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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

October 14, 2007

Get off of their Cloud 9

Peter and Anne Winkles thought they were making a simple business decision. The owners of Yarmouth’s Cloud Nine Shuttle — which operates a 364-day-a-year Halifax-Yarmouth shuttle service using three family-style, seven-passenger vans — decided they could save on monthly maintenance costs that run as high as $4,000 as well as increase their overall efficiency by replacing one of the aging vans with a newer, slightly larger, 10-passenger commercial-use van.

Explains Anne Winkles: “[The price of] gas we can't control. We can't control roads; we can't control anything. One of the few things I thought we might be able to control was maintenance on the vehicle.”

In Nova Scotia, nothing is as simple as it seems — or as it should be.

Soon after they began kicking tires at the car lot, they got a call from the province’s big brother Utility and Review Board informing them that it would have to put a notice in the Royal Gazette notifying their competitors of their nefarious van-buying scheme and inviting objections.

Two companies — bus giants Acadian Bus Lines and Trius Tours — did object. That led to a URB hearing where high-priced corporate lawyers for the bus companies explained how adding three piddling extra seats on Cloud 9’s shuttle service could spell doom for their own operations in the area.

Incredibly, the board listened and then turned down — without explanation — Cloud Nine’s request.

“It's extremely frustrating that my own government seems to be impeding my business efficiencies,” Anne Winkles told the Yarmouth Vanguard. “I think our government talks the talk about helping small businesses but, in my opinion… it looks like there is a lot of partiality for the big guys.”

No kidding.

Smoke signals

In December 2004, the Central Highlands Association for the Disabled asked New Glasgow town council to provide visual smoke alarms for fewer than a half dozen local hearing-impaired residents. The town said no. Providing the alarms, it said, was “not a municipal role or responsibility, nor an area that would be appropriate for [it] to pursue.”

Last week, 64-year-old Donald William Marshall, a hearing-impaired man, died in a fire at his residence.

“This is a tragedy that no one wants to see in any community,” Kim Dickson, the town’s marketing and communications director, told the New Glasgow News.” But Dickson was quick to add that council simply can’t say yes to every request it gets and that it did suggest the disabled group approach local businesses to donate the equipment.

“I don't remember them suggesting we do that,” the association’s Ron Levy countered. He said he realized the town wasn’t under any legal obligation to provide the alarms but he said it was a “moral responsibility.”

Let’s call it YRM

More than 100 people jammed into the Municipality of Yarmouth council chambers last week for a public meeting, “filling every available inch, doorway and even the hall,” according to Yarmouth Vanguard reporter Michael Gorman. The turnout, he wrote, was “so overwhelming… some people turned around at the door when they realized there was no hope of fitting in the room.”

The issues that roused the residents to such a fever pitch?

Whether to build a new $4-million building to house municipal offices and, and perhaps not coincidentally, whether it makes more sense for Yarmouth — town and county — to follow the lead of Halifax, Cape Breton and Queen’s counties and amalgamate to form one larger and more efficient regional unit.

The main concern among those opposing the construction project was that a fancy new building — according to the official plans, the structure will come complete with terraces, an exercise room and a sophisticated geo-thermal heating system — would end up increasing taxes for county residents.

“It's the dollars that we have to pay,” complained Roy Andrews. “My taxes have gone up 30 per cent in the last seven years.”

Despite assurances from municipal officials that building the building wouldn’t add to their tax burden, several speakers argued that councillors, instead of wasting money on new infrastructure, should be looking to reduce the size of government and their own budgets.

Which is to say, they should amalgamate with the town.

Perhaps predictably, Warden Bryan Smith wasn’t keen. “If Yarmouth County ever became a region,” he said, “we would be classed in with CBRM and HRM. You want to talk about being a small fish… We would really be small."

Countered resident Barrie MacGreeggor: “Queen's County has been amalgamated for 11 years, effectively saving money and… ending the persistent unpleasant and unproductive debate of town versus on many issues…”

Uh, well, not really.

Perhaps he might want to reconsider his last remark considering some of the ongoing debates among Halifax Regional Municipality councillors over pet bylaws, snow removal and whether to call their fiefdom Halifax or HRM…

Hmmm… Yarmouth? Or YRM?

Selling Wellness for wellness

The good news — if you’re in need of medical care in Port Hawkesbury — is that the local waterfront development society is going ahead with a $75,000 renovation to a town-owned downtown office building to provide better facilities for a family doctor whose practice is growing.

The bad news — if you own commercial real estate in the town — is that tenants like the doctor who lease space from the society in buildings owned by the town don’t pay the same taxes as those in privately-owned commercial buildings.

“I’ve had a lot of phone calls from businesses in town that say, ‘How can [we] compete?’” Coun. Joe Janega told the Cape Breton Post.

But the deal with the doctor may inadvertently ease the concerns of those same businesses. Earlier this month, as part of the deal in which town council approved a loan to cover the costs of the renovations, the society agreed to pay back the money by selling off the Wellness Centre, another building it owns.

Which assumes, of course, they can find a private buyer for another office building in the town Stora forgot.

More good news, bad news…

The Nova Scotia government may — or may not — be relieved to learn that Digby finally has a new emergency room physician.

Dr. Ron Matsusaki, who had been working for the past four years at Western Hospital in Alberton, P.E.I., has agreed to accept less money to relocate to the Digby General where officials hope his presence will allow their often shuttered ER to return to regular service.

Why would the provincial government — which has been under fire for months over ongoing closures at rural emergency rooms — be wary about Matsusaki’s impending arrival?

Well, the doctor ‘s reputation precedes him. He’s known on Prince Edward Island as an outspoken critic of that province’s agricultural pesticide policies. He claims there’s a connection between use of the pesticides on local farms and what he says are higher-than-normal cancer rates in the area.

The doctor has said the pesticide issue had nothing to do with his decision to switch locations — he says vaguely there were changes he wanted made at Western that he couldn’t convince the powers-that-be to follow up on — but it’s unlikely he’ll be any quieter in Nova Scotia than he was in P.E.I.

Be careful what you wish for, Rodney.

Better news

Speaking of Digby and the health care crises there — aren’t we always? — the community received even more good news this week.

Dr. Roy Harding is back. The longtime local family physician — who’d carried almost twice what’s considered a normal patient load before resigning his 2,500-patient practice at the end of June — is opening a new part-time walk-in clinic in the local hospital.

By focusing on the management and treatment of chronic illness — the clinic is intended for patients with routine health problems who don’t have their own family doctors — Harding’s clinic should help ease the burden on the hospital’s emergency room.

Green author alert

Green Party leader Elizabeth May’s quest to wrest Central Nova from the iron grasp of federal Tory cabinet minister Peter MacKay will get a publicity — and financial —goose this week when two of Canada’s literary icons stage a night of readings in the riding in support of her campaign.

The famous Margaret Atwood, who joined the Green Party last year and says “anything I can do to help Elizabeth May in her efforts to gain a seat and thus give the Green vote a voice in Parliament is a pleasure,” will be joined by the infamous Farley Mowat, who will be doing his first public reading in a number of years. Atwood’s husband, novelist Graeme Gibson, and Nova Scotia’s own multi-talented, multi-award-winning Linda Little will also take part in the event at Trinity United Church in New Glasgow on Wednesday evening.

Call 902-695-4000 for more information.

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: CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, YARMOUTH VANGUARD.

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

October 7, 2007

Out of gas

Despite pleas from local residents, a pitch from internationally famed photographer Sherman Hines and even a brief stay of demolition by the Queens Municipal Council, Liverpool’s architecturally rare and historically interesting Petro Canada gas station is no more.

Demolition crews spent the week leveling the station, which was built in the 1920s for the Fina gas company and featured pillars and stonework throughout.

The company said the station had to be demolished so it can determine the extent of oil and gas contamination in the soil under the building and clean it up, but local residents claim there were other, less destructive ways to remove any contaminated soil.

Sherman Hines initially proposed turning the building into an automobile museum and later offered to cart away its bricks and rebuild the structure somewhere else, but the company spurned both suggestions.

Municipal council did its part too, ordering a delay in the demolition to see if residents could strike a deal with the company. They couldn’t.

“It’s a loss to the town and it’s a loss to the heritage of the town and anyone who cares about vintage heritage,” Hines told the Queens County Advertiser.

With the levelling of the Liverpool station, there are just a few service stations from that era left in the province, including a still-functioning one in Bridgewater and a former station that is now a collection of retail outlets in Mahone Bay.

That got their attention

When a South Shore Regional School Board member mused recently that the only way to get the provincial government to pay attention to the “woefully inadequate facilities” at Centre Consolidated School might be for students to stage walkouts and demonstrations, the department of education very quickly got the message.

The minister and deputy minister, along with department officials responsible for capital projects, all attended a hastily convened face-to-face meeting with the school superintendent and two board members, assuring them — in the words of a report from superintendent Nancy Pynch-Worthylake — that it recognized “the need for an extensive renovation project at the school.”

The province has agreed to fork over $60,000 immediately to help deal with the most urgent issues — including constructing a barrier-free entrance and upgrading washrooms in the elementary section of the school.

The $60,000 will help, but it’s the barest of beginnings. The board’s director of operations, Paul Rand, told a recent school board meeting the school needs over $6 million worth of work.

No word on when that cash might flow. Can you say the next election?

Score one for Rodney

Rodney MacDonald’s plan to introduce legislation to take away the right to strike from the province’s health care workers has a new ally.

John Malcolm, the CEO of the Cape Breton District Health Authority who had previously opposed such legislation, says the threat of a strike in his district last year changed his mind. He’s not only changed his mind, he’s joined the Nova Scotia Association of Health Organizations $350,000 lobbying effort to convince the rest of us to support the controversial legislation

A strike, he told the Cape Breton Post’s editorial board last week, would have been “terrifying,” resulting in the closure of three emergency rooms, cancellation of elective surgeries and continued cancer treatment only for people already receiving treatment.

“It’s this and the changes I’ve felt in the system over the last five years that have brought me around to saying we’ve got to look at this differently,” Malcolm explained. “You have a disruption of services, you create a backlog. I don’t know how you ever get out of that.”

This fall’s legislature sitting — if Rodney ever calls it — will be interesting.

The burning question

If you haven’t already ordered your winter supply of firewood, forget about it, or accept the fact that you’ll probably end up with wet wood in your woodstove or fireplace.

That, at least, is what a number of suppliers told the New Glasgow News this week.

The problem, says Darcy Graham of Nodar Farms in Upper Stewiacke, is that much of the best wood is now being turned into chips and shipped to markets overseas. The problem has been getting worse over the past decade as demand for firewood goes up at the same time the supply goes down, but it’s reached a crisis point this year.

“I’m selling people wood that’s only been cut a month or two and I’m telling them that,” Graham explains. “They’re in a situation where they’ve got to buy because they can’t get wood anywhere else.”

Graham isn’t alone. David MacKay, who sells split firewood out of Truro, told the newspaper he’s down to just three or four weeks’ stock. “We won’t have enough wood to go through the winter; we usually do, but we won’t this year.”

Although both MacKay and Graham say they’re considering cutting and stockpiling more firewood in the spring, Graham points out that “it’s costly for us to hold onto it.”

The solution, they say, is to buy your wood for next winter in the spring. “I’m thinking next year my phone is going to be ringing off the hook in April or May,” Graham says, hopefully. “People are going to be getting their wood earlier next year.”

Maybe.

All’s well that ends well

The curtain is about to fall on a three-year soap opera at Parsboro’s Ship’s Company Theatre and — as happens more often on stage than in real life — the final act appears to include a surprise happy ending.

This real-life play began three years ago when the theatre company moved into a new facility and applied to Parsboro for tax exempt status as a cultural institution.

The town said no, designated 22 per cent of the building as commercial and dinged the theatre company for that share of its property taxes.

The Ship’s Company countered that it couldn’t survive the extra costs and, besides, other municipalities with theatre companies exempted them from property taxes.

Relations between town and theatre got so bad, reports the Amherst Citizen, that they were “barely [on] speaking terms” at the beginning of the summer.

But now, thanks to last minute negotiations, the town has agreed to tax the theatre on only 12 per cent of its property instead of the original 22.

“I’m thrilled, and you can put that in bold, capital letters,” Ship’s Company general manager Chuck Homewood told the Citizen. “This is a wonderful step in the right direction.”

The denouement should occur later this month when council holds second and final reading on the revised tax exemption bylaw.

No curtain calls, please.

Whose obstacle course

Former-gym-teacher-turned-premier Rodney MacDonald says he wants to remove the “obstacles” that prevent community groups from using local school facilities after hours. But critics say his own government’s failure to foot the bill for the required extra insurance is the biggest obstacle those community groups face.

The long simmering rural issue bubbled back to the surface during a recent meeting of a committee of the Tri-County Regional School Board in Yarmouth. The commitee was discussing the board’s community use policy. Board members said they too wanted to open up their school rooms and gymnasiums — often the only large public gathering spots in rural communities — but their school insurance policies won’t cover such “non-school” activities. That means the groups often have to ante up hundreds of dollars to buy additional insurance just to hold one meeting or event. And, worse from the school board’s point of view, they end up blaming the board for forcing them to purchase the insurance.

Responding to those concerns, the premier told the Yarmouth Vanguard he’s instructed his ministers of education and health promotion and protection to figure out ways to make the province's schools more accessible.

If he’s really serious, says school board vice-chair Ron Hines, the solution is simple. ”If the province is so determined to provide these facilities to the community they should have liability insurance that would cover the whole thing across the province.”

Back to you, Rodney.

Come in, the water’s warm

No one around Isle Madame had seen such a creature before. It was a six-foot-long, 60-pound fish with “large silver scales and a large, round mouth” that recently washed up on shore in an estuary of a brook in nearby Port Royal.

So they called the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. DFO sent out an officer to examine the sea creature. He confirmed the fish was, in fact, a tarpon.

A tarpon? Sometimes called the “silver king” and prized by sports fishermen because they put up such a good fight, tarpon are usually only found in the tropical and sub-tropical waters around the Gulf of Mexico, Florida and the West Indies.

How did it end up in Isle Madame? Good question? Can you say global warming?

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, Cape Breton Post, New Glasgow News, Queens County Advertiser, Port Hawkesbury Reporter, Southshorenow.ca, Yarmouth Vanguard.

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

September 30, 2007

Fish story

The president of the Northumberland Fisherman’s Association, says it could be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back.” Or perhaps the loon that cracks the lobster’s claw.

Ronnie Heighton told the Truro Daily News last week that the skyrocketing value of the Canadian loonie coupled with plummeting catches of lobster in some areas of Nova Scotia’s north shore has the potential to spell doom for struggling fishermen.

Last spring, American buyers were paying $5-6 a pound (US) for market-sized lobsters. When the season opens in the spring, he fears the price could be as low as $3 a pound.

“It’s fine in areas where fishing is good and guys are hauling in 25,000 [pounds] a season,” Heighton says. “They could sustain a loss, but in areas where fishing hasn’t been good and guys are landing about 5,000, it could sink us.”

He’s hoping “the people we sell fish to” will find alternate buyers, possibly in the European market.

Hmmm?… If the fishermen are paid for their catch in American dollars and the Canadian dollar is at par, does that mean it will be cheaper for us to buy lobsters this Christmas?

Don’t bet on it.

A failure to communicate

Annapolis County Councillor Pat McWade says he’s fed up with “us asking specific questions and us not getting a specific answer.”

The questions “us” — which is to say county council — are asking have to do with what Ottawa plans to do to keep the Digby-St. John ferry operating and what the province intends to do about issuing exclusive aquaculture licenses for beaches currently closed to clamming.

And the answers?…

Well, the councilors say, they’re not getting any. At least none they like.

For months, they’ve been writing to ACOA minister Peter MacKay, trying to get him to acknowledge that the ferry service is a vital cog in the national infrastructure and, therefore, a federal responsibility.

MacKay’s replies include vaguely worded references to “economic viability” and blah blah blah.

Says McWade: “The ferry will run, period, without reference to any economic or other indicators. We want the people in Ottawa to understand a very simple fact — that this ferry will run.”

He says council has been getting equally formulaic and platitudinous runarounds from Fisheries Minister Ronald Chisholm whenever they ask about the aquaculture leases.

The council’s reponses to these ongoing slights? They’ve agreed to write yet another letter to Chisholm, this time asking for itemized responses to their itemized questions. And they’ve put over to their next committee of the whole meeting a discussion about how to get their message across to MacKay.

Yes, that should help.

Endangered species… endangered sign

A 50-foot banner an environmental group had erected on private property near the Falmouth exit to Highway 101 to draw attention to “how environmental carelessness can kill a river” has gone missing.

Friends of the Avon River has been lobbying for five years to have the existing causeway over the river opened in order to allow the Avon to flow naturally again and restore some of the salmon habitat destroyed by silt build up at the mouth of the river. It’s also worried that a new federal fisheries act will undermine their efforts to force a full environmental assessment of a proposal to twin the Highway 101 causeway over the river. That’s why it’s encouraging people to write to the prime minister and the federal fisheries minister.

The roadside banner proclaiming “River in Distress” was part of that campaign, says Friends spokesperson Sonya Wood, who told the Hants County Journal she was disappointed that “people feel the need to destroy something of meaning to others. Shame on them. We have an endangered species that needs access to these waters.”

The RCMP is investigating the theft, though not the disappearance of the salmon.

Is the mayor proud yet?

Truro is ready to “move on” from the great gay pride flag flap of 2007. So says Charles Thompson, who organized a community forum in the town last week to discuss equality rights and religious freedoms.

In August, town council voted 6–1 to turn down a request that it fly the rainbow-coloured pennant during Gay Pride Week. At the time, Mayor Bill Mills told reporters that, as a Christian, he simply could not support the idea.

“God says, ‘I'm not in favour of that,’ and I have to look at it and say, ‘I guess I'm not either.’”

But Thompson says the mayor, the deputy mayor, three councillors and the town’s chief operating officer were among the 60 who attended last week’s forum.

“I think it was a huge success,” he told the Truro Daily News. “A lot of people opened their minds and were willing to learn and to listen.”

We shall see.

A hunk out of history

King’s County Advertiser reporter Wendy Elliott wasn’t impressed. “It doesn’t look like much to the untrained eye,” she told her paper’s readers, just “a two-toned grey hunk of rock.”

But Chris Mansky, a fossil hunter and curator of the Blue Beach Museum, who found the object during a walk along the Minas Basin beach earlier this month, says it is, in fact, a fossilized, 335-million-year-old skull of a tetrapod, a reptilian creature that crawled out of a pond onto land sometime in the long long ago.

According to Mansky, paleontologists are still trying to fill in gaps in their knowledge of creatures that existed between those that lived totally in water and those that live on land. “This,” he says of his find, “is incontrovertibly the oldest land animal.”

It’s not the first big fossil find at Blue Beach, once a swampy area of the Minas Basin. Mansky, who describes the beach as a Noah’s Ark for fossils, says the first major discovery there dates back to 1841. Currently, there are tens of thousands of pounds of fossil finds stored in and around the small private museum, which currently consists of a Quonset hut and a basement storage area.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the museum’s operators are now asking county council to rezone their property to allow for the development of a proper museum building and research centre.

Second opinion

Residents of East Mountain in Colchester County weren’t quite as smug — or as optimistic — about the long-term impact of last week’s drug raids in their neighbourhood as the Mounties who made the highly publicized arrests and seized houses and cars belonging to the alleged dealers.

Linda Rushton, who lives near one of the seized homes, says the raid “should have happened a long time ago…. The police have known about it as long as we have — at least 10 years.”

Given the lack of police action over the years, she adds, residents have simply learned to live with the dealers and the extra traffic that comes with their illicit trade. “They leave us alone if we leave them alone… You know where [the buyers are] coming from but, like I say, they don’t stop to bother anyone.”

As for the impact of the high-profile busts: “It’s not resolved. It may be stopped for a little while, but they’ll never wipe it out.”

Do you know where your spacecraft is?

At 11:20 p.m. on Oct. 4, 1967 — 40 years ago this Thursday — at least 11 residents of Shag Harbour on the province’s south shore reported seeing a large, illuminated, low-flying object falling from the sky into the harbour with what sounded like a “whoosh” followed by a loud bang. Some of them, thinking they’d witnessed a plane crash, called in the local RCMP. The officers who responded saw the object too — describing it as a pale yellow light bobbing on the water just before it sank. When rescuers were unable to turn up any sign of anything, the Canadian navy was called in to search for whatever it was — no planes had been reported missing — but divers never found anything either.

Which may explain why official government records describe what wasn’t found as a — cue the ominous music —UFO.

The Shag Harbour Incident, as it’s become known among UFologists worldwide, has been the subject of a book and several TV documentaries. Along with Rosswell, New Mexico — the scene of another similarly unexplained sighting — the small Nova Scotia fishing village now occupies a special spot in the international pantheon of earthly places where aliens may — or may not — have landed.

This coming weekend, the Shag Harbour Incident Society, a recently formed local group that is hoping to establish a permanent museum to commemorate whatever it was that happened that night, will stage a 40th anniversary celebration, featuring talks by UFO experts and local eyewitnesses, tours and, of course, a buffet supper in the local firehall as well as a collectables sale down at the community hall.

No word on whether a certain large, illuminated, low-flying object will put in a special guest appearance.

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: ANNAPOLIS COUNTY SPECTATOR, HANTS COUNTY JOURNAL, KING’S COUNTY ADVERTISER, TRURO DAILY NEWS, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD.

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

September 23, 2007

Do I hear $1.25?

The owner of the Seafreez fish plant in Canso is willing — even eager — to sell his local fish processing plant to the town for a dollar. But the town isn’t certain it can afford the price.

Barry Group, the Newfoundland-based company that’s run the plant for 17 years, says Seafreez is a victim of changing circumstance — the collapse of fish stocks in the 1990s followed by the Supreme Court’s 1999 Marshall decision that allocated more of the annual quota to native fishermen.

“The reality is that [the Seafreez plant is] a facility that was designed for an era that doesn’t exist now,” Bill Barry told the Guysborough Journal. “It was built for a 600–700-people operation with massive amounts of wet fish and other resources to go into the plant. The opportunity to get that in Atlantic Canada has all but disappeared over the last 15 years.” He says Seafreez’s quota, which used to top 136,000 metric tons of fish a year, is now down to just 3,000 pounds.

Barry, who has had well publicized tiffs with the town over unpaid property taxes, water bills and the fact he processes some of his quota at another company-owned plant in Pubnico, insists: “We’ve held on; we’ve held on. There’s nothing to hold onto anymore.”

But Canso Councillor Fin Armsworthy says the real problem is that Barry has “given up on the community… He had the resources and potential to keep work [at Seafreez], but he never did.”

Canso Mayor Ray White is more understanding — “I think [Barry’s] made efforts” — but he isn’t keen on the town owning the plant, even for a dollar. “As a council, I think our preference would be for the provincial or federal government to go to the private sector, seek expressions of interest and hopefully [attract] people with the expertise to develop such an industry.”

If, of course, there is a fishing industry left to develop.

Failure to communicate

It started out as a petition against spraying the herbicide Vision in their backyards, says Aylesford and Loon Lake Property Owners’ Association chair Andy Bryski, but now “it has noting to do with herbicide. It’s about the reaction by a minister of the Crown… We have an elected official who didn’t give us even a simple phone call.”

Bryski is miffed because Environment Minister — and King’s North MLA — Mark Parent didn’t even acknowledge, let alone respond to their 368-name petition demanding that the spraying be cancelled.

Instead, less than two weeks after they sent off their petition, crews showed up to do the deed.

Kings County Coun. Chris Parker, who says Parent’s lack of response was uncharacteristic — “That’s not like Mark; he’s normally great at that” — admits he too found it “frustrating.”

Parent, for his part, claims it was all a misunderstanding. He thought the petition had been addressed to municipal council and had simply been sent on to his department for comment — a process that normally takes a few weeks to work its way through officialdom. Parent told the Kentville Advertiser he felt “badly” about the miscommunication and is willing to meet with the residents.

Meanwhile, Bryski has written directly to Premier Rodney MacDonald, complaining about Parent’s lack of communication on the spray issue.

He hasn’t — wait for it — had a reply or acknowledgment to his letter from the premier’s office.

Are you listening, Rodney?

While the provincial government doesn’t seem to have a plan — we’re being charitable here — to solve Nova Scotia’s rural health care crisis, local communities are busily patching together often innovative coping schemes of their own.

Last month in Middleton, for example, a new collaborative practice — with two doctors, a nurse practitioner and a family practice nurse — opened its doors in a clinic beside Soldiers Memorial Hospital. The clinic is the result of a partnership involving the regional health authority, Soldiers, the hospital foundation (which bought the building), and the doctors and nurses who set it up.

The idea is to give patients one-stop access to a health care team. And it’s working. According to Dr. Jane Brooks, the clinic “has cut down waiting time for my patients from six weeks to three weeks.”

Dr. Eric Balser, the new clinic’s other physician, says “the ultimate goal is to encourage doctors to spread their time out better with the patients who need it. This is an important step that will lead to a better model for everyone.”

It may also help to attract new young doctors, Brooks adds, not only because they’re already trained in the collaborative model but also because joining an existing collaborative practice would be less intimidating than trying to set up on their own with no support system.

When thanks is not enough…

If the ferry service between Digby and Saint John ever stops running, southwestern Nova Scotia’s economy will take a direct hit of up to a $40 million a year.

That’s the key finding of a study sponsored by the Bay of Fundy Transportation Coalition, an ad hoc group made up of local governments and businesses. The coalition is trying to convince Ottawa the service must continue.

The future of the ferry has been in doubt ever since Bay Ferries announced last year that it planned to drop the service. Ottawa, along with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, quickly anted up $8 million to keep the ferry operating until January 2009 while federal officials figured out a long-term solution.

Digby Warden Jim Thurber says a federal working group that held public hearings in the area this summer seemed to listen to community concerns, but its members have offered no assurances it will recommend continued government support for the ferry.

Thurber says the coalition gave federal officials a copy of its new study, but the only response so far has been a simple thank-you. Which is better than no reply at all from a premier.

For the record

The issue of how, and whether, to protect our province’s agricultural land from being gobbled up for housing and other non-farm uses was the subject for debate during “Pave Paradise? Our Farmland Under Stress,” a panel discussion at the Kentville Fire Hall.

Some of what was said, as reported in the Kentville Advertiser:

Agriculture professor Ralph Martin told the audience that half of all Class 1 land — the best farmland — in Canada can be viewed from the CN tower in Toronto and has already been paved and skyscrapered. “When California runs dry, we had better be prepared to produce the food we'll need.”

Apple farmer Bob Wright, who left Ontario 40 years ago to get away from development, said, “People just want to maximize returns and to hell with the future.”

Developer Cecil Lockhart made the point that there are now 1,350 serviced building lots within a 10-mile radius of Kentville — a 20-year supply. Still, people keep creating more lots because “it comes down to dollars and cents and there's more money in development than farming.”

Earl Kidston, who is both a farmer and a developer said, “I'm so disappointed. We’re polarized.”

No kidding.

Thar she blows… but quietly

Schneider Power Inc. is the latest Ontario-based energy company hoping to catch a wind in Nova Scotia — but it wants to do so without the controversy that has dogged other proposed wind farms in the province.

Schneider wants to develop a small-scale — fewer-than-five-turbine — wind power project on Goodwin’s Island, a kilometre offshore from Lower Woods Harbour. The company, which has owned the island since the 1990s wants to feed electricity from the turbines directly into the Nova Scotia Power grid.

President Thomas Schneider says the firm currently has two projects in operation and eight others in development in Canada, the U.S. and Germany.

Although the Goodwin’s Island project is still in the early planning stages — and there’ll be all the usual public meetings, feasibility and environmental assessments before it becomes reality — Schneider thinks his firm’s focus on a small scale project that will have little impact on the environment will help it win community support.

“We want to have a positive impact on the communities we work in,” he told the Shelburne Coast Guard.

What a concept!

Speaking of which…

Cumberland County Council said thank you very much last week when the Gulf Shore Preservation Society presented it with a 1,169-name petition opposing a proposed 20-27 turbine wind farm in their area. But council members balked at the idea of writing a letter of support for the group’s campaign.

“It’s not that council’s not empathetic to the residents of that area,” Warden Keith Hunter told the Amherst Daily News, “but we have a bylaw and the developers go by that bylaw and invest their money according to that bylaw. If we were to try to give any influence on the negative development of that project we could be liable for legal action.”

Translation: Don’t call us.

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 SPECTATOR, DIGBY COURIER, GUYSBOROUGH JOURNAL, KENTVILLE ADVERTISER, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, TRURO DAILY NEWS, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD.