What to make of Peter Kelly’s Moses memo to members of HRM Council? Thou shalt not drink to excess… Thou shalt not drive drunk… Thou shalt call 9-1-1 if a fellow councilor violates #2… Thou shalt pause and reflect…

Mayor Kelly issued his I-regret-I-have-to-write-this-however-circumstances-demand-it memo July 9. The ink had barely dried before it showed up in the media, local and national; closely followed by outraged howls from councilors claiming the mayor’s broad brush, father-knows-better innuendo sullied what passes for their reputations; followed by their own temperature-inflating innuendo about who leaked the memo and why; followed by the mayor’s digging-himself-ever-deeper defence to reporters that he’d once intervened to keep a drunk councilor—no name—from driving away from a public event—no name; followed by…

First question. Do Halifax Regional Councilors have a drinking problem? How many? Who?

Metro reporter Alex Boutilier bravely named names—two of them—in a report Thursday. Veteran city hall watcher Tim Bousquet didn’t name anyone but did suggest, in a radio interview, as many as four councilors appear to over-indulge at times; he later refined that to suggest only one probably has a serious drinking problem.

From a personal point of view, one, of course, is too many.

But there are only two legitimate public concerns here. First, is alcohol interfering with the individual’s ability to do the job? Second, is the individual endangering public safety by driving drunk?

If the answer to either question is yes, councilors face the same wrenching dilemma the rest of us do: how, and how far, to intervene in the personal life of another person.

It’s complicated.

As a reporter, I’ve covered politicians who accomplished more for the public good in one night of drinking than others after a lifetime of sobriety.

Several readers who posted to Metro’s website claimed to have seen one councilor drunk at public events and said he drove away after. How many called police? Should councilors—or the mayor—be held to a different standard?

The mayor has raised a serious issue. But his hectoring memo just trivializes it. One more symptom of the sad lack of leadership at city hall. Pity.

Stephen Kimber will be the featured speaker Saturday, July 31, at the 2010 Port Medway Reader's Festival in Port Medway on Nova Scotia's south shore.

Founded in 2002 by writers Cynthia Wine and Philip Slayton, the Festival is "an opportunity for readers to listen to and meet writers in an informal and friendly village setting. The Festival continues the tradition of the Tennysonian Reading Circle, started by the ladies of Port Medway in 1903."

During its eight-year history, the event has featured, among its readers, Margaret Atwood, George Elliot Clarke, Marq de Villiers, Wayne Johnston, Robert MacNeil, Donna Morrissey, Lisa Moore, Calvin Trillin and Jane Urquhart.

Tickets are $15. Proceeds will be used to support the Port Medway Cemeteries Committee for work at the Old Port Medway Cemetery, a Municipal and Provincial Heritage Property.

Readings take place in the Old Meeting House on Long Cove Road in Port Medway from 7-8pm. Readings are followed by a reception and book signing—which the Globe and Mail once described as a "down-home party"—at the Port Medway Fire hall across the street.

For more information, check out the Festival's website. Or email the organizers.

David Lloyd Johnston, our soon-to-be governor general of all we survey, is, I’m sure, a fine fellow. Even if he does fit—right up to his blue button-down—every stereotype known to boring, old white guy governors general of the pre-Adrienne Clarkson, pre-Michaelle Jean era.

But hey, I’m a boring old white guy too, and it’s nice to be represented once again in the corridors of ceremonial powerlessness.

Johnston is, of course, a lawyer. Better yet, a legal scholar. A specialist in securities law, something happily impenetrable to the rest of us.

He played hockey at Harvard. Of course Harvard. Better yet, he captained its hockey team. At 69, if you believe his gushing friends, he still possesses the speed and finesse of a young Yvan Cournoyer.

He is a former principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, one of Canada’s most venerable institutions of higher learning, and now a soon-to-be former president of the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s most leading edge—can you say particle physics?—groves of academe.

Of course—of course—he is an excellent family man. Married to the same woman forever. The same woman, it should—and will—be said, who is accomplished in her own right, but will not seek her own limelight like… well, no need to mention John Ralston Saul or Jean-Daniel Lafond.

And the kids? Five of them. All girls. All grown. All overachievers. Did we forget the seven grandkids?

Lovely.

Uh… but there is this one nagging footnote to his resumé that’s hard to forget—or forgive.

David Johnston is the person most responsible for the fact we wasted $14 million on a public inquiry to discover what we already knew about Brian Mulroney—that he is a pathological prevaricator of the first order—but not what we actually wanted to know—which is who really got how much of that $20-million in Airbus grease money?

That Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose Johnston—among all the boring old white guy academic overachievers available—to set the sharpened pencil-point-narrow terms of reference for the inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair says much about Stephen Harper’s prescience.

And perhaps too much about David Johnston’s willingness to go along.

Which is why he will make an ideal governor general... for Stephen Harper.

 I don’t necessarily oppose the new convention centre proposed for that gaping hole in the heart of downtown Halifax.

And I don’t completely subscribe to the too-tall, edge-of-the-wedge principal objections raised by the Save the View Coalition.

The preservationist group argues the convention centre’s twin 18 and 14-storey towers will obliterate much of the iconic Citadel Hill view of George’s Island, which is true, thus threatening our historic city’s world-renowned tourist-postcard calling card, which is significantly more debatable.

While I appreciate the battles earlier generations of activists waged to preserve as many views as possible from the Citadel, I personally like the idea of a tightly packed, eclectic downtown that mixes historic and modern, tall and squat, ugly and beautiful, commercial and residential in a funky, lively urban stew. With some great views.

It is the coalition’s back-up argument—that there is no solid business case for a huge new convention centre that will necessitate at least $100 million in taxpayers’ dollars to make happen—that gives me pause. And the dismissive, don’t-worry-be-happy Commonwealth Games-all-over-again response of convention centre boosters to legitimate questions that gives me more pause.

Those questions begin with those commissioned, fore-ordained-to-be-favourable consultants’ reports. While they acknowledge the key issue—declining numbers of major conventions coupled with ever increasing competition to land them—their conclusions either ignore or dismiss it.

Convention centre boosters organized a website forum, supposedly to discuss issues “relevant to the proposed new convention centre.” But when Coalition organizer Bev Miller questioned what she claims will be a $6-million annual shortfall between how much it will cost the province to borrow funds for the centre and how much in new tax revenues it will generate, her post was “removed by the moderator due to a violation of the Code of Conduct.” (It was later reposted, but only after Miller objected.)

Last week, convention promoters released a poll they claimed showed locals support their dream. But the questions—“Governments should invest in a new convention centre if there is a strong business case showing the centre will attract visitors to Nova Scotia, create new jobs, and generate economic benefits and tax dollars”—were clearly skewed to create the desired result.

Now chief booster Trade Centre Ltd. promises to release results of yet another commissioned study—this one on the economic impact a new convention centre will generate—before the developer submits his final plans July 19.

One hopes this report will be more honest—and helpful—than previous ones. We need answers, not spin.

Last Friday, a group calling itself the Coalition to the Save the View held a press conference to release its analysis of four reports on the financial viability of a new convention centre for downtown Halifax. Promoters want the province to ante up one third of its $300-million cost.

You may recall that when those vital-to-understanding-the-business-case reports were first released last winter—following a freedom of information request from (let the record show) the coalition rather than any media outlet—they were so heavily censored as to be unintelligible.

At the end of April, under orders from provincial infrastructure minister Bill Estabrooks, the reports were finally released, almost in full.

Initial media accounts claimed the reports supported the convention centre. While technically true, such conclusions, the coalition countered, “can only have resulted from a very superficial reading of the reports.” The coalition’s documentation includes four, small-type pages’ filled with quotations from the reports, each raising doubts about the case for the convention centre.

Between caveats—one report concedes it was prepared “without the benefit of any primary research”—and quietly acknowledged facts—a “huge supply of underutilized facilities in the US” is forcing convention marketers to deep discount or eliminate rental rates entirely in order to attract ever fewer conventions—the coalition argues the reports don’t actually make the upbeat case they claim to.

The coalition’s own analysis indicates it will cost governments far more to cover the interest on borrowing funds to build the centre than it will recover in additional tax revenues.

“There’s no business case,” the coalition concludes.

Rather than responding to the substance of those arguments, Halifax Herald business columnist Roger Taylor began his day-after-the-press-conference column this way: “It must be difficult for a group calling itself the Coalition to Save the View to argue that its opposition to a new convention centre in Halifax is anything other than an attempt to prevent high rises from being built in the downtown.”

Huh?

Taylor coupled his swipe at the coalition’s motives—he didn’t mention that one key report in favour of a new convention centre was written by the executive director of Convention Centres of Canada, a convention industry-promoting agency—with a no-numbers, no-analysis attack on its conclusions. “The coalition’s effort to fight the project on economic grounds,” he wrote, “fell short.”

Of what exactly?

The convention centre is beginning to sound like the Commonwealth Games all over again. With promoters and the puff press urging us to drink the Kool Aid—without wanting to tell us what’s really in it.
 

***

The World Trade and Convention Centre maintains a pro-new convention centre website, which includes links to the four reports. The Save the View Coalition's press releases can be found at its website.

The Harper government’s proposal to replace the current, gums-only Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP with a new, baby-toothed civilian watchdog agency is better than nothing.

But not by much.

The new agency will have power to force witnesses to appear and testify, but will need to get the justice minister’s OK to initiate investigations. And there are Mack-truck-sized loopholes permitting the Mounties to withhold information.
Former complaints commissioner Shirley Heafey asks: “Where is the really big change that is going to make a difference in RCMP accountability across the country?” And answers: “I don’t see it.”
The new agency, of course, will also do nothing to resolve several ongoing, high-profile complaints, including one about the 2008 death of Nova Scotia Native John Simon on the Wagmatcook reserve.

On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable named Jeremy Frenette shot and killed Simon, who was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time. By entering the house alone without a warrant, the junior RCMP officer violated his superior’s orders. Frenette claimed Simon—who was sitting on the toilet smoking a cigarette when he first slipped into the house—ran to the kitchen and grabbed a rifle. The officer fired three times, killing Simon. The rifle, which other witnesses didn’t see, wasn’t loaded.

The Mounties asked Halifax Regional Police to investigate. But its investigation was anything but arm’s length.

Gary Richard, the lawyer for the Wagamatcook First Nation, recently released emails he says show the Mounties were in the loop on the investigation and may have even influenced its final outcome. He also provided transcripts of interviews with potential witnesses whose evidence appears to have been ignored. Richard’s conclusion? The Halifax police department’s report was “incomplete and even, in some respects, indifferent.”

The current Commissioner for Complaints Against the RCMP, under pressure from First Nations groups, finally initiated his own probe this winter. But the commission’s powers are severely proscribed. Hence, the need to replace it.

Hence, the need for a provincial public inquiry. Nova Scotia Justice Minister Ross Landry, a 34-year RCMP veteran, refuses to call one.

But he does recognize the current police-investigate-police system is not the answer. Last fall he too announced plans for new legislation to create our own “independent” provincial unit to investigate allegations of police misconduct. But that legislation won’t be introduced until this fall. And it won’t look at old cases.

We need an independent inquiry—with teeth—now.