A promise is not a law until it is
It happened so long ago that Alexa McDonough was still the leader of a rag-tag band of New Democrats in the provincial legislature. And I was a still-young-ish reporter.
McDonough had just introduced a private member’s bill to reform the ways in which political parties got financed. Its specifics have long since escaped my memory. But I do recall that everyone knew the legislation—like virtually all such proposals that arrived without the imprimatur of the party in power—had no chance of passing. Her critics accused her of grandstanding.
Why should we believe you’re serious, I asked her?
You shouldn’t, she replied matter-of-factly. That’s why we need laws. To make sure whichever party forms the next government, or the one after that, can’t just do what will benefit its own interests. Voters, she said, shouldn’t have to depend on the too often-empty promises of campaigning politicians. Of any stripe.
I couldn’t help but think of that as I watched the MLAs expense scandal unfold. The NDP is now the government. It has the power to reform the system. But its record to date is mixed.
The NDP started off well enough. It eliminated the policy of providing cabinet ministers with cars, for example. That was a next logical step in a reform process that had begun with Ernie Fage’s 2006 fender bender. The fact that the minister was driving an expensive, taxpayer-provided vehicle at the time had already prompted Rodney MacDonald’s Tories to tighten the rules on cabinet ministers’ pricey rides. (Scandal, of course, has long been the best—often the only—driver of reform.)
And the NDP, during its first legislative session last fall, killed a number of the most outrageous perks of office, including the too-generous severance package for retiring or defeated MLAs and payments for chairing ghost committees, and cut back on members’ technology allowances in the name of fiscal restraint.
But the government has continued to resist efforts to open up the process for appointing people to provincial boards and commissions—reforms it had championed in opposition—and it waited until after the firestorm over the auditor general’s report to make changes to an MLA expenses system it knew was corrupt.
The new and more transparent expenses rules announced this week are another positive, if belated step, but not until those changes get enshrined in legislation and regulation.
As Alexa McDonough rightly said, we shouldn’t ever have to depend solely on politicians’ promises.
MLA expenses a scandal but….
Yes, the MLA expenses scandal is a scandal. Some of what some MLAs filed as legitimate expenses were not. A few claims may even be criminal. Let’s make MLAs pay back what they can’t justify, and prosecute those whose actions crossed the line. Let’s fix a screwed-up system. Then let’s move on.
When it comes to scandalous wastes of taxpayers’ dollars, MLA expenses represent a piddling amount, even within the auditor-general’s report that started the current tsunami of public outrage.
The auditor-general’s report painted with a broad brush, flagging items he deemed excessive, lacked receipts or were otherwise questionable without digging deeper to determine which might actually be justifiable.
While many expenses—can you say the Dance Dance Revolution video game in the hands of ex-Tory MLA Len Goucher’s grandson, or the patio furniture in Liberal Dave Wilson’s backyard?—seem indefensible, others are more iffy.
Take ex-premier Rodney MacDonald’s $3,250 purchase of a projection screen for presentations. Hardly something for your rec room. MacDonald says community groups still use it. Did he pay too much? Should such items be paid out of constituency expenses? Good questions. But neither justifies labeling MacDonald a pig or a crook.
Or take the pink Nano—valued at $261.06 —that shows up among NDP MLA Leonard Preyra’s expenses. Preyra says he donated it to the Italian-Canadian Cultural Association of Nova Scotia for a fundraiser. He’s not alone. NDP Transportation Minister Bill Estabrooks proudly acknowledges he spent much of his flagged $44,424 in advertising, donations and gifts on local schools and sports teams. Should MLAs use constituency funds to help not-for-profit groups and teams? Another good question. But is doing so a flogging offence?
And, while the auditor general noted over half of legislative members—28 of 51—filed duplicate receipts, the report shows the total cost was $14,123, or approximately $92.31 per MLA per year of the audit.
“The types of wrongdoing… and the scale of it… simply would not warrant more work from my office,” the auditor-general initially said. Partly because of the outcry and new information he’s received, he is now looking at possible criminality. Go for it. Prosecute the cheaters.
Then let’s reform the system: make new expense rules in public, require tendering for purchases, demand receipts for everything and then publish every MLA’s expense report every month on the web.
With those—easy—changes in place, let’s finally turn our attention to the same auditor general’s report, which identifies a $52 million windfall private developers get to pocket from those infamous P-3 school projects. Now that’s scandalous!
Whose best interests?
For Family Court Judge Beryl MacDonald, the question seemed simple. Does she have the authority to order the minister of community services to provide a service the department, by policy, doesn’t offer? Her answer, delivered during a family court hearing this week, was equally simple. She does not.
The legal issue may be simple; the case is anything but. And her defensible judicial answer may conflict with the ultimate goal of our child protection legislation: the best interests of the child.
The case involves a troubled Cole Harbour teenager whose grandparents raised him. Two years ago, when they realized they could no longer cope—he has serious psychological problems—they sought help from community services. Instead, the government assumed his guardianship and—because Nova Scotia doesn’t have secure long-term youth facilities—shipped him off to Bayfield, an Ontario institution “for boys experiencing difficulties.”
His grandparents objected and began to act as the boy’s advocates. That made them intruders in the government’s and the institution’s father-knows-best care program.
At one point, after the grandmother complained publicly about his treatment, Bayfield refused her a face-to-face visit despite the fact she’d travelled to Ontario just to see her grandson. Bayfield has also occasionally cut off all communications between the child and his grandparents.
These days, telephone contact is tightly controlled and monitored. A recent note from Bayfield staff claims one conversation “was beginning to turn negative as it was ending.” This apparently referred to the fact the grandmother “asked about his medication again, and was more assertive that he she did not believe he should just be taking medication whenever he wanted.”
Doctors at Bayfield, who have prescribed Seroquel XR, an antipsychotic medication, allow the boy to take some of his daily dosage “as needed.” The province has authorized a dosage of up to 850 mg. per day. According to the website healthcentral.com, “the safety of doses above 800 mg/day has not been evaluated in clinical trial.” Drugs.com says Seroqel XR “should not given to anyone younger than 18 years old.”
The grandparents are just as concerned by what they see as escalating “incidents” of violence during which Bayfield staff “restrained” the boy.
My non-legal question is equally simple: Is this boy better off now than he was when he left Nova Scotia? What will he be like in three years when he becomes an adult and Bayfield spits him back out—as it has other Nova Scotia children.
The judge may see this as a narrow legal question. The Minister of Community Services should see it as a larger question. Is what her department is doing in the best interest of this—or any other—child?
Visionless NS Tories look for leader before vision
Tonight, 600 Nova Scotia Tories will gather at the Westin Hotel to pay perfunctory tribute to Rodney MacDonald, their thankfully former, now hardly ever mentioned leader.
After that—if not before—conventioneers will get down to the real, if unspoken business at hand: making sure the party doesn’t blow it again like they did in 2006.
That’s when delegates chose the awkward, inexperienced and visionless MacDonald, not because of what he stood for or what he promised to do, but because what passed for the Tories’ brain trust convinced delegates MacDonald’s youthfulness (he was 33), good looks and cheerful bonhomie could help them sway the youth vote, win back metro from the socialist hordes and restore the party of John Hamm and John Buchanan to its rightful majority in the legislative firmament.
I’d say that worked out rather well for them…
The irony, in retrospect, is there were more qualified candidates. Neil LeBlanc, a former finance minister, for one. And Bill Black, a political neophyte but a successful businessman with clear views on policy.
Their names are now being bandied about again as party members prepare for a late October leadership convention. They’re not the only could-be contenders, of course. Karen Casey, the party’s interim leader, may want the job permanently. But so might fellow MLA and former health minister Chris d’Entremont. Or Cape Breton’s Cecil Clarke. Or—Lord forbid—Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly, who admits he still hasn’t shuttered his political ambitions.
The current front runner, at least according to allnovascotia.com’s political reporter Brian Flinn, is Jamie Baillie, 43, the president and chief executive officer of Credit Union Atlantic. Baillie, a former chief of staff to John Hamm, is a longtime backroom organizer. But his Wikipedia biography was deleted in 2006 as “not a notable enough person to warrant a page.” Ouch.
Still, any of them could do better than the hapless MacDonald. But is that really the question? What the party needs at this point—with at least two-and-a-half years to go before even an early next election—is not a leader but a vision.
They need to distinguish themselves from the increasingly conservative NDP, on the one hand, and the suddenly far less laughable Liberals on the other.
Like Michael Ignatieff’s federal Liberals, Nova Scotia’s Tories need to stop scrambling to find the magic leader button back to power and start doing the hard but necessary work of creating policies and programs that will make voters see them as relevant alternatives.
Don’t hold your breath.
Having our history and swallowing it too
So here is our question for today.
Should the Charles Morris House—a down-at-the-heels, 240-year-old wooden structure that once served as the headquarters of Nova Scotia’s chief surveyor but today sits, forlorn, beached and abandoned in a downtown parking lot—be resurrected and spiffed up to serve as a living memorial to the man who is credited with laying out Halifax’s original streetscape (can you say Granville, Argyle, Hollis, Grafton streets et al) and property lines (including landmarks like Grand Parade and St. Paul’s Church, which survive today)? Morris went on to serve as our province’s chief justice. Not to forget fathering future surveyors who took on the continuing task of mapping and shaping today’s Nova Scotia.
Or should this dilapidated old eyesore of a building be demolished instead, perhaps even burned to the ground as a final public acknowledgment of—and overdue mea culpa for—the reality that the self-same Charles Morris also played a role in the brutish Expulsion of the Acadians.
Katie Reid votes yes to the latter option. Intriguingly, Reid is the “eight-generations-removed” granddaughter of the man himself. She says her family discovered a Morris family history in her grandmother’s attic that shows that Captain Charles Morris took part in planning the expulsion of the Acadians, helping devise a scheme “to break their dykes, to burn the fields of crops they’d grown, to burn their homes… Maybe they should burn down [the Morris House] instead.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Peter Delefes disagrees. The president of the Heritage Trust Society of Nova Scotia, which saved the building from the wrecker’s ball in December and still hopes to see it made useful again, acknowledges that Morris did play an “unfortunate” role in the Expulsion. But he is quick to note “other important historic figures also had a hand in that whole process, but I don't think we condemn them on that basis.”
Actually—and unfortunately—we’ve already begun to do exactly that more and more often.
Consider Edward Cornwallis. The once-deified founder of Halifax is now the subject of a persistent campaign to strip his name from public buildings, statues and even street signs because of his treatment of Natives.
Or, to go further afield, Christopher Columbus himself.
Perhaps it’s time we stopped needing to see our historic figures in such stark either-or terms, and publicly celebrate their accomplishments while acknowledging—in equally public ways—their shortcomings. That way we can have our history and swallow it too.
Protecting privacy or covering up?
So whose privacy are they protecting?
On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable shot and killed John Andrew Simon, a member of Cape Breton’s Wagmatcook First Nation. Simon, everyone agrees, was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time he was killed. According to what police reportedly told Simon’s family, he was unarmed, sitting on the toilet and smoking a cigarette when Cst. Jeremy Frenette first entered the house. They claim Simon then fled to the kitchen where he grabbed his shotgun. Frenette fired three times, killing Simon.
What was Cst. Frenette doing inside the house without a warrant? And without backup? Especially considering that Simon, at that point, was no threat to anyone except himself.
The Halifax Regional Police, who led what was supposed to be an arms-length investigation into the shooting, concluded he only fired “after reasonably perceiving that John Simon posed a threat of grievous bodily harm or death and believing that he could not otherwise preserve himself from grievous bodily harm other than by using deadly force.”
Simon’s widow and members of the local band council would beg to disagree.
But that’s not the issue here.
Why are the Mounties now refusing to release the report into the incident? Just as importantly, why is it even the RCMP’s call whether to release this supposedly independent review?
RCMP Chief Supt. Blair McKnight told reporters in December the Mounties weren’t “permitted” to release the report under Canada’s privacy laws.
Whose privacy is being protected here? Simon himself is dead. His widow and the local band council—which contract the RCMP to police their reserve—both say they want to read a copy of the report.
Others have seen it. Nova Scotia’s Justice Minister, Ross Landry, for example—himself a former RCMP officer—told reporters this week he has read the report and believes the band council should too before he makes his decision on their request for a public inquiry into Simon’s death. His office, in fact, is trying to help the band get a copy.
But RCMP brass seem happy to hide the report behind the privacy veil.
Little wonder the Wagmatcook band council has decided to replace the RCMP when its policing contract expires at the end of next month. Little wonder too that the council has called for a public inquiry to determine why “policing hasn’t changed in our First Nation territories” in the two decades since the Marshall Inquiry report.
keep looking »Subscribe
About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in 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 eight non-fiction books.