Heroes and blemishes: Edward Cornwallis and Cesar Chavez
“Edward Cornwallis is deeply offensive to members of our Mi’kmaq communities and to Nova Scotians generally who believe school names should recognize persons whose contributions to society are unblemished by acts repugnant to the values we wish our schools to embody and represent.”
Kirk Arsenault
Aboriginal Halifax School Board member
***
The Atlantic’s latest issue boasts a history-revisiting article about Cesar Chavez, a hero of my youth. I read it last week as our school board expunged the name of Halifax’s European founder, Edward Cornwallis, from a local Junior High.
During the sixties, Chavez—an iconic, Ghandi-following, Mexican-American union leader—organized 50,000 grape pickers and lettuce harvesters to challenge California’s all-powerful farm owners.
“Si, se puede”—Yes it’s possible—became his rallying cry. Inspired by Chavez, white liberals—me too—boycotted grapes for five long years until the farm workers finally won a contract. I can still recall the sweetly satisfying taste of my first post-boycott grape.
Chavez, who died in 1993, is rightly revered. His birthday is a holiday in California and seven other states. Colleges, schools, parks, streets, even a bowling alley are named in his honour.
The Atlantic piece focuses on an “exhaustively researched, by turns sympathetic and deeply shocking” new book re-examining Chavez’s life and legacy. It claims his saintly image masked “the take-no-prisoners, balls-out tactics of a Chicago organizer.” Chavez, for example, turned over to immigration authorities undocumented workers who didn’t support his union so they would be deported. Later, he fell under the spell of a “sinister cult leader,” became “unhinged” and even mocked his own farm-worker followers. “Every time we look at them, they want more money,” he complained in one recorded conversation. “Like pigs, you know.”
So… should California cancel its holiday, rename its schools and parks?
Cesar Chavez—like Edward Cornwallis—isn’t “unblemished.”
That appears to have become the Halifax school board’s new litmus test for having a school named after you.
But no hero—no human hero—can pass that test. Not Chavez. Not Cornwallis. But also not Martin Luther King, John A. MacDonald, Nelly McClung, even “Canada’s Greatest Hero,” Tommy Douglas...
Edward Cornwallis helped establish Halifax, a noteworthy accomplishment to those of us who now call it home. But during the English-French-Mi’kmaq struggle to control the territory, Cornwallis offered a bounty for any captured or killed Mi’kmaq, “or his scalp as is the custom of America.”
The notion rightly shocks our contemporary sensibilities, but Cornwallis wasn’t alone. Nor were the English. It was a nasty time.
We should be able to honour Cornwallis for his accomplishments while acknowledging not everything he did was honour-worthy.
Which is true of most of us.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Peter Kelly: The joke’s on us… still
Peter Kelly has become the journalistic gift that keeps on giving, our local, 21st century version of those famous “Franco-is-still-dead” Saturday Night Live sketches from the mid-1970s.
Breaking News just in. Peter Kelly is still the mayor.
And will be for at least another year. If not for life. And perhaps after death…
So is it time—as the mayor’s defenders (and there are, inexplicably, still too many of them) would argue—to get over it? Or is it past time, as the columnist spinners, Facebook fulminators, talk-show talkers and letters-to-the-editor writers insist, to get on with getting him gone?
None of this would likely even be a matter for discussion today if the mayor—when the news broke in February he was up to his eyeballs in a City Charter-violating decision to secretly front cash to a concert promoter whose shows were so singularly unsuccessful he couldn’t pay it back—had acknowledged his wrongdoing and apologized.
Peter Kelly
I blew it. I got so caught up in competing with Moncton for big concerts I went too far. I was sure the concerts would be a success, the advances would be paid back and we would all benefit. But I violated the Charter and kept council in the dark. I was wrong. I’ve learned my lesson. I apologize.
Genuine mayoral apologies being as common as common sense at a city council meeting, of course, that didn’t happen.
And Concertgate has assumed a larger-than life of its own, puffed up beyond bursting after each new mealy-mouthed, weasel-worded non-apology from the mayor.
In the last week alone, Kelly has faced—and faced down: the embarrassing council vote on calling in the cops to investigate his actions; the spectacle of an ex-cop personally filing a criminal complaint against him; the slap-in-the-face of a retired provincial auditor-general publicly asking him to resign; the salt-in-the-wound declaration by the I-don’t-owe-the-city-a-penny concert promoter that the mayor was a “professional;” and, of course, the modern ignominy of a “Peter Kelly—Resign Now” Facebook group.
This still in… Peter Kelly is still the mayor.
The real joke will be if we have to keep saying that after the October 2012 mayoral election.
It just won’t be funny.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
The real crime of Concertgate
Was it criminal? That seems to have become the question.
It’s the wrong question.
Last week’s 96-page auditor general’s report into the great concert fiasco-fandangle dissected and bisected the ever escalating series of high-level handouts that rambled merrily along—unchecked and in secret—from one faux-successful Common concert to the next fluff-the-numbers extravaganza to, oops, there goes $359,000…
The auditor general’s most damning conclusion was that the mayor, the city’s acting chief administrator and the head of the Metro Centre all made “inappropriate” decisions that violated the city’s Charter and/or common sense and—worse—knew or should have known better.
Were their actions criminal?
By week’s end, the criminality question seemed so pervasive even the auditor general mused “it would be prudent for me to seek advice” on possible charges.
There’s no question the three acted inappropriately, but it seems clear they didn’t do so for personal gain. They got caught up in what the report calls an “overwhelming desire” to match Moncton’s success as a concert venue and made some wrong-headed—wrong—decisions as a result.
In the unlikely event they were to be charged, it’s even less likely they’d be convicted.
If we want retribution/satisfaction, we need to look elsewhere.
Wayne Anstey, the city’s acting CAO, did the honourable thing and resigned last spring.
Scott Ferguson, the head of Trade Centre Limited, accepted personal responsibility, promised to do better and got a vote of confidence from his boss, provincial minister Percy Paris.
Peter Kelly? Well, the mayor did what he does best. Evaded personal responsibility with bafflegab and bluster.
His own official response began with a beside-the-point civics lesson on the role the auditor general plays in helping council be “accountable for the stewardship of public funds… I support and will continue to support this important function.” And blah blah. Ending with “I fully accept the recommendations,” without ever acknowledging—or apologizing for—his central role in making those recommendations necessary.
That may not be criminal. It probably isn’t. But it’s a political crime worthy of electoral defeat. The next municipal election is in just over a year. Let’s hope there’s a worthy alternative this time. And that we vote and deliver the verdict that really counts.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Hypocrisy, patronage and the cleansing power of transparency
Michel Samson is right on both counts. The Liberal MLA is right to acknowledge that last week’s collection of NDP appointees to various provincial agencies, boards and commissions is clearly a well qualified lot.
But he is right too to point out the unbecoming hypocrisy of a government that—while in opposition—railed so righteously against patronage picks.
Last week’s 16 rubber-stamped, Grade-A choices include a former federal NDP MP, a former provincial NDP MLA, a former provincial NDP candidate, the father of a current NDP cabinet minister and a party donor. The government, Samson noted, had already appointed another former NDP MLA and the son of a former provincial and national leader to significant positions too.
But interestingly, neither Samson nor Chris D’Entremont—a Tory member of the Human Resources Committee, who also tut-tutted the NDP’s hypocrisy—appear to want the process changed.
Someday, they said without saying, it may be their turn to reward friends and punish enemies, and they don’t want their own plum-proffering proscribed. (Perhaps the real reason the NDP opposed the system in opposition was that, at the time, they couldn’t imagine becoming the government…)
Our appointments process is far better than it used to be—how could it not?—but it can still be improved.
These days, if you apply for any of dozens of now-publicly-advertised positions—from the Agricultural Marshlands Conservation Commission to the Crane Operators Appeal Board—your application is first vetted by a non-partisan committee of civil servants and lay appointees.
The names of those chosen to do the choosing are published on the government’s website.
Transparent.
Once the vetters come up with their list of qualified candidates, it is passed on to the minister responsible who gets to make the final choice.
Accountable.
But we never get to decide for ourselves if the minister has chosen the best qualified candidate because the other names on the short list aren’t made public.
Which is neither transparent nor accountable.
It would be a small change but making those names public would give us the information we need to make up our own minds about whether the best qualified candidate got the position.
Transparent. And accountable.
Copyright 2011 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.