Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Oct 14, 2007)
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.
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Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Oct 7, 2007)
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.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Sept. 30, 2007)
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.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Sept. 23, 2007)
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.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Sept. 16, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
September 16, 2007
Pretty … impressive in pink
As soon as the staff at the Cambridge Discount Centre understood the reason behind David Shepherd’s unusual request, “clothes were flying… [The clerks] were digging in to help us find pink shirts.”
Shepherd, a Grade 12 student at Central King’s High School, and a group of his classmates — Travis Price, Chris Spencer, Nick Sullivan and John Kenneally — wanted the pink shirts to make a public statement to a small group of bullies at their school. The bullies had been harassing and threatening to beat up a Grade 9 student who showed up for his first day in his new school wearing a pink polo shirt.
Having collected their supply of pink tank tops, the boys returned to school and set up a giveaway shop in the lobby. Students “would just grab” the shirts, put them on, wrap them around their bodies, turn them into headbands. “The school looks cool,” Sullivan told the King’s County Register. “There’s pink all over the school.”
“One of the guys that was doing the bullying came up to me and asked if I knew the story of pink,” Shepherd said. “I said, ‘Sure, and it doesn’t matter.’”
Explaining their decision to confront the bullying this way, Shepherd added: “It’s our last year and we want to make a difference. At a young age, you don’t know the difference between playful teasing and bullying. Doing it over the colour pink is just so stupid.”
Central Kings principal Stephen Pearl, who approved the pink protest, told the newspaper: “It doesn’t surprise me at all they’d want to do this — we have some great kids.” Although the lead bully wasn’t in school the day of the protest, Pearl is sure he’ll get the message. “Student-driven attention goes a lot further, and he’ll hear about what happened today.”
Twisted times at Strait Board
It should have been a simple enough matter. The Strait Regional School Board decided to hire an outside human resources firm to conduct an external evaluation of the work of its superintendent, Phonse Gillis. So it contracted Halifax-based Thompson Associates — a firm whose website boasts it helps organizations “in developing their most valuable resource: their people” — to conduct the assessment.
Thompson consultants came, they interviewed staff and board members, they went away and prepared a preliminary report.
After that, things get murky. There was supposed to be an Aug. 14 meeting between a committee of the board and Thompson reps to discuss the firm’s preliminary findings, but it got cancelled. Except it didn’t really, since not everyone got the notice in time. So the board Chair, Mary-Jess MacDonald, who’s only ex-officio on the committee, met with some Thompson reps and received their report and filed it in a safe deposit box until… well, until something.
Something turned out to be board member Brenda Gillis. She claims the HR firm didn’t interview everyone as completely as it should have, was “biased” in its interview with her and made the superintendent aware of the contents of its initial report before the committee got to read it. She has declared the process “tainted” and insists she’ll have nothing more to do with it. At the board’s Sept. 5 meeting, she even introduced a motion to fire Thompson Associates.
That motion was defeated, but members agreed to withhold payment to the firm until … well until.
Have you had enough yet?
Because there’s more. There will be a special board meeting Sept. 19 to meet with Thompson Associates to discuss… well, whatever.
And you wonder what school boards really do.
Bringing in the spliffs
The RCMP’s annual fall harvest-the-harvest from marijuana grow ops across the province began in earnest last week with woods-stomping raids through backwoods Pictou and Shelburne counties.
“If anyone is growing plants outside,” Sgt./farmer Barry MacLellan of the Shelburne RCMP, told the local Coast Guard, “now is the time when they are ripe.”
Ripe?
Shelburne cops pulled 500 marijuana plants out of the ground in the small village of Sable River while their Pictou County colleagues took down about 750 of the armed and dangerous plants from their territory.
Pictou RCMP Const. Bill Rudolph, who said his boys captured about 1,000 lbs worth of “plant matter,” explained that the raids were “months in the making.”
How many “bad guys” did they catch?
Uh, none. “Not at this time, that's what we're saying,” he told the New Glasgow News.
What happens to the seized matter?
It gets burned.
Pity.
Ferry bad times in Yarmouth
Forget the rosy Department of Tourism stats that show overall visitor numbers up by five per cent in July of this year as compared with 2006. In Yarmouth, the actual numbers plummeted by a whopping 33 per cent, and locals says the situation is the worst it’s been since the province began compiling statistics in 1990.
The problem is that Yarmouth to Maine ferry service, which used to leave port early each morning — generating business for local hotels, motels and bed and breakfasts as well as shops and restaurants — now leaves port in the afternoons. That means many tourists arrive in Yarmouth just in time to join the lineup for the ferry’s departure, leaving behind no money in local business tills.
Bob Benson, owner of Churchill Mansion, says the changes cost Yarmouth more than $800,000 in July alone.
But Terry Grandy, owner of the Manor Inn and past president of the Inn Keepers Guild of Nova Scotia, says the seriousness of the crisis in Yarmouth’s tourism industry is being masked because the Tourism department stats lump in visitors as far away as Windsor into the same geographic area with Yarmouth.
“Our numbers are rolled in with Digby numbers, New Minas numbers, Wolfville numbers, etc..” he told the Yarmouth Vanguard. “They may be up but if Yarmouth is down, it only softens the real impact of what is happening in Yarmouth.”
Added Benson: “The only salvation at this time is a ferry service departing in the early morning.”
Wake up and smell the coffee.
Michel Samson for Finance Minister?
Richmond County wants Richmond MLA Michel Samson to cough up $550 for two months worth of back rent for his constituency office in a municipally owned mall. The county claims Samson owes the money from as far back as 2002.
Samson, who has suggested he’s the victim of a smear campaign or gross incompetence, says he won’t pay until the his landlord tells him which months he didn’t pay rent.
Huh?
Shouldn’t there be a paper trail — cancelled cheques, bank records — that both sides can quickly check to determine if there are missing cheques and for which months?
Well, yes. And no. The municipality claims its records show Samson didn’t make a payment at all in 22 of the last 72 months. In 18 of those other months, however, he made multiple payments. Some cheques were post-dated. Some included memos indicating the month the payments were to cover.
Richmond County CAO Louis Digout says it should be easy enough for Samson to figure out. “The amount owing to us is the net sum of the 22 months that he missed payments and those months where he made multiple payments.”
Samson isn’t buying. “If I’m going to be told that I have missed a payment, I believe that for me to do due diligence on behalf of the taxpayers, it’s to ensure that I, in fact, did not make the payment.”
He thinks it’s up to the county to figure it out.
We think he should take a basic bookkeeping course.
Maybe they want to open a home supply store
Unimaginative thieves with more bolt cutters than brains have hit the Annapolis Valley Exhibition in Lawrencetown three times in the past month.
Just before the Valley Exhibition in August, they used their bolt cutters to cut the padlocks and steal $800 worth of drop-down electrical cords supplying commercial booths at the fair. Less than a week after the Exhibition closed, they were back to swipe $1,000 worth of tools. And then last week, the bolt-cutter bandits with limited horizons stole most of the exhibition’s plumbing — including 43 taps, shutoffs, copper pipe, and brass fittings for sinks and urinals. The cost: another $1,000.
The break-ins represent a major financial blow to the Exhibition, according to manager John Longley, who says he’ll try to discourage future visits from the bolt-for-brain brigade by using flexible plastic pipe, including for the taps, instead of copper.
Will that be enough to keep them away? Don’t bet on it.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, KING’S COUNTY REGISTER, NEW GLASGOW NEWS, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, SHELBURNE COAST GUARD, YARMOUTH VANGUARD
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
Kimber’s Nova Scotia (Sept. 9, 2007)
Kimber’s Nova Scotia
September 9, 2007
That clarifies the mud
Nova Scotia Liberal leader Stephen McNeil has waded into the waters of the controversy over a proposal to develop a new aquaculture farm on Port Mouton Bay — sort of. Actually, he just tentatively dipped a toe into the roiling waters, declared himself… concerned… and moved on.
McNeil and South Shore-St. Margaret’s federal Liberal candidate Dr. Bill Smith happy-handed their way through another late summer festival crowd at the Queen’s County SeaFest last week. Along the way, McNeil boasted about what he described as the renewed “excitement that’s been missing among Liberals across the province” while Smith prattled on about how he had “recently witnessed more meaningful discussions with the Liberals than I’ve seen in the last 10 or 11 years.”
Between rounds of self congratulation, they dissed their opponents and, oh yes, not to forget, pronounced themselves squarely on all sides of the controversial aquaculture farm plan.
Smith made a point of saying he had spoken to Darlene Norman, a member of the Friends of Port Mouton Bay, a citizens’ group lobbying to stop the development. But he was quick to add, according to the Queen’s County Advance that the Liberal party is “not opposed to aquaculture if it is developed in places that won’t hurt an area’s eco-system.”
McNeil, the newspaper noted, “echoed this sentiment.”
That’s good to know. Even if we don’t know what it actually means.
Speaking of happy-handing politicians
NDP Leader Darrell Dexter was in Mulgrave last week to tell the board of directors of the troubled, on-the-verge-of-closing Mulgrave Medical Centre exactly what it wanted to hear.
Board Chair Al England, who gave Dexter a tour of the facility, told the Opposition leader the centre used to have its own staff physicians, but they’re long gone and the board now needs $15,000 just to keep the building open. “If something doesn’t happen by the end of… September, we have to close up,” he said.
But England also said he believes the centre can still provide important community health services through nurse practitioners, or offering clinics for problems like smoking and alcohol abuse.
Dexter agreed. The provincial government should not only be supporting more preventive care facilities, he said, but it should also be doing so in local communities rather than concentrating such services in larger centres.
“The answers to these [health care] delivery questions,” Dexter explained, “are going to be rooted in the community itself. They know their community best, they know what the challenges are, so it’s got to be a collaborative effort.”
According to the Port Hawkesbury Reporter, “Dexter said he would listen to the concerns of the board of directors and consider what he could do to help make sure the government is aware.”
Translation: Don’t start planning your new clinic yet, Mr. England.
And more politicians on the prowl
The big news in Canso wasn’t that Premier Rodney MacDonald and Fisheries Minister Ronnie Chisholm had visited the town recently. It was who they didn’t meet with that created controversy
At the most recent town council meeting, representatives of the Inshore Fishermen’s Association tore a strip off Mayor Ray White for not informing them the premier would be in Canso Aug. 13 to meet with union reps from the ailing Seafreez fish plant.
“If the fishing industry was being discussed,” association manager Ginny Boudreau said in what the Guysborough Journal called “a passion-laden” address to council, “we should be part of those discussions. We represent 134 businesses in the community… It’s very difficult to be a part of the solution if you’re not involved in the dialogue to start with.”
Added inshore association director William Bond: “For years and years and years all of us felt like outcasts,” Bond said. “With no work at the plant, the offshore fishery is history. Now they’re forgetting about the inshore fishery.”
The inshore fishermen’s association wants the province and Ottawa to upgrade both the town wharf and the mothballed Seafreeze plant in order to meet the needs of a scaled-down fishery.
For his part, Mayor White said he understood their concerns but that the town hadn’t been involved in setting up the premier’s agenda. Still, he added: “The message came clear that if dignitaries are coming, remind them we’re also here.”
Are you listening Rodney and Ronnie?
First we harvest, then we build
Protesters may have won the battle to keep Gerry Fulton from transforming some King’s County farmland he owns into a 300-unit, $50-million residential housing development but Fulton says the municipal council’s decision to turn down his project this summer may ultimately make it more difficult to win the war to keep local farmland for farming.
Fulton says his fallback position will be to start subdividing some of the 1,000 acres he now owns and build single family houses on each lot — something he doesn’t need council approval to do.
Fulton, who claims he’s had “100 opportunities” to sell building lots piecemeal in the past — “the only one we’ve ever done was one for my son; that was the way I protected farm land” — admits he “feels sick” about having to go this route. But he says he has no choice. He has 49 employees he needs to keep employed.
He concedes council’s decision to reject his original proposal — after noisy protests from some locals — still rankles. “It annoys me,” he told reporter Sara Keddy of the King’s County Register. “Thirty-two thousand people can vote in the county, half of them voted last time and council listens to 20 of them.”
His first step, he says, will be to build two single-family houses on the McLean Road, the site of his original proposal — but not quite yet. “I’ve got a crop to get out of there first.”
Where’s the Vision?
The debate over aerial spraying of the herbicide Vision continues. The provincial Environment Department has approved the spraying and the federal pest management agency says it’s safe. But local residents’ groups — the latest being the Aylesford and Loon Lake Property Owners Association, which collected 300 names on a petition against the spraying — have their doubts.
Association chair Andy Bryski, whose group is trying to convince the municipal council to take up their cause with the province, argues that, “as an absolute minimum, council should debate the question of the need for aerial spraying… in the Kings County watershed.”
He points out that, even with government restrictions on spraying near waterways, studies have shown that up to 10 per cent of fish still die as a result.
“If it kills fish,” he says, “there’s some downside.”
Sounds reasonable.
Yum… trout
The Mersey Tobeatic Research Institute and the Clean Annapolis River Project are teaming up on a project to enlist recreational fishermen in determining where and how many chain pickerel have managed to invade southwestern Nova Scotia’s rivers and lakes.
The pickerel, which was illegally introduced to Nova Scotia in 1945, is nicknamed the “water wolf” because it has a nasty habit of attacking and destroying other fish and native creatures. Scientists say their mere presence not only poses a threat to biodiversity but they could, if not controlled, wipe out the region’s economically valuable brook trout population.
The problem, explains researcher Kyle Hicks, is that the fish not only migrate along the province’s endless rivers and waterways on their own but they are also sometimes illegally dumped into new bodies of water by people, “so no one really knows the full distribution of these two species. In order to prevent their further spread into the remaining brook trout habitats it is necessary to know where they currently are.”
Hicks is looking for volunteer anglers willing to report any catches or sightings. You can contact him by email: kylehicks@annapolisriver.ca
Top cop
Bridgewater Police Cst. Christine Bonnell has become so well known among skateboarding young people in Bridgewater that “I’ve had kids come up to me in the Superstore when I’m off duty and say, ‘Are you the policewoman who has those helmets I've heard about?’”
She is. It all began back in June after a police crackdown on skateboarders who weren’t wearing helmets prompted an email from one suggesting the reason they weren’t wearing helmets was because they couldn’t afford them.
“When I got the e-mail, I went out that morning and picked up one of the kids… and took him to Zellers,” Bonnell told the Bridgewater Bulletin. “I bought three of them out of my own money.”
Since then, the Bridgewater police department has given out almost a dozen helmets, most of them donated by Wal-Mart.
Vaughn Whynot, the 20-year-old emailer and a member of the group that oversees the local skateboard park, is pleased. “It's great that they're willing to help out rather than just slapping cuffs or fines on people.”
Ironically, Whynot himself usually doesn’t wear a helmet despite pressure from his new police friends to be a good role model.
“In every picture in a skateboard magazine, not anybody in any picture or ad has a helmet on,” he explains. “That makes it hard when the cops say you should be a good role model.”
Uh… whatever
More than 50 people attended the recent open house at Bowood, the controversial former Shelburne Boys School property, which Halifax developer Ralston MacDonnell is in the process of turning into what he calls a “creative community development.”
Visitors got to wander through the apparently well constructed and preserved “cottages,” and to wonder why municipal staff, as recently as a month ago, offered “alarming presentations… describing the facility in near-ruin and a prospect for demolition.” Another local company is suing the developer and the local development authority, claiming MacDonnell got the property for “grossly below fair market or replacement value.”
After the usual upbeat speeches from the usual suspects — the municipal warden and local MLA — MacDonnell took the podium to talk about his plans for the site and, he said, to answer any questions from locals.
But according to the website Shelburne County Today, MacDonnell didn’t bother to ask at the end of his presentation if there actually were any questions.
Moving on…
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:
BRIDGEWATER BULLETIN, GUYSBOROUGH JOURNAL, KING’S COUNTY REGISTER, QUEEN’S COUNTY ADVANCE, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, SHELBURNE COUNTY TODAY, YARMOUTH VANGUARD.
Copyright 2007 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of 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 seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.