So… did Percy really pop Keith? Is the premier going to pull the plug?

Can I get back to you?

I’m still in the Metro Centre. It's fun, frenzied Friday night. “The Cup is in the House,” and the house is bursting. Ten-thousand-five-hundred-and-ninety-five fans, plus media, scouts, officials, parents, friends of friends. Expectant, ready to implode, explode.

“We want the Cup!”

Will this — finally — be the night?

The puck hasn’t yet dropped and tonight’s 50-50 prize pot heads north of $20,000, double the usual regular-season end-of-game total. Feeling lucky…

Ron is grinning. Dave is worried. We’ve been coming to Moosehead games for 19 years. Ron knows how good this team is. Dave knows how often defeat has been snatched from the jaws of victory.

“Battle on the boards and the puck comes loose…”

At 5:32 of the first period — Stephen MacAulay, a 20-year-old from Cole Harbour whose mother recently died of cancer — wrists a hard shot from in front of the net… 1 – 0! We’re on our feet. Over in the next section, the “Pom-Pom Lady” — she’s been a fan as long as we have — shakes her pom poms. With vigour.

By the end of the first, it’s 3 – 0, the 50-50 pot is $30,000 and climbing (who had time during a period to buy tickets?) and the line-ups for the men’s washrooms snake like conga lines around the lower level. Heard inside the washroom: “Meet you back at the beer line.”

Ron is still grinning. Dave is still worried. “Don’t sit back,” he implores mid-way through the second period. “Skate!” He only looks like he’s not enjoying himself.

The final seconds tick down...

“We will… We will… rock you!” For once, arena rock isn’t necessary. The crowd is into this. With 10 minutes still to go in the third period and the Mooseheads only up by two, the we-are-the-champions chant starts in the upper bowl above. “Olé. Olé. Olé-olé, olé…” No one remembers it’s a Spanish football chant.

Some guy from Prospect wins the 50-50 draw, takes home more than $39,000!

Two more late goals, including a second MacAulay goal into an empty net, seals it. It’s over. Ron is still grinning. Dave smiles. Finally. High fives all around our section of bad-times-and-good-times fans. See you in September...

Percy Paris? An election call? Oh, right, I’ll get on that.

The good news is that Nova Scotia’s four Conservative MPs say they are not going to waste taxpayer dollars sending constituents their national party’s mudroom-generated, bottom-feeding Justin Trudeau mauler-mailers.

The bad news is that not one of them — Peter MacKay, Gerald Keddy, Scott Armstrong, Greg Kerr — seems prepared to denounce either their bullying content or their flagrant abuse of public funds.

The publicly-funded mailers, which are intended to allow local MPs to update their constituents on what they’ve been doing for them in the House of Commons and alert them to programs or issues of local significance, have been hijacked by the national parties — mostly but not exclusively the Tories — to fund partisan federal muck-tossing.

Consider the latest, which is scheduled to “blanket” the country June 1. Using every cheap font and design trick from a 1970s graphic designer’s handbook, it flanks side-by-side photos of Trudeau (dated, wispy beard, jacket over his shoulder, bathed in sparkles) and Harper (current, formal, larger, surrounded by what one wag called an “angelic glow”). Above the photos, the ad features a series of fact-maligning, decontextualized, bullet-smearing points intended to contrast the two men.

Perhaps our Nova Scotia MPs should read them more carefully.

“A famous last name,” mocks the mailer, “is not enough to run Canada’s economy.”

How about Canada’s defence? Consider Peter MacKay, whose admittedly more modestly famous last name smoothed his own entrée into federal politics and whose resumé is sprinkled with the fairy dust of semi-glamorous liaisons with semi-glamorous celebrities… Is having his semi-famous last name really enough to justify botching the purchase of a fleet of untendered fighter jets?

In the mailer, the Tories mock Trudeau’s supposed inexperience by highlighting the fact he was once — horrors — a “drama teacher,” a “camp counselor” and “white water rafting instructor.”

Should Scott Armstrong’s next campaign flyer begin with the embarrassing boast he was once a kids’ baseball coach? Should Gerald Keddy confess he is — as his bio attests — an “avid… outdoorsmen(sic)?” Should Greg Kerr own up to the fact he, like the unqualified Trudeau, was once — oh no! — a school teacher?

Or should our MPs finally stand up, tell their leader enough is enough, and demand an end to the gutter politics that demeans us all?

So federal justice minister Rob Nicholson isn’t the tiniest bit curious/concerned/appalled about what went wrong, and why, and what needs to be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada threw out Fenwick MacIntosh’s 2011 conviction on 18 charges of sexual assault and gross indecency, not because he didn’t do terrible deeds to at least four boys back in Port Hawkesbury in the 1970s but because the federal justice department, Canada Customs, Passport Canada, the department of foreign affairs, the RCMP and Nova Scotia’s Public Prosecution Service botched his case so badly MacIntosh’s rights had been violated beyond the possibility of a fair trial.

The minister sees no need for a public inquiry.

Really?

After the boys came forward with their allegations as adults in the 1990s, the RCMP investigated. Officers laid charges in December 1995. By then, however, MacIntosh had left Canada for a job in India.

It took the Mounties a full year and a half to alert Canada Customs to watch for him. It took another year for Nova Scotia’s prosecution service to ask Ottawa to ask India to send him home to Canada for trial. And then another five years — yes, five, count ’em! — for Ottawa to prepare the extradition request. And — hold it, we’re not even half done yet — another three years for Ottawa to deliver the request to New Delhi.

During this time, MacIntosh, a known fugitive from Canadian justice, got his passport renewed twice. When Passport Canada turned down one application, MacIntosh appealed. Passport Canada didn’t show up at the hearing and a federal court judge “temporarily” overturned its decision. Passport Canada apparently never followed up.

In fact, MacIntosh traveled back and forth between India and Canada on at least three occasions without even being questioned by authorities.

And yet, Rob Nicolson doesn’t believe there are any lessons to be learned from a full public airing of how this travesty of justice happened?

Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter has promised an “eyes wide open” inquiry into the province’s role in all of this, which is welcome. But given all of the federal agencies involved, it isn’t nearly good enough.

It’s complicated.

The Canadian Psychiatric Society, among others, publishes guidelines for reporting on youth suicide. Don’t put the word “suicide” in the headline, it says. Don’t give such stories undue prominence. Don’t describe the method. Don’t glorify the victim.

The guidelines are designed to reduce the very real risk of copycats.

We know many media outlets violated those guidelines while reporting Rehtaeh Parsons’ suicide.

We can’t know — yet — whether that will lead more young people to kill themselves. But we also can’t know whether the avalanche of publicity about this horrific incident will encourage as many or more parents to ask their kids the right questions before it’s too late, or give some troubled kids the courage to seek the help they need.

What we do know is that publicity about her case has triggered a much-needed public debate about youth sexual assault, cyber-bullying and teen suicide.

It’s complicated.

I, for one, worry about the mob mentality unleashed by publicity about Rehtaeh Parsons’ suicide. Too many people have been too quick to leap to conclusions based on too little real evidence. Too many people have been too willing to assume they know all they need to know to become judge, jury and executioner — of the justice system, of the school system, of the boys allegedly responsible.

And yet, I also have to acknowledge that same social media mobilization not only forced the reopening of the criminal investigation of Rehtaeh’s alleged sexual assault but has also sparked a broader review of how the system worked, or didn’t, and has even led to proposals for new laws, including how to deal with distributing intimate photos without permission.

It’s complicated.

Ask Adam Barnes. The 19-year-old Cole Harbour youth was among those “outed” as one of Rehtaeh Parsons attackers. Vigilantes distributed his photo online. Though he says he wasn’t even at the party where the assault allegedly occurred, Barnes now fears for his life. “I always have to worry about who recognizes me,” he told CBC News last week. “I always have to look out behind my back.”

In our rush to end online bullying and win justice for Rehtaeh, will we become the new bullies?

It is complicated.

On April 19, 1989, a 39-year-old woman named Trisha Meili went for a jog in New York’s Central Park. She was raped and violently assaulted.

Partly because of the attack’s brutality, partly because of news reports the perpetrators were a gang of “wilding” black youths and partly because of who the victim was—white, a Yale MBA, a Wall Street investment banker—“the Central Park Jogger” case stirred global pre-Internet passions and angry demands police arrest someone—now.

The police did charge five teenaged boys, four blacks and an Hispanic. Though some were juveniles, police and media publicly identified them anyway. Four confessed. They were all convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

“Justice” had been served.

Flash forward 13 years.

The boys, now men, had served their sentences and been released.

That’s when another man confessed to the crime. His DNA matched that found at the crime scene.

The original convictions were—too late—vacated.

What went wrong? In the rush for “justice,” certain inconvenient facts got overlooked. The confessions, which often contradicted one another about what had happened and were all later recanted, had been coerced by a police force under intense public pressure to nail the bastards. None of the crime scene DNA matched any of the suspects; the only DNA collected came from one, then-unknown-now-known person.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because, at a time of understandable, social-media-enflamed passion about the tragic suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons, we need to be cautious about what we think we know.

The no-name hactivists at Anonymous who, ironically, threaten to name Parsons’ alleged rapists if their hang-’em-high version of justice isn’t done—and done quickly—claim to know who did it. They also claim names of alleged perpetrators being circulated by others are wrong. How do they really know either?

And would what they imagine they know actually stand up in court, where the evidence bar rises above an email allegation, a Facebook post or a 140-character tweet?

By all means, let’s have an independent public review of how police, prosecutors, the school and others handled this case.

But let’s not assume its outcome.

Or presume mob vengeance is justice for Rehteah or anyone else.

Did Darrell Dexter balance the budget?

Is the pope Argentinian?

Depends on which pope you mean.

And what you mean by balance.

Not to forget "the..."

The perhaps more relevant pre-election questions out of last week’s legislature exercise:

• Would the other parties have done anything different in either the budget’s broad strokes or in its jiggery-pokery, see-we-kept-our-promise presentation?
• And, setting aside for the moment everyone’s OCD-like obsession with balanced budgets, is there anything good, and/or different to be said about this NDP budget?

The answer to the first question is easy. No.

One of the lessons learned from electing our first “democratic socialist” government four years ago is how little party labels matter.

This NDP has continued the dream-big-or-go-home Tory-Gliberal tradition dating back to at least Robert Stanfield, doling out wing-and-a-prayer pots of taxpayer dollars to multinational corporations—can you say Dae Woo?—for jobs that never seem to materialize.

And, like governments of all stripes everywhere, the NDP claims to worry about deficit and debt while implicitly subscribing to reality-discredited tax-cutting-to-prosperity theories. It continues to cut corporate taxes that help fund programs it then has to cut in order to pretend to bring down the deficit.

Throw in the uncontrollable constraints of a high Canadian dollar, an aging provincial population, declining federal transfers, corporate non-re-investment and the torrent-down joblessness of the global non-recovery… and you end up with an NDP budget that, in its broad outlines, probably resembles what Stephen McNeil or Jamie Baillie would have presented.

And McNeil and Baillie would almost certainly have engaged in the same reality-adjusting, future-finessing, Pollyanna presentation as the NDP to peddle it.

Which brings us to the tinkers. Is there anything good, and/or different to be said about this NDP budget?

Even in the current slice-and-dice-to-balance atmosphere, the NDP did play at its progressive edges.

There were minor increases for those on income assistance, more funds for low-income housing, an upped age limit for free kids’ dental care, modest tax breaks for low-income seniors and laudable, targeted new spending from insulin pumps and newborn screening to head-start education programs for poor children.

It’s not much—maybe $12 million in a $9.5 billion budget—but, from a progressive point of view, it’s probably more than we could have hoped for from the Liberals or Tories.

As we head into an election, is it enough?

By Stephen Kimber

On Friday, April 5, at the Metro Centre, the Halifax Mooseheads—the number-one-ranked team in all of Canadian junior hockey—begin the second round of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League Championships. The team steamrolled through the first, no-need-to-break-a-sweat, tune-up round, sweeping away the Saint John Sea Dogs in the minimum four games, outscoring their opponents 25 – 4.

That this year’s Mooseheads team is special is beyond question. According to the fan website herdhistory.com, the 2012-13 Mooseheads can already claim franchise regular season records for most wins, most points, most goals scored, fewest power play goals allowed and most games in a row—43—in which the team earned at least a point. The 2012-13 team had more 30-goal scorers (five) and more 20-goal-scorers (eight) than any previous team. Its flashiest forward, Jonathan Drouin, set a record for the longest consecutive point streak at 29 games, and would almost certainly have won the league scoring championship if not for injuries and the mid-season month he spent dazzling fans at the World Junior Hockey Championships in Ufa, Russia. Not to forget the Mooseheads brilliant young goalie Zachary Fucale, who now owns team records for most wins in a season and best goals-against average.

Not bad for a team that, three years ago, was not only the worst in the league but, according to its owner, the “worst team in the country.”

How did the Mooseheads get from there to here?

And is this—after close to two decades of respectable futility—the year they win it all?

There are any number of places where this story might begin, but let’s start in California on a sun-drenched summer day almost two years ago…

***

“Yes, well… that’s great,” Graham Mackinnon responded coolly, calmly, to the voice at the other end of his cellphone. “Thanks for letting us know.”

It was the morning of July 13, 2011, and Graham, his wife Kathy and their two teenaged children—Nathan, still almost two months’ shy of his 16th birthday, and Sarah, Nathan’s 17 year old sister—were on an L.A. Freeway in a rented car headed for a day at the beach.

Nathan was in California to attend a summer camp his advisor-agent, Pat Brisson, organized each year for his most promising young hockey prospects. Kathy and Graham had decided to make it a family vacation—in part to escape, if only for a few days, Nathan-crazed Halifax. Back home, Nathan’s future had become a matter of fevered, obsessive conjecture. “It was frustrating,” Kathy would recall later. “Why was everyone talking about what we’re going to choose?”

Not that Kathy was unaware of the significance of the choice she, her husband and their son would soon make. The family had set August 1st—less than three weeks away—as Decision Day.

Nathan MacKinnon wasn’t just another talented young hockey player. From the time he was seven or eight, everyone knew he had that magic elixir of natural talent and unnatural obsession that could take him… wherever he chose. At age 12, a year or two younger than his teammates on Cole Harbour’s Bantam AAA Red Wings, Nathan scored 110 points in 50 games. The next year, he scored 145. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if he could go to university and play, and maybe get a scholarship?’” Kathy says. “My husband was more forward thinking.”

It was Graham, in fact, who’d suggested, two years earlier, that Nathan attend Shattuck-Saint Mary’s, the Minnesota prep school and professional hockey incubator fellow Cole Harbour hockey player Sidney Crosby once attended. Kathy especially liked the fact hockey was integrated into Shattuck’s curriculum; if you were late with an academic assignment, you’d hear about it from the coach. For Nathan, a “hockey-is-who-he-is” kid but an average, “happy-to-get-Bs” student, Shattuck represented—for his mother at least—an ideal place to develop and mature as player, student and man.

Having completed grades 9 and 10 at Shattuck, Nathan was scheduled to start Grade 11 in September. Under U.S. National College Athletic Association (NCAA) recruitment rules, that meant already-slavering American university scouts would finally be allowed to talk to him. You didn’t have to look far—one of the banners hanging from the roof at the Shattuck hockey arena honoured Jonathan Toews, a school alum who’d gone on to play college hockey before starring for the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks—to see where that might lead. Shattuck, says Kathy MacKinnon, “certainly didn’t seem like a bad place for Nathan to spend the rest of high school.”

But it was far from his only option.

Just over a month before—on June 4, 2011—the Baie Comeau Drakkar of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League had made Nathan its first overall selection in the league’s annual draft of the best 15- and 16-year-old midget hockey players from eastern Canada and the United States. The QMJHL, one of three elite junior hockey leagues in the country, represented the traditional rite of passage for Canadian boys who aspired to play professional hockey.

But it was no longer their only pathway.

In fact, Nathan and his mother had skipped the high-profile QJMHL draft day in Victoriaville, Quebec, the month before and drove instead from Shattuck to Omaha, Nebraska, to check out the Lancers, a junior team in the United States Hockey League. The USHL had not only begun to rival Canadian major junior leagues as an NHL training ground (more than 150 grads play in the NHL) but, just as importantly, it also served as a gateway to Division 1 American universities (close to 250 young men each year made that leap). After a day scrimmaging with the Lancers, Nathan reported the hockey “very competitive.”

In Omaha, he could play against elite older players while retaining his NCAA option.

That option would disappear if Nathan decided to play for Baie Comeau, or any other QJMHL team. Making Baie Comeau less appealing—from Kathy’s perspective—the team didn’t send its kids to local schools, preferring instead to arrange for them to take correspondence courses and attend team tutoring sessions. “I worried Nathan could end up the only English kid in a room taking correspondence courses,” she explains. “After Shattuck, we weren’t willing to take that chance.”

That was one reason they’d skipped the QMJHL draft. “If he’d gone there that day,” his mother says, “it might have seemed like we were committed—and we weren’t ready to commit.”

But the MacKinnons knew at least one other QMJHL team—the hometown Halifax Mooseheads—were also fishing for his future services.

If the Mooseheads landed him… well, that would change everything.

Back in the rental car on the LA freeway on the way to the beach on July 13, Graham listened to the voice at the other end of the line. “Sure,” he said into the phone, then handed it to Nathan, smiling. “It’s for you. It’s Cam.”

***

Cam Russell—another Cole Harbour lad who’d enjoyed a successful NHL career before retiring home to Nova Scotia—had run summer hockey schools Nathan attended. Russell—now the Mooseheads’ general manager—was just one of the family’s many connections to the team. When Nathan was seven, the family had billeted Mooseheads forward Frederic Cabana. Later, goalie Jeremy Duschene stayed with them. Nathan himself had been a member of Hal’s Pals, a kiddie fan club.

“We got to know the organization,” Kathy MacKinnon says, “and we were impressed by the way they operated.” Including, of course, their emphasis on education.

If Nathan could play for the Mooseheads, it would have been “a no-brainer,” Kathy says. “Nathan could have what he wanted—a chance to play and develop his skills with a good organization—and I could have had what I really wanted—my son at home again.”

The Halifax Mooseheads wanted—needed—Nathan MacKinnon to play for them at least as much as the MacKinnons wanted their son to play for the Mooseheads.

The Mooseheads had been in the league for close to two decades and—though the team put on respectable showings most years—it had yet to win a league championship, let alone a Memorial Cup, the holy grail of Canadian junior hockey. The closest they’d come—twice—was getting to the third of four rounds in the QMJHL championships. In 2000, they’d played in the Memorial Cup, but only because host teams automatically qualify for the tournament. The Mooseheads were eliminated in the semi-finals.

Their last—worst—major disappointment had come in 2007-08. That year’s already talent-rich team had traded away five future draft picks, including two first-rounders, for Brad Marchand, another local boy-then-making-good, believing he was the final piece in their Memorial Cup puzzle. Instead, the team was swept in four straight games in the third round of their league playoffs, and Marchand was such a bust he was benched for the final playoff game.

Some Mooseheads fans will tell you—retrospectively, of course—that was the best thing that ever happened to the team. After years of doing whatever it took to be in the muddling middle of the league pack but never quite enough to win it all, the Mooseheads had gambled—and lost.

The team went from first in their division to last in the entire league two years in a row. That should have allowed the team to rebuild by choosing the best young players available in the next years’ drafts—last place teams pick first—but the Mooseheads had already traded those picks away.

On January 14, 2009, the team’s new owner, former NHL star Bobby Smith, fired general manager Marcel Patenaude and appointed Russell, then the coach, to assume the dual mantle of coach and general manager.

“That was the day the rebuild began,” Russell says today. He and Smith agreed the team would stop trading future prospects in order to remain just OK; they would take their lumps and swap veterans for draft picks, building a contender from within.

In the short term, it didn’t help. There was more bloodletting. In October 2010, Bobby Smith “relieved” Russell of his coaching duties, briefly, quixotically, taking over the reins himself, but asked Russell to stay on as general manager to continue rebuilding the team. “That was a difficult day,” Russell admits, but he sucked it up. “We’d started something, and I wanted to see it through.”

By then, Russell had put many of the building blocks of what would become the 2012-13 Mooseheads in place. In 2009, he’d drafted forwards Carl Gelinas, Brent Andrews and Matthew Boudreau, along with defencemen Steve Gillard and Trey Lewis. Lewis, now the Mooseheads’ 20-year-old co-captain and one of its steadiest defenders, was chosen with a late-in-draft-day 67th overall pick. “Our scouts,” says Russell, “are very good at their jobs.”

In the draft of top European prospects the next month, the Mooseheads added gangly German defenceman 16-year-old Konrad Abelsthauser, now a San Jose Sharks NHL draft pick.

After wheeling and dealing a stockpile of five of the first 37 picks for the 2010 draft, Russell added forwards Luca Ciampini, the second overall pick, Andrew Ryan and Darcy Ashley, then topped up his talent pool in the European draft with 17-year-old Czech scoring sensation Marty Frk. (The next year, Detroit would confirm Frk’s worth, selecting him in the second round of the NHL draft.)

While Russell believed he had put together the core of a winning team, he knew he needed something more to transform it into a true championship contender. He needed Nathan MacKinnon.

***

Nathan MacKinnon and Jonathan Drouin. (Photo: Riley Smith)

The Halifax Mooseheads had never had a homegrown superstar. They’d missed out on Sidney Crosby, who’d played his junior hockey in Rimouski, Quebec, and James Sheppard, a Lower Sackville boy who set his junior hockey records in the uniform of the Cape Breton Screaming Eagles.

“We didn’t want to miss out again,” Russell says simply.The problem was that Baie Comeau, the league’s second worst team the season before, had won first draft pick in a coin toss. They weren’t about to trade away the chance to select MacKinnon, even after his parents made it clear Nathan wouldn’t report. Baie Comeau gambled that, even if it couldn’t eventually convince the MacKinnons the Drakkar was the team for their son, other teams would bid up the price for him after the draft.

The best the Mooseheads were able to do before the June 2011 draft was trade with another team to get the second pick (as fourth worst team the season before, they were scheduled to choose fourth).

With that pick, Russell chose another budding superstar named Jonathan Drouin, who would turn out to be far from a consolation prize.

But Russell also scored another draft-day coup. The Lewiston Maineiacs, the only American-based team in the QMJHL, had dropped out of the league at the end of the season, and their players—and future picks—were up for grabs by the league’s other teams in a dispersal draft. Russell had the opportunity to add an experienced 53-goal scorer, but opted instead to take the Mainieacs’ first-round pick—11th overall—in the next day’s midget draft. He used that pick to choose Zachary Fucale. “We had our goalie coach watching him all season and he was a consensus No. 1 for us,” Russell told reporters later. “You look around the league and you can’t win championships without good goaltending. That’s why it was important to get that 11th pick. We knew there were other teams that were very high on him.”

Russell had his goalie of the future, his two key European picks, a budding superstar in Drouin and a cast of talented prospects who’d spent the past two seasons learning to play together.

Now all he needed was Nathan MacKinnon.

***

In the weeks following the draft, Russell worked the phones, talking two, sometimes three times a day, with Steve Ahern, Baie Comeau’s general manager. Probing, proffering, feinting, making offers, fielding counter offers—How about Jonathan Drouin, plus, plus?… No deal—cajoling, bullying, shouting, hanging up, calling back. After it was over, Russell would call Ahern to apologize for things said, and unsaid. “These discussions can get pretty emotional,” Russell allows.

By early July, Russell understood the outlines of what Baie Comeau wanted—both draft choices to help their team rebuild and also one or more proven veterans who could make the team respectable immediately.

On July 12, Russell landed those draft picks in a separate deal with the Quebec Remparts. The Mooseheads dispatched a young American player named Adam Erne—another Mooseheads’ top 2011 draft pick, but one who’d indicated he was unlikely to report to Halifax—to Quebec in exchange for the Remparts’ first round picks in 2013 and 2014, and a 2012 second round pick.

The next day, Russell packaged those first-round picks with another first rounder from his own collection, and sweetened the pot by including Carl Gelinas, a class of 2009 Mooseheads draft pick who’d blossomed into the team’s most valuable player, and Francis Turbide, a solid defenceman.

Done.

After the official announcement was arranged, Russell asked for—and got—permission to be the one to call the MacKinnons to convey the good news.

Talking on the phone on the freeway in L.A., Nathan kept his composure, thanked Russell for his efforts, said he was excited to play for the Moose. It wasn’t until after he hung up the phone that the family looked at one another and, as Kathy puts it, “started screaming ‘woo hoo’ all the way to the beach.”

They weren’t alone. Within minutes, Mooseheads’ staff were fielding calls from newly fantasizing fans eager to buy season tickets.

Everything was finally in place.

But then, just over a month later, on the eve of the team’s training camp, Jonathan Drouin’s family unexpectedly informed the Mooseheads he wouldn’t play for them that season.

***

What makes junior hockey so endlessly entertaining, frustrating and unpredictable is that it is played by teenaged boys who are themselves endlessly entertaining, frustrating and unpredictable.

Russell and the Mooseheads’ new head coach, Dominic Ducharme, immediately flew to Quebec to try to persuade Drouin to change his mind. But his parents, his agent and his midget hockey coach had apparently decided Jonathan, still physically slight, could benefit from another year of maturing as well as another year in his local school.

“It came out of the blue,” Russell admits now. Though publicly accepting—“These are his wishes and we’ll respect them,” Russell told reporters—Mooseheads scouts remained in constant touch with Drouin, attending his every game. Russell himself checked in with the family weekly and made frequent face-time visits. “By Christmas,” Russell says with an exhale, “Jonathan was ready to make the jump.” He pauses. “It was a huge relief.”

***

At one level, junior hockey players are professional athletes who train year-round, practise daily and play a relentless 68-game schedule in front of demanding fans who treat them like heroes—or bums, often both at the same time. They’re expected to live up to their exalted status off the ice too, making public appearances, visiting schools, sick kids in hospital… If they don’t perform, they can find themselves traded or, worse, cut.

And yet… they’re also 15 and 16 year olds coping with life in a new city, a new school system, often a new language, trying to make new friends. They’re boys who miss their mothers, teenagers whose girlfriends break up with them, students whose essays are due Monday morning, kids who sometimes do stupid, fun things they wouldn’t want their parents to read about in the newspapers…

To complicate matters, they’re also still developing, both physically and emotionally. “There’s no guarantee that the best player at 15 will still be the best player at 19,” Russell admits.

Shaping a winning team out of that messy clay is no easy task. And it must be done in three-year cycles because—unlike professional teams—junior players are only eligible to play between the ages of 16 – 19 (each team is also allowed three 20 year olds). And rare talents—like MacKinnon and Drouin—often end up graduating to the NHL at 18.

Which means…

This year’s team may be the Mooseheads best chance to win its first ever league championship, perhaps even its first Memorial Cup.

Can they?

Cam Russell remembers what happened back in 2007-08. He knows how unpredictable teenagers are, how fickle the hockey gods can be. He laughs. “We’ll see,” he says.

Stephen Kimber's latest non-fiction book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, will be published in August. When he's not "researching" in sunny Cuba, Kimber attends Mooseheads games as a long-time season ticket holder.

(From The Coast, April 4, 2013)

Richmond, the primary-to-nine school I attended in north end Halifax, is long gone.

Not quite true.

The oldest section, ironically the one re-built after the 1917 Halifax Explosion, now serves as a family court building. The other two wings, hastily tacked on after World War II to accommodate then-exponentially expanding baby boom babies, were unceremoniously leveled after the wave crested, young families moved to the suburbs and Halifax finally outgrew its wasteful tradition of parallel Protestant-Catholic schools.

I can’t help thinking about Richmond’s fate whenever the province’s annual March Madness Educational Demolition Derby enters its final fevered days.

Last week, with today’s looming deadline for determining which schools no longer make the Survivor cut, provincial school boards voted to shutter at least five schools, amalgamate two others and put up 14—or more; who can keep count?—for review in the next year.

Which means more families will suffer through the same gut-wrenching process next year.

The issues are easy enough to catalogue: declining birth rates, rural depopulation, pinched provincial budgets, delayed-until-it’s-too-late building maintenance, continuing collapse of rural economies, more budget cuts…

The answers… less so.

While there is a growing consensus big is not necessarily better—particularly now that technology can connect students in the smallest rural schools with the Internet’s vast, comprehensive database of facts, ideas, life—the reality is cash-strapped school boards currently spend $100 million a year just to heat, light and maintain empty classrooms in more-than-half-empty school buildings.

One promising suggestion, touted by some parents and community groups, calls for under-used schools to become fully utilized community hubs, with classrooms sharing space with rent-paying community groups, non-profits, government offices, even businesses.

“We have to view these buildings as an asset and not a liability,” says CUPE Nova Scotia President Danny Cavanagh, who believes they could become “community centerpieces.”

While the department of education is experimenting with a modest version of the idea—SchoolsPlus combines government services with classrooms—it only currently plans to implement it in four schools a year. That’s not nearly enough.

The next March madness is less than a year away.

While there may be no easy answers, the current answer is no answer at all.

If his latest poor-me pronouncements weren’t so outrageously obnoxious—not to mention flagrantly false—we would be wise to treat disgraced, and disgraceful former MLA Russell MacKinnon with the mocking contempt he’s richly earned.

The Finance Department made me do it… The Finance Department made me do it…

MacKinnon, one of four MLAs whose entitled-to-their-entitlements expense claims were so egregious they warranted actual criminal charges, arrived for his trial two week s ago, loudly proclaiming his innocence. Three days later, he copped a mid-trial plea like a common thief when it became clear he couldn’t sell his convoluted contortionist’s explanations for his bad behavior.

He pled guilty to one count of breach of trust and got a sweetheart deal. Four months’ house arrest, with numerous get-out-of-the-house free cards, four months’ curfew, a year’s probation.

Unfortunately for MacKinnon’s reputation—and our blood pressure—his sentence didn’t come with a muzzle.

MacKinnon has spent the past week playing the aggrieved. “I didn’t defraud the government of five cents, not a penny… I got the bejesus kicked out of me for the last three years over this, and I didn’t do anything wrong… I pleaded guilty to breach of trust because I believe MLAs are held to a higher standard, and I have to take responsibility even though the fault lies with the Department of Finance…”

Oh, let’s not bother responding to his truth twisting.

No wonder people are upset. No wonder the call by the we-hate-any-government-anywhere-anytime-anyway Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation to eliminate pension benefits for former MLAs convicted of crimes has traction.

But we need to pause, take a breath.

The real problem here isn’t with MLAs convicted of breaching their public trust continuing to draw pensions to which they contributed, and to which they—and, more importantly, their families—are legally entitled.

It’s with the MLA pensions themselves. By most anyone’s standards, they’re incredibly rich and wrongly funded out of regular operating revenues rather than investments.

By all means, let’s reform the MLA pension system.

But let’s not set a bad precedent by taking away someone’s legally earned pension benefits. There’s no telling where that could lead.

Let’s just accept that Russell MacKinnon’s behavior is beneath and beyond contempt—and move on to more important matters.

Like MLA pension reform.
 

What was he thinking? That he could baffle, buffalo, bamboozle past way too many inconvenient contradictions from too many witnesses with too little to gain to lie about what he’d done? That the law wouldn’t apply to him because he’d been an MLA and Liberal cabinet minister?

On Friday—after four days of a scheduled five-day trial and in the middle of his own credulity-stretching testimony—Russell MacKinnon caved, signed a hastily cobbled together one-page written statement of agreed facts and copped to a plea of a breach of the public trust.

By the end of the day and after an apology that wasn’t—“I would like to apologize for allowing the matter to come this far”—MacKinnon managed to walk away from it all with no jail time. Just a ruler-to-the-knuckles eight-month conditional sentence.

Huh?

Let’s recap.

In 2006, MLA MacKinnon submitted $3,400 in receipts for work done by constituency secretary Nicole Campbell. The problems: Campbell never did the work and never received the money. MacKinnon did.

He also submitted $7,500 in receipts for work done by George MacKeigan, his executive assistant. Again, MacKeigan never saw the cash; MacKinnon kept it.

Four years later—after an auditor general’s report triggered an investigation that led Canada Revenue Agency to issue T4A slips to MacKinnon’s former aides for the payments they’d never been paid—the whole sordid mess unraveled.

At that point, MacKinnon doubled down on his deceit, showing up on the doorsteps of his former aides with cash peace offerings to make his wrongs right.

Even after that didn’t wash, MacKinnon still had the audacity to take up valuable court time with his far-fetched versions and that-never-happened stories.

Until late Thursday when his wife, NDP MLA Michele Raymond, and his lawyer, Joel Pink, decided Judge Felix Cacchione wasn’t buying the soap MacKinnon was selling.

“You watch your client, you watch the body language of the judge and you try to make a determination as to how the judge is reacting to the evidence,” Pink explained later.

Deal time.

Russell MacKinnon should have gone to jail.

Not so much for what he did. But for what he didn’t do. Apologize. And take real responsibility for his actions.

He didn't. Pity.