Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Sept. 9, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
September 9, 2007
That clarifies the mud
Nova Scotia Liberal leader Stephen McNeil has waded into the waters of the controversy over a proposal to develop a new aquaculture farm on Port Mouton Bay — sort of. Actually, he just tentatively dipped a toe into the roiling waters, declared himself… concerned… and moved on.
McNeil and South Shore-St. Margaret’s federal Liberal candidate Dr. Bill Smith happy-handed their way through another late summer festival crowd at the Queen’s County SeaFest last week. Along the way, McNeil boasted about what he described as the renewed “excitement that’s been missing among Liberals across the province” while Smith prattled on about how he had “recently witnessed more meaningful discussions with the Liberals than I’ve seen in the last 10 or 11 years.”
Between rounds of self congratulation, they dissed their opponents and, oh yes, not to forget, pronounced themselves squarely on all sides of the controversial aquaculture farm plan.
Smith made a point of saying he had spoken to Darlene Norman, a member of the Friends of Port Mouton Bay, a citizens’ group lobbying to stop the development. But he was quick to add, according to the Queen’s County Advance that the Liberal party is “not opposed to aquaculture if it is developed in places that won’t hurt an area’s eco-system.”
McNeil, the newspaper noted, “echoed this sentiment.”
That’s good to know. Even if we don’t know what it actually means.
Speaking of happy-handing politicians
NDP Leader Darrell Dexter was in Mulgrave last week to tell the board of directors of the troubled, on-the-verge-of-closing Mulgrave Medical Centre exactly what it wanted to hear.
Board Chair Al England, who gave Dexter a tour of the facility, told the Opposition leader the centre used to have its own staff physicians, but they’re long gone and the board now needs $15,000 just to keep the building open. “If something doesn’t happen by the end of… September, we have to close up,” he said.
But England also said he believes the centre can still provide important community health services through nurse practitioners, or offering clinics for problems like smoking and alcohol abuse.
Dexter agreed. The provincial government should not only be supporting more preventive care facilities, he said, but it should also be doing so in local communities rather than concentrating such services in larger centres.
“The answers to these [health care] delivery questions,” Dexter explained, “are going to be rooted in the community itself. They know their community best, they know what the challenges are, so it’s got to be a collaborative effort.”
According to the Port Hawkesbury Reporter, “Dexter said he would listen to the concerns of the board of directors and consider what he could do to help make sure the government is aware.”
Translation: Don’t start planning your new clinic yet, Mr. England.
And more politicians on the prowl
The big news in Canso wasn’t that Premier Rodney MacDonald and Fisheries Minister Ronnie Chisholm had visited the town recently. It was who they didn’t meet with that created controversy
At the most recent town council meeting, representatives of the Inshore Fishermen’s Association tore a strip off Mayor Ray White for not informing them the premier would be in Canso Aug. 13 to meet with union reps from the ailing Seafreez fish plant.
“If the fishing industry was being discussed,” association manager Ginny Boudreau said in what the Guysborough Journal called “a passion-laden” address to council, “we should be part of those discussions. We represent 134 businesses in the community… It’s very difficult to be a part of the solution if you’re not involved in the dialogue to start with.”
Added inshore association director William Bond: “For years and years and years all of us felt like outcasts,” Bond said. “With no work at the plant, the offshore fishery is history. Now they’re forgetting about the inshore fishery.”
The inshore fishermen’s association wants the province and Ottawa to upgrade both the town wharf and the mothballed Seafreeze plant in order to meet the needs of a scaled-down fishery.
For his part, Mayor White said he understood their concerns but that the town hadn’t been involved in setting up the premier’s agenda. Still, he added: “The message came clear that if dignitaries are coming, remind them we’re also here.”
Are you listening Rodney and Ronnie?
First we harvest, then we build
Protesters may have won the battle to keep Gerry Fulton from transforming some King’s County farmland he owns into a 300-unit, $50-million residential housing development but Fulton says the municipal council’s decision to turn down his project this summer may ultimately make it more difficult to win the war to keep local farmland for farming.
Fulton says his fallback position will be to start subdividing some of the 1,000 acres he now owns and build single family houses on each lot — something he doesn’t need council approval to do.
Fulton, who claims he’s had “100 opportunities” to sell building lots piecemeal in the past — “the only one we’ve ever done was one for my son; that was the way I protected farm land” — admits he “feels sick” about having to go this route. But he says he has no choice. He has 49 employees he needs to keep employed.
He concedes council’s decision to reject his original proposal — after noisy protests from some locals — still rankles. “It annoys me,” he told reporter Sara Keddy of the King’s County Register. “Thirty-two thousand people can vote in the county, half of them voted last time and council listens to 20 of them.”
His first step, he says, will be to build two single-family houses on the McLean Road, the site of his original proposal — but not quite yet. “I’ve got a crop to get out of there first.”
Where’s the Vision?
The debate over aerial spraying of the herbicide Vision continues. The provincial Environment Department has approved the spraying and the federal pest management agency says it’s safe. But local residents’ groups — the latest being the Aylesford and Loon Lake Property Owners Association, which collected 300 names on a petition against the spraying — have their doubts.
Association chair Andy Bryski, whose group is trying to convince the municipal council to take up their cause with the province, argues that, “as an absolute minimum, council should debate the question of the need for aerial spraying… in the Kings County watershed.”
He points out that, even with government restrictions on spraying near waterways, studies have shown that up to 10 per cent of fish still die as a result.
“If it kills fish,” he says, “there’s some downside.”
Sounds reasonable.
Yum… trout
The Mersey Tobeatic Research Institute and the Clean Annapolis River Project are teaming up on a project to enlist recreational fishermen in determining where and how many chain pickerel have managed to invade southwestern Nova Scotia’s rivers and lakes.
The pickerel, which was illegally introduced to Nova Scotia in 1945, is nicknamed the “water wolf” because it has a nasty habit of attacking and destroying other fish and native creatures. Scientists say their mere presence not only poses a threat to biodiversity but they could, if not controlled, wipe out the region’s economically valuable brook trout population.
The problem, explains researcher Kyle Hicks, is that the fish not only migrate along the province’s endless rivers and waterways on their own but they are also sometimes illegally dumped into new bodies of water by people, “so no one really knows the full distribution of these two species. In order to prevent their further spread into the remaining brook trout habitats it is necessary to know where they currently are.”
Hicks is looking for volunteer anglers willing to report any catches or sightings. You can contact him by email: kylehicks@annapolisriver.ca
Top cop
Bridgewater Police Cst. Christine Bonnell has become so well known among skateboarding young people in Bridgewater that “I’ve had kids come up to me in the Superstore when I’m off duty and say, ‘Are you the policewoman who has those helmets I've heard about?’”
She is. It all began back in June after a police crackdown on skateboarders who weren’t wearing helmets prompted an email from one suggesting the reason they weren’t wearing helmets was because they couldn’t afford them.
“When I got the e-mail, I went out that morning and picked up one of the kids… and took him to Zellers,” Bonnell told the Bridgewater Bulletin. “I bought three of them out of my own money.”
Since then, the Bridgewater police department has given out almost a dozen helmets, most of them donated by Wal-Mart.
Vaughn Whynot, the 20-year-old emailer and a member of the group that oversees the local skateboard park, is pleased. “It's great that they're willing to help out rather than just slapping cuffs or fines on people.”
Ironically, Whynot himself usually doesn’t wear a helmet despite pressure from his new police friends to be a good role model.
“In every picture in a skateboard magazine, not anybody in any picture or ad has a helmet on,” he explains. “That makes it hard when the cops say you should be a good role model.”
Uh… whatever
More than 50 people attended the recent open house at Bowood, the controversial former Shelburne Boys School property, which Halifax developer Ralston MacDonnell is in the process of turning into what he calls a “creative community development.”
Visitors got to wander through the apparently well constructed and preserved “cottages,” and to wonder why municipal staff, as recently as a month ago, offered “alarming presentations… describing the facility in near-ruin and a prospect for demolition.” Another local company is suing the developer and the local development authority, claiming MacDonnell got the property for “grossly below fair market or replacement value.”
After the usual upbeat speeches from the usual suspects — the municipal warden and local MLA — MacDonnell took the podium to talk about his plans for the site and, he said, to answer any questions from locals.
But according to the website Shelburne County Today, MacDonnell didn’t bother to ask at the end of his presentation if there actually were any questions.
Moving on…
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
Sources:
BRIDGEWATER BULLETIN, GUYSBOROUGH JOURNAL, KING’S COUNTY REGISTER, QUEEN’S COUNTY ADVANCE, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, SHELBURNE COUNTY TODAY, YARMOUTH VANGUARD.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Information underload (Sept. 6, 2007)
The endemic epidemic of secrecy
During an opening-day address to law students at the University of Ottawa Tuesday, Maher Arar posed an interesting question to a standing-room-only hall full of future lawyers: “Who will you include and who will you exclude?”
At one level, Arar — whose deportation, detention and torture in the soiled name of combating terrorism transformed the mild-mannered Ottawa software engineer into the public personification of all that can go wrong when secrecy trumps the rule of law — was talking to the lawyers about the need for lawyers to fight for justice by taking on cases and causes that need to be fought, not just clients who can pay the highest fees.
But on an another, slightly more prosaic level, Arar was also alluding to the federal government’s new and top secret “no-fly” list. The blandly named “Passenger Protect” list contains the names of between 500 and 2,000 people who are considered “an immediate threat” to air security. But Ottawa won’t say who’s on the list or why their names are included.
Not to worry, they say. Trust us. There are secret safeguards in the secret system to make sure only the right people are on the list.
Worry, Arar told the students. Consider not only what was done to him by the very same officials who are now overseeing the new no-fly list, but consider too the lengths they went to in order to cover their tracks in his case — even including blacking out sections of the public inquiry report into his deportation to Syria to be tortured. It took a court ruling to force the government to release some of the redacted sections of the report last month, which made it clear the government was just trying to protect itself from embarrassment.
When one of the students asked him about the no-fly list, Arar answered: “The security agencies are telling us we should trust them. My answer to that would be, we've seen good examples where we trusted them and then at the end of the day, those redacted portions had nothing to do with national security.”
Indeed.
The reality is that governments time and again demonstrate they aren’t to be trusted when it comes to what information needs to be kept secret and what can be entrusted to the public.
On matters of much more mundane interest, in fact, my experience is that local information gatekeepers can be just as butt-covering.
When I filed a freedom of information request last winter, for example, asking the Capital District Health Authority for details about how much it had wasted — I didn’t use that word, but it’s true — on each of the outside legal firms it hired to cover its butt in the Dr. Gabrielle Horne case, the authority initially stonewalled, ludicrously claiming solicitor-client privilege on the amounts of the bills it had paid the firms. After I appealed, they grudgingly released the embarrassingly large global figure, but still refused to say how much went to each firm. Solicitor-client privilege or lawyer privilege?
When I asked the Halifax Regional police for a copy of its review of the 2004 Shirley Street standoff, it obligingly sent it along, with several blacked-out — redacted in the jargon — sections. One of those turned out to be covering up the fact the Crown prosecutor in the case had told the police there weren’t sufficient grounds to lay charges in the case in the months before its actions transformed a child apprehension order into a crime scene.
Such bureaucratic butt-covering is endemic and epidemic.
In yesterday’s Daily News alone, there were reports of two more instances.
The province’s Workers’ Compensation Board announced it will be imposing a new surcharge on 79 local firms that, over the past four years “have consistently and significantly worse experience than their industry peers” when it comes to on-the-job accidents. But the WCB refuses to disclose the names of the firms. How come? Surely, potential employees should have the right to know if they’re applying for a job at a company that’s an accident-waiting-to-happen.
And what about the story out of Halifax Regional Council yesterday that councilors — and the rest of us — will have to file freedom of information requests in order to see material gathered at public expense for the failed 2014 Commonwealth Games bid?
“I just don't know how these people can get away with this, Coun. Gloria McCluskey lamented. “How they can get away with not telling us?”
Another interesting question.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. He will be the featured speaker at tonight’s Fuller Terrace Fundamental Freedoms Public Lecture Series. His subject: “Halifax: Last Outpost of the American South.” For information: fullerterracefreedoms@gmail.com
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Bill Deagle Profile (Sept. 6, 2007)
The prophet in Clayton Park
Bill Deagle MD, ABFP, CCFP, AAPM, CIME, AAAAM, ACOEM, AAEM claims to know things they don't want you to know about 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing and Columbine school shootings, to name but a few world-shaking events. So what's he doing in Halifax?by Stephen Kimber
On the morning of September 11, 2001, a family doctor named Bill Deagle was driving his two older sons—Matthew, 16, and Stephen, 14—to Chatfield, their charter high school in Littleton, Colorado, a couple of miles from their home, when he heard the first confused, confusing, stuttering reports on the radio. A plane has crashed into New York's World Trade Center! No, two planes! Passenger jets! Fires! Chaos! Rescues! Jumpers! The Pentagon! More planes... missing planes!... And then, finally, at one minute before 8am Mountain Time, he listened as the shocked-and-awed radio newscaster told his even more startled listeners that the trade centre's south tower had suddenly, inexplicably collapsed in on itself in a whoosh of smoke and dust from pulverized stone, steel, glass, desks, paper and people.
It was not inexplicable to Bill Deagle.
"I knew right away," he would say later. "They did it." His rage that day was directed not, as you might expect, at the men who'd commandeered the planes and turned them into jet-fueled weapons of mass destruction. Deagle knew the terrorists (if indeed they really were terrorists) were mere dupes, diversions in the grander—far grander—cosmic scheme of it all.
Bill Deagle knew. He knew because—more than six months earlier—they had told him almost exactly what was going to happen.
September 11 was one—but only one—of many world-changing, cataclysmic catastrophes that rearranged Bill Deagle's world, too, transforming him from a seemingly ordinary Nova Scotia-raised and schooled, Colorado-based medical doctor into the Larry King of the global conspiracy celebrity circuit, the host of his own internet radio talk show and a featured speaker at major George-Bush-did-it, 9/11, New-World-Disorder conferences and conventions.
Given his status in that world, it is perhaps not surprising that he has his detractors too; there have even been videos produced and a book written specifically to denounce him.
What is, in fact, much more surprising is that his holy mission—to save the world from the "real enemy"—has brought him back here to Halifax to live and work.
But we're getting ahead of our story. How did Bill Deagle really know in advance what was going to happen on the morning of September 11, 2001?
On March 1, 2001, Deagle was attending an infectious diseases and bioterrorism conference at the Adams Mark Hotel in downtown Denver. There, he met Jay Reddington, a former colleague at the VA Hospital and the University of Colorado. The two men had worked together on a number of government terrorism simulations designed to test how major American cities would respond to a real attack. One of them, 2001's Operation Top Off, had even featured simulations of a bioweapons attack on Denver, along with a chemical weapons attack on Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and a "radiological event" targeted at Washington. In every case, the people who were supposed to identify the threats and deal with them—hospital personnel, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Emergency Preparedness—had failed miserably.
In the smug run-up to 9/11, America was extremely vulnerable, but most Americans were blissfully ignorant of the threat.
Not Bill Deagle. That's why, when he encountered Reddington outside the conference room that day, Deagle began to badger him with questions about exactly what was being done to prepare for an attack. What Deagle calls their "lively tennis game of questions soon became invited private lunch," and Deagle found himself sitting opposite some of the key players in the pre-9/11 battle against terrorism, including senior officials from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control.
As they lingered over lunch at "a private table for speakers, a sufficient distance from others," an FBI official—"sensing that I was one of the boys, having worked on these sensitive government simulations"—leaned closer to Deagle and confided, "There is, according to our war game simulations and current intelligence, a 95 percent likelihood of a major devastating attack on a city in the northeast within 24 months. It will kill from between 50,000 to 500,000 individuals, and bring about immediate institution of martial law in America and a national implantable ID."
Stunned, Deagle pressed him to repeat the claim, which he did—twice more—and for details about what he really knew. The FBI man talked blandly about the likelihood of an anthrax release, the detonation of a dirty nuclear bomb, even the use of airplanes as weapons. As he talked he became even more specific. The city would be New York. And the chance of it happening was not, as he'd initially suggested, 95 percent—it was 100 percent.
The more the FBI man talked the more Deagle began to realize what he really meant. Finally, the veins in his neck popping in anger and frustration, the words finally spilled out of his mouth. "You are either going to let this happen—or cause it, aren't you!" Deagle almost shouted.
Realizing belatedly that he wasn't sharing gossip with one of the "inner circle," the FBI man turned pale. He and the others hurriedly excused themselves to return to their conference sessions.
But Bill Deagle now knew.
None of that made the news on the morning of September 11th any easier to take. "The unfolding disaster," he would say later, "hit me like a prizefighter's right to my left temple."
Deagle, in fact, knew even more than the FBI man had told him. He also knew exactly how they'd brought down the buildings. Not with planes—that would have been impossible—but with tiny micro-nuclear bombs carefully pre-placed in the walls of the towers all the way down to bedrock.
Just like in Oklahoma City.
Bill Deagle knew about Oklahoma City because he'd been there too. Not there on April 19, 1995, when Timothy McVeigh supposedly blew up a Ryder truck filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer outside the Murrah building, but there two months later at the Center for Occupational Medicine at St. Francis Hospital in Colorado. Deagle, who says he was an occupational health specialist working with the military, was testing five military forensic bomb experts from Ft. Carson for chemical exposure. They'd all worked at the bomb site after the blast.
One of the men—who "looked really frightened, acting like he wanted to tell me something"—finally blurted out the truth. "He told me they'd removed two softball-sized micro-chip nukes as well as... C-4 pineapples [a type of plastic explosive] and many C-4 placer charges systematically put throughout the building." According to the soldier, special FBI units had placed the devices in the building before the explosion as yet another prelude to—and pretext for—declaring martial law. McVeigh was a decoy.
The soldier told Deagle he had to tell somebody "but feared he would be killed if this ever leaked out."
When the military did somehow eventually discover his indiscretion, the soldier—whom Deagle will not identify—was court-martialed, and Deagle himself threatened.
Deagle, however, says he warned his military interrogators he had a "hidden vault of information" he wouldn't hesitate to make public "if anyone tried to harm me or my family." In the end, he says, they cut him a $35,000 cheque, gave him a letter of reference and shoved him out the hospital door in hopes it would buy his silence. It didn't.
"I remember telling them even if they killed me, I wasn't going quietly," Deagle recalled later. ""If you come within 500 miles of me or my family with any of your operatives, me or my buddies will take you out,'" he says he warned them, adding: "And I meant it."
Thanks to his own many contacts within the military, Deagle says he's continued to discover even more and more cataclysmic schemes they've hatched to...well, not to put too fine a point on it, control the world.
In February 2002, for example, while teaching at another bioterrorism conference in St. Louis, Deagle says he spent three days "with Delta Force and Special Ops guys, all of them saying that our own government was in control and pulling the strings of terrorism. They warned me that the next event was going to be a radiological event involving six major cities, including Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, Seattle, Boston and San Diego."
Coincidentally, Deagle says he also treated a government worker who'd become ill while working inside massive, city-sized government tunnels and underground facilities in Colorado and Mexico. According to Deagle, there are more than 4,000 of these clandestine underground cities worldwide, including in and around 132 US cities. His patient, he says, "told me about things going on there, literally involving people from out of this world."
That surprising revelation was probably less surprising to Dr. Deagle than it might have been to you or me. That's because, as Deagle explained it during a recent speech in Vancouver, "I was called, not only as a doctor and a scientist—but also as a prophet." He has claimed he is, in fact, one of the two end-of-days prophetic witnesses identified in Revelations 11:3—"And I will give power to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth..."
Being a prophet, he has said, is "a gift that was given to me for this moment."
The story of that gift begins on Saturday, April 24, 1999, when an angelic visitor first appeared while Deagle was praying. "I prayed in tongues privately and, as always, heard the immediate translation in English of the audible voice of God," Deagle wrote of the experience. "God said, "If you are obedient and seek wisdom in prayer tonight, I will reveal to you a great revelation. Go to your vitamin cabinet and take two specific nutrient capsules and pray until you are sound asleep, and I will send forth the angel Gabriel from the Throne Room to show you what you must tell My People!!'" (Strange as it might seem, those "specific" nutrient capsules may have been significant. Read on...)
Gabriel then whisked Deagle off to Kosovo where he not only saw the devastation that war had brought there but also the inside of a "baroque ornate room with high ceilings and chandeliers" where Yugoslav president Slobidan Milosevic was arguing with a Russian diplomat. Before Deagle could settle in for the discussion, Gabriel hustled him off to a basement room at the White House where Bill Clinton and his advisors were gloating over the success of their effort to demonize Milosevic.
Then, with barely a breath, Bill and Gabe were standing on "a cobbled street in a quaint German city" watching a parade of soldiers wearing blue hats who were marching, Nazi-like, past a reviewing stand while a crowd chanted, "Hail the United Nations World Armed Forces!!"
That, Gabriel confided, was what Kosovo was really all about: another step in the creation of a new world order... The New World Order... The New World Disorder...
It wasn't Gabriel's only nocturnal visit to Bill's bedside. On another occasion, Deagle says Gabriel took him inside a secret facility within the North American Air Defence Command base in the Cheyenne Mountains of Colorado. "I told him that I had been in the NORAD facility before and wondered why he was taking me there," the world-wise Deagle explained later. But Gabriel told him this was a new, even more super-secret complex and showed him a "white, bubble-shaped button" labeled "Neutron Fuse."
"What do you think will happen when this system is activated and the president of the United States gives the order to push the white button?" Gabriel asked.
"I don't know," Bill reasonably answered.
Pushing the button, Gabriel explained, will trigger the shutdown of all communications on earth—except for a select few devices controlled by them. That will be the beginning, Gabriel declared, of "the Great Falling Away."
But why was Gabriel telling him all this, Bill Deagle not surprisingly wondered?
So Gabe told him. Bill Deagle had been chosen to pass the message on to "the people of our Lord Jesus." After hearing Deagle, "personally and in cell churches, [the chosen] will have fled to places of refuge," Gabriel explained.
Bill Deagle was to save the world. But from what?
Three months later, in the middle of a conversation with one of his more earthly sources at Lockheed Martin, Gabriel whooshed in again, taking Deagle off "in the spirit" one more time. "I will show you preparations, which are now ready to begin," Gabriel said. "They are making final preparations for the Time of Terror."
This then was the Big Reveal. Project Omega!
Deep in the bowels of Colorado, Gabriel explained, they had created Project Omega to command and control "all the evil plans of the Evil One, Satan, to destroy the Holy People." Forget the so-called terrorists, Bush's axis of evil, Bush himself, Cheney, even the American empire as we know it. The real enemy is Satan, and the chain of command up to the top of Project Omega is a long and twisting one that scales through and past the secret American government, Hillary "Rotten" Clinton, the royal family, the pope, the "Luciferian" Catholic church, the Rothschilds, the "non-human" higher levels of masonry above 180 all the way up to the Pindar, the leader of the Illuminati, the Lizard King.
Deagle confided to attendees at a recent conference in California that, on three different occasions, the Pindar has actually tried to recruit him to become his understudy and run the earth on behalf of the evil doers. "But I chose light over darkness," he explained.
Bill Deagle had been given the gift. He'd been chosen to take the message to the Holy People.
Deagle soon became a featured speakers for an American cataclysmic end-time organization called the Prophecy Club, and even wrote a book, Clay and Iron: Answers to the Endtime Puzzle (Vol I) .
No wonder the American government tapped his phone. No wonder they wanted to do him harm.
Which is why, according to one internet news report, Bill Deagle "moved to Canada for his own safety..."
"Something really bad is going to happen in America," Deagle himself confided, "and that is why I moved my family to Canada."
Which is how it came to pass that Dr. William Richard Deagle MD, ABFP, CCFP, AAPM, CIME, AAAAM, ACOEM, AAEM1—not to forget prophet—has come to be living on a cul de sac in the heart of Clayton Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
But that, of course, is only part of the story.
Although William Deagle, Jr., was born in Detroit on February 15, 1952, his first stay in the US was a brief one, likely no more than a month, but long enough for a green card. Deagle mostly grew up in Dartmouth, the oldest of five children of William Deagle, Sr., a jeweller-turned-plumber, and his wife Lorraine, a devout Roman Catholic of Lebanese ancestry.
Bill has claimed that one reason for his "superior intelligence" is that his mother's smoking during pregnancy, which probably resulted in his low birth-weight—just over five pounds—had the happy side effect of increasing his neural pathways and thus his intelligence. He's also told people his first experience with other-worldly creatures occurred on Dartmouth's shores when he was visited by aliens who were following him because of his superior intellect.
During the early '70s, Bill, Jr., studied biology and chemistry at Dalhousie University, where he claims to have been a charter member of Greenpeace. After graduating with his science degree in 1973, Deagle enrolled in Dal's medical school.
A year later, he says the CIA first came calling, attempting to entice him to take a year off from his medical studies so he could work on his PhD in virology in Uganda, where he would have been involved in a secret project to create the AIDS virus. He says he turned them down.
He claims that wasn't the only time recruiters would seek him out. After graduating with his MD in 1977, Deagle says UCLA's Wadsworth veteran's hospital in California invited him to go there to do research into the causes of multiple sclerosis, which his first wife, Denise, already suffered from.
For some reason, Deagle's medical school colleagues don't recall the campus being overrun by recruiters during their years there—especially not from the CIA. Nor do they think Deagle would have been the first candidate such high-level intelligence agencies would have come looking for.
"I always wondered how he passed each year," one of them told me, but admitted, "if asked on what basis I state this, I cannot be more specific." But another former student concurred, adding his clearest memory of Deagle was that "he used these coloured pens to mark up his textbooks—one colour for important, another for less, another for not at all. His books were just covered in colours—like a child's colouring book."
No one I talked to remembered an alleged incident from those days that Deagle has mentioned in his speeches. In 1975, Deagle claims his psychiatry professor brought in a special guest speaker, Dr. Ewan Cameron, to speak to the class. Though Cameron's work probably wasn't well known at the time, he is now, of course, infamous as the psychiatrist the CIA hired to conduct "mind-control" experiments using LSD and electro-convulsive treatments on unwitting subjects during the '50s and '60s at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute.
No one I talked to at the medical school remembers Cameron's visit, which isn't surprising. According to the official record, Cameron died in an accident in 1967—eight years before his talk at Dalhousie.
"Supposedly died," is the way Deagle puts it.
Deagle's trail between his graduation from med school in 1977 and obtaining his licence to practise in Colorado 17 years later is murky. According to Nova Scotia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, he was licensed to practise in Nova Scotia from 1987 to 1995, and several people report that he had a practice in Enfield at one point. I was told he interned in Vancouver, and that he also practised medicine in Calgary.
It was in Calgary in the early 1980s where he met his second wife, Michelle Fiander. Both were married to other people at the time.2
Michelle was born in Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, one of three children of a local fisherman and his emotionally troubled wife. Michelle has told friends her mother, a sophisticated woman with a master's degree who was unhappy in a fishing village, was institutionalized on a number of occasions. Michelle attended Acadia University where she met her first husband and then, somehow or another, ended up in Calgary, where she met Bill.
Acquaintances suggest it was Michelle rather than Bill who instigated what one calls their "strange religion shopping." After they met, says one, Bill, who didn't seem especially religious and was "just a simple working MD out in Calgary... at an amazing speed... was pulled into one extremist church after another."
They were "pretty much everything and anything," notes another of their church-jumping, which included one stint in a Mormon offshoot, "though sometimes only for a few months at a time."
Deagle's incidental (if bizarre) emergence as a public figure in the netherworld of conspiracy and intrigue appears to have begun after they moved to Denver in the mid-'90s. More specifically, it can be traced back to April 20, 1999, the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, two troubled teens from the Colorado town where Deagle lived, opened fire, killing 12 of their fellow Columbine High School students and a teacher, and wounding 23 others.
Deagle, who says he was the local fire department's doctor at the time, claims to have been one of the first emergency personnel on the scene. But when he, the battalion chief and a ladder man tried to enter the building to help the wounded, Deagle says a Jefferson County sheriff's officer stood in their way. "If you go in," the cop warned them, "we'll shoot you."
Deagle would probably dismiss suggestions the officers might have simply been trying to keep the emergency personnel from getting trapped in what was still a free-fire zone.
"Did you know there were 26 federal and state agencies at Columbine?" Deagle has said by way of the real explanation. "There were BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms personnel] in the building." He claims he later personally interviewed three students from the school who told them the BATF "were shooting children. There were Denver SWAT teams inside the building at the time of the shooting that didn't engage them."
In the months after the shootings, however, Deagle initially became known, not for his conspiratorial take on what had really happened inside the school,3 but for the fact Bill Deagle was 16-year-old Mark Taylor's family doctor.
Taylor, one of the first students wounded in the attack, had been shot seven times and was not expected to live. "I'm looking at a dead man," Deagle remembers Mark's surgeon telling him before the boy was wheeled into the operating room that day.
But Taylor did survive. And he quickly became a symbol of the good that could come from such a tragedy, thanks to faith. "God's plan for me," the boy told the Rocky Mountain News, "is for me to speak to people against violence."
Mark and his mother—and, perhaps strangely, their doctor—soon became fixtures at public events where Mark talked about what had happened to him, his mother Donna offered her motherly perspective and Bill Deagle showed slides of the boy's X-rays and talked about his miraculous recovery. There were plans for a national tour to "promote Christian values," and Mark and his doctor began collaborating on a book so Mark could "get my story out. People are looking for hope."
The book never did get written. Taylor's mother would later break off relations with Deagle, complaining "he tried to control me and my son. It got deeper and deeper. It was insane," says Donna Taylor. She began to believe Deagle was "nuts."
Once, when she and the Deagles flew off to Los Angeles to do a seminar, she claims the Deagles asked her daughter to stay at their place and look after the Deagle's four children. If she needed money to feed the children, the girl claims Deagle told her, she could take what she needed from a drawer in the bedroom. The daughter told her mother later that she saw more than $200,000 in cash in hundred-dollar bills in the drawer. By the time Taylor cut off contact with the doctor, she says Deagle had begun talking about how the government was implanting chips in unsuspecting victims—"he even showed them to us." She was also concerned about the number of medications he was prescribing to her son.
Taylor isn't the only person to question Dr. Deagle's drug prescribing habits. KUSA, a Denver television station, looked into complaints from the family of one of Deagle's patients, a woman named Debra Darnell who died while in Deagle's care. Over the course of one nine-month period, the station reported, Deagle had written 102 different prescriptions for the woman.4
On March 11, 2004, the Colorado State Medical Board temporarily suspended his medical licence after investigating three separate incidents in which Deagle had allegedly over-prescribed a pharmacopia of drugs.5 The coroner's report ruled that one patient's death was "accidental" but concluded it had happened as the result of "respiratory depressive effects of the combination of drugs revealed by toxicology analysis." A second patient had to be hospitalized for a week "for withdrawal from medications,"while the third ended up in a hospital emergency room "incoherent and unable to remember what had happened to him."
Although he has since added his troubles with the medical board to the larger conspiracy against him, Deagle initially told the Rocky Mountain News he was a victim of insurance and drug companies—the pharmaceutical companies boost their prices to the point where "insurers do everything they can to persuade doctors not to prescribe very many pain medications."
Despite the fact that some of his patients supported him—"I would be in extreme pain, a basket case, without Dr. Deagle," one woman told the newspaper—the medical board only finally agreed to let him continue practising medicine if there was a mentor in place to monitor his prescribing habits.
And the family of another of his patients has filed a still-in-progress wrongful death suit against Deagle.
That may have prompted Deagle's decision to return home to Nova Scotia three years ago. Or it may have been, as he has suggested, the fact that they were out to get him.
Whatever the case, Deagle, his wife and their four children now call Clayton Park home.
Perhaps it's because Bill Deagle's candy store of conspiratorial causes—right, left, medical, political, environmental, ethereal, logical, loony—taps into some 21st century zeitgeist. Or perhaps (and more likely) it's because his uncanny ability to at least claim to have been in the middle of cataclysmic events such as 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing and Columbine gives him a certain cachet among those who believe there must be logically illogical, irrationally rational explanations for what's happening in the world around us.
Perhaps the reasons matter less than the reality that William Deagle has become a "player" in the global world of conspiracy. If you plug the words "Deagle" and "conspiracy" into Google, for example, you come up with 160,000 hits in .14 seconds.
The twin towers of Deagle's own mini-empire focus on two seemingly separate but strangely interconnected websites—the CLAYandIRON Ministry, "commissioned by the Most High God & to bring the truth of the end of this Secular Age and prepare His People spiritually and physically for the Times of Jacob's Troubles," and Nutrimedicals Inc., a site that sells a typically prosaic assortment of vitamins and pills to combat everything from overeating, to aging, to erectile dysfunction—along with such less likely products as a $129.95 three-day, one-person survival kit in case of "chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and natural disasters."
What brings the two together is Deagle's daily two-hour weekday afternoon show on the Genesis Communication Network, a US-based internet radio station that features many of the big names in global conspiracy. From a makeshift studio in his Halifax home, Deagle takes—very—occasional calls from listeners, ramblingly reinterprets current news events to fit his own perspective and somehow manages to mingle conspiracy theories with plugs for his nutritional supplements.
GCN's website describes him as a pro-life physician-whistleblower who has experienced first-hand the operations of globalist plans of above-government agencies New World Disorder.6
Bill Deagle is now an in-demand "expert" at international gatherings of conspiracy buffs. He was a featured speaker recently at the Los Angeles-based Granada Forum, "a research center for all types of subject matters that cannot be talked about in the mainstream media," and was on the list of well-known conspiratists at June's "Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference."
Ironically, Deagle isn't a very compelling speaker. On video—at least the ones I've watched—Deagle comes across as a stubby, middle-aged man with a droopy moustache, bushy brows and a speaking style that can be excruciatingly, university-lecture dull—even when what he is saying is anything but.
Consider the following, delivered straight-faced and without inflection, to listeners at the Granada Forum: "All roads do lead to Rome," he said, appearing to read from the text on his laptop computer screen. "All kings and rulers are subject to the Jesuit general, the black Pope. Zionism is just an apostate arm of the Bablyonian Talmudic Satanism, subject to the Vatican. Spiritual dark lords of blood and sexual sacrifice are identical with IFEs—Identified Fiendish Entities. And they exist. In the astral plane. And the physical..."
He admits he's "a little long-winded"—the online video of his Granada speech clocked in at two hours and 18 minutes—and he occasionally has very un-prophet-like problems with his Powerpoint presentations.
So why does anyone listen? Deagle seems to succeed, at least in part, by making listeners believe he is smarter than them.
"I was supposed to go into nuclear physics at MIT," he confides at one talk, just after boasting about his "near photographic memory." "Instead, I did honours biochemistry. I completed my PhD research project in five months at age 20. I didn't finish my thesis because I went into medicine." He pauses to let that sink in. "I'm not exactly stupid," he says.
He also claims, of course, to have been a member of what he calls "the inner circle," a claim some of those in the conspiracy world who interview him are quick to pick up on on. Alex Jones, who hosts another popular internet radio all-conspiracy-all-the-time program, introduced Deagle on his show as a man who had "worked for the government at every level...So much of his bio is classified..."
Deagle plays on the power of that mystery, claiming American Special Ops buddies and contacts in high places who tell him things unknown even to the most plugged in. "Senators on the armed forces committee," he boasted to Jones's listeners, "don't know what I know."
What he knows, however, may be less than he claims. It's difficult to fact-check all of his claims—and probably pointless too, since Deagle would almost certainly argue that his role was too classified for anyone to admit to. But consider just one claim with a local connection.
In his speech at the Granada Forum, Deagle claimed his brother-in-law is the "executive assistant to our premier in Nova Scotia, where I live right now." That much is true...well, more or less. Michelle's brother, Wayne Fiander, is a former Tory candidate and current special advisor to premier Rodney MacDonald. Deagle went on to claim that Fiander and "his best friend, Barry, a senior planner for the Canadian government," had been involved in a secret study that showed that if Washington ever declared a "code red," the highest level terror alert, the resulting shutdown of transportation and other vital infrastructure would lead to the deaths of "half the population of North America."
When I emailed Fiander to ask him about his brother-in-law's claim, he sent me a terse reply: "I have no knowledge of this."
Perhaps not surprisingly, Bill Deagle has his share of detractors and debunkers.
"Screwloosechange"—a website set up to expose "the lies, distortions and myths" in Loose Change, a 9/11 conspiracy documentary—describes Deagle as a "fruit loop." Even within the mainstream conspiracy movement—and, post Iraqi-weapons-of-mass-destruction, there's nothing particularly "out there," of course, about questioning whether the American government is really telling the whole truth about 9/11, or anything else—many worry that Deagle's never-ending web-spiral of ever greater conspiracies is undermining their legitimate questions, and some even wonder if Deagle himself is part of a misinformation conspiracy to discredit them.
Even at the fringes of the movement, Deagle is often seen as beyond the fringe. He's been the subject of one book (Deadly Medicine of Dr. Bill Deagle) and a number of videos (including Why Should You Care What Dr. Bill Deagle Says).
Deagle knows there are people who not only don't agree with him, but who are also out to get him, and not just verbally. He claims he isn't worried. "I'm not afraid to die tonight," he announced to those attending his Granada Forum speech last December. "I'm totally fearless."
So why won't he talk to me?
"Dear Dr. Deagle," I began a blandly inoffensive email to him on January 27, 2007. "I'm a feature writer for The Coast, a Halifax-based alternative news weekly, and I'm interested in doing a story about you—your ministry and radio show, your views on the state of the world, and your Nutrimedical business...I'm curious to know more about you, your career and what brought you back to Halifax at this time."
I sent the email by way of his wife, Michelle, who was then a Royal LePage real estate agent. She passed it on to him, with the one-word comment—"Interesting"—and he responded a day or so later (he really does include his entire alphabet soup of ostensible professional credentials as part of his email address) with a request that I give him a call. I did, and we spoke briefly, and pleasantly enough, on the telephone. Deagle asked me to send him copies of some of the stuff I'd written, and then we'd talk again.
I did.
And...nothing. He didn't get back to me. So I emailed him again a week later. And then at the end of February. Nothing. At the end of June, I emailed him one more time, telling him I was going ahead with this story and offering him another chance to be interviewed for it.
He never replied.
In the end, the information in this story has been gathered from a variety of other sources: internet websites—Deagle's own and others—audio interviews with him, videos of his presentations to various groups, documents from his legal troubles with the medical board in Colorado, property records, newspaper reports and interviews with a number of people who've known him.
The story is as complete as I can make what, in the end, still adds up to an incomplete picture of the man. Which is too bad. He is—to say the least—a fascinating character, and there are all sorts of questions I would have liked to ask him, beginning with the obvious: Is Bill Deagle for real?
If it is a scam, what's in it for him? Is there major money to be made in the conspiracy business? In the online videos I watched, Deagle does hawk his DVDs and makes relatively low-key pitches for "sugar daddies" to help him get his now internet-only show on Sirius satellite radio, but none of it seems designed—or likely—to generate the wads of cash Donna Taylor's daughter once suggested she saw in his drawer.
Speaking of cash, where does he get his now that he no longer practises medicine?
On June 1, 2007, the Colorado state board of medical examiners got a court order revoking his licence to practise there. In its complaint, the board cited six cases in which Deagle had over-prescribed medications, including one case in which Deagle prescribed a month's worth of Oxycotin to a patient, and then, less than a week later, wrote another prescription for the same patient for another month's worth of the drug. During the course of the year-long hearing in the complaints, Deagle dropped his lawyer, represented himself, and eventually refused to participate in what he described as a "witch hunt," issuing instead what the court called "qualified threats against counsel for the [medical] board," and began each of his email messages with the statement: "OFFICIAL NOTICE of reporting of corrupt acts, attempted extortion, deprivation of Rights under color of law, mail fraud, and deprivation of the intangible Right of honest services, and Violation of Oath of Office."
The Nova Scotia College of Physicians says he doesn't have a current licence to practise here either.
His four-bedroom Clayton Park house is assessed at $412,600, but real estate records show his wife Michelle—to whom he gave power of attorney—took out a $294,375 mortgage when she bought the property in May 2003.
(Intriguingly, that is almost a full year before the Colorado medical board first slapped restrictions on his licence. Paula Woodward, the reporter at 9News in Denver who broke the story of Deagle's prescribing habits, tells me the station began its investigation of Deagle two years before its spring 2004 stories aired. Since she would have talked to the medical board a number of times during her research, it's probable Deagle would have been aware he was under a cloud long before the actual suspension. And then, of course, there is the wrongful death suit, which is still hanging over him. Whatever the cause, it seems Michelle and the three youngest children relocated to Halifax a year before Bill. I'd like to ask the Deagles more about the timing of their move back to Nova Scotia, but it doesn't seem likely I'll get the chance.)
Speaking of Michelle—who is still listed on their CLAYandIRON ministry home page as one of the Servants of the Most High God—what is her role in all of this? Some suggest she is the real eminence gris behind Bill's transformation from boring family doctor to God's chosen servant. She seems to have recently given up the Halifax real estate business that was their only other visible means of support. The website that used to tout her property listings is now home to the still-under-construction site of Michelle Deagle, chief financial officer of Nutrimedical, Inc. Strangely, the fax number for the company is in the 902 area code, while Nutrimedical's office address is listed as being in a Denver suburb.
Nutrimedical's products—most of which come from other supplement makers—carry the sheen of Dr. Deagle's personal recom mendations based on his long "experience with the use of nutritional supplementation integrated with allopathic medicine." Deagle, in fact, helpfully includes a complete listing of all his initialed credentials twice in the first two paragraphs of Nutrimedical's "about" page. Still, perhaps mindful of his ongoing troubles with Colorado's medical board, he carefully notes that his selling of the supplements online "is not be construed as an online consult or anything other than educational materials.... One-on-one consultations," he adds, "must be in person, by appointment only with Dr. William R. Deagle MD's Colorado clinic."
Which raises another question. What Colorado clinic? Is William Richard Deagle really in Halifax? Or Colorado? Or...?
Bill Deagle isn't answering. At least not me. Maybe I've now become they, too.
Stephen Kimber, The Coast's senior features writer, isn't sure who's really responsible for 9/11 but he's quite sure the angel Gabriel wasn't involved. At least not directly.
FOOTNOTES:
1. In case you need to know, ABFP stands for American Board of Family Practice, CCFP for Certificant of the College of Family Practice of Canada, AAPM for American Academy of Pain Management, CIME for Certified Independent Medical Examiner (American Board of Independent Medical Examiners), AAAAM for American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, ACOEM for American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and AAEM is the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. Now you know.
2. Deagle's first wife has since died.
3. In case you're wondering, Columbine too seems to be part of the great master plan, but that only became clearer later.
4. Those prescriptions included 24 for pain (2,072 doses), three for sleep (66 doses), seven for depression (294 doses) and 12 for anxiety (821 doses).
5. Including Oxycotin, Oxy IR, Actiq, Xanax, Klonopin, Paxil, Bextra and Soma.
6. Deagle's own website is even more effusive if not much more grammatical: "As a pro-life messianic Christian physician, I expose the evils of abortion and genetically engineered designer babies, euthanasia on-demand, trans-human gene enhancement cyborg technology, RFID National and Global ID, Scalar Mind Control, GMO genetically modified and irradiated foods, toxins of Mercury and Fluoride, Depleted Uranium DNA Landmines, planned American Hiroshimas, NeoCon Iranian WWIII, World Trade Organization Codex Alimentarius, Illegal Immigration, End of the Age eschatology, classified above-government technologies, DUMB1 Deep Underground Military Bases One, Scalar Sacred Geometric Vortex Technologies, Zero Point Energy, SDI Strategic Defense Initiative "Star Wars', ET . Doctrines of Devils, apostasy in the church and the coming One World False Church and the weaponized Avian Flu Pandemic from a Biblical, scientific-logical and prophetic viewpoints..." Phew. And that doesn't even include what he has called the molecular holocaust of Aspartame.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Sept 2, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
September 2, 2007
And they didn’t use a shredder either
Disgusted residents of MacBeath Road near Scotsburn were sifting through the rubble from an illegal dumpsite last week when they hit the motherlode. Amid the chunks of sheet rock, broken glass, food waste and toxic construction materials that had been dumped by the side of the road near a scenic brook and waterfall, the residents discovered telltale packing slips, and personal receipts linking the mess to its maker.
The residents called the Mounties who called the perpetrator. Though he or she — the cops weren’t saying — was out of town, the police did say that “some people who are sympathetic to that individual” volunteered to clean up the site.
So, while he or she — or perhaps even it — faces a $337 fine, local residents think they have a right to know the miscreant’s identity. Michelle Ferris told the New Glasgow News the public should know “someone is running a business who operates like that. I'd hate to think I would hire somebody who works that way.”
Sorry, world
In the latest round of the cat-and-mouse battle over herbicide spraying in Nova Scotia, the cat won.
Just after 6 a.m. on Tuesday, helicopters contracted by North Nova Forest Co-op doused a 22-hectare site near Roslin in Cumberland County with Vision, a controversial herbicide that has been approved for use by the federal pest management agency.
Though some residents had vowed to serve as human shields to prevent the spraying, the planned protest fizzled when only one local was on site for the early hour swoop.
Although the contractor didn’t spray in the section where local beekeeper Jerry Draheim stood — Question: If it’s so safe, why did they avoid spraying him with the stuff too? — the rest of the land was Visioned.
“We got ‘er all done,” North Nova silviculture supervisor Bruce MacLeod declared. Except, of course, for the spot where Draheim was. “We’ll probably go in and touch that up later, I’d imagine.”
MacLeod said he wasn’t surprised the protestors were a no-show. “Typically it turns out to be two or three people… I would have to guess they just didn’t get out of bed early enough.”
Local resident Dale Brown, who arrived in the middle of the action, says he’s disappointed they weren’t able to stop the spraying, but he thinks their protest got a message across. “More and more people are recognizing that we have to be more astute at protecting our own personal health and property,” he told the newspaper. “To me, it’s about morally standing up for your personal beliefs.”
Oh, no, not Shelburne again… still
There has been yet another twist in the twisted, tangled, tortuous saga that is the old Shelburne Boys School property — previously known as Shelburne Place and recently re-re-christened Bowood.
Ocean Products International has filed a law suit against Halifax developer Ralston MacDonnell and Southwest Shore Development Authority CEO Frank Anderson — and all their various associated corporate connections — alleging conspiracy and breach of trust in the bidding process that resulted in MacDonnell buying the property this spring for $550,000.
OPI, which has been involved in a separate legal kerfuffle with the development agency over property at the former Canadian Forces Base Shelburne for the past seven years, alleges Bowood — which MacDonnell incorporated after the sale — got the property for “grossly below fair market or replacement value.”
None of the allegations, as we say in the standard journalism biz boilerplate, has been proven in court.
Speaking of strange
The town council in Westville, which is still in the process of deciding whether it should even exist, is now trying to figure out whether members of the public should be allowed to speak during its meetings.
At its latest meeting, council reversed an earlier decision that would have required anyone who wanted to address its august self to submit their comments in advance, in writing, and in triplicate. (Actually, I made up the triplicate part; it just seemed to fit.)
Councillors were apparently concerned that unruly citizens were talking out of turn and upsetting the decorum of a body that its own CAO recently chastised for poor leadership.
“It’s a reality that no citizen has any right to be heard by council,” Coun. Gary MacLaughlin explained, apparently citing the book, Grassroots Democracy: Local Government in the Maritimes, as his source. It says so right here, he told his fellow councillors, adding that it’s a rule so fundamental, it isn’t even written down anywhere.
“The meeting is called to do the council's business,” he said.
And what business would that be?
Buy local, buy often
Looking to buy local this fall but don’t know how, or where, or from whom? King’s County wants to help. It’s set up a free Online Famers’ Market website — http://www.county.kings.ns.ca/cgi-bin/classifieds/classifieds.pl — where local producers can list what they have on offer (think “pesticide-free, dried yellow eye beans, which are naturally air dried for quick cooking”?),and customers can make contact with them directly.
“We’re setting up a forum,” says Coun. Chris Parker, who initially came up with the idea and sold it to his council colleagues. “It’s another way for people to buy local. We’re contacting farmers we know and people can contact us.”
Classified categories include all the usual — fruits, vegetables, cheese, dairy, poultry, pork, beef, specialty meats, fish, honey and maple products — as well as soy and organic products.
Muddying the black hole
Upper Granville residents, who had complained they encountered a “black hole” when they tried to find information about a proposed quarry in their area, may now find the situation even murkier.
Nova Scotia’s Environment Department dispatched an inspector to the North Mountain area last month after sightings of sediment in the Annapolis River. The inspector fingered the source as land owned by B. Spicer Construction Ltd, the company that had applied to develop the quarry and is now in the process of developing the land for it.
“Sufficient stabilization wasn’t in place to prevent sediment from entering the watercourse,” the inspector, Steve Sanford, told the Annapolis County Spectator in his best officialese. “Direction was given to the proponent to remediate the site…[and] install erosion and sediment control.”
Although the company’s quarry application is still in process, Sandford says the department doesn’t regulate preparatory land development, “so we don’t have a proactive means of going to land developers [to address these areas. This incident] wasn’t in contravention of an existing approval.”
That will come as small comfort to opponents of the project.
Come to pee?
There’s bad news and good news in the latest tourism statistics out of Barrington on the south shore. The Barrington Visitor Information Centre reports that the number of tourist visits plummeted a startling 47 per cent in the first three months of this year’s tourist season compared with last year.
In 2006, 3,270 visitors stopped in at the Centre from May to July. This year, that number was only 1,721.
The Pollyanna version of that? Warden Louise Halliday says at least 75 per cent of the visitors were actually interested in visiting the area. “In the past,” she said, “some visitors… have just stopped to use the washroom or the Internet.”
Perhaps the geniuses who came up with the province’s “Come to Life” tourism-hawking campaign will want to rethink the moe practical aspects of visitor luring.
And then there were three… two
Digby, which is already desperately seeking at least one new physician to take the place of Dr. Roy Harding, who retired in June, got more bad news last month when Dr. Richard Denton posted a notice in the Digby Courier that he too will be closing his practice Oct. 31 for health reasons.
Barb Johnson, a spokesperson for the South West Nova Health Authority, says the decision came as a shock, and complicates an already complicated situation.
When Denton stops practicing, the community will officially be down to just three general practitioners. The reality is even more dismal. One of the three has recently gone on maternity leave. And the retired and still unreplaced Dr. Harding carried almost twice the recommended patient load.
The latest blow, Johnson concedes, is “hard news for the Digby community,” where the local hospital’s emergency department has also been closed for much of the summer due to lack of doctors to staff it.
They wuz robbed
His local fans knew it was all over even before the results were announced. And not just because Yarmouth favourite son and Canadian Idol finalist Dwight d’Eon blew last week’s assignment to sing musical standards. (One judge gently advised the singer that crooning Paul Anka and Frank Sinatra tunes, even in cool white suit, is “not your thing.”)
But the real problem, fans complained, was with the telephone system in southwestern Nova Scotia. According to the Yarmouth Vanguard, fans were encountering inordinate problems with busy signals and other telephonic gremlins when they tried to call in their votes for D’Eon.
“Grrr… my phone is about ready to fly out the window,” one complained on D’Eon’s Facebook site. “Four votes in almost two hours….either busy, dead line or ‘this call cannot be completed as dialed.’” (There are no restrictions on the number of times you can vote for your Canadian Idol favourite.)
Meanwhile supporters of leading contender Brian Melo, a Hamilton, ON, singer, were gleefully announcing on his Facebook site that they’d had no trouble getting through — with two posters reporting they’d each been able to cast more than 750 ballots for their favourite during the two-hour voting window.
When the votes were counted, Dwight’s fans fears proved founded.
D’Eon is gone. But not forgotten in Yarmouth
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, DIGBY COURIER, KENTVILLE ADVERTISER, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, SHELBURNE COUNTY TODAY, 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
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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.