Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Sept. 30, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
September 30, 2007
Fish story
The president of the Northumberland Fisherman’s Association, says it could be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back.” Or perhaps the loon that cracks the lobster’s claw.
Ronnie Heighton told the Truro Daily News last week that the skyrocketing value of the Canadian loonie coupled with plummeting catches of lobster in some areas of Nova Scotia’s north shore has the potential to spell doom for struggling fishermen.
Last spring, American buyers were paying $5-6 a pound (US) for market-sized lobsters. When the season opens in the spring, he fears the price could be as low as $3 a pound.
“It’s fine in areas where fishing is good and guys are hauling in 25,000 [pounds] a season,” Heighton says. “They could sustain a loss, but in areas where fishing hasn’t been good and guys are landing about 5,000, it could sink us.”
He’s hoping “the people we sell fish to” will find alternate buyers, possibly in the European market.
Hmmm?… If the fishermen are paid for their catch in American dollars and the Canadian dollar is at par, does that mean it will be cheaper for us to buy lobsters this Christmas?
Don’t bet on it.
A failure to communicate
Annapolis County Councillor Pat McWade says he’s fed up with “us asking specific questions and us not getting a specific answer.”
The questions “us” — which is to say county council — are asking have to do with what Ottawa plans to do to keep the Digby-St. John ferry operating and what the province intends to do about issuing exclusive aquaculture licenses for beaches currently closed to clamming.
And the answers?…
Well, the councilors say, they’re not getting any. At least none they like.
For months, they’ve been writing to ACOA minister Peter MacKay, trying to get him to acknowledge that the ferry service is a vital cog in the national infrastructure and, therefore, a federal responsibility.
MacKay’s replies include vaguely worded references to “economic viability” and blah blah blah.
Says McWade: “The ferry will run, period, without reference to any economic or other indicators. We want the people in Ottawa to understand a very simple fact — that this ferry will run.”
He says council has been getting equally formulaic and platitudinous runarounds from Fisheries Minister Ronald Chisholm whenever they ask about the aquaculture leases.
The council’s reponses to these ongoing slights? They’ve agreed to write yet another letter to Chisholm, this time asking for itemized responses to their itemized questions. And they’ve put over to their next committee of the whole meeting a discussion about how to get their message across to MacKay.
Yes, that should help.
Endangered species… endangered sign
A 50-foot banner an environmental group had erected on private property near the Falmouth exit to Highway 101 to draw attention to “how environmental carelessness can kill a river” has gone missing.
Friends of the Avon River has been lobbying for five years to have the existing causeway over the river opened in order to allow the Avon to flow naturally again and restore some of the salmon habitat destroyed by silt build up at the mouth of the river. It’s also worried that a new federal fisheries act will undermine their efforts to force a full environmental assessment of a proposal to twin the Highway 101 causeway over the river. That’s why it’s encouraging people to write to the prime minister and the federal fisheries minister.
The roadside banner proclaiming “River in Distress” was part of that campaign, says Friends spokesperson Sonya Wood, who told the Hants County Journal she was disappointed that “people feel the need to destroy something of meaning to others. Shame on them. We have an endangered species that needs access to these waters.”
The RCMP is investigating the theft, though not the disappearance of the salmon.
Is the mayor proud yet?
Truro is ready to “move on” from the great gay pride flag flap of 2007. So says Charles Thompson, who organized a community forum in the town last week to discuss equality rights and religious freedoms.
In August, town council voted 6–1 to turn down a request that it fly the rainbow-coloured pennant during Gay Pride Week. At the time, Mayor Bill Mills told reporters that, as a Christian, he simply could not support the idea.
“God says, ‘I'm not in favour of that,’ and I have to look at it and say, ‘I guess I'm not either.’”
But Thompson says the mayor, the deputy mayor, three councillors and the town’s chief operating officer were among the 60 who attended last week’s forum.
“I think it was a huge success,” he told the Truro Daily News. “A lot of people opened their minds and were willing to learn and to listen.”
We shall see.
A hunk out of history
King’s County Advertiser reporter Wendy Elliott wasn’t impressed. “It doesn’t look like much to the untrained eye,” she told her paper’s readers, just “a two-toned grey hunk of rock.”
But Chris Mansky, a fossil hunter and curator of the Blue Beach Museum, who found the object during a walk along the Minas Basin beach earlier this month, says it is, in fact, a fossilized, 335-million-year-old skull of a tetrapod, a reptilian creature that crawled out of a pond onto land sometime in the long long ago.
According to Mansky, paleontologists are still trying to fill in gaps in their knowledge of creatures that existed between those that lived totally in water and those that live on land. “This,” he says of his find, “is incontrovertibly the oldest land animal.”
It’s not the first big fossil find at Blue Beach, once a swampy area of the Minas Basin. Mansky, who describes the beach as a Noah’s Ark for fossils, says the first major discovery there dates back to 1841. Currently, there are tens of thousands of pounds of fossil finds stored in and around the small private museum, which currently consists of a Quonset hut and a basement storage area.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the museum’s operators are now asking county council to rezone their property to allow for the development of a proper museum building and research centre.
Second opinion
Residents of East Mountain in Colchester County weren’t quite as smug — or as optimistic — about the long-term impact of last week’s drug raids in their neighbourhood as the Mounties who made the highly publicized arrests and seized houses and cars belonging to the alleged dealers.
Linda Rushton, who lives near one of the seized homes, says the raid “should have happened a long time ago…. The police have known about it as long as we have — at least 10 years.”
Given the lack of police action over the years, she adds, residents have simply learned to live with the dealers and the extra traffic that comes with their illicit trade. “They leave us alone if we leave them alone… You know where [the buyers are] coming from but, like I say, they don’t stop to bother anyone.”
As for the impact of the high-profile busts: “It’s not resolved. It may be stopped for a little while, but they’ll never wipe it out.”
Do you know where your spacecraft is?
At 11:20 p.m. on Oct. 4, 1967 — 40 years ago this Thursday — at least 11 residents of Shag Harbour on the province’s south shore reported seeing a large, illuminated, low-flying object falling from the sky into the harbour with what sounded like a “whoosh” followed by a loud bang. Some of them, thinking they’d witnessed a plane crash, called in the local RCMP. The officers who responded saw the object too — describing it as a pale yellow light bobbing on the water just before it sank. When rescuers were unable to turn up any sign of anything, the Canadian navy was called in to search for whatever it was — no planes had been reported missing — but divers never found anything either.
Which may explain why official government records describe what wasn’t found as a — cue the ominous music —UFO.
The Shag Harbour Incident, as it’s become known among UFologists worldwide, has been the subject of a book and several TV documentaries. Along with Rosswell, New Mexico — the scene of another similarly unexplained sighting — the small Nova Scotia fishing village now occupies a special spot in the international pantheon of earthly places where aliens may — or may not — have landed.
This coming weekend, the Shag Harbour Incident Society, a recently formed local group that is hoping to establish a permanent museum to commemorate whatever it was that happened that night, will stage a 40th anniversary celebration, featuring talks by UFO experts and local eyewitnesses, tours and, of course, a buffet supper in the local firehall as well as a collectables sale down at the community hall.
No word on whether a certain large, illuminated, low-flying object will put in a special guest appearance.
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 COUNTY SPECTATOR, HANTS COUNTY JOURNAL, KING’S COUNTY ADVERTISER, TRURO DAILY NEWS, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD.
Iran’s president not problem (Sept 27, 2007)
Denouncing Iran’s president rings hollow
The problem with lobbing rocks inside glass houses is that the shards often end up all over you.
Consider the case of Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, whose 15-minute, scattershot denunciation-introduction of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the university earlier this week was so gratuitous, insulting and self-serving it could have been written by the White House (or perhaps by those great Canadian military minds who gave us Afghan President Hamad Karzi’s supposed paean in praise of Canada’s military role in Afghanistan in the House of Commons last year).
Bollinger was doing his best intellectual tap dance to on-the-one-foot defend Columbia’s controversial decision to invite Ahmadinejad to speak as part of the university’s World Leaders’ Forum — the invitation was, he said, “in the great tradition of openness that has defined this country for many years,” ignoring the reality that he himself last year unilaterally rescinded his School of Public and International Affairs’ invitation for Ahmadinejad to speak — while making sure that no one, but especially funding agencies and potential donors, missed what he thinks of the the Iranian president. He represents “the mind of evil” and exhibits “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” whose views are “repugnant” to right-thinking Americans everywhere, Bollinger declared.
In his rambling tirade, Bollinger did raise some important questions about Iran’s human rights record and its treatment of women, homosexuals and religious minorities — all of which deserve better answers than Ahmadinejad offered — but too many of Bollinger’s barbs seemed at best, hypocritical.
Talking about one Iranian dissident, for example, Bollinger lamented that the man “does not know whether he will be charged with a crime or allowed to leave the country…”
Uh, Lee, can you say Guantanamo Bay?
At another point, Bollinger charged that Iran “leads the world in executing minors.” Of course Bollinger didn’t mention that it was only two years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court — by only the narrowest of margins (five-to-four) — finally put an end to this “cruel and unusual” form of punishment. At that point, 20 American states still had laws on their books allowing the executions of those under the age of 18.
And so it went.
“Can you tell us why Iran is fighting a proxy war in Iraq?” Bollinger demanded, repeating administration allegations that Iran support insurgents “undermining American forces in Iraq.”
The next day, the chancellors of seven Iranian universities released an open letter of rebuttal to Bollinger, inviting him to come to Iran and respond to their 10 questions, one of which included: “Why did the US support the bloodthirsty dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iraqi-imposed war on Iran?”
Can you say proxy war, Mr. Bollinger?
It probably goes without saying that Bollinger also parroted the Bush administration’s line that Iran’s nuclear enrichment program is just a cover for that country’s plan to build a nuclear bomb — which, to be fair, it may very well be.
“Would you stop?” he demanded rhetorically of the Iranian president. That call might have sounded slightly less hypocritical if Bollinger had coupled it with a demand that Iran’s enemy, Israel, rid itself of its equally-unconfirmed but decidedly more real cache of nuclear weapons. Or, closer to the home, that the Americans government — which has been threatening to attack Iran — live up to its commitments under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty to reduce its stockpile of weapons.
It is also intriguing to note just how selective Bollinger has been in confronting dictators.
In an article in the online edition of The Nation, Jayati Vora, a former student in Columbia’s School of Public and International Affairs, recalls attending a similar speech two years ago by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. “As one of many Indian students at the event, I burned with questions I was dying to pose about democracy, women's rights and peace with India,” she writes. Instead, she says, she was astounded to find on her seat a pamphlet distributed by the university stating that Musharraf had “’assumed the office of chief executive of Pakistan in October 1999.’ There was no mention of the coup through which Musharraf seized power,” Vora writes. “Not once did Bollinger refer to the military man, who had overthrown the elected government and then refused to hold elections as promised, as a dictator — a word he seemed to have no problem using to describe Ahmadinejad.”
But then, of course, Musharraf is a friend of America. And that makes all the difference in the world.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Sept. 23, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
September 23, 2007
Do I hear $1.25?
The owner of the Seafreez fish plant in Canso is willing — even eager — to sell his local fish processing plant to the town for a dollar. But the town isn’t certain it can afford the price.
Barry Group, the Newfoundland-based company that’s run the plant for 17 years, says Seafreez is a victim of changing circumstance — the collapse of fish stocks in the 1990s followed by the Supreme Court’s 1999 Marshall decision that allocated more of the annual quota to native fishermen.
“The reality is that [the Seafreez plant is] a facility that was designed for an era that doesn’t exist now,” Bill Barry told the Guysborough Journal. “It was built for a 600–700-people operation with massive amounts of wet fish and other resources to go into the plant. The opportunity to get that in Atlantic Canada has all but disappeared over the last 15 years.” He says Seafreez’s quota, which used to top 136,000 metric tons of fish a year, is now down to just 3,000 pounds.
Barry, who has had well publicized tiffs with the town over unpaid property taxes, water bills and the fact he processes some of his quota at another company-owned plant in Pubnico, insists: “We’ve held on; we’ve held on. There’s nothing to hold onto anymore.”
But Canso Councillor Fin Armsworthy says the real problem is that Barry has “given up on the community… He had the resources and potential to keep work [at Seafreez], but he never did.”
Canso Mayor Ray White is more understanding — “I think [Barry’s] made efforts” — but he isn’t keen on the town owning the plant, even for a dollar. “As a council, I think our preference would be for the provincial or federal government to go to the private sector, seek expressions of interest and hopefully [attract] people with the expertise to develop such an industry.”
If, of course, there is a fishing industry left to develop.
Failure to communicate
It started out as a petition against spraying the herbicide Vision in their backyards, says Aylesford and Loon Lake Property Owners’ Association chair Andy Bryski, but now “it has noting to do with herbicide. It’s about the reaction by a minister of the Crown… We have an elected official who didn’t give us even a simple phone call.”
Bryski is miffed because Environment Minister — and King’s North MLA — Mark Parent didn’t even acknowledge, let alone respond to their 368-name petition demanding that the spraying be cancelled.
Instead, less than two weeks after they sent off their petition, crews showed up to do the deed.
Kings County Coun. Chris Parker, who says Parent’s lack of response was uncharacteristic — “That’s not like Mark; he’s normally great at that” — admits he too found it “frustrating.”
Parent, for his part, claims it was all a misunderstanding. He thought the petition had been addressed to municipal council and had simply been sent on to his department for comment — a process that normally takes a few weeks to work its way through officialdom. Parent told the Kentville Advertiser he felt “badly” about the miscommunication and is willing to meet with the residents.
Meanwhile, Bryski has written directly to Premier Rodney MacDonald, complaining about Parent’s lack of communication on the spray issue.
He hasn’t — wait for it — had a reply or acknowledgment to his letter from the premier’s office.
Are you listening, Rodney?
While the provincial government doesn’t seem to have a plan — we’re being charitable here — to solve Nova Scotia’s rural health care crisis, local communities are busily patching together often innovative coping schemes of their own.
Last month in Middleton, for example, a new collaborative practice — with two doctors, a nurse practitioner and a family practice nurse — opened its doors in a clinic beside Soldiers Memorial Hospital. The clinic is the result of a partnership involving the regional health authority, Soldiers, the hospital foundation (which bought the building), and the doctors and nurses who set it up.
The idea is to give patients one-stop access to a health care team. And it’s working. According to Dr. Jane Brooks, the clinic “has cut down waiting time for my patients from six weeks to three weeks.”
Dr. Eric Balser, the new clinic’s other physician, says “the ultimate goal is to encourage doctors to spread their time out better with the patients who need it. This is an important step that will lead to a better model for everyone.”
It may also help to attract new young doctors, Brooks adds, not only because they’re already trained in the collaborative model but also because joining an existing collaborative practice would be less intimidating than trying to set up on their own with no support system.
When thanks is not enough…
If the ferry service between Digby and Saint John ever stops running, southwestern Nova Scotia’s economy will take a direct hit of up to a $40 million a year.
That’s the key finding of a study sponsored by the Bay of Fundy Transportation Coalition, an ad hoc group made up of local governments and businesses. The coalition is trying to convince Ottawa the service must continue.
The future of the ferry has been in doubt ever since Bay Ferries announced last year that it planned to drop the service. Ottawa, along with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, quickly anted up $8 million to keep the ferry operating until January 2009 while federal officials figured out a long-term solution.
Digby Warden Jim Thurber says a federal working group that held public hearings in the area this summer seemed to listen to community concerns, but its members have offered no assurances it will recommend continued government support for the ferry.
Thurber says the coalition gave federal officials a copy of its new study, but the only response so far has been a simple thank-you. Which is better than no reply at all from a premier.
For the record
The issue of how, and whether, to protect our province’s agricultural land from being gobbled up for housing and other non-farm uses was the subject for debate during “Pave Paradise? Our Farmland Under Stress,” a panel discussion at the Kentville Fire Hall.
Some of what was said, as reported in the Kentville Advertiser:
Agriculture professor Ralph Martin told the audience that half of all Class 1 land — the best farmland — in Canada can be viewed from the CN tower in Toronto and has already been paved and skyscrapered. “When California runs dry, we had better be prepared to produce the food we'll need.”
Apple farmer Bob Wright, who left Ontario 40 years ago to get away from development, said, “People just want to maximize returns and to hell with the future.”
Developer Cecil Lockhart made the point that there are now 1,350 serviced building lots within a 10-mile radius of Kentville — a 20-year supply. Still, people keep creating more lots because “it comes down to dollars and cents and there's more money in development than farming.”
Earl Kidston, who is both a farmer and a developer said, “I'm so disappointed. We’re polarized.”
No kidding.
Thar she blows… but quietly
Schneider Power Inc. is the latest Ontario-based energy company hoping to catch a wind in Nova Scotia — but it wants to do so without the controversy that has dogged other proposed wind farms in the province.
Schneider wants to develop a small-scale — fewer-than-five-turbine — wind power project on Goodwin’s Island, a kilometre offshore from Lower Woods Harbour. The company, which has owned the island since the 1990s wants to feed electricity from the turbines directly into the Nova Scotia Power grid.
President Thomas Schneider says the firm currently has two projects in operation and eight others in development in Canada, the U.S. and Germany.
Although the Goodwin’s Island project is still in the early planning stages — and there’ll be all the usual public meetings, feasibility and environmental assessments before it becomes reality — Schneider thinks his firm’s focus on a small scale project that will have little impact on the environment will help it win community support.
“We want to have a positive impact on the communities we work in,” he told the Shelburne Coast Guard.
What a concept!
Speaking of which…
Cumberland County Council said thank you very much last week when the Gulf Shore Preservation Society presented it with a 1,169-name petition opposing a proposed 20-27 turbine wind farm in their area. But council members balked at the idea of writing a letter of support for the group’s campaign.
“It’s not that council’s not empathetic to the residents of that area,” Warden Keith Hunter told the Amherst Daily News, “but we have a bylaw and the developers go by that bylaw and invest their money according to that bylaw. If we were to try to give any influence on the negative development of that project we could be liable for legal action.”
Translation: Don’t call us.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: AMHERST DAILY NEWS, ANNAPOLIS SPECTATOR, DIGBY COURIER, GUYSBOROUGH JOURNAL, KENTVILLE ADVERTISER, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, TRURO DAILY NEWS, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD.
Health care right to strike (Sept 20, 2007)
Health care strikes not the issue
It is intriguing to watch politically tin-eared, ideologically wrong-headed Rodney — the premier who couldn’t make up his many minds on Sunday shopping until it was too late for him to claim anything but blame — now relentlessly clutching between his teeth the chewed, spit-up bone of legislation to outlaw strikes by health care workers, even after the Opposition parties had well and truly cremated the cadaver.
“The issue,” the premier bravely insisted to reporters last week after both opposition parties announced they wouldn’t support his minority government’s anti-strike legislation, “is long from over.”
The real question is how did it get started in the first place.
Back in May, less than two weeks after a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, 15-hour strike by 600 workers at the IWK Health Centre resulted in the cancellation of 59 surgeries, the discharge of 30 youths with mental illnesses and the rescheduling of 474 appointments, MacDonald called a press conference to dramatically declare that “our current system of resolving impasses has failed all of us… Moreover, I believe it is destined to fail again.”
Therefore, he said, his government had no choice but to introduce legislation to create a new “dispute resolution system” for health care workers in order to “protect the health and safety of Nova Scotians” from all those greedy, villainous, care-only-for-themselves nurses, technologists, therapists and other front-line health care workers who have hijacked our health care system with all their many and various outrageous demands and strikes and walkouts and…
Uhh… Wait a minute.
The actual, long-term consequences of the IWK strike, while certainly unfortunate, were probably not much worse than a typical winter storm. And, while no one likes to see such disruptions, especially at a hospital dedicated to the care of children and women, the reality is that there haven’t been a lot of labour stoppages in our health care system.
According to union statistics, in fact, there have been just three health care workers’ strikes in the past 25 years. The government has puffed up that number to 100 “separate work stoppages,” apparently by totaling up the number of institutions affected by each strike. But however the government wants to fiddle the numbers, the reality is that most Nova Scotians — for very good reasons — don’t see strikes by health care workers as a matter of major import.
That’s because there are lots of other real health care issues for them to worry about.
The shortage of doctors and nurses willing to practise in rural Nova Scotia, for example. The continuing closures of emergency rooms all over this province. The too-long wait times to see some specialists…
And yet this government chooses to train all its legislative and political resources on what is essentially a non-issue.
The government has done its best to spin the story dizzy. Labour Minister Mark Parent, for example, has tried to claim he has only the health care workers’ best interests in mind. “I believe the truth is that health-care workers are focused on helping others,” he wrote in a paternalistic op-ed piece last week, “and don't want the stressful internal conflict that comes with the prospect of a strike.” But the reality is that 94 per cent of those dedicated, stressed-out health care workers at the IWK felt they had no choice but to vote in favour of strike action last spring. Not because they wanted to strike. But because they wanted what they considered a fair settlement.
MacDonald himself still seems to believe he can still score political points with legislation he now knows could force an election. “Regardless of what has been said the last couple of days,” he told reporters last week, “I believe that the people of Nova Scotia want the government to move forward with this legislation and I hope that both of the opposition parties, once they see the legislation, will be supportive.”
Ironically, even as he tried to make the case against strikes, however, he helped make a more compelling one against his own government’s many health care failures.
“The question I’m going to ask him,” MacDonald said of Liberal leader Stephen McNeil’s decision not to support the legislation, “is how many appointments is it OK to cancel? One thousand? Five hundred? How many minutes is it OK for someone to wait in an emergency situation?...”
Good question, Mr. Premier. Perhaps you’d like to answer that question in Digby where the lights go out in the emergency room on a regular basis — not because of any labour dispute but because there aren’t enough doctors to staff the place.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column, “Kimber’s Nova Scotia,” appears in the Sunday Daily News.
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Sept. 16, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
September 16, 2007
Pretty … impressive in pink
As soon as the staff at the Cambridge Discount Centre understood the reason behind David Shepherd’s unusual request, “clothes were flying… [The clerks] were digging in to help us find pink shirts.”
Shepherd, a Grade 12 student at Central King’s High School, and a group of his classmates — Travis Price, Chris Spencer, Nick Sullivan and John Kenneally — wanted the pink shirts to make a public statement to a small group of bullies at their school. The bullies had been harassing and threatening to beat up a Grade 9 student who showed up for his first day in his new school wearing a pink polo shirt.
Having collected their supply of pink tank tops, the boys returned to school and set up a giveaway shop in the lobby. Students “would just grab” the shirts, put them on, wrap them around their bodies, turn them into headbands. “The school looks cool,” Sullivan told the King’s County Register. “There’s pink all over the school.”
“One of the guys that was doing the bullying came up to me and asked if I knew the story of pink,” Shepherd said. “I said, ‘Sure, and it doesn’t matter.’”
Explaining their decision to confront the bullying this way, Shepherd added: “It’s our last year and we want to make a difference. At a young age, you don’t know the difference between playful teasing and bullying. Doing it over the colour pink is just so stupid.”
Central Kings principal Stephen Pearl, who approved the pink protest, told the newspaper: “It doesn’t surprise me at all they’d want to do this — we have some great kids.” Although the lead bully wasn’t in school the day of the protest, Pearl is sure he’ll get the message. “Student-driven attention goes a lot further, and he’ll hear about what happened today.”
Twisted times at Strait Board
It should have been a simple enough matter. The Strait Regional School Board decided to hire an outside human resources firm to conduct an external evaluation of the work of its superintendent, Phonse Gillis. So it contracted Halifax-based Thompson Associates — a firm whose website boasts it helps organizations “in developing their most valuable resource: their people” — to conduct the assessment.
Thompson consultants came, they interviewed staff and board members, they went away and prepared a preliminary report.
After that, things get murky. There was supposed to be an Aug. 14 meeting between a committee of the board and Thompson reps to discuss the firm’s preliminary findings, but it got cancelled. Except it didn’t really, since not everyone got the notice in time. So the board Chair, Mary-Jess MacDonald, who’s only ex-officio on the committee, met with some Thompson reps and received their report and filed it in a safe deposit box until… well, until something.
Something turned out to be board member Brenda Gillis. She claims the HR firm didn’t interview everyone as completely as it should have, was “biased” in its interview with her and made the superintendent aware of the contents of its initial report before the committee got to read it. She has declared the process “tainted” and insists she’ll have nothing more to do with it. At the board’s Sept. 5 meeting, she even introduced a motion to fire Thompson Associates.
That motion was defeated, but members agreed to withhold payment to the firm until … well until.
Have you had enough yet?
Because there’s more. There will be a special board meeting Sept. 19 to meet with Thompson Associates to discuss… well, whatever.
And you wonder what school boards really do.
Bringing in the spliffs
The RCMP’s annual fall harvest-the-harvest from marijuana grow ops across the province began in earnest last week with woods-stomping raids through backwoods Pictou and Shelburne counties.
“If anyone is growing plants outside,” Sgt./farmer Barry MacLellan of the Shelburne RCMP, told the local Coast Guard, “now is the time when they are ripe.”
Ripe?
Shelburne cops pulled 500 marijuana plants out of the ground in the small village of Sable River while their Pictou County colleagues took down about 750 of the armed and dangerous plants from their territory.
Pictou RCMP Const. Bill Rudolph, who said his boys captured about 1,000 lbs worth of “plant matter,” explained that the raids were “months in the making.”
How many “bad guys” did they catch?
Uh, none. “Not at this time, that's what we're saying,” he told the New Glasgow News.
What happens to the seized matter?
It gets burned.
Pity.
Ferry bad times in Yarmouth
Forget the rosy Department of Tourism stats that show overall visitor numbers up by five per cent in July of this year as compared with 2006. In Yarmouth, the actual numbers plummeted by a whopping 33 per cent, and locals says the situation is the worst it’s been since the province began compiling statistics in 1990.
The problem is that Yarmouth to Maine ferry service, which used to leave port early each morning — generating business for local hotels, motels and bed and breakfasts as well as shops and restaurants — now leaves port in the afternoons. That means many tourists arrive in Yarmouth just in time to join the lineup for the ferry’s departure, leaving behind no money in local business tills.
Bob Benson, owner of Churchill Mansion, says the changes cost Yarmouth more than $800,000 in July alone.
But Terry Grandy, owner of the Manor Inn and past president of the Inn Keepers Guild of Nova Scotia, says the seriousness of the crisis in Yarmouth’s tourism industry is being masked because the Tourism department stats lump in visitors as far away as Windsor into the same geographic area with Yarmouth.
“Our numbers are rolled in with Digby numbers, New Minas numbers, Wolfville numbers, etc..” he told the Yarmouth Vanguard. “They may be up but if Yarmouth is down, it only softens the real impact of what is happening in Yarmouth.”
Added Benson: “The only salvation at this time is a ferry service departing in the early morning.”
Wake up and smell the coffee.
Michel Samson for Finance Minister?
Richmond County wants Richmond MLA Michel Samson to cough up $550 for two months worth of back rent for his constituency office in a municipally owned mall. The county claims Samson owes the money from as far back as 2002.
Samson, who has suggested he’s the victim of a smear campaign or gross incompetence, says he won’t pay until the his landlord tells him which months he didn’t pay rent.
Huh?
Shouldn’t there be a paper trail — cancelled cheques, bank records — that both sides can quickly check to determine if there are missing cheques and for which months?
Well, yes. And no. The municipality claims its records show Samson didn’t make a payment at all in 22 of the last 72 months. In 18 of those other months, however, he made multiple payments. Some cheques were post-dated. Some included memos indicating the month the payments were to cover.
Richmond County CAO Louis Digout says it should be easy enough for Samson to figure out. “The amount owing to us is the net sum of the 22 months that he missed payments and those months where he made multiple payments.”
Samson isn’t buying. “If I’m going to be told that I have missed a payment, I believe that for me to do due diligence on behalf of the taxpayers, it’s to ensure that I, in fact, did not make the payment.”
He thinks it’s up to the county to figure it out.
We think he should take a basic bookkeeping course.
Maybe they want to open a home supply store
Unimaginative thieves with more bolt cutters than brains have hit the Annapolis Valley Exhibition in Lawrencetown three times in the past month.
Just before the Valley Exhibition in August, they used their bolt cutters to cut the padlocks and steal $800 worth of drop-down electrical cords supplying commercial booths at the fair. Less than a week after the Exhibition closed, they were back to swipe $1,000 worth of tools. And then last week, the bolt-cutter bandits with limited horizons stole most of the exhibition’s plumbing — including 43 taps, shutoffs, copper pipe, and brass fittings for sinks and urinals. The cost: another $1,000.
The break-ins represent a major financial blow to the Exhibition, according to manager John Longley, who says he’ll try to discourage future visits from the bolt-for-brain brigade by using flexible plastic pipe, including for the taps, instead of copper.
Will that be enough to keep them away? Don’t bet on it.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 COUNTY SPECTATOR, KING’S COUNTY REGISTER, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, YARMOUTH VANGUARD
Mulroney memoirs (Sept 13, 2007)
The Mulroney questions that won’t go away
So Brian Mulroney believes Pierre Trudeau’s youthful opposition to fighting the Nazis in World War II “doesn’t qualify him for any position of moral leadership in our society.”
Then how does Mulroney imagine his ongoing, continuing never-ending refusal to answer simple, reasonable questions about the envelopes stuffed with $300,000 in cash he took from a controversial German-Canadian influence peddler at secret meetings in restaurants and hotels in the months after he left the highest office in the land qualifies him for sainthood?
Mulroney and his high-priced, too-clever-by-half handlers had to know that questions about the mysterious payments — which, conveniently, occurred just after the time this autobiographical ramble ends at the end of his prime ministership — would bubble back to the surface anyway during Mulroney’s current memoir media offensive.
That payment wasn’t the only difficult issue they knew they would have to parry. There was, of course, the drinking. In the years between his humiliating loss at the 1976 Tory convention that chose his arch-rival and lesser, Joe Clark, as party leader and his ultimate victory over “that loser” Clark seven years later, there were more-than-just rumours circulating in gossipy Ottawa that Mulroney was drowning his sorrows in booze and recrimination.
In his memoir, Mulroney tackles the issue head on, acknowledging that, after the 1976 convention, he drank far too much and slipped into what he calls an “unbecoming display of bitterness and improper conduct,” and that he isn’t really sure how his wife “tolerated” him during those years.
During his CTV interview, he was described as looking “uncomfortable” as he talked about that period of his life. But it was effective because he appeared to be speaking honestly.
Of course, the saving grace — from the spin perspective — is that there’s a happy ending to that story. Mulroney, convinced by family and friends of the damage he was doing, finally “woke up one morning and said I am never going to have another drink.” And he hasn’t. Triumph. Redemption.
Karlheinz Schreiber? Not so simple. Or so fully resolved.
So, rather than answer polite, puffball questions about the affair from what has always been a overly respectful national media, Mulroney did what he does best — and worst. He counter-attacked. “This is the usual trash and trivia of politics,” he declared dismissively of the Schreiber questions. And then quickly ran and hid behind the skirts of his legal team, claiming he couldn’t say more because of ongoing litigation.
“I've won every case, I've won everything at every step of the road, and I'll continue to do so,” he boasted, neglecting to mention that his most significant legal victory — his $50-million lawsuit against the federal government in 1995 that was settled a year later with Ottawa apologizing and agreeing to pay Mulroney’s $20 — is now tainted because his under-oath description of his relationship with the shadowy Schreiber seems… well, not to fit the facts as we have come to know them.
Not to worry. “I'm going to write about it my next book,” Mulroney smiley-faced for the camera.
Not good enough, Mr. Mulroney.
If you want to claim the mantle of “moral leadership” you believe is so ill-fitting in Mr. Trudeau’s case, you need to stop playing games and start answering questions.
What exactly did you do to earn that $300,000 from Schreiber? Where’s the documentation to show how you earned your “consulting” fee? Letters you wrote? Phone calls you made? To whom? Actions you took? Did you invoice Schreiber for your services? What was your per-hour rate for this project?
Why did you agree to accept payments in cash? Were you aware that the money came from Swiss accounts Schreiber had allegedly used to “grease” the sale of Airbus jets to Air Canada? And that one of them appeared to identify you in code as the recipient?
How did you account for the $300,000 in your financial records at the time? In what year did you claim this income — as you say you did — as part of your tax return?
Why did you testify under oath as part of your lawsuit against the federal government that “I never had any dealings with him [Schreiber],” when, in fact, you had had $300,000 worth of dealings?
Perhaps when you start answering those questions instead of avoiding them, you will be entitled to claim moral leadership. Until then, well, there are still questions. Lots of them.
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.
keep looking »
Subscribe
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.