So Nova Scotia’s largest non-union employers are eager to preserve an unfettered collective bargaining process. They are, they claim, deeply concerned about “a third party deciding what will be the appropriate terms and conditions of employment.”

How progressive.

Where were they when the Harper government systematically ripped the guts out of that process during the recent Air Canada and Canada Post disputes?

Nowhere.

Oh, right. They don’t want to preserve collective bargaining; they want to prevent it.

Last week, the Nova Scotia Employers’ Roundtable—made up of 21 employers “representing” 34,000 workers—sent a letter to Premier Darrell Dexter, expressing horror at even the whiff his government might contemplate “first contract arbitration” legislation.

First contract arbitration is specifically designed to protect workers who choose to join a union and whose employers then refuse to bargain in good faith on a first contract. It happens—rarely, but it does. When it does, the legislation provides, initially, for conciliation or mediation. If that fails, there is the big stick of an imposed settlement. Studies show the threat of first contract arbitration increases the chances of a negotiated contract and reduces work stoppages by a “statistically significant” 65 per cent.

Conservative leader Jamie Baillie calls it a “crazy idea” and warns it will be a job killer.

Really? Six provinces and the federal government have similar laws. Eighty 80 per cent of Canadian workers—including the 15 per cent of Nova Scotians working in federally regulated industries—are already covered.

Where are all those dead jobs, Jamie?

For his part, Liberal leader Stephen McNeil frets such legislation will tilt the balance in favour of workers.

Earth to Stephen. During the 1970s, Nova Scotia governments—at the behest of powerful, and powerfully anti-union, Michelin Tire—rewrote the province’s labour laws on several occasions to make it virtually impossible for the company’s workers to organize, let alone bargain for a first contract. Those laws are still on the books.

Tilt the balance? Perhaps it’s time to take the corporate thumb—and fist—off the scale.

And perhaps—just perhaps—it’s time Stephen McNeil and Jamie Baillie stopped shilling for the powerful and spoke for the least powerful, including unorganized workers.

Occupy Nova Scotia's campers will decamp—temporarily—from Grand Parade so Remembrance Day ceremonies can take place there next week.

Given the respectful, peaceful tenor of the protest, that’s hardly surprising.

Neither will it come as any surprise—though it will doubtless disappoint Mayor Peter Kelly—that the protesters also intend to rebuild their tent village and continue the occupation outside City Hall after Nov. 11.

The Occupy movement sometimes seems easy for those of us not in its trenches to mock: its endless, participatory, consensual, non-decision-making gatherings; its megaphone-less, speak-and-repeat chanting communications; its occasional unconnected-to-the-larger-group-or-to-reality oddball conspiracy theorist accosting passers by with their truths—“Read ‘The Creation of First Corporation’ on my web page,” one older man in a wheel chair, who bills himself as Truth Soldier, urges me. “It explains everything about everything”—and, of course, with its conspicuous lack of the standard laundry list of easily answerable concrete complaints or demands.

That—and the fact local Occupiers have been so peaceful—may explain why the mayor underestimates its strength.

He does.

His paternalistic thanks-for-coming-you’ve-had-your-say-now-go-away mantra misses the fact the protesters are tapping a deep worldwide well of frustration and anger. Even among those of us who don’t camp out.

The rich get even richer, the poor get poorer and everyone else stagnates. More than 40 per cent of the world’s income is now gobbled up by the already wealthiest 10 per cent; the poorest 10 per cent get the one per cent crumbs. In Canada, federal corporate taxes get sliced in half and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty says it’s pointless to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes. The rest of us will have to tighten our belts.

In Cape Breton, a single mother of two had her power cut off last week because of an electrical bill provincial social assistance refuses to cover.

Her problem?

Unlike the bankers or the auto industry, she is not too big to fail.

And so it goes.

The problems haven’t disappeared; neither will the protesters. Good.
 

The good news is we won. The better news is that we won fair and square. The best news would be for the process by which Halifax’s Irving shipyard last week won a $25-billion federal shipbuilding contract-for-a-generation become the new norm.

But that last, of course, is least likely.

That’s because the shipbuilding contract was that rare special case in which the always tempting opportunity to claim credit smacked up against the even more critical need to deflect blame.

Usually, when politicians dole out big-ticket largesse, they either try to spread the wealth around so every no-name MP of the right political persuasion from every unlikely constituency—“Calgary sure is a fine place to build a destroyer”—gets their own say-cheese moment... Or they simply plunk all the cash where they think it will win them the most votes.

Sometimes, such cynical schemes backfire. Spectacularly.

In 1986, for example, Brian Mulroney’s government awarded a maintenance contract for its CF-18 fighter jet fleet to a Quebec firm instead of rewarding a clearly better bid from Winnipeg. Western anger over that slight helped spawn the Reform party... and we know where that led.

The current Reform... er, Conservative government certainly didn’t want this contract to go CF-18 on them, especially given competing bids from both coasts and Quebec.

But the Tories—to their credit— also wanted to use this once-in-a-generation contract to create more-than-a-generation centres of shipbuilding excellence in Canada.

So Harper shut out the lobbyists and muzzled the partisans. It’s no surprise he benched Nova Scotia’s “Patronage Pete” MacKay, and no surprise either that MacKay lashed out at the provincial NDP for claiming the (equally undeserved) credit he wanted all for himself.

Instead, Harper turned the process over to senior civil servants and a private sector “fairness monitor.”

By all accounts, the process worked—so well Canadians are asking why not use the same process for other big contracts, like Harper’s recent sketchy $9-billion, no-tender fighter jet deal?

And why not extend this fairness idea to provincial, even municipal contracts?...

Uh, right... This is Canada. Pity.
 

The good news: there are public consultations. The bad news: those consultations are happening late, and only after the central question has already been answered.

“Is a stadium a good idea for HRM?” demands the white-letters-on-red-bristolboard-styled poster on the home page of the Stadium Consultation web page.

But the actual questions we are now being asked assumes we already said, Yes-love-one-thanks-for-asking, to the initial question.

During Phase 2, which began in earnest last week, the so-called “citizen-led stadium analysis steering committee” invited us to say where we think this shiny new stadium should be located and how big it should be.

Not whether we want one.

The idea to build a big-ticket, big-event venue in HRM has been floating in the HRMament for at least two decades. But it suddenly became yesterday-urgent in March after Canada won the right to host the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup soccer event. The tournament will be staged in a number of different cities.

Even though it lacks the 20,000-seat stadium required to host such an event, Halifax wants to be one of them.

So council set up a committee, ostensibly to tell it whether the idea made sense... really, to tell them it did.

Although there was a cursory nod to the opinions of the unconnected-but-for-their-tax-dollars rabble during Phase 1, the bulk of initial public input consisted of “business-case” sessions with 17 “key informants,” 30 members of “key informant groups” and seven provincial sporting organizations.

Unsurprisingly, they thought there was a business case for a stadium. Moving on...

To its credit, the stadium committee has not tried to “stifle” broader debate. Metro reporter Aly Thomson described attendees at last Wednesday’s first well-attended and engaged consultation as “hot, cold and everything in between” on the stadium proposal.

It could have been the beginning of a meaningful exercise in participatory municipal democracy. But the clock is tick-ticking. The committee must report by December so council can say yea or nay before FIFA announces which cities will host events. Hurry, hurry.

So much for participatory democracy. Pity.

___

The Stadium Consultation website

Andrew Macdonald had a question. Several.

The allnovascotia.com reporter was following up a recent HRM decision not to challenge a Supreme Court ruling that Polycorp Properties could develop a $15-million, 66-unit condo project on Brunswick Street.

The city had refused to issue a development permit for the project because it claimed a never-officially-registered 1970 document reserved that land as playground.

The futile legal battle cost taxpayers $150,000 in court costs, not to mention high-priced lawyers to fight it.

How much did those lawyers bill the city, Macdonald wanted to know? Did HRM’s decision not to appeal reflect a “weak” city case? Is the city concerned taxpayers could now be on the hook for even more since Polycorp is seeking damages for losses caused by the delays.

Reasonable questions.

In the B.B.—Before Butts—era, Macdonald would have simply picked up the phone, called the bureaucrat in charge and gotten his answers.

But in May, HRM’s new city manager, Richard Butts, issued a gag order—er, new “communications approach” for senior staff, effectively ordering them to refer all media inquiries to Communications Director Shaune MacKinlay “to ensure media responses are well-coordinated and aligned across the organization.”

Let’s see. Every day, reporters—often more than one—from Metro, the Herald, CBC radio and TV, CTV, Global, 95.7 News Radio, allnovascotia.com, The Coast, Frank, occasionally the Globe and Mail, OpenFile, campus papers, local magazines and websites seek answers to HRM questions on deadline.

How many HRM communications staffers are solely responsible to respond to those inquiries? None.

On Wednesday just before 1 p.m., Macdonald emailed MacKinlay. MacKinlay was in a meeting. She said she’d look into it, but couldn’t guarantee when. She didn’t get back to him in time for his deadline.

The next day, MacDonald emailed MacKinlay, Butts and Mayor Peter Kelly, asking the city to go back to its old way of dealing with media inquiries, which, he said, “worked fine… was more accommodating to journalist deadlines and, truthfully, provided better insight as we got to talk to the expert at hand.”

Macdonald did eventually get belated answers to his initial questions, but he’s still waiting for replies from Kelly and Butts.

So are we.

***

HRM—you may not be surprised to learn—got the worst grade in the country in a recent freedom of information audit conducted for Newspapers Canada.

No one asked them. Again.

The real lesson of the original Africville relocation—which should be seared into our collective consciousness after 50 years of hard-learned lesson-living—is that outsiders, even well intentioned ones, cannot make decisions for a community without at least asking the people of that community what they really want.

Back in the 1960s, many well-intentioned outsiders (and some, it must be said, not so well intentioned) believed Africville, a poor black community on the edge of Bedford Basin, was a blight and an eyesore, a health risk to its 400 inhabitants.

They unilaterally determined the families who lived there would be better off in massive new concrete-and-asphalt public housing complexes.

So they grabbed their land for far less than its prime waterfront location should have commanded; eliminated Africville’s traditional communal subsistence economy; moved residents in city trucks and dumped them in places that were not their own—and expected a thank you for a job well done.

They didn’t get it.

Africville’s residents never asked to be relocated. They liked their community precisely because it was filled with family, friends, neighbours and “other mothers.” They did want long-denied city services like sewer, water and fire protection, of course, but the city could have provided them for less than it cost to relocate the community.

No one had asked the residents what they wanted.

Which is why “No More Africvilles” is still the looped refrain in Nova Scotia’s remaining black communities whenever well-intentioned outsiders try to make decisions for them.

Now, another even more well-intentioned group, the Africville Heritage Trust, has decided it knew best who to hire to run the new non-profit group’s Africville memorial.

They hired a white woman from out of the province.

Even if the woman had turned out to be otherwise qualified—which it now seems she was not—the fact the community was not consulted made her a non-starter.

Last week, 200 members of the local black community voted unanimously to demand the trust find a new executive director. Belatedly, the Trust de-hired the woman.

And unintentionally reminded us again that we still need to learn the real lesson of the Africville relocation.
 

Previous Africville-related columns, etc.