Not “Africville all over again”… not yet
Rev. Rhonda Britten may have been guilty of hyperbole when she compared last week’s city council decision to sell the former St. Patrick’s-Alexandra School to a local developer to “the rape... of a community… Africville all over again!”
But she is not entirely canary-in-the-coal-mine wrong.
In 2009, Halifax Regional School Board—over the ongoing objections of the north-end community—decided to shutter St.Pat’s-Alexandra after the 2010-11 school year.
That suddenly freed up a tantalizing 3.85-acre chunk of valuable, edge-of-downtown real estate in a rapidly gentrifying poor neighbourhood.
Last summer, the city issued a call for proposals. Six groups—three for-profit and three non-profit—responded. After evaluating them, staff last week recommended a private developer’s proposal to tear down the school and replace it with a mixed residential/affordable housing/community space development.
But Britten, who is the well-connected pastor of Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, says she didn’t even learn about the call for proposals until 12 days before the deadline.
That’s interesting. Municipal policies call for residents to be consulted before the city invites proposals if surplus schools might have community uses.
Britten’s group did quickly manage to cobble together a plan to transform the former school into spaces for community. But staff scored that pitch—along with the two other non-profit community-based proposals—at the bottom of its evaluation sheet.
No wonder. “Community interest” wasn’t one of the criteria considered. Close to 50 per cent of the final score, in fact, was made up of the bidder’s financial capability and financial offer. Not easy hills for cash-strapped community groups to climb.
To add insult to injury, councillors—who routinely debate cat bylaws more times than Fluffy has lives, and who just put off a decision on a municipal stadium again—refused Coun. Dawn Sloane’s motion to defer a final decision on the school sale for a month because of alleged flaws in the process.
St. Pat’s-Alexandra isn’t, by itself, the new Africville.
But the community is clearly under siege.
Pushing out the poor in the interests of progress.
Where have we heard that before?
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Time for a public inquiry into the Fenwick MacIntosh case
One hopes Nova Scotia’s prosecution service will find compelling legal grounds to appeal last week’s Nova Scotia Court of Appeal decision overturning Fenwick MacIntosh’s conviction for sexually abusing children.
The accusations are too serious and the legal issues too important not to appeal.
But whatever the outcome of the legal process—and, indeed, without waiting for its results—Ottawa needs to launch a public inquiry into what went so horribly wrong in this case. To make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The allegations against MacIntosh date back to Port Hawkesbury in the 1970s but the complainants—some as young as 10 at the time of the incidents—understandably didn’t come forward until the mid-1990s.
The RCMP formally began investigating in January 1995, five months after MacIntosh left Nova Scotia for a job in India. It’s not clear whether his departure was related to those accusations then-bubbling in the community.
In December 1995, the RCMP filed the first charges against MacIntosh.
Even though they knew he was in India, it took the Mounties a year and a half to alert Canada Customs to watch for him, and Passport Canada another year to notify MacIntosh it intended to revoke his passport, which would have made it difficult for him to work and live in India.
But a federal court judge then “temporarily” overturned Passport Canada’s decision, in part because no one but MacIntosh presented evidence at his hearing. Where was the RCMP? And why didn’t Ottawa follow up on what was supposed to be just a temporary court order?
In April 1998, Nova Scotia’s Director of Public Prosecutions asked Ottawa to ask India to send MacIntosh back to Canada for trial.
At that point, the case disappeared into yet another diplomatic and bureaucratic black hole. It took Ottawa more than five years to prepare its extradition request and another three to deliver the request the 11,000 km from Ottawa to New Delhi. Why?
While all of this was not going on, there are reports MacIntosh got his passport renewed three times and traveled on at least two occasions between India and Montreal.
An inquiry? Absolutely. Regardless of what happens with the court case, there are larger questions we need answers to. Before something similar happens again.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
First-contract arbitration: the sky is(n’t) falling
Eric Durnford says if working conditions in Nova Scotia now were the same as in 1984, he too would support first-contract arbitration. Durnford, a prominent labour lawyer who represents employers, was responding last week to a union presentation on why we need the law.
Back in 1984, a CUPE official reminded the law amendments committee, workers at Keddys Nursing Manor in Halifax joined a union. Their employer refused to negotiate, suspending one union executive and forcing another worker to clean a floor with a toothbrush. It took the employees four years and an 18-month strike to win their first contract.
That was then. Now, Durnford says, Nova Scotia is a labour-relations utopia. We don’t need no first-contract-arbitration legislation.
Strangely, I can’t find any evidence Durnford—who was already an influential labour lawyer in 1984—spoke up for first-contract arbitration back when he says it might have been worth supporting.
Or perhaps not so strange. Self-interested supporters of the status quo inevitably claim that now—whenever now is—is the best-of-couldn’t-be-better times. And predict the sky’s collapse if it’s changed.
Last week, Corporate Chicken Littles Sobeys and Michelin—two of our biggest employers and, perhaps not coincidentally, two of our most successful government teat-suckers—lined up at law amendments to paint the sky black and gone.
Unions, they predcicted, would take advantage of the law to bamboozle their unsuspecting—and otherwise, of course, happy-happy—workers into signing union cards.
Reality check Number 1. Statistics show union membership is declining across the country, including in provinces with first-contract legislation.
In British Columbia, which has had first-contract arbitration since 1993, only 10 per cent of initial contracts go to arbitration, and fully one-third of those applications come from employers. Oops.
And such legislation, our concerned-only-for-what’s-best-for-the-province corporate spokes-folks also warned, will scare off potential investors.
Reality check Number 2. In 2007, Sobeys shelled out $260 million buy a supermarket chain in… uh, investment-slaughtering British Columbia.
Sobeys also currently operates 16 stores in Manitoba, all acquired long after that province’s supposedly draconian first-contract legislation came into effect.
Welcome to 2011.
Shades of Orwell’s 1984.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.