Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Dec 30, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
December 30, 2007
Winning the wharf war
More than eight years after Ottawa disastrously handed control of Digby’s vital fishermen’s wharf to outsiders and more than five years after frustrated locals first organized to buy it back, the wharf is finally in the hands of a community group.
In 1999, as part of its ill-conceived port divestiture program, the federal Liberals not only gave the wharf to an outside private company for a dollar but then handed it $3 million to maintain the structure. Instead, critics charge, the group used Ottawa’s money to pay salaries to its non-resident directors and foot the costs for unrelated ventures. To make matters worse, it turned out Ottawa couldn’t do anything about that because, as an arbitrator ruled last year, the contract it signed with the group “had the proverbial hole in it ‘big enough to drive a truck through.’”
Meanwhile, the wharf was — quite literally — falling apart. The situation became so bad this spring local fishermen had put chains around a section of the wharf just to hold all the pieces together.
The Digby Harbour Port Authority, the local group that’s been negotiating to buy back the wharf, had intended to officially announce yesterday that it had finally finalized a deal, but word began leaking out earlier in the week.
Fishermen using the wharf “noticed that the fellow checking boats [for the wharf’s former owners] wasn’t doing it anymore,” Authority spokesperson Reg Hazelton told the Digby Courier, adding that even he found it “hard to believe” the deal was finally done.
The Authority managed to leap a final hurdle — a clause in the infamous original contract that would have imposed a $500,000 penalty on the private group if it sold the wharf before 2009 — after Transport Canada agreed to waive the penalty clause.
The Authority will begin shoring up the crumbling structure immediately. An engineering report estimates the total cost of repairs at around $9 million.
Without being specific, Hazelton said the Authority has received promises — though nothing in writing — of financial assistance.
Let’s hope Ottawa’s negotiators do a better job this time.
Community dis-spirit
’Tis the season for giving… and giving… and giving. But Bowater Mersey’s unionized employees can be forgiven for wondering what, if anything, they’ll receive in return.
Last month, the 330 south shore workers voted overwhelmingly to take a pay cut to enable 49 of their fellow employees to retire early rather than be laid off. And, in February, their union executive will meet with other east coast union officials to discuss whether to open up their collective agreements to offer the company more concessions.
Despite that, AbitibiBowater, the parent company, won’t promise to keep its Nova Scotia operations open; in fact, it has already announced that more of its plants may close in 2008.
To add smack to punch, union president Courtney Wentzell says some in the local community are blaming the employees — particularly their “inflexible” work rules — for the problems at the plant.
While conceding there was a time when “you couldn’t screw in a light bulb without an electrician,” Wentzell says those days are long gone. The workers, he adds, didn’t agree to the pay cut just to help some of their members retire early. “We did it for the community to keep the mill here.
“We really hope the blame thing goes away,” he told the Queen’s County Advance. If local residents really want to lay blame, he added, they had “better start looking somewhere else.”
He says Premier Rodney MacDonald’s government should help the industry — perhaps by allowing Bowater to harvest crown land without charge, provided there are no layoffs, as has been done in Newfoundland and Quebec — but it’s up to the company too.
“We hope the community and the government and everybody else sees that the workers took a big hit and are willing to do their part,” Wentzell said.
Earth to Ernie
Should Cumberland North forgive Ernie? was the title of an editorial in the weekly Amherst Citizen published in the heart of disgraced cabinet minister, convicted MLA and turfed Tory Ernie Fage’s home constituency last week.
The paper didn’t pull any punches. “In less than two years, the veteran MLA has gone from being a respectable senior cabinet minister to becoming the laughing stock of his party,” it wrote, adding that his recent guilty plea to charges of leaving the scene of an accident came as “no surprise.”
Damning their veteran MLA with the faintest of praise, the paper allowed that “Ernie is a heck of a nice guy, and that popularity might get him re-elected. But does he deserve it? After all, if there is only one thing we can expect of our elected officials, it is that they demonstrate good judgment.”
Noting that Fage has said he intends to run as an independent candidate in the next provincial election, the editorial muses: “Why Fage would want to put himself through this is a question only he can answer, but whether or not his constituents want to potentially put themselves through another embarrassing situation is a question that will be answered come next election day...”
Ouch.
Experiencing history on the Internet
It was one of the most sport famous fishing trips ever undertaken in Nova Scotia — Albert Bigelow Paine’s two-week canoe adventure along the waters and through the woods of southwestern Nova Scotia at the beginning of the last century.
Now, to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Tent Dwellers, Paine’s account of the journey, local organizers are planning a summer-long festival of adventure-related events, including a guide’s meet and competition, canoe-building and fly-tying exhibitons, an outdoor arts festival and even a re-enactment of the historic two-week canoe trip.
Although novices are not welcome on that journey — there will be a public paddle in June along a section of the Shelburne River that was part of the original route — the experienced paddlers who will follow the original route will post photos and videos to the Internet each day so the rest of us can enjoy the trip vicariously.
Now that’s my idea of outdoor adventure.
I don’t C U
This week’s where-not-to-get sick alerts come from Amherst and Tatamagouche.
The Cumberland Health Authority has announced it won’t reopen its largest hospital’s intensive care unit until New Year’s morning at 7 a.m.
The Amherst hospital’s ICU has been shuttered since Christmas Eve — the third time in a month it’s been closed — because the authority couldn’t find a qualified physician to fill in for the hospital’s three regular specialists. Patients needing intensive care are being shipped to Moncton or Halifax.
Meanwhile, in Tatamagouche, the Lillian Fraser Memorial Hospital’s emergency department will be closed on New Year’s Eve from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. and then again on Jan. 4 from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Be well.
Fishing the bottom harder…
Having lobsters for New Year’s? Enjoy. Because tomorrow… well, who knows?
Lobster catches are down in southwestern Nova Scotia this winter, partly because gale-force winds not only kept lobster boats in port during the first week of the season. But only partly. Some in the industry are beginning to think there may be more to this season’s less.
“We say it’s the weather,” Denny Morrow, executive director of the Nova Scotia Fish Packers Association, told the Yarmouth Vanguard, “but we know we’ve been fishing the bottom harder and harder every year.”
Though the industry has managed to supply its traditional Christmas and New Year’s markets, the next big concern is whether there will be enough inventory to last until spring. Eat up.
Oh, Christmas Tree
When the Greenwood Military Family Resource Centre called King’s County Christmas tree grower Steve Bezanson to ask if he’d be willing to donate 30 of his trees to give to families of Greenwood-based military personnel serving in Afghanistan, “I didn’t even hesitate,” he told the King’s County Register.
The national program, supported by the Canadian Council of Christmas Tree Growers, provided over 3,000 free Christmas trees this year to those with loved ones deployed to Afghanistan during the holiday season.
“Christmas can be tough when you have a family member deployed,” explained Margaret Reid, co-ordinator of deployment services for the resource centre, “and any act of kindness can ease that.”
Angie St. Nicolas, who was among the recipients of Bezanson’s trees, told the newspaper she and her two children, Emily and Owen, were planning to decorate their tree in time to welcome her husband, Shawn, home on a mid-deployment break the week before Christmas.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: AMHERST CITIZEN, AMHERST DAILY NEWS, ANNAPOLIS COUNTY SPECTATOR, DIGBY COURIER, KING’S COUNTY REGISTER, QUEEN’S COUNTY ADVANCE, YARMOUTH VANGUARD.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Dec 23, 2007)
December 23, 2007
They like us, they really like us
“It is a land of the great outdoors with breathtaking scenery: thousands of glassy lakes, pristine beaches and carpets of forest that draw tourists to see the autumnal reds and golds.”
That’s us that Britain’s widely read Telegraph newspaper is gushing on about. In a story in its property section last week, the newspaper — once owned by Conrad Black — claims that Nova Scotia (“the size of England, and yet with a population of just under a million”), is becoming an “increasingly popular and affordable destination [for] British second homeowners who crave tranquility.”
While touting our modest house prices and historic and psychic links to the mother country (Chester is “billed as the ‘Mayfair’ of Nova Scotia,” the paper explains, while adding delightedly that “there is even a town called Liverpool on the Mersey River”) and quoting happy British settlers (“I'd never go back to the UK,” says one. "Lunenburg has everything”), the article does offer a few cautions.
The weather, for starters. “Summer water sports are great,” says a Suffolk man who now calls Liverpool — the Nova Scotia one — home. “People are friendly and British people are welcomed, but a challenge can be the weather with heavy snowstorms in winter.”
We knew that.
And then, of course, there is that… tranquility thing. “It’s not a place for people who need to be constantly entertained,” explains Kilmeny Fane-Saunders of Second Home Nova Scotia, a new British-based real estate company catering to British buyers of chunks of Nova Scotia. Though 50 per cent of her clients are actually emigrating to the province, she says they need to be “outdoorsy, and crave peace and quiet.”
“Indeed,” adds the Telegraph’s reporter, “there is little in the way of cultural events or nightlife, aside from the odd ukulele festival.”
Uh… thanks for the kind words. And pass me my uke in which to...
Less cause, more effect
Nova Scotia’s Richmond County has a distinction it doesn’t want — statistics show the rate of kidney disease there is 10 times higher than the provincial average.
While researchers scramble to figure out the why, municipal councillors are more concerned with what Health Minister Chris d’Entremont will do to help them cope.
Researchers, who theorize Acadian families in Isle Madame are genetically predisposed towards high rates of kidney disease, are now in the early stages of a two-year study to determine precisely what causes the disease to be so prevalent among them. Residents have been providing the researchers with information on their family histories as well as DNA samples.
“We’ve identified a number of families and family members that have been diagnosed since we first started,” explains Cape Breton Regional Hospital nephrologist Dr. Tom Hewlett, “and the patterns we’re seeing are very suggestive of a genetic cause — there’s no question about that.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, local politicians are less interested in long-term cause than immediate impact. At their last meeting, Richmond municipal councillors voted unanimously to ask the health department for more dialysis machines as well as for better training for local nurses and doctors in how to deal with the disease.
The fire next time
When they last had a fire protection cost-sharing agreement three years ago, Cumberland County paid the town of Amherst $122,000 a year so its firefighters would respond to calls in the county. At the beginning of negotiations on a new deal, Amherst town council proposed upping that by a whopping $160,000 a year. The county countered with an offer of a measly $55,000 in total.
The two sides have been trading barbs and accusations ever since.
Some Amherst councillors now claim the county low-balled them because it wants to set up its own fire department “as a means of partially justifying the existence of its fire services co-ordinator position.”
Last week, Amherst council voted unanimously to stop providing fire protection to county residents effective July 1, 2008.
Currently 22 per cent of the calls the Amherst department responds to are in the county.
“If they want to establish another fire department, minutes from ours, so be it,” explained Amherst Coun. Ed Chitty. “If, on the other hand, they’d like to have a sensible, mature discussion about sharing real costs on some rational basis then we are up for that as well.”
Now that sounds like a starting point for …
Let the Capers freeze in the dark
Last week, a modern management tool — just-in-time delivery — smacked up against Mother Nature — an earlier, colder-than-usual winter — and created not only an immediate home heating oil shortage for Cape Bretoners but also a wake-up call for residents.
Imperial Oil, which now operates the island’s only distribution terminal, limited the amount of heating oil available for customers after one of its tankers was a day late in arriving with fresh supplies.
That, say critics, highlights the reality that the company’s just-in-time system — which is designed to keep inventories low — doesn’t maintain enough fuel in the tanks for emergencies. It also brings home the fact that Cape Bretoners are vulnerable because there’s no longer competition in the marketplace.
A dozen years ago, three companies delivered home heating oil to residents and businesses; now there is only one. Imperial, frets Liberal MLA Manning MacDonald, “could decide that Cape Breton might not be a priority at any given time if they’re experiencing a shortage themselves.”
But company spokesman Robert Theberge insists there was never an issue to begin with. “There were people who probably ran out of oil, and they had to get some, and the deliveries were not as large as they expected, but it’s something that happens,” he told the Cape Breton Post in an interview — from his office in Calgary.
Oh, right.
New year, old problem
The Digby General Hospital is starting the new year much the way it finished the old — with another announcement of emergency department closures. During the month of January, the ER will be closed every Thursday as well as on one Monday and one Tuesday.
Residents are advised not to need emergency medical attention on those days.
Good news in the bad
Mahone Bay residents and businesses could be paying more for their electricity after April 1 — but still not as much as thee or me.
The south shore town is one of several in the province that operates its own electric utility. While the town normally passes along increases from Nova Scotia Power directly to its customers, this will be the first time since the early 1990s that it has applied for a rate increase of its own.
But Mahone Bay CEO Jim Wentzell told municipal councillors that even if the town gets the 4.5 per cent increase it is seeking, local customers will still be “paying less than those buying directly from the provincial corporation.”
How does that work?
Strait strife
The Strait Regional School Board still has a code of ethics — sort of.
Back in November, you may recall, the board reluctantly agreed to change its bylaws and code of ethics to conform with demands from Education Minister Karen Casey. Casey, who wasn’t happy with the elected board’s decorum, had threatened to replace the entire board as she did in Halifax if it didn’t go along with her demands.
Immediately after that vote on the amendments, which barely got the two-thirds majority needed to pass, board member Brenda Gillis gave notice she would introduce a motion to abolish the code of ethics completely.
That has since sparked more procedural wrangling. West Guysborough representative Kim Horton called for Gillis’s motion to be tabled so the board could seek a legal opinion. Then East Antigonish board member Frank Machnik introduced a motion calling on the board chair to invite the minister to meet with them to explain herself, or at least hear what they had to say.
Superintendent Phonse Gillis, who says the board can eliminate the code of ethics with a simple majority vote if it chooses, isn’t keen on seeking a legal opinion. “It’s taking public money to use to get legal opinion to challenge the minister,” he pointed out, “and that may want to be looked at.”
Indeed.
Two blue
Last week, you may recall, we told you the story of veteran Pubnico fisherman Réal d’Entremont, who had hauled up a rare, “perfect market-size” blue lobster — blue down to the crustacean’s antennas — from his traps in Lobster Bay.
We told you this was a rare phenomenon that occurs in only one of every two million lobsters.
Today, we are here to tell you about lobster two-million-and-one.
Jeffrey Leeman caught the pound-and-a-half blue lobster in St. Mary’s Bay. He’s already named it — Boy Blue — and says he hopes to find it a good home, perhaps at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg.
“We didn’t want to sell it and we didn’t want to let anyone eat it,” explains Leeman’s wife Sherry, who was fishing with him at the time.
Why so many blue lobsters all of a sudden? Perhaps Blue Boy heard that the last blue lobster caught in these waters is still swimming around in a tank of cold water rather than a pot of boiling water, and decided to spray paint itself.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: AMHERST DAILY NEWS, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, SOUTHSHORENOW.CA, THETELEGRAPH.CO.UK.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Dec 16, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
December 16, 2007
The lawyers’ Christmas present
There has been yet another flurry of new legal developments and even newer un-developments in the always developing, ever stranger-than-last-week saga of Nova Scotia’s development-promoting South West Shore Development Authority.
In one of the most recent incidents, the SWSDA’s executive finally struck a deal with Australian movie producer Steve Gilmour to sell him the former Shelburne military base at Sandy Point for use as a film studio.
But within hours of that agreement, Gilmour says SWSDA lawyers began piling unanticipated conditions on the sale — including provisions that Gilmour pony up a $50,000 non-refundable deposit and agree to close the close-to-$3-million deal within five days of the receipt of any other competing offer arriving prior to the planned end-of-January closing.
Gilmour isn’t amused. The former Australian MP says SWSDA boasts “the most toxic business environment I have ever witnessed,” and added that the new provisions effectively change “the terms of the agreement which is in place, with terms so onerous as to jeopardize any sensible negotiations on the sale.”
While dueling lawyers sort that one out, on another front, the SWSDA and its CEO are now threatening to sue Shelburne Mayor Parker Comeau and the Halifax Herald over published comments about the sale, earlier this year, of the former Shelburne Boys’ School — which was also in the care and keeping of the SWSDA — to a Halifax developer.
The mayor had suggested it may be time to call in the RCMP “fraud squad” to do a forensic audit of that deal and find out what happened to the proceeds from the $550,000 sale of a property that was, at one point, appraised at $20 million.
Meanwhile — OK, you can stop and catch your breath if you need to — there are reports the developer of the boys’ school, who just finalized that purchase this summer, is not only now trying to peddle two parcels of the property for $320,000 — “What a deal!” is the heading for the real estate listing — but that he’s also asked the local council to take over responsibility for road maintenance.
And, of course, there are those other unsettled lawsuits still floating in the ether, waiting to be dealt with.
Only in Shelburne, you say. Pity… for Shelburne.
Thanks for the snow
Kevin Thompson, the owner of Pictou County's Best Christmas Trees, says he is on track to equal his best-ever tree sales season — which would be the 2,800 fresh-cut ones he sold in 2005.
Despite the growing popularity of fake trees — including ones with the lights already strung and ornaments already hung — and the flip-side proliferation of U-pick Christmas tree lots for those who feel the need to cut their own, Thompson says people are still streaming onto his lot outside the Aberdeen Mall in order to buy their own real but pre-cut and selected tree.
For that, he gives thanks to the season’s early snows. “It does help my business,” he told the New Glasgow News. “Who wants to go to the U-picks when there's that much snow on the ground?”
Who wants to go out in the snow at all? Or is that just me?
They do, they do
Ski Wentworth opened for the season this weekend. Again, thanks to all that earlier than usual snow.
“This is one of the earliest opening days we’ve had in 10 years,” enthused Leslie Wilson, Ski Wentworth’s general manager, in an interview with the Amherst Daily News. She predicts the Sissy, Rosebowl, Bunnyhill and possibly the Beaver and Chickadee will all be operating this weekend for over-eager skiers and snowboarders.
The ski hills usually don’t open until after Christmas when the province experiences its first major snow storms.
Where’s global warming when you need it?
Bah, humbug.
Deck the Hall with Vince
Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s Vince Hall won’t be legally forced to resign as a municipal councillor following his recent second guilty plea for impaired driving. But Mayor John Morgan says council may want to take another look at paying Hall his $140 weekly “local” travel allowance.
Hall, who was fined $1,200 and banned from driving for two years for his latest driving offence, which occurred last spring in Halifax, is supposed to get the allowance for traveling within the municipality on council business. But Morgan says Hall not only works at CompuCollege in Halifax — five hours by car from Sydney — but that he also already had a spotty attendance record at council committee meetings.
So why should he get the travel allowance?
“There is a section in the Municipal Government Act that allows council to reduce salaries in circumstances in which committee [meetings] are not attended,” Morgan told the Cape Breton Post.
How much is the bus from Halifax anyway?
Zero tolerance
Three East Pictou junior high school students — aged 14 and 15 — are facing criminal charges of intimidation and assault in connection with what the RCMP says was a three-and-a-half week campaign of teasing, taunting and threatening a fellow student.
While Sgt. Law Power conceded “there was no big physical assault where someone got punched in the mouth,” the bullying involved “a number of pranks over a period of time… Individually, these pranks would have been considered minor in nature. But all the incidents combined make the offence much more serious.
”In general,” he added, “if there is an alternative solution to judicial action available we'll exercise that. But in this particular case arresting these males was in the best interest of the victim and the school.”
The teens are scheduled to appear in court in New Glasgow next month.
Fish scraps and…
There is finally a company that actually wants to buy Canso’s shuttered Seafreez fish plant. The catch — it doesn’t want to use the facility as a fish freezing and processing operation.
In fact, Eastern Scrap and Demolition Services wants to dramatically transform the plant by scrapping part of it, installing a marine slipway and making the rest over into a marine salvage operation that it claims could employ up to 40 people.
Last week, council and local residents met with company representatives to discuss the proposal.
Mayor Ray White admits there are concerns: the environmental effects it would have on the waterfront and the harbour, for example, as well as how it would fit into the existing community and last, but certainly not least, how many jobs it might really eventually create.
The proposal hasn’t yet been finalized, he said, but added that the public will get the chance to have their say before any deal is done.
Oh, Christmas tree
Vandals in Argyle aren’t easily discouraged. But then neither are the residents.
On Dec. 2, the night of Argyle’s popular annual ceremonial lighting of its community Christmas tree, vandals tried and failed to douse the Christmas spirit by trying — and failing — to set the tree ablaze.
They did it twice more before finally succeeding in destroying the tree early last week.
But Argyle warden Aldric d’Entremont told this week’s municipal council meeting residents would not allow vandalism to ruin its Christmas spirit. So, on Thursday, there was another tree and another ceremony.
Three young people are facing charges in connection with the tree torchings.
I’ll have a blue… lobster
Once in a blue lobster, it turns out, is a much rarer event than once in a blue moon. Blue moons — two full moons in the same month — happen roughly every two-and-a-half years. But only one in two million lobsters will turn out to be blue.
Now you know…
All of which may — or may not — explain why 45-year veteran Pubnico fisherman Réal d’Entremont was startled recently when he hauled up his traps in (where else?) Lobster Bay and discovered he’d caught a “perfect market-size” blue lobster, which was blue through and through. “Even the antennas,” he marveled to the Yarmouth Vanguard, “are perfect and blue.”
The good news for the lobster is that it’s enough of a novelty that it will remain in the fish tank at the seafood department at Barrington’s Atlantic Superstore — at least until the novelty wears off. The blue lobster will share swimming space there with another unusual specimen, a yellow lobster caught by a Cape Sable fishermen.
In the end, of course, their unusual natural colours won’t matter much. When they’re cooked, which they will be, the heat changes the pigments, releasing that lovely red we associate with cooked lobsters.
Makes the mouth water…
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: Amherst Daily News, Cape Breton Post, New Glasgow News, Port Hawkesbury Reporter, Queen’s County Advance, Shelburne Coast Guard, Shelburne County Today, Southshorenow.ca, Yarmouth Vanguard.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Nov 11, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
November 11, 2007
Between a rock and an empty place
The Digby Courier is reporting what it calls “a noticeable increase in real estate for sale” in Digby Neck in the wake of last month’s joint federal-provincial panel report rejecting a proposed basalt quarry and marine terminal there.
An American company, Bilcon, wanted to develop the 120-hectare quarry to supply two million tons of rock a year for the next 50 years to New Jersey.
But the proposal badly split the community. Some supported it and its promise of close to three dozen fulltime jobs in an area already decimated by the collapse of the fishery. But others, with equal fervour, opposed the very idea, claiming it would ruin the environment and destroy their way of life.
Now that the review report has come down so unequivocally against the project, supporters are left with the fading hope they can pressure federal and provincial environment ministers — who have the final say on whether to approve the project — to just say yes.
They staged a two-hour “Start-the-Quarry” rally recently during which “car after car and truck after truck honked in support of the rally message.”
“I honestly can't see how they can turn this quarry away,” longtime Centreville resident David Graham told the Courier, but then added: “To be quite honest, I've even been thinking about selling… If things continue getting worse, we're not going to have anything around here.”
A final decision on the quarry is expected to be announced within the month.
This week’s health care alert
It hasn’t a good couple of weeks to get sick in a number of communities in Nova Scotia.
Last week internists who staff the intensive care unit at South Shore Regional Hospital in Bridgewater withdrew their services to protest a recent deal with the department of health they claim doesn’t deal with their key issues: physician recruitment and retention, as well as compensation.
What that’s meant is that the hospital isn’t admitting new critically ill patients; they’re being transferred to facilities in Capital Health instead.
The week before, the Cumberland Regional Health Care Centre was shipping its ICU patients off to Moncton or Halifax because of the same dispute.
The internists there decided to switch to a new, more restricted on-call schedule after they hit an impasse in negotiations with the health department.
Meanwhile, in Shelburne, the scene of numerous earlier emergency room closures, the illness of a doctor forced the Roseway Hospital to shutter its ER department for a day recently. And South West Health admitted it “anticipates that there may be an additional emergency department closures until such time as this physician is recovered.”
And in Pugwash, North Cumberland Memorial’s emergency department was closed during daytime hours three times recently “because no physician is available to provide the necessary medical coverage.”
No word yet on whether Premier Rodney MacDonald plans to introduce legislation outlawing doctor shortages.
If we build it, they will stay
Last year, residents of Greenfield, Queen’s County, feared that their desperately-needing-to-be-replaced, more-than-60-year-old elementary school — which served just three dozen local students — would have to close.
Knowing the province’s financially strapped Education Department was unlikely to ante up money for a new school, area residents decided to set up their own community non-profit society, fundraise for “a compelling out-of-the-box proposal for a community-built school” and build it themselves.
They’re doing just that. The foundation has been poured, the building framed in and crews are ready to begin work on the school’s interior. “We’re making really good progress,” reports project manager Pat Jones.
Though the school is valued at $1.25 million, the Greenfield Community Resource Centre Society Inc. — which is acting as its own contractor and is using donated lumber — hopes to complete construction for just $950,000. The province, in a unique arrangement, has agreed to lease the community-owned building for $72,000 a year for the next 20 years.
The two-classroom school is expected to welcome its first pupils in September 2008.
Tale of two ports
While Yarmouth tourism operators worry about their future in light of a disastrous 2007 season, officials in Portland, Maine, are preparing to open a “beautiful” new $20-million terminal in the heart of the city’s tourist district.
The new Ocean Gateway terminal is specifically designed to cater to cruise ships and international ferries like Bay Ferries’ Yarmouth-Portland service.
Two years after the Scotia Prince abandoned its daily summer runs between Nova Scotia and Maine because of what it called unacceptable conditions at Portland’s old International Marine Terminal, the city is clearly doing whatever it takes to keep the new operators happy.
And it is succeeding.
Portland is not only winning the battle of Maine ports with Bar Harbour — this summer, Bay Ferries reduced its number of sailings to Yarmouth from Bar Harbour — but Portland has also become the ferry’s supply centre of choice. It buys all its fuel and provisions there.
To rub salt in Yarmouth’s wounds, Bay Ferries’ schedule — departing Portland early in the morning and returning in the evening — now favours their hotel and tourist operators instead of the Nova Scotia town’s.
“It worked out very well for us,” understates Portland’s Transportation and Ports Director Captain Jeff Monroe.
He’s currently in negotiations with Bay Ferries on a long-term contract to use their new terminal.
Which raises the question: What are provincial tourism department officials doing to counter Portland’s new-found aggressiveness?
No apple for Karen
Karen Casey, Nova Scotia’s chief schoolmarm, gave her unruly students, the members of the Strait Regional School Board, a one-week extension to complete their assigned homework. But then warned them there could be consequences if they didn’t do as they’re told.
They listened… sort of.
Last month, the education minister sent a letter to the board, pointing out that it “is not behaving in a manner in keeping with the best interests of students,” and admonished them to “show respect for others [and] not pursue a procedure calculated to embarrass another board or staff member.” She then issued five directives designed to improve their deportment.
If they didn’t comply, she waved the big stick: she had the authority, she pointed out, to “appoint a person who shall carry out such responsibilities and exercise such authority of the school board as the minister determines.”
Though it was not lost on board members that the courts had recently upheld the minister’s right to fire the Halifax school board last year, five of the 12 board members still initially voted against complying with the minister’s order. By this week’s meeting, however two of those nays had become yeas and the motion — to change the board’s bylaws and code of ethics —received the required two-thirds majority to formally approve it.
But the issue isn’t over yet. Later in the meeting, board member Brenda Gillis announced she intends to introduce a motion at next month’s meeting to abolish the code entirely.
“I think we’re being stifled, and I think we’re allowing ourselves to be stifled,” Gillis said.
Uh-oh.
Oh, no, not them again
Truro town council, which refused to fly a gay pride flag from its flagpole this summer, is now saying no to a request from the Northern AIDS Connection Society to raise an AIDS awareness flag this month — even though it had previously agreed to do so.
Council said yes in July but then — after the gay pride flag flap — hastily came up with a new, cover-their-butt policy to reserve town flagpoles for municipal, provincial or national flags only.
So no AIDS awareness flag.
Councillor Raymond Tynes, who also, ironically, heads up the town’s affirmative action human rights committee, was unrepentant. “I’ll stand behind any decision I’ve made,” he declared.
Whatever that means.
Al McNutt, the chair of the AIDS group, told the Truro Daily News the town is “going backward. With all the hoopla and the chaos over the gay flag, they’re just going to start this over again.”
No kidding.
In my backyard please
While residents in other parts of the province debate whether they want wind farms — and just how many kilometres from their own homes they want them located — a Masstown farmer is installing wind turbines in his backyard.
Glen Jennings, whose poultry farm boasts 12,000 laying chickens producing 10,000 eggs a day, eventually hopes to generate enough wind power to run his farm, his house and his father’s house. So far, the three turbines — costing $20,000–$28,000 each —are generating 75 per cent of the farm’s electrical needs.
“Twenty years ago a project like this would have been inconceivable,” Nova Scotia Power’s Margaret Murphy told those attending the turbines’ official turning. Now, thanks to dropping turbines costs, skyrocketing oil prices and growing environmental concerns, “projects like this one will inspire others.”
Jennings own inspiration? “If I had a quarter for every time I chased this hat across the field I’d probably be retired,” Jennings told the crowd gathered to celebrate the launch.
Remember this
A Nova Scotian soldier, who was wounded in Afghanistan last year, is home in River Hebert talking with local school children and attending today’s Remembrance Day events.
Master Corporal Mark Brownell, who joined the army after graduating from River Hebert District High School, served as a Canadian peacekeeper in Bosnia before being deployed to Afghanistan in 2006.
On Aug. 3 last year, he suffered shrapnel wounds in a grenade attack that killed three of his comrades in one of the bloodiest days of that conflict.
He was to speak to the students about “the culture and kids of Afghanistan,” as well as the Canadian mission there. His message, as he earlier told the CBC: “The people of Afghanistan need us over there … if we're not there, it's going to get worse.”
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: AMHERST CITIZEN, AMHERST DAILY NEWS, ANNAPOLIS COUNTY SPECTATOR, CAPE BRETON POST, GUYSBOROUGH JOURNAL, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, QUEEN’S COUNTY ADVANCE, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, SOUTHSHORENOW.COM, TRURO DAILY NEWS, YARMOUTH VANGUARD.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Oct 28, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
October 28, 2007
Whose quality of life?
After sifting through thousands of reports and submissions from government departments, scientists, environmental groups, industry experts and ordinary citizens, the joint federal-provincial review panel’s report on a massive quarry project proposed for Digby Neck was unambiguous. The federal and provincial environment ministers should reject the American proposal, the report said, because it could wreak havoc on the environment and with the quality of life in local communities.
Environmental groups, not surprisingly, were ecstatic.
“There was a lot at stake here,” noted Stephen Hazell, executive director of Sierra Club of Canada. “The health and well-being and traditional livelihoods of the residents of Digby Neck… and the unacceptable prospect of turning Nova Scotia's North Mountain into America's gravel pit are just a few. This panel saw that and did the right thing, and they are to be commended.”
“The people of Digby Neck have spoken and now so has the panel,” added Laura Hussey, marine coordinator for the Nova Scotia chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.
But at least some “people of Digby Neck” don’t believe the decision speaks for them, or that it will enhance the quality of their lives.
As area resident Cindy Nesbitt told the Digby Courier: “It’s so disappointing that the panel has ignored the community support for this and misunderstood what it calls the core values of our community. It seems to me that core values are things like being able to have a full-time job, being able to live and raise a family with a decent wage.”
The quarry would have created 34 full-time jobs.
Quarry supporters were planning a rally for yesterday. Stay tuned.
Right time to be a right whale
It was a very good week to be a right whale in Nova Scotia.
For starters, there was the Digby Neck quarry decision. Environmentalists successfully argued that fallout from the quarry project — from the impact of blasting on the whales’ feeding habitat to the effect increased ship traffic could have on whale populations — posed a danger to the survival of the “critically endangered” North American right whale.
Meanwhile, a new and unrelated International Maritime Organization agreement announced this week designates Roseway Basin on the province’s south shore — one of two known areas where the whales hang out in large numbers — as an ATBA.
An ATBA? In bureaucratese, it stands for an “Area to be Avoided,” meaning large vessels, including cargo shops, bulk carriers, oil tankers, gas carriers, auto carriers and cruise ships are required to steer clear of the 1,780 sq km area between June 1 and Dec. 31.
Though Transport Canada officials say it will add only seven or eight minutes to the typical Halifax-to-New-York sea journey, the no-go zone could save at least some of the world’s remaining 400 right whales from being killed in collisions with ships. Such collisions, it turns out, are one of the leading causes of whale mortality.
How come the whales don’t know enough to get out of the way of oncoming vessels?
“When whales are engaged in social activities,” explains Moira W. Brown, a senior scientist with the New England Aquarium & Canadian Whale Institute, “they are pretty oblivious to everything else that’s going on around them other than the nearest whale.”
Dear Rodney
More than 700 users of the Pictou-Antigonish regional libraries have already sent letters to Premier Rodney MacDonald demanding his government increase funding for the local library system.
Last week, library officials announced they can no longer afford to buy new books and will have to consider even more money-saving measures — including cutting back on hours or canceling popular programs like Books for Babies — if it doesn’t get more support from the province.
“This can be an easy fix Mr. Premier,” declared Ken Johnston, chair of the library's finance board, as he officially launched the library’s letter-writing campaign. He urged MacDonald to “refocus your energy to provide the necessary financial assistance to the gateway of lifelong learning.”
It may — or may not — be worth noting that the last non-government-report literature MacDonald is known to have read is The Life and Times of Angus L., a long out-of-print biography of Nova Scotia’s popular and long-serving Liberal premier who came from the area of Cape Breton our current premier also calls home. As for the book, he “liked it.”
Making history
One of Nova Scotia’s last segregated school houses could soon become a registered heritage site. Which is quite an accomplishment considering that, barely a year ago, the Five Mile Plains School was in danger of falling to the wrecker’s ball.
“We were at our end,” Beulah States, a volunteer member of the committee that has run the building as a community hall since the school shut down in 1963, told the Hants Journal. “We couldn't even replace the oil tank and fix the roof… We were all tired out and just couldn't do it any more.”
The building’s first saviour came in the form of David States, an historian who had written about the school’s significance. He encouraged the committee to have the hall registered as a heritage property.
The committee was keen but, since there was no deed for the property, there would be legal fees they couldn’t afford.
Enter saviour number two. Local MLA Chuck Porter convinced his government colleagues to not only help foot the bill for emergency repairs on the building but also covered the costs of a lawyer to begin the heritage designation process. “If it wasn't for him, I don't know what we would have done,” States said.
Given the growing interest in the history of segregated schools in Nova Scotia — Sylvia Hamilton’s feature documentary The Little Black School House had its premiere at this year’s Atlantic Film Festival — locals hope the building will become what States calls “a major stopping place.”
Adds Roddy Johnston, a former student, the school could become as significant in its way as Windsor’s hockey heritage centre. “Here you have a community with such an important history; there should be tours stopping here to learn about it,” he told the Hants Journals, adding with a laugh, “I'd like to see Oprah visit.”
With or without Oprah, States hopes the building will soon get its heritage designation and have its “grand opening” this spring.
When that happens, she says, “we’ll jump for joy.”
Hatchet job
Nova Scotia’s lumber operators appear to be among the first to be sideswiped by what one industry spokesman calls a “perfect storm” — the ever-rising value of the Canadian loonie coupled with the collapse of the American housing market.
Last week, Ledwidge Lumber in Enfield laid off 27 workers indefinitely while the Irving-owned Sproule Lumber in Truro, which employs 170 people, has been shut down for the past two weeks.
And the worst isn’t likely over yet. MLA Brooke Taylor (Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley), whose riding includes the most and biggest sawmills, told the Truro Daily News, “there’s certainly more bad news coming down the pipe in the days and weeks ahead.”
And that’s in spite of a recent provincial government announcement that it will provide up to $35 million for the industry for silviculture and other forest-related initiatives.
Helping hands
Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalist Heritage Society in Birchtown — devastated by a deliberately-set fire that destroyed part of its museum last year — got a boost recently from students and staff from the Nova Scotia Community College’s nearby Shelburne campus.
It was part of a province-wide “Reach Out to Nova Scotia” campaign the college launched to better connect with local communities.
Students and staff painted, replaced damaged signs, spread sand and gravel on pathways, and trimmed branches and placed markers along some walking trails. Later, they’ll help put together a pamphlet to explain the significance of the markers, as well as telling the story of what life in Nova Scotia was like for the black loyalists who came to the province after the American revolution.
The society is currently in the midst of a fund-raising campaign to rebuild a bigger, better museum.
Sign of the times
In case you missed it, last night marked the end of an era in Kingston — the last Western Kings Arena Association weekly bingo night.
For years, the arena association has depended on bingo to raise money to help operate the community rink but, as Chair Bob Lyle told the Kings County Register, “we have gone from making thousands of dollars each year to almost losing money.”
Whatever the cause — and it could be anything and everything from the growth in online gaming, to the proximity of the Halifax casino, to the proliferation of lotteries — Lyle says the reality is that “it just doesn’t make sense to hold them anymore.”
Under the “E” for the End.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: DIGBY COURIER, HANTS JOURNAL, KINGS COUNTY REGISTER, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, TRURO DAILY NEWS.
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Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Oct 21, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
October 21, 2007
We knew it was bad, but…
A few weeks back, we told you just how awful this summer’s tourism season had been in Yarmouth: visitor numbers down by an incredible 33 per cent. One motel operator even confided to a reporter from the Yarmouth Vanguard that local businesses had lost $800,000 in July alone.
Those numbers took on a much more human dimension last week when Marianne Carrier, who’s operated the Voyageur Motel for 30 years, called in a wrecking crew to demolish a dozen of her motel’s 34 units. “There are no alternatives,” she says. “There’s no way you can afford to keep them up.”
Her decision follows three difficult years of declining bookings during which she’s already been forced her to shorten her season, hiring staff later and laying them off earlier.
Carrier blames her problems ¬— and those of the town — on a change in the ferry schedule between Yarmouth and Portland, ME. While the previous schedule — morning arrivals and evening departures — encouraged visitors to spend time and money in town, the current mid-day sailing schedule means most people zip into and out of town without leaving behind any cash.
Carrier, who says her customers are “very upset with the ferry service,” believes the government “should step in and say ‘Hold on here.’ This new schedule killed Yarmouth tourism.”
Strait secrets
Education Minister Karen Casey has sent a letter to the Strait Regional School Board making certain recommendations — er… amend that please, “directives” — and the board has agreed to take action on them.
But exactly what those recommendations/directives are, no one is saying. The letter was discussed last week during an in-camera session with board members, Deputy Education Minister Dennis Cochrane and other department officials in attendance. Since the substance of those in-camera discussion are secret, that night’s public board meeting proved awkward, to say the least.
Board member Henry Van Berkel introduced a motion to accept the minister’s unexplained recommendations. Brenda Gillis successfully proposed an amendment to call the recommendations directives. But when Mike Brown put forward another motion demanding “the Strait regional school board not bow to the pressure of the Minister of Education” the chair ruled it out of order. Which led yet another board member, Frank Machnik, to declare: “Now I completely understand what it was like to live under the former Soviet Union.”
Ouch.
To add to the confusion, Nancy Watson, director of communications for the Department of Education, told the Cape Breton Post her department won’t release the contents of the letter until the board does. “Frankly,” she added, “I think we all expected that it would have made its way out at some point before now, but we can’t be the ones to provide that.”
Speaking of secrets…
A Mahone Bay man who opposes plans for a new housing development on former school lands in the town, has called on Mayor Joe Feeney “to do the honourable thing and resign.”
Keith MacDonald told a well-attended council meeting earlier this month that local officials have “a long-standing history of using in-camera sessions to discuss public business.”
Though MacDonald cited plenty of examples — from discussions about renovations at a local church to renaming the town’s fire department — his real concern seemed to relate to secret discussions between council and Bob Youden, the proposed housing project’s developer.
MacDonald pointed out that councillors had accepted Youden’s development proposal at an in-camera meeting in April, then reconvened to publicly rubber-stamp their secret decision. Following that meeting, the town’s CAO sent an email to the developer outlining what he called the “creative thinking” needed to respond to the developer’s request for tax abatement on the undeveloped land. “Municipalities’ hands are somewhat tied by legislation,” Jim Wentzell wrote, “but we will look at ways of achieving the same results.”
“The bottom line,” MacDonald told councilors, “is council should really be more open to the public in what it’s discussing and how it’s discussing it.”
As for Mayor Feeney, he told southshore.now he’s convinced he’s done nothing wrong. But, “If I’m wrong, I’ll be glad to resign.”
Just when you thought it was safe to be sick
Now that Digby General Hospital’s ongoing emergency room closure crisis seems finally to be easing — a Prince Edward Island doctor has agreed to relocate to the town — we get news that the North Cumberland Memorial Hospital in Pugwash had to be shut down twice last week.
The issue, as per usual: “a shortage of available physicians.”
And so it goes. And goes…
The story that keeps on keeping on
Although it finally unloaded the site of the former Shelburne boys school to a Halifax developer this spring, the South West Shore Development Authority is reporting a loss for last year of more than $330,000 — 20 per cent more than it lost the year before. The authority’s “operating deficiency” now tops $1.3 million.
There are a number of reasons for SWSDA’s worsening financial crunch, including a 25 per cent reduction in federal and provincial grants to the authority.
And things are unlikely to get better anytime soon. The report says that the authority only received about 50 per cent of fair market value when it sold the boys’ school property, now known as Shelburne Place or, as the developer prefers, Bowood. And it’s still stuck with the former CFB Shelburne property now known as Shelburne Park.
White elephants by any other name…
‘It got pretty hairy’
Fisheries and Oceans officer Kevin Juteau modestly describes the night of August 10, 2005 as “quite a time on St. Mary’s Bay.”
Indeed it was.
He and seven other officers in two boats were doing a routine night patrol on the bay — using radar and a nightscope-equipped spotter to catch lobster poachers doing their thing — when they spied what looked like suspicious activity. They decided to close in on their prey with lights off, then flash their spotlights to surprise them.
The three men in the vessel may have been surprised by they weren’t subdued. They led the officers on a long and merry chase around the bay. When the officers finally did manage to pull alongside, the suspects first decided to play pretend — pretending to pull guns on the officers, pretending to pour gasoline on the decks and set the officers’ vessels ablaze — and then pepper-sprayed Juteau for real.
“It got quite violent,” Juteau understates, but adds that, in the end, the officers did finally get their men.
Late last month, one of the three, Derek William Neven, was fined $6,000 after he pleaded guilty to unauthorized lobster fishing, fishing lobsters during a closed time and obstructing fisheries officers in the line of duty.
Juteau says illegal fishing is “out of control” in the area. That summer, he says fisheries officers seized 11 boats, arrested 31 people, and laid over 131 charges.
How dangerous is it? It can, as Juteau finally conceded in an interview with the Digby Courier get “pretty hairy” out there.
No kidding.
Smashing pumpkins
‘Tis the season for pumpkin vandals. On Oct. 9 at 11:46 p.m., Annapolis Valley RCMP officers responded to a report that two suspicious males had been seen near Carleton Corner pulverizing pumpkins by smashing them on the ground. According to a report in the Annapolis Valley Spectator, the officers “discovered ample evidence of pumpkin tampering [but] the culprits could not be located.”
The next day at 10:30 a.m., the Mounties got a call from a transport truck driver whose windshield has just been attacked by a flying pumpkin while he was driving through Bridgetown. Someone, it seemed, had decided to amuse themselves by tossing pumpkins at passing motorists.
And it’s still almost two weeks until Halloween.
Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.
SOURCES: AMHERST DAILY NEWS, ANNAPOLIS COUNTY SPECTATOR, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, QUEENS COUNTY ADVANCE, SHELBURNECOUNTY.TODAY, SOUTHSHORE.NOW YARMOUTH VANGUARD.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
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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.