Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Aug 12, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
August 12, 2007Sowing the seeds
King’s County Council voted 9–2 Tuesday to reject controversial land use amendments so a local developer could transform 47 acres of prime farmland into 200 new residential housing units.
While that puts an end to Fury Farms’ plan to develop property adjacent to the Berwick Heights Golf Course property, the larger issue — what to do about increasing acres of abandoned agricultural land — will be more difficult to resolve.
Close to 50 people spoke out — most against —at a four-hour public hearing on the proposal. And then, just before council met to make a final decision, a caravan of farm vehicles — including, perhaps tellingly, a manure spreader — paraded through town bearing signs that demanded, “Keep Weston Rural,” “Farmers: The Real Heart of the Valley,” and “Give Farming a Future.”
“Saving the farmland,” local resident Leslie Wade told councillors, “is about a future for our grandchildren. It’s our valuable resource, our gold mine.”
But Warden Fred Whalen, whose district includes the proposed development and who was one of the two to vote in favour, visualized a gold mine of a different sort. The $50-million project, he said, would add $4 million a year to the county tax base, generate employment, attract newcomers and help keep local young people from heading west.
Don’t expect the larger issue to go away soon. Coun. Janet Newton, who voted against this plan, told councillors she plans to support another proposal for agricultural land rezoning in her community when it comes before council.
Sign me up
A horrific car crash near Hubbards late last month that claimed two lives has sparked renewed calls for government to twin and upgrade Highway 103, the main route between Halifax and Yarmouth. In Lunenburg County alone, the Bridgewater Bulletin reports, the highway has claimed “close to 10 lives” this year.
Last week, former Bridgewater firefighter Tim Conrad, who now lives in Halifax, created a Facebook group “dedicated to the dozens of lives lost in recent years,” and an online petition site —http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?hwy103ns — demanding Ottawa and the province fix the highway. “The people of Nova Scotia accept only action,” the petition declared, “and require it to be done by 2010.”
The petition has struck a chord. By Friday morning, close to 1,000 people — me included — had signed.
Wrote Candice Ramey of Bridgewater: “The government needs to get its priorities in order and put their money where it will save lives instead of buying cars for MPs and wasting thousands of dollars bidding on sporting events.”
As if to underscore the problem, the Bulletin reported last week that, just four days after the deadly July 30 collision, “emergency responders were called to a four-car collision, again, near Exit 6. This time, no serious injuries were reported.”
Next time…?
Don’t ask, we won’t tell
The town of Amherst has a new policy on proclamations and flag raisings, but don’t ask what it is, or whether the town will run the gay pride flag up its town hall flagpole.
“We don’t want to make an issue out of something that’s not an issue yet,” Town Manager Greg Herrett told the Amherst Daily News following the Great Truro Flag Flap of 2007. “It’s something we’ll deal with when a request is received.”
Without disclosing too many secrets, we can tell you that, under the policy, Herritt has the discretion to decide which flags will flutter and which will flounder, but he can also pass the buck to town council if he chooses.
The town will likely have to choose whether to fly or flee next spring when local gay activists plan to approach both the town and Cumberland municipality to fly the flag during pride week.
We’ll see who salutes then.
Beach blocking bingo
A landowner in Port Hood has made a lot of people angry by placing two huge cement barriers across the only access road to a popular local beach. The unnamed owner of a property next to Lawrence’s Beach was apparently miffed at the number of noisy young people using the area as a late night party place, and decided to force them at least walk to their beach fun.
But his unilateral action has not only raised questions about whether anyone has the right to interfere with a public right-of-way but also prompted concerns for safety because so many people are now being forced to park their cars along Route 19 and walk to the beach.
The local councilor, Jim MacLean, told the Inverness Oran he’d received over 100 calls about the barriers and “has worked on nothing else over the week.”
The dispute escalated last Monday when some local men moved the blocks out of the way, only to discover they’d been put back the next day.
The RCMP says “the matter is currently being researched.” Department of Transportation lawyers are on the case too, and plan to talk to municipal lawyers soon.
By the time they get it sorted out, of course, the summer beach and party season will be over.
Toothpaste, dog food and now…
Greenwood’s Aurora newspaper says a fire last fall that destroyed a home in Woodland Gardens was caused by a faulty power bar that was likely a bootleg device.
“This is a big, big problem,” the local fire chief says.
People buy the knockoffs, some made in China, he says, because they’re considerably cheaper and appear no different than the more expensive models. But they’re not certified for the kind of use they get in most households. They may even boast Underwriter’s Lab of Canada (ULC) code or Canadian Standards Association (CSA) approval tags, but “fly-by-nighters do a good job counterfeiting the tags as well.” Many retailers, the chief added, aren’t even aware they’re peddling dangerous goods.
If you have a concern about a device you’ve bought or are considering buying one, check out the Underwriters’ home page — http://www.ulc.ca/ — for consumer alerts and a news release archive.
A piece of Guysborough Township? Priceless…
The Mersey Heritage Society is trying to figure out who — if anyone — owns an invaluable piece of Nova Scotia history.
Archaeologists and members of the society have been surveying parts of Guysborough Township — no, not that Guysborough; this one is a long-gone loyalist settlement around what is now Port Mouton — since 2001.
They’ve already found a dozen home sites, stone walls and bits of ceramic from the 40-acre township that was briefly home to as many as 2,300 disbanded soldiers who arrived there after the American Revolution.
The heritage society and the Archaeological Land Trust of Nova Scotia want to protect the site, but the problem is nobody seems to know who owns it.
But even if the land turns out to be a long-lost chunk of your family inheritance, don’t expect to build condos there. It’s already protected under the Special Places Act.
This week’s doctor news
While other Nova Scotia communities wine and dine out-of-province physicians to entice them to settle in their towns, Middleton’s Soldier’s Memorial Hospital has scored a coup by hiring its new chief of staff and director of emergency services from within (almost).
The new man is Dr. Scott MacDonald, a Dalhousie Med School grad and former Canadian Forces medical officer who has spent the past two years as the senior medical authority to 14 Wing in nearby Greenwood.
That fills one big hole, but only one.
Since MacDonald won’t be setting up a private practice, the community is still looking for replacements for two longtime local doctors who have retired. Both had been seeing about double the usual recommended caseload, so that makes the task doubly difficult.
Some patients will probably end up with no family doctor, concedes site manager Lisa Salley, while others “will probably have to drive farther to see a doctor.”
Given the health care situation in rural Nova Scotia these days, they could be driving all day.
The gall of it all
Here’s something more to blame on climate change: lousy berry crops in some parts of Nova Scotia this summer.
“Some people might laugh,” John Lewis, a horticultural consultant with Agrapoint, told the New Glasgow News, “but I think [climate change] is a concern. This winter, it was very mild very late, and then boom, it was down below minus 20. I think that will become more common and maybe we need to find other ways to prepare the (berry) plant.”
While inspecting berry fields in the Annapolis Valley, Lewis says he discovered many bushes were suffering from “cane gall,” a bacterial disease he believes “has to do with the type of winter we had last year.”
Saltspring U-pick operator Al Illsley isn’t sure what caused his problem, but he is definitely seeing the result. Usually, by this time of summer, his farm fields are over-run by pickers scooping up the 3,000 pints of raspberries weighing heavy on his bushes. This year, there’s no one here.
“I didn't even open,” he says. “There were no berries. I used to get 100 pints off a row. [This year], I picked the whole thing, two acres, and got 40 pints.”
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 NEW, ANNAPOLIS COUNTY SPECTATOR, THE AURORA, BRIDGEWATER BULLETIN, INVERNESS ORAN, KENTVILLE ADVERTISER, LIVERPOOL ADVANCE, NEW GLASGOW NEWS.
Shirley Street standoff report revisited (Aug 9, 2007)
Blacked-out bits raise questions
“’Satiable curiosity,” as Kipling called it, is one of the peculiar traits of the journalist. I have spent more hours than I can count — or should admit to — trying to decipher the usually meaningless upside-down writing on the desks of people I am interviewing. Or listening in on banal conversations to which I am not a party.
Which may explain how I came to be hunched over a spotlight last week, squinting, trying to make out what was hidden beneath the black felt-markered-out sections of the copy of the Halifax Regional Police Operational Review of the Shirley Street standoff.
Last week, I wrote about what was in the publicly released portion of that much delayed report I had received through a Freedom of Information request. It focused on the police department’s role in a controversial May 2004 incident in which heavily armed police used a battering ram to smash their way into a Halifax home in the middle of the night to execute a Children’s Aid apprehension order for an infant.
This week, I want to talk about the parts I wasn’t supposed to see.
To be fair, the police only blacked out three small sections of the 16-page report. In his cover letter to me, Deputy Chief Tony Burbridge cited two sections of the Protection of Privacy and Freedom of Information Act to justify what he described as the “severed parts of the record.” The first was that disclosing the information “would be reasonably be expected to harm law enforcement and harm the effectiveness of investigative techniques or procedures…” The second was that the information “would be an unreasonable invasion of a third party’s personal privacy.”
So, of course, I peeked. And peered. And stared. And held the documents up to the light to see what, if anything, they might reveal.
I was unable to decipher anything from two of the excisions, which were among a catalogue of what the report described as “numerous tactics… utilized in attempting to reach a successful resolution of the incident.”
But the third blacked-out section — about an incident before the stand-off when the police were still trying to find out where Carline VandenElsen had disappeared to with her baby daughter — turned out to be at least partially readable.
And intriguing.
In the chronology, the incident occurs sometime between Feb. 23, when a Det/Cst. Webber contacted a Children’s Aid official to update her on the progress of the investigation, and Feb, 26, 2004, just three days later, when Larry Finck, the father of the little girl and husband of Carline, came to police headquarters aking to lay a complaint against Children’s Aid “for conspiracy in the abduction of his child.”
Which means that the subject of this blacked-out section occurred more than a month after police first unsuccessfully tried to enforce the apprehension order and almost two full months before police attempts to seize the child touched off a three-day SWAT team siege at the Finck home.
Here’s what I can read: “Det/Cst. Webber met with Senior Crown Attorney Frank Hoskins to discuss proceeding with —“ which is followed by a few words I can’t read — “He advised that there were insufficient grounds at this time to support prosecution. Barbara MacPherson of Children’s Aid was advised of this decision.”
Which raises an interesting question.
How does this information match up with the department’s stated explanations for refusing to disclose this particular section to me?
Surely, consulting with a Senior Crown on whether there are grounds to lay charges is commonplace police procedure, hardly the sort of top-secret investigative technique the Act is supposed to allow police to keep confidential. As for violating the privacy rights of a third party, the fact is that both the cop and Barbara MacPherson, a CAS case worker, are already identified in several sections of the report released to me. And Frank Hoskins is a public official acting in a public capacity.
So which of the stated exemptions applies in this case?
If neither do — and it appears they don’t — then why did the police decide to try to keep this small section of the report from my prying eyes?
Could it be that they simply didn’t want to publicly admit there were no grounds to lay charges against anyone in this case until police officers banged on the door in the middle of the night of May 19 and turned a family matter into a criminal case that changed the lives of all of those involved?
And what does that say about the police department’s commitment to openness and transparency?
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. In 2004, he was a member of an ad hoc citizen’s group that campaigned unsuccessfully for a public inquiry into this case. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Aug 5, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
August 5, 2007
And you think telemarketers are annoying
A Bridgewater man, who claims he’s gotten hundreds of unwanted confidential medical reports and referrals on his home fax machine over the past five years, took his concerns public last week.
The man, who asked not to be identified, told the Bridgewater Bulletin he’s been writing to South Shore Health and the Department of Health since 2002, alerting them to what’s been happening and asking that something be done. Nothing has. In one recent seven-day period, he got 40 more faxes.
The problem is that the man’s number is similar to the fax number for South Shore Health’s rehabilitation services and doctors are apparently mistakenly sending their referrals to him. Some of the referrals came from Capital Health’s rehab centre and the IWK in Halifax.
“One of the most disturbing things about this,” the man told the newspaper, “is most of it is not marked ‘Confidential.’ It’s not marked anything. It’s just sent.” The documents include patient names, health card numbers and medical diagnoses.
South Shore Health CEO Kevin McNamara says there isn’t much he can do. “I cannot be accountable for dialing somebody else's phone,” he told the newspaper.
Perhaps, but perhaps that isn’t being accountable at all.
Calling Anne Murray
An American-based company has erected two test wind towers on marshlands near Amherst as it scouts for a location to plop a new $200 million, 40-turbine wind farm.
“Everyone has said… there’s plenty of wind in the Tantramar Marsh area,” Invenergy Canada director Mark Bell explains, “and we’re here to prove it.”
Get in line.
At least two other projects are already in development. Atlantic Wind Farms wants to build a 20-27-turbine project near Pugwash while Wind Dynamics of Saint John is pushing ahead with its $60-million development on the Amherst side of the marsh.
Bell, who says his company is planning a series of community meetings, adds he isn’t worried about opposition from local residents. Developers and communities “can co-exist as long as [wind farms] aren’t shoved down people’s throats. You have to be sensitive to the concerns of local residents and meet those concerns in an appropriate forum.”
Speaking of hot air
The Gulf Shore Preservation Association has quietly dropped its planned lawsuit against the Municipality of Cumberland over the Atlantic Wind Farm project.
Last spring, after municipal council approved a new bylaw requiring wind farm projects to provide only a 500-metre buffer zone between their turbines and local residences, opponents threatened legal action and talked about taking the issue to the provincial Utility and Review Board.
But the board recently ruled the dispute is outside its jurisdiction and Lisa Betts, a spokesperson for the group, now says she believes “a non-confrontational” approach may work better. “We know council was divided on this issue and feel if we can sit down as adults and discuss this that we can come up with something that works for the county, the developer and us.”
Given that other developers are pitching even more wind farms, she says it’s important for the municipality to come up with a better bylaw.
“We’re not opposed to the notion of setting siting requirements but we have to make sure these things aren’t right up against people’s homes,” she told the Amherst Daily News. “We’re talking about people’s health here; we have to make sure this is done right.”
Fixer-upper with a view
Two Cape Breton historical societies are hoping to use an innovative revolving heritage fund to save the… wait for it… Sydney tar ponds. Well, not the tar ponds. Just the neighbourhoods around them, including as the Kolonia section of Whitney Pier, which includes distinctive company houses built near the former steel plant.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there hasn’t been a market for those properties in recent years. But a report to Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s heritage advisory committee suggests that could change as the area’s environmental cleanup progresses.
The Old Sydney Society and the Whitney Pier Historical Society want to create a seed-money fund to buy and renovate one home, then sell or lease it to provide funding for the next and so on until the neighbourhood is revitalized.
Tom Urbaniak, chair of the committee, says such revolving funds have helped refurbish older homes in down-at-the-heels urban neighbourhoods in the United States.
The project, which could be up and running within the year, could be the first of its kind in Canada — or not. Vancouver is apparently considering a similar scheme.
“They may beat us to it, but we don’t mind,” Urbaniak told the Cape Breton Post. “The more, the merrier.”
The ER as family physician
This summer’s emergency room closures are just the canary-in-the-health-care coal-mine’s much more serious crisis: a critical lack of family physicians, especially in rural areas.
That became apparent recently when officials in Digby began reviewing emergency room visits over the past year to help them develop plans for limited weekday reopening of the Digby General Hospital’s ER this fall.
Barb Johnson, a spokesperson for South West Health, says three-quarters of the ER visits were for what she described as non-urgent problems. Often, she says patients only come to the emergency room because they have no family physician of their own.
South West Health has just received provincial funding to hire several new nurse practitioners who will assist a local doctor at his primary care clinic, freeing him up to take ER shifts. Though the nurse practitioners can’t run an emergency room, they can refill prescriptions, perform pap smears, run baby clinics, order diagnostic tests and prescribe medication
Johnson says the hirings mean “we’re moving in the right direction. We will have a little more ER service as well as help for those without a family physician.”
To complicate matters, however, health authorities may need to recruit two new doctors just to take the place of Dr. Roy Harding, who closed his practice at the end of June. Harding had 2,300 patients on his active list, but most new physicians accept only 1,000 to 1,500 patients, some even fewer.
Last month, MEDIC (Medical Emergency Digby in Crisis), a seven-year-old committee established to help recruit doctors to the area, hosted its latest out-of-province physician recruit.
Spokesperson David Irvine says the doctor “was very impressed by the scenery, the friendliness of people and the number of artisans in the area,” but there’s no word yet on whether the physician will relocate.
More canaries singing
Annapolis Valley Health has announced its Outpatient Clinic at Eastern Kings Memorial Community Health Centre in Wolfville, will be closed every weekend from Aug. 11 to Sept. 3.
And South West Health says Shelburne’s Roseway Hospital ER will be closed for 24 hours next Sunday.
The most recent closures, the health authorities say “are due to lack of doctor coverage for these times.”
And so it goes.
Unfriendly fire
It’s probably not often the web site of the San Franscisco-based American magazine Mother Jones gets inundated with messages from readers in Pictou County, Nova Scotia.
But news that the left-wing magazine’s latest issue contains a graphic account of the death of a young Stellarton soldier killed in Afghanistan has prompted demands from local residents that the magazine remove the story from its website, and touched off an investigation by the Canadian military into whether the story’s author breached doctor-patient confidentiality.
The controversy centres around an article entitled Talk to Me Like My Father: Frontline Medicine in Afghanistan by Kevin Patterson, a Canadian medical officer and captain, who wrote a compelling first-person account of his stint this year treating coalition soldiers and Afghani civilians.
On Mar. 6, 2007, Patterson writes, “four Canadian infanteers run in through the emergency entrance carrying a fifth. ’Gunshot wound,’ they yell, as they heave him onto a stretcher…” The story goes on to describe in gory detail the failed effort to save 25-year-old Kevin Megeney, a corporal who’d been accidentally shot by a roommate.
The family first learned the story was being published in a letter from the magazine, offering to send them copies prior to publication. Neither the author nor the magazine had asked for permission to include the details.
That’s a no-no, according to Lynette Reid, assistant professor of bioethics at Dalhousie University Medical School. “If I read an article like this,” she told the New Glasgow News, “I would assume that the doctor had the patient's or family's permission (to use the name) and I would be very surprised if they didn't.”
Be surprised, be very surprised.
Sign of the times?
Sidnee Falkenham says she was “overwhelmed” when she was crowned the 46th annual Parsboro Old Home Week Queen last month.
Fortunately — or unfortunately — the 17-year-old may get to keep her crown.
Lloyd Smith, the chair of the Lion’s Club-sponsored pageant, says only two local girls had ofgfered to compete by the time entries closed this year, and organizers spent two weeks “scrambling” to flesh out the field to six contestants.
“I believe the Lions Club has to really look at whether the queen’s pageant is going to continue as part of Old Home Week,” he told the crowd gathered for the ceremony, “or whether we look at another avenue to fill this spot.”
As for Sidnee, she was understandably less concerned with the pageant’s future than with her present. When asked how she felt, she simply said: “Awesome!”
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, AMHERST WEEKLY CITIZEN, BRIDGEWATER BULLETIN, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, NOVANEWS.COM.
Police review of standoff (Aug 2, 2007)
Police learn nothing from standoff
The Halifax Regional Police learned nothing from 2004’s costly three-day Shirley Street standoff — because there was nothing for them to learn. They did everything right.
That, at least, is the pre-determined conclusion of the department’s self-serving, butt-covering, two-years-in-the-making, 16-page internal review of “Incident Number 04-21470.”
That is the blandly bureaucratic designation for the infamous case in which police bungled efforts to execute a Children’s Aid Society apprehension order to seize the infant daughter of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen. That quickly escalated into a 67-hour siege, complete with barricaded suspects, a shot fired, deployment of a heavily-armed SWAT team, the evacuation of a Halifax neighbourhood, the natural-causes death of Finck’s mother who was inside the house at the time, prison terms for both VandenElsen and Finck and the end of any hope their infant daughter might have had for a normal family life.
One hopes the reason the police didn’t release the report’s findings publicly themselves — I had to get my only slightly blacked-out copy through a Freedom of Information application — is because they’re embarrassed by it.
One hopes…
Though the report deals with, or, more accurately, dismisses questions about the entire chain of events — from the department’s initial attempt on Jan. 15, 2004 to execute a court order to take the infant into protective custody to the moment the child was finally grabbed on May 21, 2004 — let’s look today only at the critical decisions police officers made on the night of May 19. Those were the ones that turned what should have been a routine custody matter into a matter of life and death.
Having heard rumours that VandenElsen — who’d disappeared with her daughter around the time of the initial court order — had been spotted back in Halifax in the company of Finck in the criminal act of “pushing a baby stroller in the area of Vernon and Shirley Street,” the police immediately mounted a full-scale, drug-style surveillance operation.
Early that evening, they followed the couple to a Wal-Mart and watched as they clandestinely “purchased baby supplies.” After shadowing the dangerous duo back to their Shirley Street address with their fresh-bought diapers, one of the officers peeked in a window and saw Finck with “an infant he assumed” to be their daughter.
One assumes, though the report doesn’t say so, that the infant did not appear to be in mortal danger from her father at the time.
At that point — after 10:30 at night — police officers made the fateful decision to snatch the child immediately rather than wait for morning, or for the couple — who seemed blissfully unaware police were on to them — to leave the house again.
Why not wait? There is no evidence the child — supposedly the reason for all of this — was in immediate danger.
Was it a budgetary decision? Did police gamble a swift snatch-and-grab would be cheaper than the hard slog of continuing surveillance and safe apprehension? If so, they blew it badly.
The report never really addresses those questions, though it does attempt to justify the fact senior officers dispatched three uniformed police to pound on the door at 12:34 a.m.
Finck and VandenElsen, the report says, “were known to be violent towards police.”
While that makes an even more compelling argument for caution, we need to ask on what basis the police determined this. The report offers no backup for its assertion.
VandenElsen, it’s true, had been charged with abducting her children from a previous marriage, but a jury had acquitted her in that case. An appeals court had ordered a new trial, but it hadn’t yet taken place. There’s no evidence I’ve seen she was ever violent toward police.
As for Finck, he’d served two years for kidnapping a daughter from a previous relationship and was certainly well known to challenge authority. Did he have a history of actual violence against police? Not that I’m aware of.
The reality, as police know all too well, is that custody cases are emotional and volatile. That’s why prudent decision-making is vital to prevent an incident from escalating out of control.
The report claims police officers “do not have discretion” in enforcing apprehension orders, which is, of course, ludicrous. While they may not have a choice in whether to enforce an order, they have lots of leeway in how to do it.
Police decisions in this case led to an expensive, disruptive standoff, criminal convictions for two people who wanted nothing more than to raise their child and the total destruction, beyond repair, of a family — and yet the report claims there are no lessons to be learned.
Perhaps we will only begin to learn those lessons after a police officer — or a baby — is dead.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. In 2004, he was a member of an ad hoc citizen’s group that campaigned unsuccessfully for a public inquiry into this case. 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.