happened to be in the audience.”
Philip May, the English baritone who’d founded the Dalhousie Opera Workshop three years before, was then in the process of helping organize a new university music department, and he quickly invited Greg to audition.
“That’s when I rediscovered my voice,” Greg says today.
Though he’d taken private singing lessons as a kid — there was no school music program in those days — Greg’s focus during high school was, like most of his contemporaries, rock and roll.
In Grade 10, Greg, along with fellow Westmount junior high grad Cameron Rhindress on guitar and Eric Wood on drums — put together a garage band. I was its manager, though I’m not sure that meant much more at the time than hauling gear and hanging out with the band.
Ironically, no one, including me, though Greg, the future opera singer, should sing lead. His voice was just too… sweet.
Greg laughs. “It is a little ironic,” he concedes, “but it turned out to be a very good thing. I was a bass baritone, which didn’t lend itself to singing rock and roll anyway. And I would have destroyed my voice.”
When their first band didn’t make it out of the garage, Greg and Cameron joined forces with other QE musicians — including Joel Zemel (now a jazz guitarist and teacher), Eddie Kynock and Charlie Phillips (who later ran unsuccessfully for mayor) to form a group known as the End of the Lyne. Greg was the group’s organist.
“The highlight,” he says, “came when we performed for this Thursday evening talent show on CBC-TV. For some reason the cameraman zoomed in on the keyboard, and on this black onyx ring I was wearing. The next day, all the girls were coming up to me. ‘Let me see your ring, Gregory.’” He laughs. “That was exciting.”
The band quickly became a popular staple at school dances, and even at university frat parties — though all the band members were underage.
One night, Greg remembers, they were playing at Domus, the law school frat. “Our contract said we were supposed to play until one. So at one we started packing up our instruments. People started yelling, ‘Come on, guys, keep playing.’ We said, ‘No, the contract’s up.’ And we kept packing. Then this guy, he was a lawyer from some downtown law firm, he pulls out $1,000 in cash and slaps it down on the organ. ‘Keep playing,’ he says. ‘Not a problem,’ we said. And we did.”
When they finally finished performing it was close to dawn. Greg stumbled home to his parents’ house. “I went home and got inside the door and my mother was up waiting for me. ‘Where the heck were you?’” So much for being a rock star.
Greg says the he already knew the rock and roll lifestyle wasn’t for him. So he dropped out around the time he began university. “Once I left, I never saw them again.”
In 1971, Greg became one of the new Dalhousie music department’s first official graduates, and, later, he earned his doctorate in music from the University of Hartford. During his professional career he’s performed more than 50 operatic roles throughout Canada and the United States. He was the featured baritone soloist in a nationally televised PBS performance of Beetoven’s Ninth Symphony and, in 1999, made his New York recital debut at Carnegie Hall.
He’s returned to Halifax in 1992 when “a job came up” in Dal’s music department. By then, he was married to an American and they had a 10-year-old daughter. “I wanted to set down some roots. And I’m glad I did.”
“I don’t remember much about high school,” he tells me now. Did he have a girlfriend, I ask? “I never had a serious girlfriend in high school.” He pauses. “This is going to sound terrible,” he says, “but I can’t recall the name of my prom date. I can see her face but I can’t remember her name.” He laughs. “I liked it when I was there, but I have difficulty now trying to remember it. It really is like it happened to somebody else.”
Nick Pittas now calls Queen Elizabeth High School, circa 1967, “the best year of my life.” But the truth is “the first and only time I was a somebody” almost didn’t happen. It was September of 1966 and he had just arrived in Halifax from Cyprus to live with his older brother and attend school in Halifax.
After four years attending a boys-only, compulsory-school-uniformed grammar school in London while boarding with a by-the-book Greek-Cypriot family, 17-year-old Nick returned home to Cyprus for summer vacation with his family and announced he didn’t want to go back.
His choice, his parents told him, was London or Halifax.
That was not nearly as daunting a prospect as it might have seemed. Back in the fifties, the family had briefly immigrated to Canada, living in Digby for four years, before returning home to Cyprus. “I’d gone to Digby elementary school, so I guess thought of myself as Canadian somehow. Besides, I knew I’d be freer living with my brother than with the family in London.”
On the first day of school, Nick reported to the old school board office at the corner of Sackville and Brunswick Streets to register and find out which high school he should attend.
“Religion?” a school board official asked as he filled in the required form.
“Greek Orthodox,” Nick answered.
The man puzzled for a moment. “Uh,” he said finally, “that’s sort of Catholic, isn’t it?” In those days of religious divide in Halifax (even the office of mayor alternated terms between Protestants and Catholics) St. Patrick’s was the designated high school for the city’s Roman Catholics.
“As soon as I got there and I saw the all-boys classes, I knew this wasn’t for me,” he recalls. “I’d been there, done that. I wanted to meet girls.”
The next day he was at QE.
And it was magical. As a foreign student in London, he’d felt merely “tolerated, there on sufferance.” At blandly whitebread QE, however, he was an exotic. Darkly handsome, he dressed in what he now dismisses as modish “faux Carnaby” fashion — colourful ties, pink shirts, bell-bottomed pants — that only served to remind everyone he’d come from England from whence, in the era of the Beatles and the British invasion, all good things came.
“QEH,” he says now, “was an ego boost.”
When one student tried to recruit him to run for the Liberal Party in the school’s model parliament, Nick demurred. He loved politics — he used to get tickets from his local MP, Margaret Thatcher in her pre-prime ministerial days, to go and watch the British parliament in action — but he fancied himself a change-the-world socialist and told the young recruiter he thought he’d be more ideologically comfortable running for the NDP.
“You’ll never get elected running for the NDP,” the young Liberal confidently informed him. (Confession: That same year, I was the campaign manager for the Canadian Reform Party — no, not the later, real one but the one a few of us created that year as the “people’s” alternative to the mainstream parties, mostly so we could say we believed in CRAP.)
“I did win,” Pittas says with a laugh. “And I became prime minister. That was an ego booster too.”
He also became a member of the school’s Reach for the Top team, a kind of more intellectual Trival Pursuit-type competition broadcast on CBC-TV. The team won the provincial championship, which earned it a trip to the national finals in Montreal during Expo ’67. Though they lost there, Nick was chosen to be on the Canadian team that competed against other countries.
Graduating from high school, he remembers now, his ambition was nothing less than to change the world. “We were going to overturn all that stuff — poverty, racism, sexism — sweep away the debris of society and…”
It didn’t work out quite that way.
“That balloon popped quite quickly.” At Dal that fall, he quickly discovered “sex… the counterculture and all that went with that.” Academic life didn’t turn out to be as “glorious” as he’d hoped either. He left after four years, without the degree he’d come for, drifted through Europe until his money ran out and then made his way home to Cyprus where he did his two years service in the Cypriot National Guard. That was enough to convince him he needed to return to Dalhousie to finish what he’d started.
This time though, he managed to complete his political science degree, law school and even landed a job in private practice with a big firm in Halifax. “I did not,” he admits with a laugh, “leave a mark on Nova Scotia law.”
Instead, he eventually returned to London for his masters in law. When he came back to Nova Scotia a few years later, the province was in the process of setting up a new securities commission to regulate business. He’s now its director. “I’ve been there almost 20 years,” he tells me, seeming almost as surprised as me.
Though he says he looks back on high school in a “very positive way,” he doesn’t believe it ended up being a “huge influence on what happened in my life.”
Is he disappointed, I wonder, that he didn’t end up becoming the politician he’d imagined he would be at graduation?
No, he tells me, “I think people who get into politics want to change society, but the truth is politics ain’t about that. It’s about brokering interests. It’s no place for an idealist.”
Now married with two pre-teen daughters he and his wife adopted in China, he worries that high school will not be the same time of innocence it was for him. “It’s much harder now to be idealistic,” he says. He laughs. “Our generation thought we’d never get old. Now we’re like our parents — always talking about the past.”
Meet some of the alumni:
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Montebello mistake (August 30, 2007)
When plausible denial becomes impossible
Back in my long-lost Dalhousie University days, there was this big galoomphy guy named David MacKinnon who used to hang around the student newspaper office. MacKinnon wore unlaced army work boots, sported a perpetual blond bedhead and peppered his inevitably coarse conversation with references to “revolution” and “the pigs.”
During the late sixties, he flitted on the fringes of any number of vaguely left-wing campus groups and causes, never quite fitting in, distinguishing himself mostly by his attempts to sound more radical than anyone else and by his eagerness for action against “the man.”
At one point, he apparently single-handedly translated that eagerness into real action —planting a crude explosive device inside the Ralston federal building on Hollis Street and claiming credit in the name of some non-existent radical group. The device did little damage, but it didn’t stop MacKinnon from bragging about his exploits. Which was more than enough to convince anyone who had ever encountered him to steer well clear of him and his craziness.
It was later revealed that MacKinnon had been a police informer and agent provocateur all along. His story was eventually documented in a book by Canadian investigative journalist John Sawatsky.
In the early seventies, when I was beginning my career as a journalist, a couple of RCMP security and intelligence agents took me out for a long boozy lunch at the Old Mill Tavern in Dartmouth. They steered the conversation around to people I’d known in university — none of them nearly as dangerous to Canada’s peace, order and good government as MacKinnon — and invited me to become an informant. I thanked them for lunch and ran.
Given all of that, I’m surprised I was surprised last week when I belatedly realized the Sûreté du Québec had indeed dispatched masked, rock-wielding police agents to provoke violence at a peaceful protest outside the Fairmont Le Château Montebello hotel during the North American leaders’ Security and Prosperity summit.
I know, I know.
The SQ denies its high-minded, law-abiding officers — whose actions were captured on video — did anything wrong. “At no time did the police… act as instigators or commit criminal acts,” the force said in a statement, in which it sounded deeply wounded that anyone could suggest otherwise. “It is not in the police force’s policies, nor in its strategies, to act in that manner.”
The only problem with this denial is that it followed that denial — a claim that its officers weren’t involved at all. That statement became — as Richard Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Zeigler, once famously put it — “inoperative” only after a YouTube video of the officers in action spread like grassfire across the Internet and onto the mainstream media, making implausible the usual attempts at plausible deniability.
So why should we believe them now?
We shouldn’t.
We should be demanding answers — not just from the SQ but also from the RCMP, which refuses to say what it knew about its provincial counterparts’ provocative plans during the summit; from Stockwell Day, our Public Safety Minister, who doesn’t seem to believe the public safety of peaceful protestors in a democratic society is a matter for his concern; and, of course, from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose pompous dismissal of the summit demonstrators as “sad” may have encouraged police to believe they had permission to stomp on their democratic rights.
Without some sort of public inquiry, it’s impossible to understand where these lunatic schemes actually come from — and what can be done to prevent them in the future.
What, if anything, did those responsible expect to accomplish? Was it a legitimate if dumb-as-dirt attempt to head off more serious violence? Or was someone trying to discredit the legitimate demonstrations? Or create some real action for over-trained, under-used riot squads? And who was really responsible? Were these rogue officers? Did they get direction from higher-ups? Was there political involvement?
Despite growing calls from opposition politicians, unions and social activists for a broader public inquiry into police misbehaviour, there is little likelihood that this government — which, in its blinkered ideological way, sees legitimate protestors as an “enemy” to be dealt with — will take any positive action.
That probably won’t happen until some, even more outrageous revelation emerges — that the police have burned a barn, for example, or stolen legitimate political party membership lists in the name of some misguided notion of public security, as happened in the late seventies — and finally forces the government-of-the-day to appoint a royal commission.
It’s a shame it will only likely happen after some incident makes plausible denial totally impossible and finally renders inoperative the notion that “our” police forces wouldn’t do such things. Again.
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.
His novel Reparations, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis First Novel Award
and for the 2007 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.
•
His profile of Det. Tom Martin for The Coast
was selected as a "Notable Narrative" by Harvard's Nieman Narrative Digest.
•
Cardiac Unrest, his Coast cover story on heart researcher Dr. Gabrielle Horne's troubles
with the Capital District Health Authority won honourable mention in the Enterprise Reporting category of the 2007 Atlantic Journalism Awards.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Aug 26, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
August 26, 2007
Forest for the trees
Thanks to a new by-the-books building inspector, two small saw mills in Falmouth, Hants County, have had to turn away two or three contracts a week this summer and lay off six workers. Richard Neily says he and his wife have already “lost this milling season for sure” and will need to spend $5,000 of their own money to take a lumber grading course in September if they want to salvage the next one.
The problem is that the previous building inspector, who died last year, didn’t enforce sections of the National Building Code requiring lumber from local mills to be graded by a certified inspector. When the new inspector insisted the law be followed, the mill owners initially asked the local planning department to at least allow them to fill orders already on their books, but got nowhere.
“The building inspector insists he’s just doing his job,” says Neily, “but it’s the way they did it. It was inconsiderate and, after 30 years of being in business, we’re up against it.”
Is there an actual problem with the wood they sell? Stephen Barker, a local contractor, says the lumber the local mills produce is “number one grade, no question,” adds anyone questioning its quality “just needs to look at the material; it’s the best lumber you can get to build with and the prices are very competitive.”
Planner Lynn Davis couldn’t talk to the Hants Journal about why the sudden change in enforcement and wouldn’t allow its reporter to interview the new building inspector either.
Chalk one up for the bureaucracy.
Cold water on hot air
When he gets up a rhetorical head of steam about tidal power, Premier Rodney MacDonald can be harder to contain than the Bay of Fundy on a stormy day. In fact, when our premier loftily boasted during a recent Council of Federation meeting that “we will champion the effort for world tidal power innovation,” he sounded a tad too much like one of his predecessors.
During the seventies, Gerald Regan promised so much and delivered so little on his own Fundy tidal power dream wags of the day took to calling it the Great Fundy Hot Air Project.
Now, Parsborro Mayor Doug Robinson fears MacDonald may turn out to be all talk and no action too. “We’re behind the eight-ball now, as far as I’m concerned,” Robinson told the Amherst Citizen recently. “We should be moving ahead with this.”
Though the province has issued a request for proposals — inviting developers “from around the world to help us find the best technology,” as MacDonald puts it — Mayor Robinson thinks the province may be just muddying the waters.
Nova Scotia Power representatives are also considering test sites in the Parrsboro area, and Robinson says he’s getting mixed messages from the government and NSP, not to forget from the departments of environment and natural resources.
“It sounds like Nova Scotia Power has the project, but now the province is saying it’s looking for requests for proposals, so it seems like a step backwards,” says the mayor. “It is confusing… You can make all the promises you want, but politics is politics.”
No kidding.
More hot air about wind
Promoters of yet another wind farm project — this one on Nuttby Mountain south of Earltown — held an open house in North River last week to pitch their plan to local residents.
Atlantic Wind Power —already embroiled in controversy over its proposed wind power project on the Gulf Shore — and Cobequid Wind Power hope to jointly develop the 15-22 turbine project, which will cost $50-100-million and be completed by 2009.
David Smith, who owns property in Nuttby and was one of the 60 residents who attended the open house, told the Truro Daily News “I think they have a perfect location.” He says there are a lot of old, abandoned farms along the mountainside.
But Amanda McRae, who says she was “shocked” to hear about the proposal, urged caution. “Why not try a few at first ... to make sure the community’s OK with it?”
NSP is expected to make a decision on the proposal in early October.
Clear as mud
Dave Brush say he wasn’t looking to stir things up when he and his wife did some diving recently near a Port Mouton fish farm owned by New Brunswick’s Aqua Fish Farms Ltd. But what they claim to have found in waters near the fish farm — huge amounts of sediment and sludge, up to 34 inches thick — has definitely done just that.
That’s because Aqua wants to build a second plant nearby, and a local group called Friends of Port Mouton Bay wants to stop them. Friends claims the plant could endanger the local fishery.
Brush, who says diving conditions in Port Mouton Bay were the worst he’s ever encountered, believes the existing plant “seems to be devastating the area. It seems shortsighted to bring in an industry like this that could do so much damage.”
After his dive, Brush spoke with the citizens group, which didn’t help his credibility with the company.
“I can guarantee you the sludge does not extend that far,” Aqua President Ian Hamilton insisted to the Liverpool Advance. “It’s unfortunate that [the Friends] continue to whip up support against the farm.”
Stephen still likes him
South Shore MP Gerald Keddy is reaping his rewards for taking one for the team. Last week, Keddy was front and centre in Shelburne to announce that Ottawa would be spending $175,000 to help scientists figure out why lobster harvests are down — Can anyone say overfishing? — and “develop new practices that will be shared with people working on the front lines of this important industry.”
The report isn’t expected to be ready until 2012, by which time it may not matter overmuch to Mr. Keddy, who will have to face the electors sometime before that.
Keddy’s hometown Bridgewater Bulletin, which had criticized him for voting with Harper and against the Atlantic Accord in the recent budget vote, took another shot across his bow last week when it made a point of noting the not-very-surprising fact that Keddy had been left out of Harper’s reshuffled cabinet “again,” and quoted him defending himself against allegations he has “no influence in the federal government.”
Ouch.
See you later…
What if they staged an anti-spray protest and no one sprayed? That’s what happened Monday when a dozen protesters, some carrying signs and wearing gas masks, occupied a planned pesticide spray site near Roslin, Cumberland County.
The North Nova Forest Owners Co-op had planned to begin aerial spraying of Vision in the area that day.
The province’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency says the controversial pesticide is safe, but the protesters dispute that.
Rick Cheeseman, a local organic farmer, says that if you ask the manufacturers, “‘Is this product safe for people?’ they will say, ‘Glyphosate is safe.’ They will never tell you and never talk to you about the inert ingredients… Isn’t it time we started asking what the whole product is and start testing for it?”
In the end, the forest owners “postponed” spraying and the protesters, who’d vowed to remain on the property as human shields for as long as it takes, went home.
Until the next time.
Bash this
The Halifax-based owners of the former Shelburne boys school — now known as Bowood, after Lord Shelburne’s historic English estate — plan to strut their stuff for the locals at an open house on the property Tuesday.
The MacDonnell Group, which purchased the facility in a controversial deal in June, will outline their plans — which include offices, seniors and student housing, commercial businesses, a security training centre and parkland — in hopes the locals will become interested in the project.
“We want to see the whole community come out,” Sarah Vander Meer of the MacDonnell Group told the Shelburne Coast Guard. To attract them, there’ll be commercial booths, children’s entertainment and even an exhibition baseball game on the newly renovated boys school field featuring the Shelburne Bashers team.
No word on whether their opponents will be Bowood bashers.
There are still plenty of people in town unhappy with the secrecy surrounding the MacDonnell deal, and with the involvement in it of Bowood president Ralston MacDonnell. He was involved in the unpopular privatization of the now falling-down Digby wharf a few years back.
Twelve divided by two, take away the Blue…
Pictou East MLA Clarrie “Joe Six-Pack” MacKinnon isn’t happy with the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission’s recent move to eliminate six-packs of beer in favour of eight and 12-container packaging.
"I always liked to pick up a six-pack,” confesses the NDP MLA, sensing a hot-button summer consumer issue, “but then we moved to the smallest you can get is eight. Now, we're moving towards having 12 being the smallest."
He says it’s an issue of cost ("Lots of times, someone has $10 in one's pocket that they could afford to buy six beer with. That person doesn't have $20”) and consumption (“When you have 12, you're more apt to consume more than when you have six”).
You do the math.
But a spokesperson for the NSLC says the larger issue is shelf space. “If there are multiple sizes of one product, [suppliers] have to make a decision. We can't take all of them.” Besides, she adds, “if you were to buy a 12-pack instead of two six-packs, there's a volume savings.”
Again, you do the math. Or just open a cold one. How many was that anyway?
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 CITIZEN, AMHERST DAILY NEWS, BRIDGEWATER BULLETIN, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, TRURO DAILY NEWS.
His novel Reparations
, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis First Novel Award
and for the 2007 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.
•
His profile of Det. Tom Martin for The Coast
was selected as a "Notable Narrative" by Harvard's Nieman Narrative Digest.
•
Cardiac Unrest, his Coast cover
story on heart researcher Dr. Gabrielle Horne's troubles
with the Capital District Health Authority
won honourable mention in the Enterprise Reporting category of the 2007 Atlantic Journalism Awards.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Nove Scotia’s ER Crisis (Aug 23, 2007)
Province doesn't get rural health care crisis
In my other life on these pages, I write a weekly Sunday column called Kimber’s Nova Scotia, which is my slightly skewed take on all the news that’s fit to comment on from around the province. As part of my research, I spend a lot of time reading the stories making news in communities outside of Halifax — from the Yarmouth Vanguard to the Cape Breton Post, and every other provincial publication in between.
It’s fascinating — and eye-opening — to see that what matters in smaller communities are often not the issues that make the front pages of our city newspapers.
Take health care, for example. While we in Halifax take comfort in the government’s recent, though long-overdue announcement of a $17-million expansion of the QEII Health Centre’s emergency department, the more pressing concern in many pockets of Nova Scotia this summer us the absence of local emergency service at all.
Since I began writing the Nova Scotia column back in April, hardly a week has gone by without news of one ot more, of ER closure. The Digby General, the Roseway in Shelburne, the Lillian Fraser in Tatamagouche…
The Liberal party claims health officials have already announced 4,700 hours worth of ER closures this year, a fourfold increase over last year.
Even in those hospitals that haven’t shut down ER service completely, there are other problems. On at least five occasions, the Yarmouth General declared a Code Purple. It does that when its regular nursing units are so over-stuffed with patients — usually seniors waiting for scarce nursing home beds who shouldn’t be in a hospital — that others needing care end up stacked around the emergency room like a sky full of jets waiting for permission to land.
The lack of beds and the increased pressure that puts on ERs has had a tsunami effects on already too-high regional health care costs. The Cape Breton District Health Authority reported this spring it spent $1 million in overtime costs for emergency room care last year — double its budget — mostly because of lack of beds, and will probably do so again this year.
There are real problems in the health care system in rural Nova Scotia.
Perhaps most significantly, too few new physicians want to work in small communities, and too many older ones are retiring. I’ve counted at least half a dozen key retirements or resignations just since June. Since some carried huge caseloads — Dr. Roy Harding in Digby, for example, had more than 2,000 patients, about twice the recommended number — it will often require two new docs to replace one old one. Since many of those rural physicians also did regular stints in the local emergency room, their leaving becomes a double whammy — there’s no one to staff the ER, and their patients, who no longer have a family physician, seek medical help at the local ER.
Complicating matters is the still critical shortage of nursing home beds to accommodate our aging population.
I wouldn’t claim the government is doing nothing to deal with this crisis, It belatedly — and only after it was pushed hard by the NDP — announced plans to build more (but still too few) new nursing home beds, and it is funding some important local initiatives, like hiring nurse practitioners in Digby, to ease demand for doctors — but the reality is that Premier Rodney MacDonald and Health Minister Chris d’Entremont still don’t seem to get it.
In Digby — where d’Entremont cancelled one meeting last spring to discuss their crisis, then didn’t show up at a save-our-hospital rally and initially didn’t even bother to reply to a letter from Roy Harding, the retiring doctor who’d requested a face-to-face meeting to discuss “this unsatisfactory situation” — the situation has become so acute local councils are pooling resources to hire professional doctor recruiters.
“It is too bad we have to do this, too bad the government doesn’t provide packages in rural areas,” laments Digby mayor Frank Mackintosh. It is.
Earlier this week, I was talking with South West Nova Health Communications Director Barbara Johnson and Operations VP Anthony Muise about the specific issue of whether we actually need so many emergency rooms — another subject for another day — when it struck me how multifaceted the problems are, and how unfocused the province seems.
You may not want to answer this, I began, but is the province doing enough to deal with all these problems.
Barbara Johnson laughed. “You’re right,” she said, “we don’t want to go there.” She later emailed me to clarify that there are ongoing discussions with the provincial government to address the “difficult discussions that face health care.”
But the reality is that this government hasn’t “gone there,” at least in terms of the big picture, and it’s long past time that it did.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College.
His novel Reparations
, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis First Novel Award
and for the 2007 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.
•
His profile of Det. Tom Martin for The Coast
was selected as a "Notable Narrative" by Harvard's Nieman Narrative Digest.
•
Cardiac Unrest, his Coast cover
story on heart researcher Dr. Gabrielle Horne's troubles
with the Capital District Health Authority
won honourable mention in the Enterprise Reporting category of the 2007 Atlantic Journalism Awards.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Aug 19, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
August 19, 2007Wither Westville
It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Not only did Westville’s acting chief administrative officer suggest the town dissolve itself and join Pictou County but he also took a shot at town councillors in the bargain.
“Unfortunately, the current town council seems to be more intent on dealing with non-policy issues and reacting to the many internal problems in this town,” Rick Ramsay wrote.
Ramsay is a former CAO for King’s County, who also runs a management consulting firm that has worked with troubled rural Nova Scotia communities over the years. He was hired as Westville’s CAO on a short-term contract in March after councillors had a falling out with New Glasgow, with which the town had been sharing administrative services. Ramsay’s report says merging with the county is the best way to solve the town’s escalating financial woes.
During a public meeting to discuss the report last week, councillors responded to Ramsay’s blunt assessment with a few of their own. Coun. Gary MacLaughlin, who called the report “unprofessional” and “worthless,” among other choice phrases, claimed Ramsay “took our money and ran. He'll never be welcome in this town again.”
Ramsay, added Coun. Charlie Sutherland, his voice shaking, “gave us the most one-sided piece of fiction ever presented.”
Even Town Solicitor Charles Facey got in on the act, declaring the “Ramsay Report bothered me," and questioning the accuracy of information in it.
Which prompted a sharp retort from Lynn MacDonald, one of the residents at the meeting. She said his “ad lib… [was] totally inappropriate and unprofessional,” calling it “a classic example of council not advocating in an appropriate manner.”
Strangely — who can figure these things — the New Glasgow News reports that, after all of that, council voted to approve the report!
Got any gay sex films? The mayor asked me to check…
The buttoned-down town of Truro, which gave us this summer’s gay pride flag flap, may soon be the scene of yet another sexual smackdown.
Quebec-based X-citement Video has been posting signs in windows on a Mill Street storefront touting “X-Citement Movies... And a lot More. For Adults Only.”
The only problem is that town bylaws require stores featuring predominantly adult movies to have a permit. “They made an application,” Deputy Development Officer Juanita Bigelow told the Truro Daily News, “but the development permit was refused.”
With X-citement officials refusing comment and Truro CAO Jim Langille threatening to prosecute if the shop opens, Frank Rhyno, the owner of
another adult-oriented shop, is watching from the sidelines.
Rhyno was also turned down when he applied to open a Sister Sarah’s in Truro last year, so he now caters to the chaste sexual fantasies of Truro residents from his store across the river in — wait for it — Bible Hill.
If X-citement is allowed to open in town, he says he will too.
Ah, the x-citement never ends in Truro.
Ferry, very fast
Granville Ferry residents want the Department of Transportation to install what the Spectator described as “traffic-calming devices” to slow down drivers who zip through their community at life-threatening speeds.
More than 100 people signed a petition organized by the local Neighbourhood Watch after a DOT speed recording study on the Granville Road last fall clocked drivers at speeds up to 139.9 km per hour in a 60 km zone. In one test, 87 per cent of vehicles were caught doing more than the posted limit.
Earlier this month, the residents met with officials from DOT, the RCMP and local MLA Stephen McNeil.
Joe Crowell, District Traffic Supervisor and Authority, told the residents the department isn’t keen to use stop signs, speed bumps or rumple strips for speed control but might consider repainting the lines on the sides of the road to make the road appear narrower, causing drivers to slow down.
Psychological warfare? Sounds like a plan.
The passion of the peregrine
On a cold March day in 1997, Kip McCurdy was chopping wood in St. Croix Cove when he decided to take a break and walk along the bay to ”see what was happening in the world.”
What he saw that morning first perplexed, then fascinated and finally obsessed him.
Today, thanks in no small part to his relentless passion for the two peregrine falcons he observed that day, the birds, once thought to be nearly extinct in Nova Scotia, are finally off the endangered species list. But not, says McCurdy, out of danger.
Peregrine falcons are crow-sized predators that can soar hundreds of metres into the sky and dive-bomb their prey at speeds of more than 300 km/hr, decapitating them in mid-flight and seizing them with their talons.
They were pushed to the brink of extinction in the fifties and sixties, thanks largely to the widespread use of pesticides.
McCurdy eventually persuaded skeptical biologists to come and confirm what was then the first sighting of mating falcons in the province in 40 years. They made him part of their peregrine falcon recovery team. He helped monitor the nest on behalf of the Department of Natural Resources. Between 1998 and 2005, McCurdy watched 23 chicks hatch and grow. After her mate died in 2005, Madelaine disappeared and didn’t return to the cove. Their nest is now home to another set of peregrines — McCurdy believes the female is probably Madelaine’s daughter — and other pairs have also been spotted in the Minas Basin area.
Despite that, McCurdy isn’t confident the birds are out of danger. “DDT is still used in South America where they spend the winter," he told the Annapolis Spectator. “And we continue to introduce pesticides that are contaminating the environment and their prey.”
They know how to party
The big windstorm that ripped through Nova Scotia earlier this month also shredded the Big Tent in Cheticamp’s Acadian Village. The tent was the venue for a four-nights-a-week “Acadian Kitchen Party,” one of the summer’s most popular local tourist attractions.
Clarence LeLievre, manager of operations, says they initially tried to roll up the sides of the 60’x120’ tent to let the wind blow through, but then gusts reached 139 km/hr. Eventually, one guy line snapped, and then another and another. “It was heartbreaking to see it happen and be able to do nothing,” he told the Inverness Oran.
The bad news is that the $75,000 tent and its infrastructure were completely destroyed.
The good news is that the party must go on. And it did, in a nearby arena.
The even better news for the long-term hopes of the area’s tourism industry is that Les Soirées chez Gélas (“Evenings at the home of Gélas”) — the name of the event where residents and tourists gather to enjoy music, humour, stories, songs and dance reflecting Acadian traditions — has been attracting four times as many people as projected.
It will continue. Declares general manager Paul Gallant: “We do what is difficult immediately, the impossible tasks will take an extra day.”
First we vote, then we party?
Gary MacLean and Anne Tracey were waiting with eager anticipation and more than a little trepidation yesterday as voters in Ellershouse and Brooklyn trekked to the polls to decide whether the two historically dry communities would finally allow liquor to be sold in their local corner stores.
Tracey and her husband Grant run the Ellershouse Kwik-Way while Gary and his wife Pat operate the Brooklyn Petro-Can. Both have tentative liquor commission approval to sell booze in their shops if the vote goes as they hope.
“We’ve got to get with modern times,” MacLean says hopefully. “There's not the mindset there was 30-40 years ago.”
There is certainly interest in the plebiscite, says Tracey. People are “always coming in asking where and when they can vote, and how many people they can bring with them,” she joked.
Voting more than once, of course, is a fine old Maritime political tradition. As is a little liquor treat in exchange for voting the right way, though we’re sure that wouldn’t ever happen in West Hants.
Though MacLean expected residents to vote yes, he wasn’t taking anything for granted. “The people that don’t want it will definitely turn out, but we want those that support it to come out too,” he told the Hants Journal last week. “It's up to the public now. If they want it, they've got to vote for it.”
Vote early, vote often, take two
Yarmouth residents are flexing their fingers in anticipation of tomorrow night’s edition of Canadian Idol while still muttering darkly about phone system gremlins they believe might have been responsible for almost bringing down hometown favourite Dwight D’Eon last week.
Though he survived the latest cut in the popular CTV series, D’Eon ended up near the bottom of the heap for the first time since he made it into the top 10-contestants.
D’Eon supporters suggest that may have been because they encountered more busy signals than usual. One fan told the Yarmouth Vanguard callers had been able to get through to vote 90 per cent of the time previously but only 10 per cent of the time during the most recent balloting.
Meanwhile, as the weeks dwindle down to a precious few — the new Canadian Idol will be crowned Sept. 11 — excitement is building in Yarmouth. The local Empire Theatres carries live feeds of the performances and results on one of its big screens. They’re hoping for a full house — and no busy signals — tomorrow.
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:
ANNAPOLIS SPECTATOR, HANTS JOURNAL, INVERNESS ORAN, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, TRURO DAILY NEWS, YARMOUTH VANGUARD.
Recent News
His novel Reparations
, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis First Novel Award
and for the 2007 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction.
•
His profile of Det. Tom Martin for The Coast
was selected as a "Notable Narrative" by Harvard's Nieman Narrative Digest.
•
Cardiac Unrest, his Coast cover
story on heart researcher Dr. Gabrielle Horne's troubles
with the Capital District Health Authority
won honourable mention in the Enterprise Reporting category of the 2007 Atlantic Journalism Awards.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Peter MacKay’s new job (Aug 16, 2007)
The Peter principle at work
By Stephen Kimber
Was Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to pluck Peter MacKay from the rock of Foreign Affairs and plop him into the hard place of Defence good for Peter MacKay’s career? Is it good for the country?
It’s far easier to answer the latter than the former.
Taking the real measure of MacKay has never been easy. Viewed through one end of the telescope, he is already an incredibly successful politician with an even brighter future. He is — to steal some of the news account descriptions of him this week — “ambitious,” “telegenic,” “a sure-footed communicator…” He’s also a 10-year parliamentary veteran, having won election four times. He’s been the leader of one national political party and the architect of another. With this week’s shuffle, he will have held down two of the most senior portfolios in government. And he’s not even 42.
There’s plenty of time yet for him to reach his ultimate goal of becoming Prime Minister Peter MacKay. Why not?
And yet…
And yet there’s always been something of the Fearless Fosdick about MacKay too. Like the accident prone, loyal-to-a-fault police officer in the old Li’l Abner cartoon — whose regularly, and often self-inflicted, bullet-riddled body inadvertently reveals his two-dimensional comic strip body — MacKay is less than he appears.
Most of Peter MacKay’s “less” has to do with the issue of principle and with the question of whether he has any.
The defining moment in his political career — what should have marked the end of the beginning of his meteoric rise to power but became instead the beginning of the end of his hopes — was what then-foe-now-friend Jason Kenny called his deal with the devil at the 2003 Progressive Conservative party’s leadership convention.
That was when MacKay, for reasons that can only be described as crass, struck a secret backroom pact with his more progressive leadership rival, David Orchard. MacKay pledged to review the party’s pro-North American Free Trade Pact policy he had previously supported, and promised, cross-his-heart, not to lead the party into a merger with the right-wing Canadian Alliance. In exchange, Orchard would throw his support behind MacKay and push him over the top in the final ballot of the leadership race.
Orchard kept his part of the bargain.
Less than six months later, of course, MacKay made another deal with another devil — Stephen Harper — totally abrogating the Orchard agreement and creating the unprogressive Conservative party.
That looking-out-for-number-one slipperiness set the pattern for MacKay. Consider his most recent flip-flop flap this spring over whether fellow Nova Scotia Tory MP Bill Casey should be punished for standing up for principle on the Atlantic Accord and voting against the federal budget.
Should Casey be punished?
No, he wouldn’t, MacKay promised in the House of Commons.
Yes, he was.
Oh, that. Getting kicked out of caucus was really Casey’s fault, MacKay blithely explained, because he had actually followed through on his principles — something MacKay clearly found difficulty understanding.
To make matters worse, MacKay, as the Toronto Star aptly noted this week, was “no blazing comet” as Foreign Affairs Minister.
In part, of course, that’s because Stephen Harper was really his own foreign minister. MacKay, in public at least, was mostly just mouthing words written in the PMO — from cheerleading support for failed American policies in Iraq to an unqualified thumbs up for Israel’s relentless bombing campaign against Lebanon last summer.
When MacKay did step out on his own, he often stumbled. Remember his fawning over his American counterpart, Condi Rice? More substantively, his department spent much of the past year not only denying that prisoners captured by Canadians in Afghanistan and turned over to local authorities were being tortured, for example, but also claiming no reports on Afghan human rights abuses even existed. When it turned out they did exist and that they revealed real fears prisoners were being subjected to torture and even murder, MacKay’s excuse was that he hadn’t read them.
So what can we expect from MacKay now that he’s Minister of National Defence?
Unfortunately, probably more of the same. We are at a critical point in the Afghan war. We need to have a serious national conversation about why we’re in that troubled country in the first place, what we’ve accomplished so far and whether there is a useful role for us there in the future.
We could use a man of principle to help lead that discussion. Unfortunately, this week’s cabinet shuffle only gave us a too-glib, me-first spinmeister. Which is almost certainly bad for the country.
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
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About
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.