“Everything Right:” IWK Review in Atlantic Books Today
"When, just 15 minutes into reading the book, I am in tears, then something's got to be right. And I believe Stephen Kimber has done everything right in his captivating history of the extraordinary story of pediatric care that exists right here in Halifax and beyond... Kimber has given us a fully integrated account of what makes the IWK Health Centre what it is today, 100 years from the opening of the Halifax Children's Hospital... Interspersing the time-line with case studies has made this book a superb read and, indeed a collector's item."
Shirley Gueller
Atlantic Books Today
Spring 2010
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
NDP throne speech no defining moment
Pundits are calling passage of Barack Obama’s health care legislation last weekend historic, and a defining moment for his presidency.
The legislation is far from perfect, of course, the not unexpected result of all the far too many messy compromises needed to cajole and barter the 216 votes required to pass it. And the resulting outcry over what the bill actually accomplishes—or not—may cost Obama the chance to push other items on his reform agenda and, worse, endanger not only the Democrats’ hold on Congress but also his own hopes for a second term as president.
Despite all of that, Robert Gibbs, the president’s press secretary, told reporters this week that passing the health care legislation “meant more to [Obama] than any election night could have because… he understands just what it will mean.”
He had a vision in other words, and he was prepared to risk his electoral future to make that vision reality.
Can the same be said of our new New Democratic Party government?
While one can’t begin to compare the globally game-changing election of America’s first black president with the mere electoral victory of Nova Scotia’s first ever social democratic government, there is no question the NDP’s win last June (just six months after Obama’s) raised expectations—and hopes—here too.
Could Dexter’s NDP really do politics differently, or would it offer more of the same-old, same-old under a different brand? Did it a have a vision of a better tomorrow, or would it become another government with no higher calling than its own re-election?
The first six months have not been encouraging. Thanks to the MLA expenses scandal, the NDP has lost control of the governing-differently agenda. Whatever it does now will be seen as playing catch-up to public opinion. And it has allowed whatever higher-calling agenda it may have had to devolve into a dreary debate over raising taxes versus cutting spending.
The New Democrats are right that we must first—finally—get our financial house in order. But if that is all they accomplish, they will end up like the Chrétien-Martin Liberals who slayed the deficit dragon… but then? Good, but not game changing.
Yesterday’s throne speech was the government’s opportunity to “recalibrate,” to set out its own ambitious “more-than-any-election-night” agenda. Despite occasional rhetorical nods to tomorrow—“difficult choices now to ensure a better future later”—the speech itself was mostly a laundry listing of small accomplishments and modest expectations that could have been authored by a Liberal or Conservative government.
And not a defining moment in sight. Opportunity lost.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Mike Duffy… you’re no Mike Duffy
To paraphrase a famous American: I knew Mike Duffy, Senator, and you’re no Mike Duffy…
I couldn’t help thinking that as I read Halifax Metro’s account this week of Duffy’s inane, ill-tempered and spectacularly ill-informed rant about the King’s College Journalism School. Full disclosure: I teach at King’s.
“Kids who go to King’s, or the other (journalism) schools across the country, are taught from two main texts,” Duffy huffed to a gathering of 60 Cumberland County Conservatives. Those texts are Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and some other unnamed tome on the “theory of critical thinking,” which, to Duffy, appears to stand for subversive.
“When you put critical thinking together with Noam Chomsky,” Duffy puffed, “what you’ve got is a group of people who are taught from the ages of 18, 19 and 20 that what we stand for, private enterprise… is bad.”
Uh… Earth to Mike: Noam’s not on the curriculum at King’s. And critical thinking? What were you thinking? What were you drinking?
“When I went to the school of hard knocks,” Duffy explained, taking refuge in the last refuge of any guy who is long past his best-before date, “we were told to be fair and balanced. That school doesn’t exist any more.”
Yes it does, Mike. It’s called journalism school. We still teach that fair-and-balanced mantra your soft Senate sinecure has long since hard-knocked out of whatever was left of your own critical thinking. Only we do it far better now.
Trust me on that. I may teach in what you consider an effete journalism school, but I learned my trade in the same hit-and-miss school of hard knocks you did.
The irony—worth remembering if only for the sake of nostalgia—is that Mike Duffy was once a very good reporter. When I was a junior journalist at CJCH Radio in Halifax in the early seventies, Duffy was a star at CHNS, our bitter cross-town rival. He was energetic, driven. His skepticism about everyone and everything—call it critical thinking—made him an equal-opportunity skewerer of all he encountered. Fair and balanced?
Somewhere along the line, however, Duffy gave up thinking, let alone critically. He even used his last journalistic bully pulpit at CTV to brazenly audition for the ultra-soft-knock job of Tory Senator. By the time he’d officially become a wind-up toy for Stephen Harper, he’d long since become a parody of the journalist he once was.
Pity.
I knew Mike Duffy, and you, Senator, are no Mike Duffy.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
The sound of one cymbal clanging
It’s difficult to comprehend how a politician seemingly in such perfect harmony with the populist political zeitgeist eight months ago could have become so cymbal-clangingly tone deaf so quickly.
Darrell Dexter got himself elected premier by channeling Coffee-at-the-Tims Everyman. He was like us, only smarter. We could—and did—trust him.
We forgave him for lying to us during the election campaign because… well, we wanted to be lied to. It helped get us over the emotional hump of turfing out a government that deserved to go in order to vote for a bunch of untried, are-they-really-socialist New Democrats.
That the current MLA expenses excesses have become such a sticking scandal shows just how badly Dexter has stumbled.
When the auditor-general’s report broke in January, Dexter could—rightly—have argued he’d already begun reforming the system, that his party’s fall legislative package—which banned corporate and union donations, eliminated over-generous allowances for departing and defeated MLAs and sliced computer expenses for members—was a strong first step. And more change was on the way…
The fact the premier was out of town—on vacation, at the Olympics, at a premier’s meeting in Washington—as the messy stories seeped, spilled and ultimately flooded into the public prints made for awkward optics.
Even that could have been managed. We don’t expect our premier to sit, quill in hand, puzzling over the minutiae of legislation. He’d given the orders; we could judge the results when the legislation was tabled. Besides, his response was the correct one. I wasn’t the premier who started the system, but I will be the one to put an end to it.
But then came news the NDP had failed to return $45,000 in illicit union contributions Dexter himself—during the dying days of last June’s campaign—claimed had been returned.
And then it emerged that Dexter—whose expensive tastes in electronics and a briefcase raised eyebrows—had been billing the public purse for his $3,800 annual bar society fees.
Pre-premier Dexter would have immediately understood how that would play down at Tims, mea culpa-ed and moved on. The New Darrell tried to justify it all. By the time he finally gave up and gave in on Wednesday, he’d used up all the political capital he’d accumulated over a decade in opposition.
Just in time to deliver a very bad-news budget that will require all the political capital he’s squandered—and much more.
We are in for interesting times.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
A promise is not a law until it is
It happened so long ago that Alexa McDonough was still the leader of a rag-tag band of New Democrats in the provincial legislature. And I was a still-young-ish reporter.
McDonough had just introduced a private member’s bill to reform the ways in which political parties got financed. Its specifics have long since escaped my memory. But I do recall that everyone knew the legislation—like virtually all such proposals that arrived without the imprimatur of the party in power—had no chance of passing. Her critics accused her of grandstanding.
Why should we believe you’re serious, I asked her?
You shouldn’t, she replied matter-of-factly. That’s why we need laws. To make sure whichever party forms the next government, or the one after that, can’t just do what will benefit its own interests. Voters, she said, shouldn’t have to depend on the too often-empty promises of campaigning politicians. Of any stripe.
I couldn’t help but think of that as I watched the MLAs expense scandal unfold. The NDP is now the government. It has the power to reform the system. But its record to date is mixed.
The NDP started off well enough. It eliminated the policy of providing cabinet ministers with cars, for example. That was a next logical step in a reform process that had begun with Ernie Fage’s 2006 fender bender. The fact that the minister was driving an expensive, taxpayer-provided vehicle at the time had already prompted Rodney MacDonald’s Tories to tighten the rules on cabinet ministers’ pricey rides. (Scandal, of course, has long been the best—often the only—driver of reform.)
And the NDP, during its first legislative session last fall, killed a number of the most outrageous perks of office, including the too-generous severance package for retiring or defeated MLAs and payments for chairing ghost committees, and cut back on members’ technology allowances in the name of fiscal restraint.
But the government has continued to resist efforts to open up the process for appointing people to provincial boards and commissions—reforms it had championed in opposition—and it waited until after the firestorm over the auditor general’s report to make changes to an MLA expenses system it knew was corrupt.
The new and more transparent expenses rules announced this week are another positive, if belated step, but not until those changes get enshrined in legislation and regulation.
As Alexa McDonough rightly said, we shouldn’t ever have to depend solely on politicians’ promises.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
‘IWK: A Century of Caring’ nominated for book award
2010 Atlantic Book Awards Shortlists...
Dartmouth Book Award (Non-fiction)
- Greg Cochkanoff and Bob Chaulk, SS Atlantic: The White Star Line's First Disaster at Sea (Goose Lane Editions)
- Stephen Kimber, IWK: A Century of Caring for Families (Nimbus Publishing)
- Anne Murray with Michael Posner, All of Me (Knopf Canada)
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of 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 seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.