Let’s hear it for the eco-preservationist freaks
On Monday, News 95.7 talk show host Andrew Krystal invited listeners to weigh in on that hoary old chestnut: another kerfuffle over another plan to wipe out another view of Halifax harbour from Citadel Hill.
I didn’t catch much during my commute, but I did hear Andrew noting that one listener said he’d recently been to Calgary and witnessed a kazillion construction cranes rising up into the Big Sky from the thumping, entrepreneurial heart of Calgary’s build-it-and-they-will-come downtown. In Calgary, he claimed, he hadn’t heard one single, limp-wristed eco-preservationist freak protesting.
Uh… that’s the point.
Calgary has no views worth preserving (save of the far-off foothills of the Rockies, which are probably best seen from the higher elevations anyway).
Halifax does.
The fact we can still wander a livable city with its eclectic mix of old and new, walkable waterfront and, yes, even a few reach-for-the-sky downtown office towers that, thankfully, aren’t the only places from which we can view the harbour—is a tribute to our eco-preservationist freaks. Long may they complain.
During the sixties and early seventies, they waged a determined, multi-fronted campaign to save the city’s historic waterfront from the wrecker’s ball, stop big-dreaming bureaucrats from driving an eight-lane expressway through downtown and, in the process, protected iconic views of the harbour from historic Citadel Hill.
In January 1974, Halifax City Council unanimously approved a motion protecting 10 views from the Citadel affecting 300 acres of prime downtown real estate.
“In the larger sense,” author and activist Elizabeth Pacey wrote, “the decision represented a sweeping achievement in the pioneer field of environmental protection legislation.”
But not a permanent one.
Thanks to a Mack Truck-opening in Halifax’s new HRM By Design strategy, developers propose to build a $300-million downtown convention centre on the former Halifax Herald and Midtown Tavern lands, complete with sky-jutting 14-storey office tower and 18-storey hotel.
Those structures, say members of the Coalition to Save the View from Citadel Hill, will almost completely obliterate the view of George’s Island from the Citadel. Their website offers a Photo-shopped illustration of the result. It isn’t pretty.
One doesn’t have to want Halifax’s downtown to be trapped forever in Paleolithic splendor to wonder why we need another hotel and office tower smack in the middle of a significant viewplane when there are plenty of already-approved-but-unbuilt projects downtown that would not wipe out a view that won’t be replaced.
Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books to be published soon
One morning in the late spring of 2008, Trevor J. Adams and Stephen Clare were enjoying their usual weekly “half-business/half-pleasure” coffee at the Trident Café and Bookstore in downtown Halifax, and enjoying even more their own noisy argument about best books. Today they were debating the relative merits of two iconic Nova Scotian-Canadian authors, Thomas Raddall and Alistair MacLeod.
Adams is the Editor of Halifax, an urban lifestyles magazine, while Clare, the former Books Editor of the defunct Halifax Daily News, is one of Halifax’s busiest freelancers.
While business had been the original rationale for their weekly coffee conversations, Clare and Adams had become friends as well. They’d shared their fears: Stephen about becoming a father again at 40, Trevor about whether he was ready for marriage. And they’d shared their passions, including the Montreal Canadiens, their favourite hockey team, and of course, their favourite books.
Partly because Adams’ soon-to-be wife was from Liverpool and partly because he himself could claim one of Raddall’s sons as his dentist, Adams confessed a “natural affinity” for the late Nova Scotia writer of popular historical fiction who had been a three-time winner of the Governor-General’s literary awards. Clare, on the other hand, a Montreal-born musician and freelance writer who’d moved to Halifax nine years before, was more partial to the cerebral, Cape Breton-born, Ontario-based MacLeod, whose No Great Mischief had won him the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Today’s argument had gone on long past the end of their coffees.
Which got Clare to thinking about an interview he’d done recently with music journalist Bob Mersereau concerning his 2007 book, The Top 100 Canadian Albums.
What if?...
That was the beginning.
Next month, Nimbus will publish Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, their rank-ordered compendium of the region’s best books “ever published.” The book, which will include reviews by either Clare or Adams of every one of the chosen books, will be illustrated with book covers and author photos, and feature essays as well as additional top-10 listings for everything from best French-language books, to aboriginal books, to books bearing the silliest titles (can you say Lobster in my Pocket?).
“I’m not naïve enough to think this will be the definitive word” on which is the absolute best, number-one-for-all-time Atlantic Canadian book ever written, Adams concedes. Even if their list simply provokes “a couple of good, knock-out donnybrooks” over which should have been judged best, adds Clare, he’ll consider theirs a job well done.
They concede the process of choosing the books wasn’t scientific.
In the beginning, Adams explains, they had some “pretty rigid” criteria—the author had to be from this region, or have spent a substantial amount of time here—but then they’d encounter a book that didn’t fit their criteria yet clearly belonged on the list and… well, the criteria became less rigid.
In the same way, while the list mostly represents a tallying of votes received, there are occasional books that made the list because the editors decided they belonged. “It’s called editorial discretion,” says Adams.
The two arbitrarily decided some books—cookbooks, for example—didn’t belong, while others—poetry collections, plays—did but would probably “drop off the bottom” of any broader list. So they established separate listings for them and asked experts to submit their choices.
Once they’d sorted out their parameters, they prepared an open-ended email and sent it to everyone they could think of—authors, critics, librarians, professors of Canadian literature and history, bookstore owners and, of course, readers—inviting them to compile their own personal top 10 lists. And then invited those people to forward the email on to others they thought might be interested in doing the same.
By the time it was over, they’d received 716 replies. One woman submitted her list and then wrote back the next day to revise it, and then twice more after that to revise her revisions. “How could I have possibly forgotten…?”
There were, of course, occasional efforts to rig the outcome. Clare recalls receiving 30 almost identically worded submissions, all from the same computer IP address and all listing only the same one book. “That just wasn’t on,” he says.
Adams and Clare compiled the more than 7,000 ballots cast for 2,000 different books (with votes coming from locals, expats and interested outsiders from 17 countries) and tallied up the votes to determine the rankings.
And the winner is…
Not so fast. The book doesn’t hit the bookstores until mid-October so their publishers at Nimbus—not surprisingly—are loath to let Clare and Adams give away too many secrets too soon. Nimbus is actually inviting readers to predict which will be the top five books when the list is finally unveiled. Those who guess correctly will be entered in a draw for a $100 gift certificate for—what else?—books. For details, go to www.nimbus.ca and select “Contests.”
That said, there are a few things Adams and Clare will confide.
First, of course, is the fact that both Raddall and MacLeod will make the top 100 list. Second, while you might quibble about the order, Adams says, you won’t be surprised by which books ended up in the top 10. Their order, he adds, is “exactly as the numbers came out. It was really only when we got to the bottom 50 where we asked ourselves, ‘Why does this book matter?’”
You probably also won’t be surprised to discover that there are common themes in the selected books, and that those themes include the importance of geography and natural setting.
Or that Atlantic Canadian authors are not only talented, they’re generous. “People like Lesley Choyce and Ami MacKay and David Adams Richards would get back to us,” Adams notes, “and ask, Have you thought about so-and-so, or so-and-so?”
More by luck than by design, he adds, the book “balanced out nicely. All four provinces are well represented. There is a balance of men and women; there are writers of colour.”
But taking the project from coffee-argument idea to finished book in just over a year, they admit, did become an all consuming project. Trevor even took the manuscript with him to Jamaica on his honeymoon despite promising not to. “Busted!” he jokes. Later, his wife woke him up one morning at three o’clock; he’d been talking in his sleep about Thomas Raddall. Clare says he ended up buying his postal delivery person a thank-you package of Tylenol to compensate for all the heavy books he’d had to deliver to him.
While Adams and Clare are still putting the final-final finishing touches on Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, they admit they’re already considering another collaboration. “Something sports related,” Adams suggests. “That could be fun.”
***
Stephen Kimber, the author of one novel and seven books of nonfiction, is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. Full disclosure: he contributed his own top 10 list on the best “Historical Books of Atlantic Canada, Fictional and Not So...” to Atlantic Canada’s 100 Greatest Books.
One promise Dexter shouldn’t keep
Stephen McNeil was right. And Darrell Dexter was wrong.
During the last provincial election campaign, then-opposition NDP leader Dexter made a boy-scout solemn promise that, if elected, his government would balance the province’s books next year. Cross his heart. Really…
Stephen McNeil, the then-new leader of the nowhere-to-go-but-up Liberal party, countered—more or less—that that was a dumb-as-dirt promise to make.
The economic world, he pointed out, was still teetering on the edge of who knew what or when. Worse, Rodney MacDonald’s incumbent Tory government was playing so many peek-a-boo shell games with the Nova Scotia treasury you couldn’t trust anything it said. You couldn’t know if you could balance the books without seeing them.
Dexter’s dogged insistence that he could/would live within whatever our means were, stemmed partly from his personal history. He comes from a rural Nova Scotia pay-as-you-go culture in which thrift is simple survival necessity.
But his balanced-books promise, of course, was also a partly carefully calibrated political calculation. What better way to undermine his opponents’ “risky NDP,” “spend-and-tax socialists” and “wild-eyed radical hordes” attacks than to invoke the godly ghost of NDP icon Tommy Douglas—he was premier of Saskatchewan for 17 years and never once ran a deficit, after all—and promise to be just like Tommy?
Dexter convinced voters of his sincerity, largely because he was.
But that doesn’t make him right.
All you need to do is look at the current state of the province’s finances. Even discounting the NDP’s disingenuous trick of front-ending loading expenses on to this year’s budget to make the numbers look better next year, the actual numbers are still awful. Trying to balance the books at this point in our history is wrong-headed, perhaps even dangerously so.
Dexter’s government created its own get-out-of-jail-free card in the guise of a blue-ribbon outside economic advisory panel, which is already publicly telling him to rethink his no-deficit-never mantra.
Following its advice would have political costs, of course. Stephen McNeil will be able to gloat that he was right all along—which he was—and still be able to attack Dexter for breaking his word.
But as bad as that might be for Dexter politically, it pales in comparison to the economic costs if Dexter persists with a promise he shouldn’t have made in the first place. Suck it up, Darrell.
From Halifax Metro: September 18, 2009
How come City Hall is keeping so many secrets
On Wednesday, Halifax council announced the appointment of our first ever auditor general. Buried in the PR boilerplate was this ironically unintended wiffle-ball of wisdom from chief bureaucrat Dan English: “Independence and transparency,” he declared, “are key to enhancing public confidence in the municipal service delivery system.”
Huh?
Didn’t city fathers couple last winter’s motion to hire an auditor general—a new position required by provincial legislation to provide a much-needed public check on municipal spending—with a weasel request to change the city’s charter to let it hold secret meetings to discuss any findings the auditor general might make that could have “the potential to expose the organization to a threat or risk?”
Which is to say any findings.
Now that’s transparency.
Nova Scotia’s Municipal Government Act says all council and committee meetings “are open to the public… except as otherwise provided in this Section.”
But our council has been busy building its own secrecy superhighway through that supposedly narrow footpath of legislated exceptions.
Commonwealth Games? Secret.
The sewage mess? Close your eyes. Hold your nose. Top secret.
On Tuesday, councillors began their too-routine closed-door deliberations at 10:30 a.m. Supposedly—the meetings are secret, after all—they secretly laboured through lunch and many hours more. A full seven hours after they started, councillors finally broke for 45 minutes to refresh themselves and begin their much shorter public meeting.
What did councillors spend so many hours discussing in private?
Some of it we know because they then quietly passed un-debated motions in public to formally do what they had privately decided already. Like appealing the court decision to award $81,000 to a Preston man who had to live next to a stinky city sewage treatment for a decade. That, of course, involved legal strategy, so discussing it in camera is a legitimate exception.
But what about the decision to extend the terms of two citizen appointees to the Halifax International Airport Authority Board? Or increase the number of councillors on the advisory board for the 2011 Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference?
Should those be hush hush?
And what other public business did councillors discuss privately that we still don’t know about? More than we know.
Perhaps it’s time our elected officials discussed—in public—what is reasonable to discuss in private. And what is not.
From Halifax Metro: September 11, 2009
Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College, is the author of eight books. He’s been writing about local politics for more years than he can remember.
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STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.