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For more than 40 years, I’ve been writing about the Halifax Chronicle Herald, its predecessors and successors—including its oddly-named and ill-fated recent owner, Saltwire. In 1981, in the aftermath of a failed attempt to unionize the newsroom, I wrote this feature about the paper and its role in Nova Scotia life and politics. That story’s last line — “Journalists come and journalists go, but the Halifax Herald goes on forever” — now sadly seems dated.

I’ve written plenty of stories, features and columns about “the paper Nova Scotians love to hate” since then. Here’s a sampling:

The Publisher’s Daughter

After nearly a decade of self-imposed exile, Heather Dennis has returned to her family’s newspaper business with plans to turn the Mail-Star into a newspaper you’ll want to read. Her supporters say she’s “a breath of fresh air.” Her detractors wish she’d go away and leave them alone.

(Cities, 1988)

Victims of the Herald

Halifax Herald staff reductions result in 24 jobs lost, 24 lives disrupted. But their pain is only the beginning of the pain for the community.

(The Coast, March 2009)

What would Graham say?

As a bitter strike at Atlantic Canada’s largest and most storied daily newspaper heads into its second year, both sides frequently invoke the memory of the Halifax Chronicle Herald’s late publisher to justify their competing arguments. But the more important question now is, will Graham Dennis’s 170-year-old newspaper even be around for anyone to remember by the time this strike ends… if it ever does?

(Atlantic Business Magazine, 2017)

Can Mark Lever succeed where smarter, more experienced minds have failed? No

(Halifax Examiner, April 17, 2017)

The Chronicle Herald strike meets the ‘final option’

(Halifax Examiner, July 17, 2017)

The Herald strike ends, how long will the bitterness linger?

(Halifax Examiner, September 11, 2017)

The Gospel according to Mark (Lever)

(Halifax Examiner, July 16, 2018)

In 1978, when I was a young freelance magazine writer, Financial Post Magazine assigned me to profile Brian Mulroney. Two years earlier, Mulroney had lost his bid to lead Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party to Joe Clark and had then taken a very different job as president of Iron Ore Canada. Financial Post editors wanted me to find out what it was like to switch high-profile careers in mid-career as Mulroney had done. What followed was one of the strangest experiences of my journalism career. The story was later documented by author John Sawatsky...

(From Mulroney: The Politics of Ambition by John Sawatsky, published by MacFarlane, Walter & Ross, 1991.)

Later that spring, the Globe and Mail’s evaluation [that Mulroney’s public words of support for Joe Clark were not to be trusted] was borne out in a shockingly public manner. No matter how badly Mulroney trashed Clark in private, so far none of his bad-mouthing had ever gotten into print — for which he could thank the Montreal media, who listened to his Ritz-Carlton rants without reporting them. But all that changed in April of 1978 when Ottawa freelance journalist Stephen Kimber interviewed Mulroney on behalf of the Financial Post’s monthly, the Financial Post Magazine.

Kimber was putting together a feature profile on Mulroney. What particularly interested him was how Mulroney had switched professions in mid-career and come out on top in the business world. So, it was business and not politics that, by pre-arrangement, brought Kimber to the Chateau Lautier in Ottawa on April 11, where Mulroney had just emerged from a meeting. But instead of doing the interview in the hotel, as they had arranged, he invited Kimber to drive with him to Montreal. The two climbed into the back seat of Mulroney’s black Buick, with Joe Kovacevic at the wheel, and settled into the plush red velvet upholstery. While Kimber scribbled notes, Mulroney started to talk.

Ottawa was expecting Trudeau to call an election any day now, and that dearly was on Mulroney’s mind. He had hardly loosened his tie and lit up a cigarette when he started talking about Clark’s prospects in the coming campaign. “I look at the numbers, you know, and I just can’t see it,” Mulroney said. “God bless him if he can do it, but the way I look at it, Clark is going to get wiped out in Quebec. Without Quebec, there’s no way he can win the election.”

A great quote, but not the story Kimber had come to get. “The Liberals took a poll during the leadership convention, and it showed that with me as leader, there were only two safe Liberals on the whole island of Montreal, Trudeau and Bryce Mackasey.” Mulroney would not get off politics.

Then he launched into a description of how the “private little club” — as he called the Tory caucus in Ottawa — had conspired against him during the leadership race. On and on he went with graphic descriptions of how they had screwed him at every turn. “I can still remember after the first ballot Jim Gillies and Heward Grafftey came over and they were standing in front of me — Heward’s eyes bulging right out of his head — and they were screaming at the top of their lungs that for the good of the party I had to go to Clark. Here I was, the number two candidate, and they were telling me I had to go for number three.” Mulroney kept pouring it on while Kimber, now a somewhat frustrated note-taker, tried to squeeze in the odd question.

“You know what they called me?” Mulroney asked rhetorically. “Now, this is the unkindest cut. They said I was the candidate of big money, that I was trying to buy the leadership. I had to laugh.” He added: “It wasn’t an easy thing to go through. You work so hard, and you come so close only to have all these people gang up on you for no reason. I mean, I haven’t been a criminal or anything. If my father had been alive, all that stuff about being the money candidate would have given him a good laugh. We were broke all our lives. Anything that I’ve gotten in life, I’ve worked damned hard for.”

Once again, he repeated his well-worn claim that he was finished with politics. “I know you shouldn’t say that, but that is my decision. I can’t conceive of any circumstances that would change my mind.”

From there, he started unloading directly onto Clark, saying he himself had not run for the leadership because he needed a house and a job — a venomous dig at Clark for not having a career outside politics and for having moved into Stornoway from a tiny Ottawa apartment. “I ran because the Conservative Party needed a winner,” he added. The acid test for Clark, he declared, would be the outcome of the next election.

“Then we’ll see who’s a winner and who’s a loser.”

Why was Mulroney picking this particular moment to bare his soul to a journalist he had never met before? By now the shock of René Levesque’s victory was wearing off and the public was becoming accustomed to a separatist government in Quebec. Voters were once again starting to loathe Pierre Trudeau more than they feared Quebec sovereignty — all of which had resurrected Clark’s political standing, but he still looked like a long shot.

Another part of the reason may have been magazine lead times. Kimber’s article would not hit the stands until after a late-May election. If Clark did as badly as Mulroney figured he would, Mulroney would appear prescient in the aftermath of defeat. That was the best sense Kimber could make of it. Only later did he learn from other journalists that slamming Clark was a regular ritual for him. Actually, Mulroney’s interview was more a visceral reflex than a calculated political plot.

It was dark by the time the car reached Mulroney’s house in Westmount. Mila was home, but she was preparing to go to the symphony. Once she was gone, the Swedish housekeeper put the kids to bed, then served Mulroney and Kimber dinner while Mulroney continued venting his frustrations. “If Joe Clark wins the election, he said, tapping his plate with a fork, “I’ll eat this plate. I mean, let’s look at it. Can you see any way that he can win? Any way at all?” Through it all, Kimber scrawled notes, even during dinner.

After the meal they moved into the living room and Mulroney poured a drink for Kimber but not for himself. Kimber had noticed that he had not had a drop the entire time. Mulroney explained that he had quit drinking a while back. (In fact, this was a brief, failed attempt to go on the wagon. Not long after the Kimber interview, he was drinking as much as ever.) Every word he uttered was perfectly sober.

“The PQ wouldn’t have won that election if I was the leader,” he said. “It’s true. The Quebec people were looking for an alternative to a profoundly unpopular provincial government. I would have given them that alternative. It’s all in my platform. I can show it to you. You know who would have been the provincial Tory leader if I had been elected?” He paused for dramatic effect. “Claude Ryan, that’s who… He would have taken the job … I’m sure of it. Look at the Union Nationale and how they came back to life. With [Rodriguel Biron, for Christ’s sake. From zero to eleven seats. Imagine what would have happened if there’d been a Tory party in Quebec with a credible leader.”

After a moment, he checked himself. “Look, change that about how if I was leader the PQ victory wouldn’t have happened. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. It’s just that the people needed a provincial federalist alternative, and the Conservative Party didn’t provide one.”

As much as Kimber had come for a business story, he was leaving with a political story, and a pretty hot one at that. However, a lot would change before the article appeared in the magazine’s June issue. The spring election that seemed like a sure thing never happened. Pierre Trudeau decided to postpone the vote despite pleadings from his backroom advisers, giving the resurging Joe Clark more time to recover in the polls, and a much better shot at winning. Realizing how bad his words would now look, Mulroney phoned Kimber in Ottawa a month later to see if he could postpone the article until after the election, saying that they could then talk again and this time he would be more open. But the Financial Post said no. Shortly before publication date, in a last attempt at damage control, Mulroney tracked Kimber down on vacation at his mother-in-law’s place in New York. “Did I seem bitter?” he asked. “I didn’t mean to seem bitter. Maybe we should talk about this some more.” But it was too late.

“After Joe, Who?” read the headline of the article, which answered its own question in smaller type below: “Brian Mulroney, perhaps. He’s bitter as hell, but he does say he’s only 39.” In the text, Kimber said that talking to Mulroney about the leadership convention was “like scraping sandpaper over an exposed nerve.”

During the following storm, Mulroney categorically denied making the statements quoted in the article. In fact, he went a step further and in an interview with the Montreal Star denied ever meeting Kimber. It was an astonishing claim. Yet whether anybody believed him did not matter as much as the fact that it gave him an escape. If anybody accused him of disloyalty, he had only to disown the statements. Then his accuser had to either back off or prove him a liar, which was difficult. It was a crude but effective tactic, yet it almost backfired because Mulroney had forgotten one detail that undermined his whole cover-up.

After spending the evening in Mulroney’s house in Montreal, Kimber had suddenly realized he didn’t have enough money to get back home. Mulroney had kindly come to the rescue, calling the airport and booking him on the last plane to Ottawa and putting the ticket on his own credit card. Kimber later reimbursed Mulroney, and that transaction formed irrefutable evidence that they had met.

The Montreal Star, which was checking out Mulroney’s denial that he had ever met Kimber, asked him to produce the documentary proof. But luckily for Mulroney, before Kimber could do so, the Star went on a long strike and the story died.

Mulroney would later shift his defence to the claim that the interview was off the record and that Kimber had broken a confidence, an allegation Kimber strongly denied, citing the fact he had been taking notes the whole time, including at the dinner table.

The Kimber article had finally revealed to the world just how much the leadership loss continued to torment Mulroney. He would continue to vehemently deny that he was bitter, but nobody believed him anymore. From then on, when Tories talked about Mulroney, they always mentioned the magazine article. It certainly confirmed all the rumours that had reached the ears of Joe Clark. Although Clark said nothing in public, their official relationship, already formal, became frostier still.

You can read the original Financial Post article here.

***

Although that was my only face-to-face encounter with Mulroney, I did write about him occasionally as a columnist. Here are a few of those

Mulroney doth protest way too much (Rabble, 2008)

Mulroney and the Money (Daily News, 2007)

The Mulroney Institute, St. Francis Xavier University, and the honorary arms dealers (Halifax Examiner, 2017)

Mulroney and the Media… old columns (Daily News 2000-2007)

Our columnist says he’s had a great run, and some days he wants to continue doing this forever. But it’s time.

For more years than I care to count, I have been professionally — and often personally — “shocked and appalled” on a regular basis about the goings on going on in our world. Luckily, I’ve had the opportunity to vent my anger with words on paper, virtual and otherwise, instead of just sputtering my frustrations into my morning bowl of Bran Buds.

Since the 1980s, I’ve written weekly or monthly columns for all manner of media no longer among us — Halifax Magazine, Cities Magazine, The Halifax Daily News, the Optipress chain of weekly newspapers, The Daily News again and Metro Halifax — as well as a few outlets, I’m happy to say, that continue to survive and flourish, perhaps in spite of me, like Atlantic Business Magazine and the Halifax Examiner.

Over the years, I’ve quit on principle or been fired for cause, depending on whether you believe me or the Asper family. I’ve had publications shutter their doors while I was writing a “brilliant” column that never saw the light of day. (Trust me on that.) And I’ve been invited for coffee by editors who informed me their bosses “had decided to go in a different direction,” and so, they no longer required my columns. But thank you for your service.

I’ve had a great run. Some days, I want to keep doing this forever. But it’s time.

I reached out to Examiner Editor Tim Bousquet early in January — “Wondering if you have time for a coffee in the next few weeks?” — but then he tested positive for COVID and, well, then this, and then that… we didn’t meet until early February.

In the meanwhile, I kept trying to write one “last” goodbye column, but every week, it seemed there was something more, and even more outrageous to be shocked and appalled about:

And don’t get me started on even more recent events — the provincial government’s unilateral decision to impose a funding “agreement” on provincial universities; Tory Premier Houston’s “unfortunate” oopsy … “poor choice of words” in describing an historic record snowfall in Cape Breton as a “PR issue;” provincial Liberal leader Zach Churchill’s pretend promise (elect him and see) to cut the HST… and, well, choose your own reason to be shocked and appalled.

Rick Howe, the late, great radio talk show host, had it exactly right. “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

But I regress. Again.

It’s time.

There are other stories I want to tell. A couple of novels I still want to write. And then there’s still teaching.

It’s time.

I’ve had a great run. I’ve been privileged to have the opportunity to express my opinions in public and lucky to work with many great editors and publications, including, most recently, Tim and the crew at the Examiner.

That began in the depths of the autumn of 2016. I’d just had my “thank you for your service, goodbye and good luck” coffee with the editor of Metro Halifaxthe weekday giveaway tabloid that would itself disappear three years later.

A few hours after my final column appeared, Tim contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in writing for the Examiner.

I was.

It wasn’t time. I wasn’t ready to stop. Not then.

More importantly, I’d long been a fan of Tim’s work, first his take-no-prisoners, topple-a-mayor investigative work as news editor for The Coast and then, for the previous two years, as the owner, editor and publisher of the Halifax Examiner, his self-described “independent, adversarial news site devoted to holding the powerful accountable.”

Tim has walked that talk, and given me and others the freedom and encouragement to do the same.

Seven years and 350 columns later, it is now time.

Thank you for reading.

-30-

***

A version of this column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner

To read the Examiner, please subscribe.

An internal working group of bureaucrats who benefit from “a culture of disregard for access and privacy laws” are reviewing Nova Scotia’s freedom of information system. What can go wrong?

Tricia Ralph is Nova Scotia’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, the person best positioned to know what’s wrong with our failed and flailing freedom of information system — and how best to fix it.

Last week, she dropped a scathing 48-page submission into the laps of the internal working group of government bureaucrats appointed by the Houston government to review the province’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (passed 1993, proclaimed 1994, sort-of amended in 1999, ignored for much of the next 24 years).

The real problem with the review is encapsulated in that second paragraph: “internal working group” … “appointed by the Houston government.”ous

Ralph, despite her background and expertise, isn’t part of that working group, either as a member or advisor. Neither is anyone else who might have an interest in government transparency and public accountability — people, say, like the rest of us.

Instead, the group is made up of “employees from the Department of Justice’s Policy and Information Management and Legal Services divisions and the departments of Service Nova Scotia and Cybersecurity and Digital Solutions.”

In other words, the same butt-covering bureaucrats who have created and continue to benefit from what the information commissioner calls “a culture of disregard for access and privacy laws, and for the expertise and work of the OIPC [Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner] in its mandate to ensure those laws are upheld.”

Ralph and the rest of us, of course, are welcome to make submissions to this working group, just as we are free to spit into the wind for all the good it will do.

Early in her submission, Ralph makes a telling point about the process.

The Terms of Reference for the Legislative Review do not indicate that stakeholder submissions will be made public. If stakeholder submissions are kept confidential, then the OIPC … and other stakeholders will lose the ability to provide context to the submissions of others.

The OIPC believes that any amendments to Nova Scotia’s access and privacy laws will benefit when the submissions of those who participate in the Legislative Review are subject to scrutiny from all… The OIPC encourages the Internal Working Group to make public all submissions (subject to any privacy concerns) as well as its findings and recommendations, so that there is an opportunity to respond.

Although the working group has received 100 submissions, we only know about the few submitters who have chosen to make them public, like the Halifax-based Centre for Law and Democracy, which “works internationally to promote those human rights which it deems to be foundational for democracy, including access to information.”

Interestingly, the centre says it offered to meet with the working group to discuss its recommendation-packed 23-page submission.

“The head of the committee refused to meet.”

Even just making all those submissions public would allow us as citizens to measure what ultimately comes out of this review process with what went into it — if anything ever comes out of any of it.

This is Nova Scotia, after all, the province where reviews go to die. And where premiers routinely lie about their election campaign promises of transparency and accountability.

There is not much that is new in Ralph’s submission; not much you — or the internal review committee — couldn’t have found in a Google search of previously released reports (Here, here) Ralph and her predecessor, Catherine Tully, submitted to the government.

Submitted, dismissed, ignored…

But let’s review, once more for the record and for old time’s sake, some of what needs/has needed for far too long to happen to bring our freedom of information laws and process into at least the late 20th century:

  • Make government information public by default, in fact as in law, except in limited, clearly defined circumstances.
  • Make the information commissioner an officer of the legislature rather than a creature of whatever government happens to be in power.
  • Give the information commissioner order-making power. In 2022-23, public bodies only accepted the commissioner’s decisions 65 percent of the time.
  • Give the information commissioner the budget to do her job. There is currently a four-year backlog (!) of requests to review.
  • Give government departments and agencies the resources — and the direction — to respond to access requests in a timely manner.

Beyond those specifics, there is also this, from Ralph’s submission:

The problems plaguing access to information and protection of privacy in Nova Scotia are not solely legislative ones.

There are two main others: cultural and leadership practices that disregard the public’s presumptive right to public body information, and insufficient resources allocated to the access and privacy regime…

In the reviews that my office conducts, we frequently see decisions that disregard the public’s presumptive right to all public body information, subject only to the limited and specific exemptions.

Our ability is further hindered by many public bodies’ approaches to dealing with my office when we conduct reviews of their decisions to withhold information. My office puts a substantial amount of time and effort into helping public bodies understand their legal obligations and explaining to them how and why the laws mean they can or cannot withhold information… Many times, it seems as though public bodies’ engagement with us is more performative than meaningful. I say this because public bodies continue to regularly advance arguments that have long been rejected. They do not address, consider, or rebut our comprehensive analyses, opinions, and recommendations. This results in applicants not receiving transparent or justifiable reasons for why public bodies are withholding information. This is frustrating for me and my staff, but the people who lose out the most in this situation are Nova Scotians. 

“My primary request for this legislative review is a simple one,” Ralph says in the final paragraph of a news release accompanying her submission: “Please let me and my office do our jobs.”

The working group’s report is expected to be delivered to the minister of justice in the spring of 2025 — on the eve of a provincial election. The minister will then find ways to “consider it carefully” until the election is safely in the rearview. If the government is re-elected, the report will be yesterday’s news — filed and forgotten. If another party wins, it will owe no allegiance to a report it didn’t commission.

And the universe will unfold as it always has.

***

A version of this column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner

To read the latest column, please subscribe.

Kaitlin Saxton

Former PC leader Jamie Baillie was quick to categorically deny — through his spokesperson — that he’d ever assaulted a former aide. But he is still silent — through his spokesperson — about whether he forced her to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

The story had already been published by the time Parker Donham’s email landed in Examiner reporter Jennifer Henderson’s mailbox at 7:10 am on Tuesday, January 23.

Henderson’s piece that day had quoted court documents filed as “part of a constitutional challenge launched by Cumberland North MLA Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin against a Progressive Conservative motion threatening to expel her from the legislature.”

The backstory to all this dates back a year. Or maybe even more. In 2021, Smith-McCrossin was booted out of the Tory caucus for supporting a blockade at the New Brunswick border protesting COVID policy.(In her own affidavit, Smith-McCrossin denied being present or involved in the border blockade, although she did attend a brief protest 50 km away the day before, “expressing displeasure with the effect the border restrictions were having on the lives of my constituents economically.”)*

So, it’s complicated. It always is in Nova Scotia.

In any event, Smith-McCrossin, now an independent MLA, introduced a private member’s bill in March 2023, essentially banning non-disclosure agreements, those behind-closed-doors deals that are often used to silence victims of sexual assault and harassment.

Smith-McCrossin’s motivation, she said, was “personal.” In the House, she talked about her late former constituency assistant, Kaitlin Saxton, who’d also previously worked as a communications officer in the provincial Progressive Conservative caucus office.

Saxton had resigned in 2018 around the same time that then-leader Jamie Baillie was forced to resign because of “allegations of inappropriate behaviour,” including sexual harassment involving a then-unidentified female staff member.

According to Smith-McCrossin, Saxton “was coerced into signing an NDA with the Progressive Conservative caucus” at the time of her resignation. She tabled an unsigned version of the alleged NDA in the House of Assembly.

After which, all hell broke loose. The premier’s office issued a statement:

We can confirm [neither] the caucus nor the PC party ever had an individual sign an NDA with respect to this matter. I can also confirm the document tabled in the legislature by Elizabeth is not a document that was prepared for or by, nor was it entered into by the PC Party, PC Caucus, PC Party President, or PC Party interim leader or current leader.

Hold all those many identities in your head. Who’s missing?

A few days later, Karla McFarlane, the interim PC leader at the time the alleged NDA was signed, introduced her own motion to kick Smith-McCrossin out of the legislative until — and unless — she retracted her description of the “alleged non-disclosure agreement” as being between Saxton and the PC caucus and, oh yes, apologized for ever having suggested as much.

But before McFarlane’s motion could be debated, Premier Tim Houston took the huff out of the issue, declaring a victory known only to him and announcing that McFarlane’s motion wouldn’t go forward.

Except… it has never been withdrawn.

This brings us to Smith-McCrossin’s constitutional challenge, which names both McFarlane and Attorney General Brad Johns.

“At issue,” wrote Henderson in her article, “is the alleged existence of a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that Kait Saxton signed.”

Since Saxton isn’t around to speak for herself — she died of a brain hemorrhage in June 2022 at the age of 33 — Smith-McCrossin’s court filings include an affidavit from Saxton’s parents, Mike and Kathy Saxton.

“Allegations contained in the Jan. 16 affidavit from the Saxtons,” Henderson notes carefully,
“reveal more about what they knew (and didn’t know) about their daughter’s troubles.”

Her parents do claim — and say they submitted documents to McCrossin’s lawyer to support the allegation — that Kait hired lawyer John Rafferty, counsel to Burchell McDougall LLP …

… to handle her claims against Jamie Baillie and the Progressive Conservative Party of Nova Scotia. I understand that both matters settled. In our possession, we have unsigned minutes of settlement and mutual release between Kait Saxton and Jamie Baillie, which is eight pages long.

Their affidavit also makes other allegations, including this:

While we never learned all the details from Kait, we did eventually learn that she was the victim of some sort of sexual assault and battery by Jamie Baillie.

It is not clear from the affidavit how and from whom the Saxtons learned about the alleged assault, but in her article, Henderson makes the important point that “none of the allegations contained in the recently filed documents have been tested in court.”

OK, that’s the backstory and the front story.

Which brings us to Parker Donham. The virtual ink was barely dry on Henderson’s article when Donham — a former journalist, sometime PR person and blogger — fired off an email with the subject line, “Jamie Baillie – URGENT:”

Hi Jennifer,

I have been helping Jamie Baillie respond to the false and defamatory
statements contained in the Saxton’s [sic] affidavit. I’m disappointed that
you made no effort to seek comment from Jamie about such a salacious
statement before publishing. Had you done so, we would have supplied the
following:

“A spokesperson for Mr. Baillie categorically denied the allegation
contained in an affidavit by Michael and Kathryn Saxton. ‘There was
absolutely no assault of any kind,’ the spokesperson said.”

Please insert this high in your story.


Parker

Uh… There’s a backstory here too.

Last spring, when that all hell was breaking loose, and every Tory everywhere was denying ever knowing anything about any NDA — what’s an NDA? — one person steadfastly refused to comment.

Jamie Baillie.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t asked to comment. In fact, my colleague, Jennifer Henderson, emailed him at the time:

Jennifer Henderson:  Did you ever sign any type of non-disclosure agreement with Kait Saxton? And I’m not talking about the unsigned, undated document Ms. Smith-McCrossin produced. I’m talking about whether YOU signed any non-disclosure agreement with Kait.

Jamie Baillie: I do not make a habit of commenting on matters before the House and will not start now.

Coincidentally, I had tried a slightly different tack, asking Baillie, via Messenger, “whether you had any involvement in this matter during or after your time as PC leader?”

Different question. Same answer.

I’m guessing that that’s what Baillie also said to Saltwire reporter John McPhee — and other journalists — who contacted him at the time.

So, it’s perhaps not surprising that Henderson and other reporters didn’t rush to the phones this time seeking yet another non-responsive “I do not make a habit of commenting on matters before the House and will not start now” response to serious questions about Baillie’s personal conduct. (Donham’s response, it should be noted, was added to Henderson’s article — and high in the story.)

That said, and given Donham’s self-described role as Baillie’s spokesperson and given too that Smith-McCrossin’s legal challenge is about the alleged existence of that NDA, I reached out to Donham by email the day after his email to Jennifer:

Hi Parker, 

I’m following up on your spokesperson’s response to the assault allegations about Jamie Baillie with a related question. 

Does Mr. Baillie also categorically deny allegations he had any involvement of any sort in any discussions concerning a non-disclosure agreement involving Kait Saxton?

Thanks.

It took close to two days and a reminder email, but Donham finally responded on Thursday, the 26th.

Hi Stephen,

Jamie has said everything he has to say about this, and has nothing to add.

Regards,

Parker

So there you have it.

With luck, Smith-McCrossin’s lawyer will eventually be able to question lawyer John Rafferty about the supposed settlement between Kait Saxton and Baillie and the PCs and whether it included a non-disclosure agreement.

Or question Baillie himself under oath.

That may — or may not — answer an even more important question.

Why did the Houston government back away from its initial support of an April 2022 NDP private member’s bill to restrict the use of such NDAs, which had been modelled on legislation already passed in California as well as a law in Prince Edward Island?

At the time, NDP leader Claudia Chender said she had had “discussions with the department of justice and status of women, and the Houston government is looking at the issue and may introduce legislation in the fall.”

It didn’t happen. Instead, six months later, Tim Houston declared his government’s disinterest, even disdain for anti-NDA legislation. “There’s always individual circumstances as to how [NDAs] come about, how they’re signed, what they mean, what the wording is,” he told reporters. “I’m not aware of situations where people would be forced to enter into these.”

Perhaps that’s because he isn’t listening, or because he doesn’t want to know.

— *Updated Feb 3.

***

A version of this column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner

To read the latest column, please subscribe.

That’s because the private utility’s more-than-well-compensated executives prioritize shareholders over customers, profits over service.

So, Nova Scotia Power Inc. wants its customers — which is to say, us — to foot the remaining $26.4 million “restoration costs” from September 2022’s “unprecedented weather event,” otherwise known as Hurricane Fiona.

First, it’s worth noting that we’re already on the hook for $89.5 million in restoration costs the power company was able to designate as Property, Plant and Equipment — capital — which means it didn’t have to go, cap in hand, to the province’s utility and review board to get approval to charge that back to us. Plus interest, of course.

The remaining $26.4 million is designated Operating, Maintenance and General (OM&G), so the company needs the blessing of the utility board to tack it onto our bills.

So, big picture, $114 million more.

OMG without the &…

Hurricane Fiona, as NSP officials were quick to remind the UARB in their Application for Deferral of Hurricane Fiona Costs

… brought an extended period of extreme winds and heavy rain … with sustained hurricane-force winds of over 100 kilometres per hour and peak gusts of approximately 160 kilometres per hour. The storm caused widespread damage to the Nova Scotia Power Inc. transmission and distribution system and, at the height of the storm, approximately 415,000 customers lost power…

A bad storm, yes. Absolutely.

Unprecedented? Hardly.

Unpredictable in these times? Not at all.

Big picture again.

It was nearly 50 years ago, in 1975, that an American geochemist named Wallace Broeker introduced the phrases “climatic change” and “global warming” into our lexicon. A decade before that, writers like Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) and Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire, 1968) were already warning we were on our way to environmental hell if we didn’t change our ways.

In 1992, 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists issued a “Warning to Humanity:”

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

In spite of that, one year later, Nova Scotia’s not-short-lived-enough Donald Cameron Tory government — in an act of environmental, political and economic stupidity — handed Nova Scotia’s publicly owned electrical utility back to the private sector and essentially told its shareholders to treat the “regulated” private utility as their own personal ATM.

Thanks to guaranteed annual returns — 8.75 to 9.25 percent return on equity — they’ve done exactly that for more than 30 years.

Nova Scotia Power’s more-than-well-compensated executives have continuously prioritized shareholders over customers, profits over service. The results have been inevitable.

For six years running — from 2016 to 2022 — Nova Scotia Power failed to meet even half of the UARB’s basic reliability and customer service performance targets.

In August 2023, the UARB belatedly fined the company $750,000 for 2022 after previously fining it $350,000, which had resulted in no change in behaviour.

The board made clear its displeasure:

As previously stated by the Board, customers are entitled to receive an appropriate level of service for the rates and fees they are charged by the utility. It is not acceptable that non-compliance of the performance standards has become a normal occurrence. [emphasis added]

In its defence, Nova Scotia Power made the case that Hurricane Fiona — not to forget all that climate change stuff (who could have predicted?) — was to blame for the company’s abysmal failure to meet targets, especially for restoring power to customers.

According to the power company’s own data, the number of days from first reported outrage to full restoration across Nova Scotia after Fiona ranged from 14.41 days on the Eastern Shore to 16.81 days in the province’s Northeast.

That means that, in every region of the province, it took at least two weeks from outages beginning to ending. The average restoration time was more than four days!

The UARB didn’t completely buy into the power company’s climate-change-devil-made-me-do-it defence:

While these are relevant circumstances, the Board also recognizes that one of the consequences of our urgent need to rapidly decarbonize, in the effort to stave off even more dire climatic changes, is an increasing trend towards electrification. This means that despite the changing climate, the need for a reliable electrical grid is at least as important (and likely more important) than ever. If more frequent and damaging storms are becoming the ‘new normal’, NS Power needs to ensure that its performance, not just its investment plans, keeps up with these changes…

The increasing intensity, severity, and frequency of adverse weather events are not new phenomena… It is incumbent upon NS Power to appropriately address the challenges of climate change and adverse weather events. 

It will be interesting to see — if the company fails to meet its targets again this year — whether the UARB’s displeasure translates into a willingness to impose the Houston government’s recently legislated maximum $ 25 million penalty on Nova Scotia Power.

Don’t hold your breath.

The only way to convince NSP’s shareholders to convince NSP’s executive to prioritize service is to suspend shareholders’ guaranteed returns (and executive bonuses) until the company actually meets those reliability and customer service targets.

Don’t hold your breath on that one either.

The UARB hearing into NSP’s application will. be what’s known as a “paper hearing.” You have until February 2, 2024, to make written comments at board@novascotia.ca.

***

A version of this column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner

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Commissioner Michael MacDonald, chair, leaves the stage after delivering the Mass Casualty Commission inquiry’s final report into the mass murders in rural Nova Scotia in Truro, N.S., on Thursday, March 30, 2023.

The problem begins with the self-serving decision by Ottawa and the province to make the committee that’s supposed to be publicly accountable for the implementation of the commission’s report operate behind closed doors. And then it gets worse.

Something about this does not compute.

Let’s start at the end of the beginning.

On March 30, 2023, the Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission — after listening to 230 witnesses over 76 days of public sessions — delivered its double-doorstopper 2,964-page report into the rampage that led up to the murders of 22 Nova Scotians and one unborn child on April 18 and 19, 2020.

The commissioners detailed 130 recommendations, 70 of them aimed at police agencies, especially the RCMP, whose abysmal failures before, during and after the massacre the commission had eviscerated in excruciating detail.

But one of its most important recommendations was Number 125 — that Ottawa and the Nova Scotia government jointly establish an “implementation and accountability body” to make sure the other 129 recommendations didn’t end up on some shelf somewhere gathering cobwebs. Among its mandates: to monitor the implementation of those recommendations and “provide public information about the process of implementing the recommendations [and] public updates on progress on the implementation plan every three months and publish an annual report on the status of implementation of each recommendation.”

What made Recommendation 125 so critical is the track record of the players, especially the RCMP, when it comes to responding to the recommendations in other reports.

As the Canadian Press noted in a report:

During a[n MCC]hearing in September 2022, the inquiry heard from a former assistant commissioner of the RCMP who said the police force has a history of ignoring calls for change. Cal Corley said the RCMP has long resisted outside advice because of its deep-rooted paramilitary culture, lack of diverse views and dearth of what he called “transformational leadership.”

“It’s been an organization that’s been historically very slow to adapt to its external environment,” Corley said. “There’s an institutional culture that has been rather closed for many years.”

The former senior Mountie, who also served as head of the Canadian Police College, cited a 2017 study that included a 41-page list of recommendations for change that he said were largely ignored by the RCMP.

Fast forward to May 31. The federal and provincial governments followed through on the recommendation to establish the accountability committee and named retired judge Linda Lee Oland as its founding chair.

Here is, in retrospect, the key sentence in their joint news release: “Governments will work closely with her to finalize the funding and terms of reference to establish the monitoring body.”

We’ll come back to those terms of reference.

Over the summer, the chair — in consultation with all the players, including governments, Mounties, gender-based violence advocates and families of the victims — came up with a proposed list of members of the “Implementation and Mutual Accountability Body.” So many family members of victims were keen to participate that a decision was made that seven of them would serve in rotation in the two slots reserved for “those most affected by the mass casualty.”

The committee held its first official meeting on September 26 and 27. It later released what it called a “meeting summary,” which summarized almost nothing of substance for which anyone could be held accountable.

The Government of Nova Scotia, for example, presented “an update on work undertaken since the release of the MCC Final Report in four areas: community safety and wellbeing, public health, policing, and gender-based and intimate partner violence.”

Specifics unmentioned.

The federal government “presented a high-level overview of initiatives that the Government of Canada has undertaken to date to respond to the recommendations under the themes of violence, community and policing, noting that these are merely a representation of work underway, and that there are many findings that will be unpacked in the coming months.”

Specifics, if any… un-summarized.

The RCMP’s “Director General, Strategic Implementation Team,” David Janzen, “spoke to the new sector established within the RCMP, which is dedicated to advancing complex reforms and external reviews of the RCMP.” Uh … “He spoke to the themes and sub-themes that the RCMP is using to address the recommendations, in line with the federal whole-of-government approach. To date, the focus of the work has been on in-depth ‘deep dives,’ which bring together subject matter experts from diverse areas across the country to inform the overall action plan of the RCMP.”

Yes, but … what are you doing?

At a September 28 news conference, Oland seemed to acknowledge the questions. “Everyone is well aware” previous inquires failed to bring about substantive change within the RCMP, she said, but “there is a strong desire at the table … that there will be action taken … While we may not have a stick to make governments react, we do have a role in asking what they are doing and in reporting clearly to the public so that they can judge… When we report on the progress, the public will know and react.”

Really?

Here’s the rub. While the committee is supposed to “publicly report on the initiatives that Canada and Nova Scotia are undertaking in response to the MCC Report, including a rationale for these initiatives,” what happens behind closed doors in the monitoring committee is supposed to stay behind those locked and guarded doors.

According to the committee’s own governments-written terms of reference:

In order to encourage frank and open discussion at the PMC, discussions and meeting materials are confidential and must not be disclosed to external parties without prior discussion and approval by the PMC as a whole. Sharing of information related to the PMC will be through the Secretariat.

Whose interests, do you think, are served when a governments-appointed committee to monitor and be accountable conducts its business in secret? No need to answer.

This brings us to early December 2023 when the committee held another day-and-a-half behind-closed-doors meeting. Apparently, they heard from representatives of the federal and provincial governments, as well as the RCMP who reported “on their work to implement the MCC’s recommendations.”

Apparently… Conversations are confidential.

During a post-meeting news conference, Oland was asked specifically about whether the RCMP was working toward implementing one key recommendation — that it replace its current six-and-a-half-month training program at Depot in Saskatchewan with a university-based three-year policing training program. She deflected.

“We don’t have info I can share directly,” she said. “I can say we have not heard any of the recommendations have been rejected.”

And she was quick to offer a blandly upbeat general and generic report on everyone’s progress to date in implementing the commission’s recommendations: “I don’t have any complaints. I don’t see anyone dragging their feet.”

That was December 12, 2023.

Fast forward to January 9, 2024.

When the mass casualty commission report was released last March, the RCMP brass seemed woefully unprepared to address its sweeping recommendations. Senior Mounties hadn’t even cracked the report’s executive summary or thumbed through its summary of recommendations.

The RCMP soon promised it would release what it called “an implementation strategy” and a progress report on its actions to date before the end of 2023.

It didn’t.

January 1, 2024.

January 2.

January 3.

January 4.

January 5.

January 6.

January 7.

January 8.

Finally, on January 9, 2024, the RCMP…

… issued a brief statement confirming it “was not in a position to release its action plan and strategy by the end of the calendar year as it had previously intended.”

The statement went on to say the plan would be released as soon as possible, though a deadline was not specified.

“The [Mass Casualty Commission] made it clear that the RCMP needs to take its time to get this right and properly address the recommendations,” the statement said. “To this end, the organization has been working diligently at advancing both documents, working with subject matter experts throughout the organization and across the policing community, as well as government of Canada partners.”

Commanding Officer Dennis Daley also released a message on Tuesday, saying the force had been “anxious to learn whether the work we had underway to strengthen our response to critical incidents, our collaboration with partners, and our service to communities, would align with the recommendations and vision for the future of public safety.”

Does that really sound like no one is “dragging their feet.”

Lee’s monitoring committee is supposed to release another “general public update” sometime this month.

But if Lee and her committee are not more forthcoming, not more accountable, what is the point?

Something about this does not compute.

***

A version of this column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner

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Pete’s Frootique workers on the picket line in front of the grocery store in Halifax.

Sobeys-owned Pete’s Frootique offered its workers a wage increase below even what will be the provincial minimum wage in April. And then refused to budge until a sure-to-be-embarrassing National Day of Protest shamed it into settling. Is this the best we should expect from one of the country’s largest grocery retailers — whose profits have increased by 78 percent over the past four years?

The good news is that Pete’s Frootique’s workers have a new contract.

The bad news is that it took 20 months of non-bargaining and a nearly seven-week strike by its 90 mostly minimum wage workers to finally wrench a first contract from one of the largest and most profitable grocery chains in the country.

It’s probably no coincidence either that the deal was only achieved on the eve of a planned National Day of Action to publicly shame Sobeys for its treatment of those employees.

The company should be ashamed. When the strike began, Sobeys offered the workers a measly, take-it-or-leave-it raise of five cents an hour. When the workers voted no, Sobeys shuttered its popular downtown Pete’s location to show them who was boss.

Let us consider that five cents an hour Sobeys was dangling.

Since most of Pete’s employees were only being paid the provincial minimum wage of $15 an hour, Sobeys’ offer amounted to a salary increase of 0.33 percent.

You may have noticed that consumer prices in Canada increased last year by 3.1 percent, close to 10 times what Sobey was offering. Food prices — the main source of Sobeys ever-increasing profits — increased by five to seven percent.

Five cents an hour?

Compare and contrast that with this:

The Centre for Future Work says grocers are expected to make more than $6 billion in 2023 — a new record and an increase of eight percent from last year. The new data from the institute found food retailers are now earning more than twice as much profit as they did before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here’s more company-specific cheerful news if you’re one of Sobeys’ valued investors rather than one of Pete’s under-valued employees.

Explained a cryptic but telling LinkedIn post earlier this year from Toronto-based brand consultant Iram Blajchman:

Sobeys
2023 profit $728mm
2019 profit $410mm
+78% over 4 years.

That, of course, is why shareholders reward the man who runs the company that runs Sobeys and Pete’s. Consider this January 1 update from wallmine, a financial website:

As the President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director of [Sobeys parent] Empire Co, the total compensation of Michael Medline at Empire Co is $13,035,700. 

To put that into perspective, a Pete’s Frootique worker — if they’d accepted the company’s original offer of minimum wage plus five cents — would have had to work more than 416 hours just to earn the $6,267.16 Medline pockets in just one hour.

The good news — if you like to pretend there is such — was that the Houston government recently announced Nova Scotia’s minimum wage will increase from $15 to $15.20 on April 1.

It isn’t much at all. But in real terms it meant Sobeys would have had no choice but to pay its Pete’s Frootique employees 15 cents more an hour than what it was offering when the strike began — just to reach the bottom rung of the legally mandated provincial wage floor.

Is that why the company settled?

It will also be interesting to see just how close the actual Pete’s settlement comes to enabling its workers to earn a real living wage. (As I write this on Saturday, January 6, 2024, the details of the settlement have not been made public.) My guess is that Sobeys didn’t offer the $11.50 per hour increase that would require.

As the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ most recent living wage update in September found that, in Halifax…

… the living wage rate for two adults working full-time (35 hours a week) to support two children is now $26.50. [The report] is a call for employers to take seriously the fact that if they are paying minimum wage, there is no doubt that their employees are struggling. And struggling in a major way. Not actually making ends meet in any way that would allow them to have any kind of quality of life,” [CCPA-NS director and report author Christine] Saulnier said. 

Not everyone suffers equally in our capitalist economy, of course. Some people do better than others. Much better. While Pete’s workers scrambled to (hopefully) just put food on the table and a roof over their heads, the CCPA reported the latest from the executive trenches on CEO Pay in Canada:

It was another record-breaking year, with CEOs exemplifying the new gilded era that Canada’s rich seem to be in.

Canada’s top 100 CEOs were paid a whopping $14.9 million, on average, in 2022. This is an all-time high and bested the previous record of $14.3 million, which was set last year. This is more than double what CEOs were paid in 2008—$7.4 million—when the CCPA started publishing this data set.

These richest 100 CEOs in 2022 made 246 times more than the average worker—another all-time high for CEOs. This was a small increase from the previous record of 243 times that was set last year.

In 2022, the average worker in Canada got an average raise of $1,800, or three percent, from $58,800 in 2021 to $60,600 in 2022. However, prices went up a whopping 6.8 percent in 2022 (although much higher for things like food and rent), meaning that workers took a real pay cut of almost four percent since their money could buy much less than it did in 2021.

The top 100 CEOs, on the other hand, saw an average raise of $623,000, or 4.4 percent…

The average CEO collects $7,162 an hour. It takes just over eight hours in the new year for the top 100 CEOs to clock in an average of $60,600—what the average worker in Canada makes in an entire year. By 9:27 a.m. on January 2, 2024, Canada’s top CEOs would have already made $60,600 while the average Canadian worker will toil all year long to earn that amount of pay.

Here’s an even more sobering calculation. If you are a minimum wage earner in Nova Scotia — and there are currently 26,200 of them — you will have to work more than two years to earn what that CEO makes in one hour.

And my calculation includes the already announced and baked-in 20-cent-an-hour minimum wage increase that doesn’t take effect until April.

We have a long way to go to reduce income inequality in this province.

***

A version of this column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner

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“I hope one day you will be able to update the story with the happy ending that many justice-seeking people around the world are still working for.”

 Gerardo Hernández
in a 2013 letter to the author

This is the Epilogue to What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five by Stephen Kimber. The Epilogue will be included in the Spanish-language edition of the book, which will be published in Cuba by Nuevo Milenio in Fall 2015. The original English edition of the book is currently available as an ebook here, or you can purchase the print edition from the English publisher, Fernwood, or from Amazon.
Reviews here.

Oakland, California, December 5, 2014

Inmate #58739-004

Don’t go. The weekend’s clothes were packed, the hotel booked, the car rented for the 404-mile, six-hour, door-to-door drive to Victorville, a town on the southwestern edge of California’s Mojave Desert. Everything seemed in order. Two days earlier, Gerardo Hernández — inmate #58739-004at USP Victorville, the federal maximum security penitentiary — called Alicia Jrapko to confirm he would be able to meet with them. All clear.

Don’t go.

In late November, the last time Alicia, the co-ordinator of the American branch of the International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban 5, and her partner, social documentary photographer Bill Hackwell, had gone to see Gerardo in Victorville, they’d arrived, only to be told the prison was in lockdown. No visitors allowed. That was only the third time in more than 125 visits over the previous 12 years they’d been turned away. “In this business,” Bill allows, “that is not a bad record.” But “no visitors allowed” always hovered like a threat over their visits. Sometimes, an “incident” at the prison — a home away from home for many of American most violent drug and street gangs — would trigger a lockdown. Between 2005 and 2014, there had been at least eight violent deaths in Victorville. These were always followed by a lockdown. But sometimes, the institution’s refusal to allow inmate visits would seem arbitrary, intended simply to make an already lonely, difficult life more so for the institution’s more than 1,400 inmates, their families, and the friends who came to visit them.

Alicia and Bill had much to discuss with Gerardo this weekend. Their committee was organizing another, maintain-the-momentum event in Washington for February to press for the release of the remaining members of the Five[1], and planning the next — the fourth — “Five Days for the 5,” which was scheduled to take place, also in Washington, in September 2015.

As the international movement to win freedom for the Cuban Five had intensified over the previous five years, the focus shifted more and more to the American capital because that was where the decision to free them would almost certainly need to be made. That meant continuously lobbying a mostly indifferent Congress to put pressure on a largely uncaring administration to encourage a distracted president — it seemed there were always global crises (Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, and, most recently, the Ukraine) more urgent for U.S. policymakers than Cuba — to finally invoke his presidential clemency powers to free the last three members of the Five.

That meant groups like the International Committee needed to be in Washington, as visible as possible and as regularly as possible.

During the last Five Days for the 5 in June 2014, the Committee had rallied more than 500 people — politicians, writers, lawyers, social activists, religious, labour, and community leaders — from more than 30 countries. Between rounds of lobbying, it had staged a two-day conference on the future of U.S.-Cuba relations, and even mounted a hip hop concert in honour of the Five, featuring the popular, politically engaged Dead Prez. The Five Days had culminated with a noisy Saturday march from the White House to the Department of Justice. Demonstrators carried placards proclaiming “16 Years Is Too Long,” and chanted “Libertad Para Los Cinco.”

Knowing what it took to organize such an event, the International Committee — whose American headquarters was on the other coast in Oakland, California, and whose volunteer organizers were spread across the country — had recently decided to lease space in Washington to use as a combination headquarters-dormitory for its work there in 2015.

In November, Cheryl LaBash, a Detroit-based member of the committee, had found a “perfect” two-storey townhouse for rent on the Internet. Built in the 1920s, it was located within “walking distance from [Washington’s] Union Station, which meant it was also close to the Capitol!” There were two bedrooms and a full bathroom upstairs, a typical main floor living space that could easily be transformed into work and meeting areas, as well as a finished basement with yet another half bathroom. Better, the townhouse also boasted a direct entrance — no stairs to navigate — from the adjacent parking lot into the basement, which would make it convenient for hauling banners, placards, signs, and boxes of printed material in and out. LaBash had officially taken possession December 1, but just online. On December 15, she planned to drive from Detroit to Washington in a car loaded down with supplies, banners, books, a printer, a sleeping bag and air mattress, meet the owner (ironically, a woman who worked at the State Department), and get the keys.[2]

Alicia visits Gerardo in prison

Gerardo Hernández would want to hear all about that, of course, as well as details of the February event and the still evolving plans for September. Over the years, he had become increasingly active in the campaign to secure freedom for the Five. He jokingly referred to Alicia —who, along with Bill, had become close personal friends — as his “secretary.”[3]

Before leaving their house in Oakland today, Alicia and Bill made one last email check. That’s when they noticed the message from Adriana Pérez, Gerardo’s wife, who was in Havana. Whenever they visited Gerardo, Alicia would notify Adriana in advance in case she knew of any other planned visits — from Gerardo’s lawyer, for example, or the Interest Section in Washington — that might interfere with their plans. Adriana’s message this morning was brief. She had not heard from Gerardo — they usually spoke daily — and, although she didn’t know for certain what that meant, she worried Alicia and Bill would drive all the way to Victorville and not be allowed to visit him.

Don’t go.

Bill and Alicia quickly scanned the U.S. Bureau of Prisons website, which included a listing of all American federal inmates and the prisons where they were currently housed. According to the website, Gerardo had been moved on December 4 — yesterday — from USP Victorville to Federal Transfer Center Oklahoma City, a major stopover station for prisoners being moved from one federal jail to another.

What did it mean? “Our first thought,” Alicia recalls, “was that he was being transferred to a lower security prison.” Gerardo’s behaviour in prison had been exemplary. There was no need for him to be in maximum security. “We knew that that was a possibility but, because there’d been no sign a transfer was imminent, we were surprised.”

Could it signify something more? Was it possible Gerardo was about to be released and sent home to Cuba? That was always the hope, the dream, but it seemed even more unlikely. Among the Five, Gerardo’s case was the most complicated. He’d been convicted of conspiracy to commit murder; he was serving a double-life-plus-15-year sentence; and his lawyer’s “Hail Mary” legal appeal of his conviction was still mired deep in the American justice system. He seemed the least likely member of the Five to ever be the subject of presidential clemency. Unless… They looked more closely at the BOP site to determine whether the two others still imprisoned in the US — Ramon Labañino in Kentucky and Antonio Guerrero in Florida — had also been moved as well. They hadn’t.

Bill unpacked the rental car. “There was nothing else for us to do, except wait, and let our imaginations go wild,” Alicia recalled.

Five days later, Alicia’s cell phone screen came to life. “Unknown number” read the text on the phone’s screen. That message often popped up when Gerardo called from Victorville, but it wasn’t him. Instead, she heard a recorded voice explaining the call could not be completed because there were no funds in the inmate’s account. The message helpfully directed the listener to a webpage where she could top up his cash balance so he could use the phone. An hour later, Gerardo called.

“I’m not supposed to be making phone calls,” he told them, but a prison captain had been “helpful.” The reality was that he still knew little more than they did. He told them about the circumstances of his unexpected, unexplained transfer on December 4. He had been drinking coffee in his cell when the guards came to get him. “You’re leaving,” they said. “Don’t take anything with you.” Even the guards had seemed puzzled and eager to know what was happening to one of their best known inmates. But no one in the prison hierarchy would  — or could — tell Gerardo anything. Not when he left Victorville, nor when he arrived in Oklahoma. “I don’t know where I’m going,” he told Alicia. “No one tells me anything.”

But he did tell them he’d been thrown in the “hole” immediately after arriving in Oklahoma. He would later joke that perhaps U.S. prison authorities were just reminding him of what the hole was really like in case “Kcho” had gotten any of the details wrong. (The internationally famous Cuban artist had recently created an art installation/reconstruction of the solitary cells in which the Five had originally been imprisoned in Miami after their arrests, as part of an exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana.) But the joke wasn’t funny. Gerardo had spent the past six days by himself, “counting the hours,” waiting to learn his fate, whatever it might be. And worrying.

He knew that Adriana, back in Havana, would be concerned about him, but he hadn’t been able to call her. Would they? Of course.

Oakland, California, December 12, 2014

The letter, written in pencil from his solitary cell in the Oklahoma prison, was in Gerardo’s own unmistakable block-print handwriting. It arrived two days after their brief telephone conversation. In it, Gerardo explained that someone inside the prison had told him that  Oklahoma inmates  were allowed to send letters without stamps on Wednesdays. So he had the taken the chance. And, miraculously, it had arrived; someone at the prison had carefully affixed the necessary postage.

Gerardo’s letter was both an emotional, personal thank you to Bill and Alicia for their 12 years of unwavering friendship and support, and also a farewell. Though he didn’t know where he was headed, or how long the uncertainty about that would last, he was convinced his time in California was at an end.

“What struck us,” Alicia would say later, “was, with all the drama and uncertainty for Gerardo, what he was most concerned about at that moment was getting a letter to us, thanking us of all those years when he was in the California penitentiaries.”

In their small two-bedroom home that serves as the International Committee’s American office, Alicia and Bill have filing cabinets filled with their correspondence with Gerardo, copies of many of the letters to and from his supporters from around the world, and many of the documents from his case. But this letter would be special. “The letter was very emotional for Bill and me,” Alicia says today. “We will save it as the last physical treasure in this difficult chapter of so many years of injustice.”

At that moment, however, they couldn’t know for certain whether this really would be the final chapter in the long story of the Cuban Five. Or just one more painful chapter in a seemingly never-ending horror book.

There had been hints, and clues, and tantalizing tidbits that — especially when read in retrospect — suggested the end might be in sight. But, after 16 years of frustration and disappointment, few, including Alicia and Bill — and even Gerardo — were willing to entertain the thought it might soon be over.

Victorville Prison, November 3, 2014

One month before his transfer, Gerardo Hernández had written a brief, upbeat letter to Walter Lippmann, the editor of Cuba News, a popular, progressive online aggregator of news and information about Cuba. “Today,” he noted with delight, “we woke up with the news about the editorial in the New York Times.”

Although the Times’ editorial’s starting point had been Cuba’s continued imprisonment of Alan Gross, this was not one more of those standard issue, State Department-parroting, mainstream American media, “Alan is a humanitarian do-gooder being held hostage by the dictatorial Cuban regime, which must release him unconditionally and immediately” pontifications.

For starters, this editorial — in the most influential newspaper in America — acknowledged that Alan Gross’s arrest “was the result of a reckless strategy in which [the United States Agency for International Development] has deployed private contractors to perform stealthy missions in a police state vehemently opposed to Washington’s pro-democracy crusade… Mr. Gross traveled to Havana five times in 2009, posing as a tourist, to smuggle communications equipment as part of an effort to provide more Cubans with Internet access…”

There were phrases — “police state,” “Washington’s pro-democracy crusade,” “provide Cubans with more Internet access” — that Gerardo would normally have disputed, but he also immediately grasped the seismic shift in thinking the Times editorial represented.

The editorial, in fact, was actually the fourth in a startling month-long series of Times’ editorials, each one arguing more determinedly for Washington to end to its 53-year embargo against Cuba and press the re-set button on relations between the longtime adversaries.

“At a time when a growing number of officials in Washington and Havana are eager to start normalizing relations,” the November 3 editorial noted, “Mr. Gross’s continued imprisonment has become the chief obstacle to a diplomatic breakthrough. There is only one plausible way to remove Mr. Gross from an already complicated equation.”

The editorial’s next sentence would be its most shocking — and unexpected.“The Obama administration should swap him for three convicted Cuban spies who have served more than 16 years in federal prison.”

The Times went on to explain exactly how — and why — the administration should act. “In order to swap prisoners, President Obama would need to commute the [Cuban] men’s sentences. Doing so would be justified considering the lengthy time they have served, the troubling questions about the fairness of their trial, and the potential diplomatic payoff in clearing the way toward a new bilateral relationship.”

The Times’ call for a prisoner swap, Gerardo marvelled in his note to Lippmann that day, was “something that a couple of months ago we could only be dreaming about.”

The handshake debated round the world.

The handshake debated round the world.

In a public sense, that dream had first seemed to assume what might be concrete shape almost a year before. On December 10, 2013, U.S. president Barack Obama and Cuban president Raúl Castro had shaken hands in a was-it-really-accidental? encounter at the funeral of Nelson Mandela.[4] The two presidents were among dozens of world leaders who had come to Soweto’s FNB Stadium to attend a memorial service to honour the legendary South African leader. Obama “bounded up” a set of stairs to the stage and began glad-handing his way through a line of world leaders toward the microphone when he came face to face with Castro. The two men shook hands briefly before continuing their greetings of other leaders.

America’s army of Cuba experts eagerly attempted to parse this momentary mingling of palm on palm. Ted Piconne, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told the London Telegraph: “it’s a nice symbolic gesture, but not particularly meaningful beyond that.” Julia Sweig, director for Latin America Studies at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, offered a more positive spin. “We might look back on this as another milestone,” she said, “a test balloon that both heads of state are throwing up to measure reaction from their publics.”

For their part, White House officials insisted the handshake was accidental, incidental, meaningless. “Nothing was planned in terms of the president’s role other than his remarks,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told American reporters who had traveled to South Africa with the president. “He really didn’t do more than exchange greetings… on his way to speak. It wasn’t a substantive discussion.”

While that may have been technically true, Rhodes himself understood the larger narrative significance of the gesture better than almost anyone. A former Obama speechwriter, he was at that moment the president’s personal emissary in top-secret talks with senior Cuban officials that had been underway for six months. The unspoken goal of the U.S.-initiated round of talks: to figure out a way to finally re-establish diplomatic and other relations after more than 50 years of failed American policy toward Cuba. Before that could happen, however, both sides understood they would need to resolve two longstanding sticking points. For the Cubans, it was the case of the Cuban Five; for the Americans, Alan Gross. Until those cases were resolved, they could make no real progress on finding common ground on the larger differences between them — from removing Cuba from the list of sponsors of state terrorism, to re-establishing diplomatic relations to ending the 53-year-old U.S. embargo against Cuba. At the time of the Mandela funeral, of course, those discussions were still top-secret — and their outcome was uncertain — so no one was prepared to speak openly about them, or even admit they were happening.

But, even without knowing about the talks themselves, some observers on both sides of the Straits of Florida had begun to sniff new and hopeful signs of a possible rapprochement in the tropical breezes.

The month before the handshake seen round the world, for example, Obama had told a political fundraiser in Florida — of all places — that the United States had to be more  “creative, and we have to be thoughtful, and we have to continue to update our policies” on Cuba.

In the fall of 2014, the administration pointedly thanked Cuba for its role in sending doctors to Africa to combat the Ebola outbreak. Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who had just returned from her own fact-finding mission to Liberia, told a panel discussion in New York: “I have to commend Cuba for sending 265 medical professionals early.” Power, a confidante of President Obama, went on to mention Cuba favourably three more times during her talk. That prompted Sir Harold Evans, editor at large for Thomson Reuters, which sponsored the panel, to ask what this might mean for relations between the U.S. and Cuba. “There’s no integrated effort,” Power allowed, “but we’re very grateful to them for doing this.”

Fernando welcomed home to Cuba

And there were other, clearly unrelated but nonetheless significant — and positive —developments. In February 2014, Fernando González was released from prison. It was not a humanitarian gesture. The second member of the Cuban Five to be freed had served every hour of his sentence before being released, then immediately re-arrested under American immigration law and summarily deported back to Cuba. He’d even — one last indignity —  been shackled by U.S. marshalls until after his plane finally touched down in Havana.

That said, Fernando’s return — along with the earlier release of René González, who’d also served his full sentence — added two more powerful voices to a growing international chorus for the freedom of the remaining three. By June, Fernando had been appointed vice president of ICAP, the Cuban “friendship-with-the-peoples” organization that helped support and encourage the network of international solidarity groups.

Fernando’s return had another unintended, but not insignificant impact on hopes for a solution. It reduced by one more the number of Cuban prisoners the U.S. would ultimately need to agree to swap in any prisoner exchange.

Alan Gross

Meanwhile, in April 2014, a despondent Alan Gross — by then in the third year of his own 15-year sentence — went on a brief hunger strike. He was protesting the disclosure of yet another USAID-funded regime-change project called ZunZuneo — a secretive Cuban Twitter scheme aimed at stirring unrest among Cubans — that had continued even after Gross was arrested and imprisoned. Furious, Gross informed his lawyers and his family he would not celebrate his next birthday in a Cuban prison. The clear implication was that he would rather commit suicide. That ratcheted up pressure on the Obama administration to do whatever was necessary to win his release and, at the same time, reminded Cuban authorities just how vulnerable their best bargaining chip was.

In June, the White House appointed career diplomat Jeffrey DeLaurentis as the new chief of its U.S. Interest Section in Havana. According to his official biography, DeLaurentis had most recently been the U.S. representative for “special political matters,” and, before that, assistant deputy secretary at the State Department’s bureau for western hemisphere affairs. During the early 1990s, he’d even served as head of the political and economic affairs office at the US Interests Section in Havana.

But it was what was not in the official news release that intrigued Gerardo Hernández. “Look him up in Kimber’s book,” he urged Alicia Jrapko. It turned out DeLaurentis had been one of the three key White House Officials officials who met with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel-prize-winning Colombian novelist, in May 1998. Garcia Marquez had brought a secret message from Fidel Castro: Miami-based exile terrorists were plotting to attack airplanes carrying tourists to Cuba. That discussion led to an unprecedented meeting in Havana in June 1998 between FBI agents and Cuban State Security. The Cubans believed the FBI agents had agreed to investigate and report back to them. Instead, three months later, the FBI, instead of arresting the plotters, arrested the Five. If anyone in the American administration would understand the case of the Cuban Five, it would be DeLaurentis. Why would the White House appoint him now as the head of its Interest Section in Havana unless…?

During the Five Days for the 5,  which took place the same month as DeLaurentis’s appointment, the committee was surprised when State Department officials agreed to meet with them. Previous requests for such a meeting had been ignored. But this time, senior officials, including Raymond McGrath, the State Department’s coordinator for Cuban affairs, and Alex Lee, the deputy assistant secretary for South America and Cuba, met twice with representatives of the group. While there was no “meeting of the minds” at either session, it was clear the officials were at least curious to better understand the growing international movement to free the Five.

Many developments, however, were harder to read. Positive? Negative? On the eve of the Committee’s two-day conference on changing American-Cuban relations, for example, the White House trumpeted the release of an American soldier held captive in Afghanistan. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl had been freed in exchange for five Taliban prisoners from the Guantánamo naval base. On the one hand, the Obama administration had completed a prisoner swap in order to get one of its own back. Why not strike a similar deal for Alan Gross? On the other hand, allegations the soldier had been a deserter ignited a firestorm of protest in Congress and beyond. Would the administration contemplate another swap — albeit a very different kind of exchange — after enduring the political fallout from Bergdahl?

Set against that crazy-quilt backdrop of hard-to-parse developments, Gerardo Hernández’s sudden, unexpected, unexplained transfer from Victorville to Oklahoma on December 4 might be a positive sign. Or it might not.

“We could be living in some historic moment in terms of US-Cuba relations,” Gerardo himself concluded  hopefully — and presciently, as it turned out — in his message to Lippmann, adding even more hopefully, that “the time won’t be good for the Ileanas [Ros-Lehtinen], the Bobs [Menendez], and all the gang that for many years has profited from being hatred advocates.”

Even Gerardo still  didn’t know the half of it.

But he knew something almost no one else did. Adriana was pregnant. He was going to be a father!

Victorville Prison, May 7, 2014

Gerardo and Adriana celebrate. (Photo Bill Hackwell)

Gerardo and Adriana had been talking seriously about having children since they said their “I-do’s” in 1988. By 1991, Adriana had even assembled an almost complete layette. At first, they decided to wait until after Gerardo completed his tour of duty in Angola in 1990, then until after Adriana finished her chemical engineering degree. By then, of course, there was Gerardo’s job. Beginning in 1994, he would spend much of each year away from Cuba, ostensibly working at the embassy in Argentina but really heading up Cuba’s “Wasp” intelligence network in Miami. During his last vacation home before his arrest in 1998, Gerardo and Adriana had discussed again — and more urgently — their mutual desire to start a family. Gerardo had even written a long memo to his bosses in Havana, asking for permission for Adriana to join him in the United States.

Instead, he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a double-life-plus-15-year sentence in America with no hope of ever returning home to Cuba. The U.S. government pointedly refused to grant Adriana a visa, even to visit her husband in prison.

Despite the passing years, Adriana refused to abandon their parenting dream. In February 2013, she turned up, unannounced, at the Havana hotel where Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and his wife, Marcelle Pomerleau, a registered nurse, were staying. Adriana had previously met Leahy, an opponent of U.S.-Cuba policy, and he had helped facilitate a secret, visa-less, non-conjugal visit with Gerardo. Now Adriana made a personal appeal to the couple — as parents and grandparents — to help her find a way to conceive a baby with her husband. She was 43, and time was running out.

“It was an emotional meeting,” Gerardo would explain later. “There were tears.” Because Adriana’s phone calls with her husband in prison were monitored, however she only spoke of it vaguely to him. “Remember that thing we used to talk about,” she would say. “Well, things are moving.”

Gerardo tried not to get too “enchanted” with the possibility, but, “little by little, through the phone, she told me it was going to happen.”

Although federal inmates are not allowed conjugal visits, prison officials — at Leahy’s urging — discovered a precedent in which an inmate had been allowed to conceive through artificial insemination.

In early May 2014, Gerardo learned that Adriana’s pregnancy had been confirmed.

On the evening of May 7, after spending most of his day enduring yet another prison lockdown, Gerardo wrote to Nancy Kohn, a Boston-based member of the International Committee with whom he’d carried on a long, largely apolitical correspondence about their shared love for baseball. “It’s been an extraordinary day,” he wrote, clearly giddy with excitement. “I received good news — actually one of the best news of my life, or even the best one so far… (sorry, not related to our return to Cuba)… I hope I’ll be able to share with our friends in a while, and you sure will be among the first ones [to know]. The only thing I can tell you now is that it’s big” — he traced over the word several times to make it appear bold — “reason enough for friends like you to work with even more desire and enthusiasm to get the three of us to Cuba soon as possible… Sorry for the intrigue!”

As excited as he was at the news he would be a father  — Adriana was due in early January 2015 — Gerardo admits today he had “mixed feelings.” He worried the American government’s “accommodation” that allowed them to finally have a baby was also its way of confirming “I would be in prison in America forever.”

Marianna Federal Correctional Institution, Marianna, Florida, December 15, 2014

Antonio Guerrero

Antonio Guerrero was asleep in his cell when a guard woke him at 5:30 a.m. “Get down, Guerrero, you have to pack. At 6:30 a.m., you have to be in the concourse, you understand? You want me to say it in Spanish.”

Antonio Guerrero understood — or hoped he did. He’d read the New York Timeseditorial and even bet a Coke with his “celly” — who was due to be released January 20 — that he’d be back in Cuba before his cellmate was freed. This morning, he called out to him: “I told you I was going home before you.”

The eternally optimistic Tony assumed something “big” must be happening. He hadn’t asked for a transfer, and this transfer seemed very different than any he’d been involved in previously. When he arrived at the airport, he was greeted by an “incredibly friendly” officer who went inside the hangar and returned with news Tony would be traveling aboard a “luxurious VIP plane.”

“I was excited,” Tony says now. “I was thinking, ‘I’ll remember this trip all my life.’”

But he wasn’t, as he hoped, on his way home to Cuba. Instead, the plane flew north from Florida to North Carolina and, by 3 p.m., Tony was being processed at the Butner Medical Center, part of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex near Raleigh, N.C., where Bernie Madoff, the infamous Ponzi scheme perpetrator, was an inmate. What was he doing here, Tony wondered? No one seemed to have any idea, although one of the guards mentioned there was a unit in the medical center for prisoner-workers, so he would probably be assigned to that unit soon. Was he really going to be staying at Butner?

That night he was placed in the Center’s special housing unit — solitary confinement — and told to sleep well. “We’re coming to get you at 7 a.m.”

What was going on?

Butner Medical Centre, North Carolina, December 16, 2014, 3 a.m.

Ramon Labañino hadn’t been able to sleep. “I began to think I was in Cuba and I was waiting to see if I would spot the other guys pass by.” He knew he wasn’t really in Cuba — he was in some prison called Butner — but he was certain Gerardo and Tony must be close by. The day before, as he’d waited for his own un-requested, unprepared-for transfer from the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky, to Butner, he’d overheard two guards. “This is a strange business,” one said. “We have to get him out of here and to the nearest airport right away.”

At Butner, he’d been whisked through processing without the usual bureaucracy. “Hurry up,” one guard told another, “because the other one’s coming behind.” The other one? 

Alone in his cell that night, Ramon couldn’t sleep. Instead, he exercised, paced the millimeters of his small, solitary cell. And waited.

Havana, Cuba, December 16, 2014, 7:30 a.m. 

Elizabeth and her daughters visit Ramon in prison in Kentucky.

As she had done every morning since returning earlier that month from visiting her husband in Ashland,  Elizabeth Palmeiro checked the U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate locator web page. Ramon had said he had a feeling “something” was going to happen soon, and he urged her to “get ready for our freedom.”

In truth, Elizabeth had been preparing for her husband’s release from prison since at least 2005, when she’d first bought him new underwear and pants… just in case. In 2010, she bought more underwear, and an electric shaver. In case.

Despite that, she tried never to allow herself to become too optimistic just so she wouldn’t be too disappointed when nothing happened. Again.

By checking the BOP site each day, she already knew Gerardo had been transferred to Oklahoma. But there’d been no change in the status of Ramon or Antonio.

But this morning, she saw Ramon had been transferred as well — to some place called Butner, North Carolina!

She checked to see if Gerardo was still in Okla—. Butner too!

And Tony? He was there also.

This time, it was really happening.

Butner Medical Center, 7.a.m.

Better than their word, the guards arrived for Tony just before 7 a.m. Once outside the cell, they removed his cuffs, then began rushing him along the passageways at “supersonic speed,” the guards running in step beside him until they reached the unit’s visitors’ room.

“That’s when I saw a person shaking Gerardo’s hand!” Tony remembers, the wonder still obvious in his voice. “There were quite a few people there, but I couldn’t contain myself and said to him, ‘Gerar!’”

And then… Ramon!

For the first time in almost exactly 13 years, Gerardo Hernández, Ramon Labañino, and Tony Guerrero were together again in one place. Embracing. By 8 a.m., they were wading through the piles of official papers, each signing off on a formal presidential clemency document that would set them free.

“WHEREAS it has been made to appear that the ends of justice, foreign policy considerations, and the national security of the United States requires that the aforesaid sentence not be served in its entirety;

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT KNOWN that I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, pursuant to my powers under Article II, Section 2, clause 1, of the Constitution, and in consideration of the premises, divers other good and sufficient reasons me thereunto moving, do hereby commute the aforesaid total prison sentence of the said GERARDO HERNANDEZ to expire on December 17, 2014, commuting also the term of supervised release in its entirety and remitting any unpaid balance of the special assessment…”

For Tony, however, the most important document was the one that explained they would be landing together in Havana, Cuba at 8 a.m. EST December 17.

In 24 hours, they would finally be reunited with wives, mothers, sons, daughters — and, of course, with their two brothers, René and Fernando.

Incredibly — but perhaps not surprisingly — they were forced to spend their final night in custody in separate, solitary cells. At 2 a.m., the guards came to wake them for the drive to the airport. “It was OK,” Tony says now. “We hadn’t been sleeping anyway.

Back Story, June 2013 – December 2014

The negotiations to free the three remaining members of the Cuban Five and end 55 years of failed American foreign policy had officially begun 18 months before, in Ottawa, Canada.

Barack Obama’s presidency had begun four-and-a-half years before that with modest hope for improvements in U.S.-Cuba relations. But even those modest hopes had been quickly dashed. After Alan Gross was arrested in December 2009, the Obama administration almost instantly lost interest in virtually any public or private discussion with the Cuban government that didn’t begin and end with Gross’s immediate, unconditional release. While the Cuban government said it would be willing to discuss Gross’s case on a “humanitarian” basis, it coupled that with its own insistence the fate of the Cuban Five be part of any discussion. The Americans refused. And that was that.

As my friend Alex Trelles predicted so succinctly back in 2009: “Nothing will change between Cuba and the United States until they resolve the issue of the Five.”

But that stalemate could not be broken until after Obama had been re-elected to his second term as president in November 2012. Frustrated by an increasingly obstructionist Congress at the same time he was suddenly freed from the need to seek re-election, Obama began his second term looking for “game-changing” initiatives he could launch without reference to Congress.

In early 2013, he called together his top aides for a series of meetings, asking them — in the words of an Associated Press report — “to ‘think big’ about a second-term agenda, including the possibilities of new starts with longstanding foes such as Iran and Cuba.” A month later, during Obama’s first meeting with his newly appointed secretary of state, John Kerry, he and Kerry “discussed Gross’s ongoing incarceration in Cuba and their broader dissatisfaction with America’s policy toward the island. Kerry quickly enlisted the assistance of the Vatican, one of the few institutions in the world broadly respected in the U.S. and Cuba” to act as a go-between.

Once Cuba agreed to talk — Cuba, in fact, had been calling for such “no-pre-condition” discussions for years — the U.S. administration asked the Canadian government to facilitate a series of meetings. Over the course of the next 18 months, senior negotiators for the two sides met on seven different occasions in Ottawa and Toronto, and at least twice more at the Vatican, including one meeting in the fall of 2014 during which the two sides confirmed the details of the prisoner swap.

Those negotiations had been especially complicated and convoluted. The Americans had long since boxed themselves into a corner, refusing to publicly acknowledge Alan Gross’s role in its regime-change programs and insisting they would never trade “humanitarian do-gooder” Gross for Cuban “spies.”

So, in the end, the official story had to become that Washington was sending the three remaining members of the Five home to Cuba in exchange, not for Gross, but for a man few Americans, or Cubans, had heard of prior to December 17.

Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, who once worked in the cryptology section of Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence, had been arrested in 1995 and charged with espionage for allegedly selling state secrets to American intelligence. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Although the U.S. had neither acknowledged Sarraff as one of its agents nor made any effort to win his release until it needed a plausible public relations cover for the deal it now wanted to make with Havana, President Obama would do his best to spin Sarraff into the role of centrepiece of the prisoner exchange.

“Alan,” he would insist in a televised address to the American people on December 17, “was released by the Cuban government on humanitarian grounds. Separately, in exchange for the three Cuban agents, Cuba today released one of the most important intelligence agents that the United States has ever had in Cuba…” Cuban President Raúl Castro played along. “Forhumanitarian reasons,” he explained in his own simultaneous televised statement to the Cuban people, “today we have also sent the American citizen Alan Gross back to his country.”

As far as the Cuba government was concerned, that complicated subterfuge was really beside the point. The much more significant reality was that the last three members of the Cuban Five still in jail in the United States would be coming home. In his speech, Raúl Castro, made it official: “As Fidel promised on June 2001, when he said: ‘They shall return!’, Gerardo, Ramon, and Antonio have arrived today to our homeland.”

And there was more — much more  — to the official presidential pronouncements in Washington and Havana that day.

Belatedly acknowledging the 55-year failure of America’s attempts at regime change in Cuba, President Obama declared: “We will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries.  Through these changes, we intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people, and begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.”

No matter how Obama glossed the changes, however, the reality was that — after more than five decades of embargos, economic sanctions, invasions, terrorist attacks, airplane bombings, assassination attempts, and regime change schemes — Cuba had won. The Cubans had refused to abandon their revolution, had refused to knuckle under to the most powerful country on earth. And they had won.

Not that Cuban President Raúl Castro was gloating. Or getting too far ahead of reality. “We have agreed also to renew diplomatic relations,” he told the Cuban people in his speech. “This in no way means that the heart of the matter has been solved. The [U.S.] economic, commercial, and financial blockade, which causes enormous human and economic damages to our country, must cease.” Still, he was hopeful. “While acknowledging our profound differences, particularly on issues related to national sovereignty, democracy, human rights and foreign policy, I reaffirm our willingness to dialogue [with the United States]on all these issues… The progress made in our [prisoner] exchanges proves that it is possible to find solutions to many problems.”

No one could know at that moment, of course, where all this talk about normalizing relations would ultimately lead, but one thing was clear. None of it could have happened without the return of the last of the Cuban Five to their homeland.

The next day’s headline in Granma read simply: “Volvieron!” They have returned.

Havana, Cuba. January 6, 2014, 8:30 a.m.

Gerardo, Adriana and Gema.

On Tuesday, January 6, 2014, at 8:30 a.m., — almost three weeks to the day and hour after Gerardo finally returned home to Cuba — Gema Hernández Pérez, a healthy, seven-pound, seven-ounce girl, was born in Havana. Her proud parents: Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, 49, and Adriana Pérez O’Connor, 44.

Declared Gerardo Hernández: “I never imagined such a happiness.”

The “happy ending” to the story of the Cuban Five had turned out to be far more happy than even Gerardo had dared to imagine.

****

[1] Fernando González had been released in February 2014 after serving his full sentence. In May 2013, René González, who was on parole and a compassionate visit to Cuba, was given permission to serve out the rest of his parole in Cuba provided he give up his U.S. citizenship. He did.

[2] On December 15, as planned, LaBash drove eight hours from her home in Detroit to Washington with a car full of “Free the 5” materials. “I got the keys, spent the night at our new house and, on December 16, drove back to Detroit to prepare to bring another carload. On the morning of the 17th, I watched Gerardo, Ramon and Tony walk down the stairway from the plane.” The members of the International Committee decided to keep the house, and begin work on other unfinished Cuba business, including ending the blockade against Cuba.

[3] In October 2014, Alicia and Bill were awarded the Friendship Medal of the Republic of Cuba for their years of work on behalf of the Five.

[4] Cuba played such a key role in South Africa’s struggle for liberation from apartheid that Mandela had made a special thank-you visit to Havana in 1991 shortly after he was released from prison.

Tim Houston’s in-house committee to review our outdated freedom of information legislation refuses to even meet with an outside expert group suggesting improvements. Accountability? Don’t count on it.

PC leader Tim Houston unveils his party’s platform, 2021.

Let us begin with a return to a Better Ghost of Christmas Premiers Past — to wit, Timothy Jerome Houston, Progressive Conservative Premier in Eager Anticipation, circa August 22, 2021, five days after his party won its majority government, nine days before he was officially sworn in as the real deal.

Cue Michael Gorman, the CBC’s intrepid provincial reporter:

Premier-designate Tim Houston is poised to do something none of his predecessors were willing to do: give Nova Scotia’s privacy commissioner order-making power.

Houston, like other politicians before him, promised ahead of the provincial election that he would make the change should he and the Progressive Conservatives form power.

As the Tories prepare to be sworn in next week, Houston told CBC News on Tuesday that he’ll be keeping his promise.

There were reasons — not good reasons, in retrospect, but reasons nonetheless — to believe that Houston might possibly… may … could … perhaps be telling the truth about an issue so many others in his position had lied about so often.

That’s because Houston had his own unhappy and expensive experiences with the province’s un-freedom of information act.

On May 3, 2016, the PC caucus asked for information about the financial arrangements between Stephen McNeil’s governing Liberal government — also known as Nova Scotia taxpayers — and Bay Ferries, the company the government had contracted to operate a ferry service between Yarmouth and Maine.

The government gave the Tories a dribble of the information they’d ask for but not a word about just how much the government was paying the company to operate the ferry each year, including in years when the ferry didn’t operate.

The Tories appealed to the access to information commissioner. Two-and-a-half years later, she recommended that the government turn over information to the PC caucus it had redacted.

The government responded, Screw You, Information Commissioner, or words to that effect. “The department does not intend to make further disclosures on this file,” was the department’s actual phrasing in a dismissive letter to the information commissioner.

They could get away with that, of course, because the law only gives the information commissioner the power to recommend. Governments can ignore her recommendations with impunity.

Stephen McNeil, back when he was where Tim Houston was on August 22, 2021— premier to be — had promised to fix that. He never did because he found its toothlessness a convenient cover for his own government’s secrecy.

“I’m just wondering what they’re hiding,” Houston said at the time.

It’s a question we might ask now of Houston himself.

But not yet.

In 2019, the Tories took the government to court — their only expensive recourse to pry information from McNeil’s cold, dead hands. McNeil didn’t die, of course, but by the time of the court’s decision in February 2021, McNeil had resigned and been replaced by blink-and-you-missed-him Iain Rankin.

The court dispensed with the government’s main argument — that releasing the information would “harm the financial or economic interests of a public body or the government of Nova Scotia” — as a “mere possibility.”

As a result, thanks to Opposition Leader Houston, we learned that we — taxpayers — were/are funnelling $1.17 million a year into the coffers of Bay Ferries, whether their Yarmouth-Maine ferry ferries passengers or not. The ferry did not even sail in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Overall, the province still spends roughly $17 million a year keeping the non-service afloat.

After the decision, Houston told reporters he now knew why the government had fought so hard to keep the information secret. It wasn’t to protect the ferry operator’s proprietary information. “I think what we now know is the number is embarrassing.”

Fast forward to a still celebrating Premier-designate Houston five days after his party had won a free-to-do-whatever-he-decreed majority government:

“I know that there’s lots of Nova Scotians that have put in legitimate information requests that have got a lot of pushback, a lot of hurdles,” he [told CBC].

“We’re going to work with the privacy commissioner to make sure that the proper authority is there so that Nova Scotians have access to the information that they rightly should have access to.”

Uh… How’s that working out? For Houston? For the concept of transparent and accountable government? For us?

Here’s the premier again, but this time after one year in power:

Premier Tim Houston’s commitment to giving the province’s privacy commissioner more power could be softening.

Nova Scotia is the only province where the privacy commissioner is not an independent officer of the legislature. Recommendations from the commissioner’s office are not binding, which means government departments and other public bodies are not compelled to follow them.

“We’re looking at all the options, for sure,” Houston said to reporters at Province House on Thursday. “We’ll do the research and we’ll come up with the place that best suits the needs of making sure that Nova Scotians can access the information they’re looking for.”

It’s a departure from the commitment he made while in opposition to strengthen the commissioner’s authority. He also repeated the pledge about a year ago.

“We’re committed to it, there’s no question about that,” Houston told reporters last November.

After two and a half years in power — and after regular pleas from the information commissioner for that promised order-making power — the government has had more than enough time to demonstrate its commitment to doing what the premier himself knows is right.

It hasn’t.

Instead, the government announced in September that it would hide behind the skirts of an internal review. The review’s “working group” doesn’t include the privacy commissioner, but does include poohbahs from the Department of Justice and Service Nova Scotia. Those departments have, no doubt, been internal enablers of unaccountability and non-transparency for decades.

Under its terms of reference, says a press release, “the working group will also be accepting written submissions from the public and stakeholders outside of government.”

How important will those written submissions be?

Well, consider this. The Halifax-based Centre for Law and Democracy, which “works internationally to promote those human rights which it deems to be foundational for democracy, including access to information,” was one of the early submitters to the review.

Its 23-page submission offered a wide range of specific substantive recommendations for improving the Nova Scotia Act, including:

  • The Act should be expanded to cover all bodies which are owned or controlled by government, which receive significant public funding and the judiciary.
  • Consideration should be given to adding a section on proactive disclosure to the Act.
  • The ability to extend the time limits for responding to requests beyond 60 days should be eliminated or substantially constrained and no fees should be charged for staff time spent responding to requests.
  • The Act should set overriding standards for the secrecy provisions in other laws which it preserves, and the regime of exceptions should be substantially revised so as to protect only legitimate interests against harm, to make application of the public interest override mandatory and to impose sunset clauses on all exceptions that protect public interests.
  • The independence of the Commissioner should be substantially improved, including by making it an office of the legislature, and the Commissioner should be given binding order-making power.
  • Broader and more effective sanctions should be in place for officials who wilfully flout the provisions of the Act.

Worth at least discussing?

No.

When it delivered its submission to the government’s in-house committee, representatives of the Centre for Law and Democracy offered to meet with the committee to discuss its submission.

“The head of the committee refused to meet.”

That tells you more than all you need to know about this government’s commitment to freedom of information.

As does this comment from the premier’s press secretary to the Globe and Mail in response to a question about the committee.

No decision has been made about granting order powers and the decision will not be made until the review is complete.

And there’s no timetable for the committee’s “package of legislative options and recommendations [to be submitted] to the Minister of Justice to be tabled in the House of Assembly.”

Count on that date being after the next election.

Accountability? Don’t count on it.

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A version of this column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner

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