So the sleuths at the Canadian (sic) Taxpayers Federation have uncovered the startling (to me, at least) fact I’m “on the CBC payroll.”

They appear to believe this is the only possible explanation why I—and other members of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting—could support public broadcasting in this country.

Perhaps that’s because the CTF assumes everyone else who supports a cause must be on the payroll of those with a vested interest in the outcome of the causes they support because… well, we’ll come back to that.

First some background.

I’m a volunteer—which is to say unpaid—member of the steering committee of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. It’s an independent watchdog group whose mission is “to defend and enhance the quality and quantity of Canadian programming in the Canadian audio-visual system.”

We do support public funding for the CBC, but we also often criticize the CBC for what we see as its failures to live up to its responsibilities as a public broadcaster. We criticize—and sometimes praise—private broadcasters for their roles in providing quality Canadian content to viewers. And we make presentations to the CRTC and parliamentary committees, arguing for more and better Canadian content.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation calls itself a “citizen’s advocacy group dedicated to lower taxes, less waste and accountable government.” It’s mostly run by ex-(or not so ex)Tory hacks and right-wing zealots who have never encountered a government expenditure (other than prisons and bombs) they wouldn’t bulldoze out of existence.

On its blog last week, the CTF wrote:

“Amongst the many Access to Information (ATI) enquiries we make each year was this tidbit relating to the CBC. Our National Research Director, Derek Fildebrandt got to thinking about the leadership of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, the group that advocates for more funding for the CBC. ‘What if these people are actually on the CBC’s payroll?’ thought Derek. If it were true, it would go a long way to explaining their passion for public broadcasting. And it would be very, very funny.”

So they went fishing, filing a request to the CBC for records, “in Excel format, if possible” of all payments— “regardless of the reasons they were paid”— to the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, its spokesperson, Ian Morrison, or any of its 11-member steering committee, including me.

“As it turns out,” the CTF breathlessly reported last week in a post entitled “Friends With Benefits,” Access to Information documents had revealed that “three members of the ‘Friends’ Steering Committee actually were on the CBC payroll.”

Including me!

“Stephen Kimber was paid $675 as a ‘freelance[r].’”

Whoah. Be still my beating heart.

I earn part of my annual income as a freelance journalist, and have done so for the last 40 years. I’ve written newspaper columns, magazine articles, books, commissioned books, occasional government reports (for Tory governments, I might add) and even the 1989 Report of the Royal Commission into the Wrongful Conviction of Donald Marshall, Jr.. I’ve also worked on occasion for the CBC—and for CTV, and for what is now Global TV.

What is interesting about the $675 figure the CTF touts on its blog—and which even it behind-the-hand mumblingly admits involved “quite small sums of money”—is what the CTF didn’t say about its initial request for information.

The CTF didn’t mention that it had asked the CBC for records of all payments made “from 2001 to present” because including that inconvenient fact would make those small sums reported seem even more minuscule, and its argument even more ridiculous.

The $675, therefore, represents all of the income I received from the CBC for 10 years! That works out to $1.30 a week.

I may be buyable, but even I’m not that cheap.

Speaking of being bought, what—aside from the usual ideological zealotry—would prompt the CTF to attempt to turn this molehill of non-information into the mountainous revelation that I was “actually… on the CBC payroll?”

Who foots the bill for the CTF’s federal office in Ottawa and its regional offices in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Altantic Canada not to mention its seven apparently fulltime spokespeople?

Whose interests does the CTF really represent?

One might answer that question by asking who else has a vested interest in getting rid of the CBC? Can you say Quebecor? Sun Media?

Surprise, surprise. Quebecor has created its own not so mini-industry churning out similar access to information requests of the CBC, desperately seeking ammunition for its goal of convincing a too-easily-convinced Harper government to shutter the CBC screens.

Do Quebecor, Sun Media, their executives or board members contribute to the Canadian (sic) Taxpayers Federation?

If so, how much?

Is the CTF… ahem.. “actually on the payroll” of those vested interests.

I don’t know. The CTF doesn’t disclose the names of its donors or how much they give.

But I’m guessing those corporate interests would be far more generous in putting CTF on their payrolls than the CBC has been with me.
 

Perhaps Halifax should adopt a kinder, gentler version of the American cage match, survival-of-the-sleaziest primary system to winnow our choices for mayor. Or maybe we need to consider some variation of the NDP’s upcoming advance preferential leadership balloting system to determine who we most—and least—want as next super mayor of our supercity.

Consider. Four candidates have already declared, and at least four others are teetering on the edge. The election doesn’t take place until October.

David Boyd—cab driver, perennial political also-ran—was first out of the blocks, vowing to make Halifax “the Vegas of the east” with strip clubs and casinos. In 2008, he received 1,791 votes for mayor.

Tom Martin—celebrated former cop, manager of Sheila Fougere’s 2008 mayoralty campaign—blames “the lack of accountability, the lack of transparency, the lack of consultation with councillors and the lack of public consultation” at city hall on a mayor “without the ability to lead.”

Fred Connors—hairstylist, entrepreneur, urban chicken farmer—threw his hat in the ring earlier this month, saying he wanted to get “some real change happening in Halifax.”

Matthew Wornona—Toronto native, Dalhousie student—is running because he disagrees with Mayor Peter Kelly’s handling of the eviction of Occupy Nova Scotia protestors.

Meanwhile, restaurateur Lil MacPherson said in December she was “considering it for real,” but hasn’t formally announced. Neither has environmentalist, current MLA and former city councillor Howard Epstein, who would be a formidable candidate.

The race’s certain-to-be front-runners—former MP Mike Savage and current mayor Kelly—haven’t officially declared, but both have campaign teams and money in place.

So many candidates—all but Peter Kelly running against Peter Kelly.

Under our current first-past-the-post system, the unintended consequence of so many wannabes may be four more leaderless, wished-we-hadn’t years.

While we can’t change the system before October’s election, we can ask our preferred alternatives-to-he-who-should-not-be-re-elected to give it their best shot between now and official nomination day—Sept. 11, 2012—and then realistically reassess their chances for success.

Not to forget the chance that they may be responsible for four more years of…

As Canada Post prepares issue a new stamp next month to celebrate the life of Viola Desmond, our own government seems about to quietly take a pass on the opportunity to honour the Halifax woman whose personal courage remains a symbolic inspiration in the fight for human rights in Canada.

Viola Desmond Won't Be Budged

In 1946—nine years before Rosa Parks’ refusal to get off a Montgomery, Alabama, bus helped trigger the U.S. civil rights movement—Desmond refused to give up her seat in the “whites-only” section of New Glasgow’s Roseland Theatre. She was hauled out of the theatre, thrown in jail, charged, convicted and fined $20. She fought her conviction and lost, but the embarrassing publicity helped galvanize the fight against Nova Scotia’s state-sanctioned segregation and led to changes in the law.

Nova Scotians have only recently begun to acknowledge Desmond’s significance—and suffering. Two years ago, Premier Darrell Dexter publicly apologized for the “injustice” she’d suffered and his government issued a rare posthumous pardon.

In 2010, Tory MLA Alfie MacLeod introduced a resolution in the House of Assembly calling on the province to declare Nov. 8—the day of her arrest—Viola Desmond Day.

Some in the black community argued that date was inappropriate; others complained they hadn’t been consulted.

Fair enough.

The Dexter government consulted, but the question it asked— “how to establish a lasting form of recognition that would honour the contributions and experiences of African Nova Scotians”—seemed blandly beside the point of Macleod’s original motion.

No surprise its final report doesn’t even mention Desmond. Or that the idea for the Day now seems dead. “People,” explains a government spokesperson, “have been saying they want something that recognizes the broad scope of African-Nova Scotian accomplishments.”

Is there some reason we can’t have both?

As Desmond’s sister Wanda wrote in a recent letter to the government: “Naming a day after a popular and iconic figure does not lessen the larger ambitions of creating such a day… In fact they give the day an identity and create an entry point into an issue that otherwise may be ignored with a more generic title.”

It’s time we celebrated Viola Desmond Day.

Related links:

• Viola Desmond Will Not Be Budged Facebook page
• Sister to Courage: Stories from the World of Viola Desmond, Canada's Rosa Parks
• "Past Time for Nova Scotians to Honour Viola Desmond"
•  "Community Consultations Report," Office of African Nova Scotian Affairs

The lesson from last week’s reversal of council’s decision to sell the former St. Patrick’s-Alexandra school to a private developer? Even when our councillors finally, belatedly get it right, they bungle the process so badly everyone walks away more than slightly soiled and embarrassed by the whole exercise.

In December, over angry objections of north-end residents—who already believed they were being squeezed out of their own community by urban redevelopment and gentrification—council voted to peddle a local community school site to a private developer.

The problem—as quickly became apparent and should have been clear before the vote—was that council hadn’t followed city policy for disposing of surplus property. They were supposed to consult the community first.

Not that it mattered. City staff had stacked the evaluation process to make it virtually impossible for proposals from non-profit community groups to compete with those from private developers.

There were rallies. Hundreds protested. There was a petition. Close to a thousand people signed.

Last week, the issue made its way back to council. After four-and-a-half hours of “other business”—before a packed gallery present only for the school issue—councillors finally got around to debating a motion to rescind.

Coun. Jennifer Watts had barely moved her motion when city manager Richard Butts advised councillors to go into secret session to talk the motion over with city legal staff. Another secret meeting to discuss public business? Where was this city manager when Occupy Nova Scotia protestors got turfed? Oh, right. He was home in Toronto.

Council voted down the secret meeting, then voted down a motion to adjourn, then met in secret anyway, then—it’s now closing in on one in the morning—finally voted 17-5 to rescind their original decision. And they asked city staff, who, of course, had devised the flawed process in the first place, to report back on whether the process had been correctly followed.

As usual, nothing is settled.

Once again, Council has managed to alienate the community, the developers who submitted bids in good faith and average citizens who expect better.

Let’s hope there’s a lesson in that too.

My assignment: “Explain the Occupy Wherever Movement in 15 Minutes.”

The occasion was a recent luncheon at the Halifax Club to mark Global Ivey Day, an annual opportunity for alumni of the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business to come together to celebrate their Iveyness. I’d been invited as the post-lunch speaker, even though I’m neither an Ivey graduate nor a business person. (I did once pile-drive a business into the ground, but I’m sure that’s not why they invited me. Besides, that’s a story for another day.)

My guess is the organizer, a thoughtful Windsor, N.S., lawyer-politician-businessman named Jim White, had been reading about the Occupy movement, fretting those Wall Street tenters were on to something important and wanted someone else—me—to jolt his fellow Iveys into confronting the question too.

I was happy to oblige. But I wasn’t sure I would require 15 minutes.

Just as Bill Clinton had used his it’s-the-economy-stupid mantra to become U.S. President in 1992, the essence of Occupy boils down to four words: It’s the Inequality, Stupid.

Thanks to the three g’s—go-go globalization, government de-regulation and corporate greed—the traditional gulf between rich and poor is becoming an unbridgeable chasm.

Consider. The Conference Board of Canada—hardly a hotbed of socialist radicalism—reports the top 10 per cent of the world’s population now gobble up 42 per cent of its income, leaving the bottom 10 per cent with one per cent of their crumbs. That gap has widened dramatically since the mid-1980s. In Canada, the divide is growing even faster than in the United States.

If you made $3 million in 2005—lucky you!—you paid, on average, 25 per cent less in taxes than you did in 1990. Luckier you! The poorest 20 per cent of Canadians, by contrast, paid a higher percentage of their income in tax in 2005 than they did in 1990. Unlucky them.

Luck, in fact, has little to do with it. Capital gains, the mother’s milk of the better-off, is taxed at just 50-cents on the dollar. Why is a dollar earned speculating on the stock market taxed less than income earned educating children or caring for the sick? A hint. Child care workers and nurses don’t have powerful lobbyists to write tax rules for them.

Governments tell us we’re in a fiscal mess. We can no longer afford basic, opportunity-leveling services like health and education.

Meanwhile, those same governments slashed corporate taxes from 28 per cent to 15 per cent between 2000 and 2012, and promise more to come.

No wonder we can’t afford public services. The rich can pay for their own health and education, thanks. And their legacies.

A few days before I spoke at Ivey Day—the business school is named for Richard Ivey, who was rich enough to give enough to get the place named after him—Nova Scotia businessman Ken Rowe donated $15 million to Dalhousie University’s business school.

I respect Rowe. He’s a business builder and signifcant employment generator. But let’s look at his generosity through other lenses.

How many years would it take the average Nova Scotia worker to earn what Ken Rowe chose to give away in an instant?

Three-hundred-and-nineteen plus!

How much of that $15 million—thanks to tax benefits the giver gets—will ultimately be paid by the rest of us?

More than you’d probably guess.

So why does Rowe alone get to choose which good is greater? There are 59, mostly generously endowed business schools in Canada. Why a Ken Rowe School of Management, but no Ken Rowe School of Social Work, or Education, or Child Care?

No wonder people are frustrated and angry—and not just the Occupy tenters. Look around. At the race to the bottom that only benefits those at the top. At skyrocketing education debts and youth unemployment that is robbing the next generation of a future...

Even if the Occupy Movement’s tents get flattened, the issue they raise will not go away. And the consequences of not righting that balance will only get worse.

It really is the inequality, stupid.

(From the January-February 2012 issue of Atlantic Business Magazine.)

On Wednesday, local radio personality Bobby Mac launched a new Facebook group “for those of us who are tired of those whining people who don't want any progress in this great city of Halifax.” Its name? SCREW THE VIEW!!

By Saturday morning, STV had 163 members.

“We are tired of the groups that stop progress in this great city of Halifax,” he explained. “We want new buildings. No one goes up Citadel hill for the view. They go for the fort, and for sex at night.”

Acknowledging Bobby Mac probably knows more about sex on Citadel Hill than I do, and even accepting his dubious proposition no one goes there for the view, let’s analyze his most serious argument: whining, save-the-view-of-the-harbour-flotables crazies are preventing “progress”—by which I assume he means a forest of high rise office towers on the slopes of the Citadel.

Really?

Last year, Dalhousie’s Planning and Design Centre released a map showing 23 major downtown development projects, all of them approved, but almost none built or under construction. Who’s to blame for that? Heritage groups? Developers? Or perhaps the economy, stupid?

The convention centre? Despite the whinging from the all-things-ancient lovers, the city and province eagerly approved the proposed project and shoveled buckets of our cash in its direction. The first real delay came because Ottawa took its time to say yes.

By the time it did, the economy had gone to hell in a handcart. The developer is still scrambling to find financing and tenants to make the project viable.

Speaking of which, the whiners—who also raised Economics 101 questions about the convention centre—appear to have been right about that.

Consider this from the Dec. 31 Wall Street Journal, hardly a preserve of loony preservationists. There’s “a nationwide surplus of empty meeting facilities, struggling convention halls and vacant hotel rooms,” the paper notes. “How have governments responded to this glut? By building more convention centers, of course, financed by debt backed by new taxes and fees on already struggling taxpayers.”

Uh… Perhaps Bobby Mac’s next Facebook group will be to whinge about how all our tax dollars are being wasted on a white elephant.

Now that would be progress.

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?

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.

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.
 

I don’t know for certain. But it would not surprise me to discover, when we finally touch bottom in the Great Bridgetown Financial Fiasco—when we get past the recent auditor’s report fingering a single trusted employee for looting $113,000 from the town’s treasury, past the ongoing police investigation and likely charges and even more likely conviction (the auditor’s report says she admitted taking the money), and on to her pre-sentence report—gambling was at the heart of the crime.

I have no proof. But I read the papers.

Consider these Nova Scotia gambling-related crime stories, all published since October 1.

A former financial secretary to the Lunenburg local of the Canadian Auto Workers’ Union is ordered to stand trial on charges he failed to pay back $29,000 he stole from the organization. His lawyer claims the man is addicted to video lottery terminal gambling.

The former president of a Royal Canadian Legion branch in Waverley is sentenced to house arrest after stealing $21,385 he gambled away over three years. “Gambling took hold of me,” he told the judge at his sentencing.

A Glace Bay man pleads guilty to robbing a local bank branch of $2,389 to “support his gambling addiction.”

And a Musquodoboit Harbour doctor is ordered to abstain from gambling, alcohol and non-prescription medications after the province’s College of Physicians and Surgeons determines she prescribed narcotics to a patient—and took them herself.

Most crimes associated with gambling addictions tend to slide under our radar.

But not all.

Last spring, Jason MacRae finally admitted he killed his wife, school teacher Paula Gallant, during an argument over a $700 online gambling debt.

And two of those charged in the MLA expenses scandal—former MLA Dave Wilson and current MLA Trevor Zinck—have been publicly identified as having “issues” with gambling.

In fact, a 2006 research report says 45 per cent of all inmates at the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Institution self-reported gambling problems; 20 per cent claimed to have committed gambling-related crimes.

We have a problem we’re not admitting. Perhaps it’s because we too are hooked—on the millions of dollars in government revenues gambling provides.