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.

That said, the story raised questions that deserve better than read-the-report, cone-of-silence non-responses from the RCMP and the Transportation Safety Board.

The documentary focused on concerns—not specific allegations—by retired RCMP investigator Tom Juby. Juby claims his bosses shut down inquiries into what he believed were too-high-to-be-explained levels of magnesium in the plane’s cockpit area. He thought the magnesium suggested the crash could have been caused by an incendiary device. He wanted to pursue that as a possible criminal investigation into the murders of the 229 passengers and crew.

Although I never interviewed him, I have no doubt Juby is a dedicated professional who believes what he says.

But I also believe Larry Vance—the deputy chief TSB investigator who spent even more years investigating the crash, and whom I did interview extensively while researching a book about the tragedy—is equally dedicated, equally professional.

Vance and the TSB ultimately dismissed Juby’s concerns. They claim the heightened magnesium levels resulted from prolonged exposure to salt water, and believe an incendiary device would have caused far more damage to the cockpit. “It would be like aiming a blow-torch at your head and burning only one hair,” Vance told Canadian Press.

Which leaves us with… an interesting professional disagreement among professional investigators, goosed by tantalizing, made-for-TV tidbits about missing diamonds and the post-9/11-freighted presence of Arab royalty among the plane’s passengers.

Swiss television, which helped finance the CBC documentary, was so unpersuaded by its conclusions it refused to air it. “It’s not our task to spread speculation,” the network’s chief editor says.

My own issue is not with Juby’s clearly heartfelt complaints nor even with the CBC’s decision to broadcast a documentary filled with so much might-have-could-have-possibly speculation.

My concern is with the RCMP and the TSB, whose refusal to publicly respond to Juby’s allegations can only feed more sinister interpretations and add to the doubt and pain of those who lost loved ones in the crash.

Doesn’t anyone ever learn?

Stephen Kimber is the author of Flight 111: The Tragedy of the Swissair Crash.

Davey was  a Liberal backroom wizard, famous for wresting electoral triumph from the jaws of political ignominy. In 1963, for example, he helped Lester Pearson become prime minister. In 1974, he helped transform Pierre Trudeau’s then-floundering minority government into a renewed majority. Most famously, in 1979, he helped engineer the stunning defeat of Joe Clarke’s barely elected Tory minority government and then convinced a despondent Trudeau—who’d already announced his retirement from politics—to run one last time. He won.

But Davey’s lengthy curriculum vitae also included heading up a seminal 1969 senate committee on the sorry state of Canada’s newspapers.

Its final report was scathing, particularly about Halifax’s Chronicle-Herald.

“There is probably no large Canadian city that is so badly served by its newspapers,” the report thundered, “[and] probably no news organization in the country that has managed to achieve such an intimate and uncritical relationship with the local power structure, or has grown so indifferent to the needs of its readers.”

At the time, the Herald reacted with predictable outrage and vitriol, inadvertently confirming much of Davey’s criticism.

So I was curious to see how today’s Herald—an unquestionably much better newspaper—would handle Davey’s obituary.

Its 246-word, wire service story—“Liberal ‘Rainmaker’ Davey Dies”—focused almost exclusively on Davey’s role as a political strategist. There was not one word about the senate committee or its stinging rebuke of the Herald.

Still curious, I tracked down the original obituary from which the Herald version had been carved. It was 594 words, more than twice as long, and included best-edited-out boilerplate tributes from Prime Minister Harper and Liberal leader Ignatieff.

But the story did include three paragraphs—85 words—on Davey’s senate committee report. The CP story didn’t mention the Herald directly, of course, and it’s possible—likely even—that the editor who sliced and diced the CP story was too young to recall the paper’s long ago connection to Senator Davey.

Still, it’s a shame the Herald didn’t take advantage of the occasion to recall its own, unhappy link to Davey—if only to show how much better a newspaper it has become.

Pity.

Was it when that story about the number of rats per city block in Halifax—75; You count ‘em, I’ll pass—made CBC Radio’s marquee World at Six news show last week?

Or perhaps it was when we read yet another haven’t-we-read-this-already news story. Can you say Lance Armstrong does drugs?

Or was it when some city councilor started musing about administering lie detector tests to his fellow councilors—why not just put them in a room with the 75 rats!—to find out which politician-rat was spilling their secrets to the press. (Earth to councilor: the best way stop all the leaks at city hall is to stop writing so many silly secret memos.)

Or perhaps we can mark this summer’s real news-less, madness-begins moment as the instant when Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter and his New Brunswick counterpart Shawn Graham launched their choreographed video two-step at last week’s premiers’ conference in Winnipeg. The purpose: to convince Canadians to vote early and often for the “magnificent” Bay of Fundy, the only home-country contender remaining in a New Seven Wonders of Nature competition.

While acknowledging his province had a few pressing problems—“With a small, aging population that suffers from a high rate of chronic diseases, Nova Scotia is forced to find ways to deliver better health care while keeping costs down”—Dexter described his Fundy fun as a meeting “highlight.”

Dexter even managed to invoke the name of Nova Scotia’s iconic Joseph Howe. “Joseph Howe used to brag about the high tides at the Bay of Fundy, and rightly so,” Dexter intoned.

Well, not quite. It’s worth contextualizing what our unwilling Father of the Federations actually said—probably also in the middle of an August heat wave. “Boys, brag of your country,” Howe declared. “When I'm abroad, I brag of everything that Nova Scotia is, has, or can produce; and when they beat me at everything else, I turn around on them and say: “How high does your tide rise?’”

How low can we go? It’s only August 9.

Part page-turning thriller, part indictment of contemporary pack journalism, part thoughtful meditation on the human cost of the passion for truth, Journalist Harvey Cashore's The Truth Shows Up: A Reporter's Fifteen-Year Odyssey Tracking Down the Truth About Mulroney, Schreiber and the Airbus Scandal is essential (and entertaining) reading for anyone who wants to understand not only the shocking and still under-reported details of the biggest Canadian political scandal of the twentieth century but also the painful truth about how badly our political system too often really works.

The book is full of larger-than-life characters—from the wily, always-looking-out-for-number-one Karlheinz Schreiber, to the bullying, always-looking-out-for-his boss Luc Lavoie, to the mysterious but plugged-in insider “Tower,” who knows the Airbus deal doesn’t pass “the smell test” and points Cashore in directions that will ultimately help him prove it.

But it is Cashore himself—and his often frustrating, career-making-and-breaking, personally-costly 15-year-odyssey to discover the Truth—who is the real central figure in this compelling drama.

If “Tower” is Canada’s “Deep Throat,” then Harvey Cashore is our Woodward and Bernstein. And The Truth Shows Up is our All The President’s Men.

High praise indeed—but deserved.

That dramatic “little scheme” not only ended a simmering dispute among the five owners of the paper—Fillmore says the three non-family owners wanted to make money “so they tried to influence us to tone down the content”—but the first issue of The 4th Estate also marked the beginning of one of the most remarkable decades in Nova Scotia’s long and storied journalism history. (Full disclosure: I was a contributor to the paper.)

This afternoon, Libraries Nova Scotia, the Nova Scotia Archives and Cape Breton’s Beaton Institute will launch “Nova Scotia Historical Newspapers: An Online Resource,” a project that has so far digitized 18 provincial newspapers, ranging from the Nova Scotia Chronicle and Weekly Advertiser (1769) to the Micmac News (1991).

And, of course, The 4th Estate.

During its nine-year run, the feisty little tabloid challenged—and often bettered—its establishment rivals, the Chronicle-Herald and Mail-Star, which the Fillmores called “the Old Women of Argyle Street.” Fillmore recalls an incident when “one well-known but angry Herald journalist walked into my office with the story about the incompetence in the construction of the Glace Bay heavy water plant—a story of national importance. I was told the Herald wouldn't publish it because it would reflect poorly on Nova Scotians.”

The 4th Estate, which Nick says brought together “my father's social conscience and my journalism skills,” had no such compunctions. It campaigned against slum landlords—threatening to publish side-by-side photos of slums and their owners' private residences—and laws that sent poor people to jail for debt or allowed the power company to shut off their electricity.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Fillmore believes Halifax could still use a 4th Estate-style newspaper. “Independent media, where policies are not dictated by corporate owners and where advertising is not heavily relied on, are needed across the country,” he says.

And so are resources like the newspaper digitization project, which showcase our history. But, while organizers have done a remarkable job of digitizing 19,000 newspaper pages with a budget of just $24,000, there’s no money left to continue the work, which is estimated to cost about $150,000. “There are many, many newspapers left to do,” says Michael Colborne, one of the organizers, “and with every passing year their condition deteriorates.”

***

To see Nova Scotia Historical Newspapers: An Online Resource,” visit: http://gov.ns.ca/nsarm/new.asp.

And for more from my email interview with Nick Fillmore, check out this link.

I couldn’t help thinking that as I read Halifax Metro’s account this week of Duffy’s inane, ill-tempered and spectacularly ill-informed rant about the King’s College Journalism School. Full disclosure: I teach at King’s.

“Kids who go to King’s, or the other (journalism) schools across the country, are taught from two main texts,” Duffy huffed to a gathering of 60 Cumberland County Conservatives. Those texts are Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and some other unnamed tome on the “theory of critical thinking,” which, to Duffy, appears to stand for subversive.

“When you put critical thinking together with Noam Chomsky,” Duffy puffed, “what you’ve got is a group of people who are taught from the ages of 18, 19 and 20 that what we stand for, private enterprise… is bad.”

Uh… Earth to Mike: Noam’s not on the curriculum at King’s. And critical thinking? What were you thinking? What were you drinking?

“When I went to the school of hard knocks,” Duffy explained, taking refuge in the last refuge of any guy who is long past his best-before date, “we were told to be fair and balanced. That school doesn’t exist any more.”

Yes it does, Mike. It’s called journalism school. We still teach that fair-and-balanced mantra your soft Senate sinecure has long since hard-knocked out of whatever was left of your own critical thinking. Only we do it far better now.

Trust me on that. I may teach in what you consider an effete journalism school, but I learned my trade in the same hit-and-miss school of hard knocks you did.

The irony—worth remembering if only for the sake of nostalgia—is that Mike Duffy was once a very good reporter. When I was a junior journalist at CJCH Radio in Halifax in the early seventies, Duffy was a star at CHNS, our bitter cross-town rival. He was energetic, driven. His skepticism about everyone and everything—call it critical thinking—made him an equal-opportunity skewerer of all he encountered. Fair and balanced?

Somewhere along the line, however, Duffy gave up thinking, let alone critically. He even used his last journalistic bully pulpit at CTV to brazenly audition for the ultra-soft-knock job of Tory Senator. By the time he’d officially become a wind-up toy for Stephen Harper, he’d long since become a parody of the journalist he once was.

Pity.

I knew Mike Duffy, and you, Senator, are no Mike Duffy.

Today I want to talk about something Walker said, almost in passing, as he criticized the fact I’d written about the board without having sat through one of its (often brief) meetings.

“Nobody covers us anymore,” he lamented.

It’s true. There was a time when reporters from both daily newspapers routinely showed up for its meetings. But then the Daily News folded and, this spring, the Chronicle Herald eliminated 25 per cent of its newsroom staff, including one of two city hall reporters. Now no reporters cover a board that is supposed to provide civilian oversight of our police force.

What is the sound of stories not being told?

While it won’t rank up there with the election of our first NDP government, or Tiger Woods Master’s Tournament of Transgressions, my candidate for the most important story of the year—the decade, in fact—is the continuing implosion of the traditional newspaper in large and small cities across North America. Including Halifax.

I know, I know. I’m self interested. I’m a journalist. I teach journalism.

But I’m also a citizen. And I worry about the consequences of not knowing.

There’s a disconnect, of course. We now have far more sources of information than ever before. The web, cell phone video, citizen journalism, free dailies like this one. But do we know as much?

I confess I was among the skeptics when Metro launched following the demise of the Daily News. I happily eat crow. Thanks to an above-and-beyond collection of young journalists, Metro continually punches above its weight among local media. But even those responsible for Metro will acknowledge it was never intended to replace full-meal-deal newspapers like the Daily News. Neither was News Talk Radio. Or even 30 more minutes of underfunded CBC supperhour news.

And that’s the problem. If there’s no media outlet—print or otherwise—whose job it is to report on mundane happenings at the police commission, the school board, or the planning department, how will we know what we don’t know when there’s something we need to?

My hope for the new year is that someone figure it all out. We need journalism.

Canada’s media have some answering to do

There are still way more questions than answers. The first, and most important, of course, is why did Brian Mulroney, a former prime minister of Canada, accept $300,000 in cash in brown envelopes at clandestine meetings with Karlheinz Schreiber, a shady German-Canadian influence peddler?

A second question is when did Stephen Harper, the current prime minister of Canada and a recent friend of Mr. Mulroney’s, first discover that Schreiber was claiming the arrangements for the $300,000 payout were made while Mulroney was still prime minister, and what did Harper do about it?

But there’s a third question — not much asked on editorial pages. How and why did Canada’s paper-trained parliamentary puppy press gallery and their bosses in most major news organizations manage, for close to a decade, to not only ignore but also actively, dismissively dismiss what will ultimately be one of the great scandals in Canadian political history?

That last question, one hopes, will not be part of the public inquiry Stephen Harper has now commendably, if belatedly, set in motion — it will have more than enough on its plate — but it is our subject today.

And it should be the subject of soul-searching in most major newsrooms in the country.

While there were a few exceptional exceptions — the CBC’s dogged Fifth Estate (though not its national news division), the late-awakening but now finally-fully-in-the-game Globe and Mail and the much-maligned freelance journalist Stevie Cameron pretty much exhausts the short long list — the reality is that Canada’s news media embarrassed themselves by their kiss-the-canvas collapses on this story.

In 1995, conveniently on the same day the story leaked that the RCMP was investigating Mulroney, Schreiber and former Newfoundland premier-turned-premier-lobbyist Frank Moores in connection with the 1980s sale of Airbus aircraft to Air Canada, Mulroney launched a pre-emptive multimillion dollar lawsuit against the federal government.

Perhaps predictably, the news media chose to focus on the politics of the battle and steer clear of the substance of the allegations to avoid being drawn into Mulroney’s legal crosshairs.

But, in fact, they did much more — and less — than that.

They even applied editorial pressure on the government and the RCMP to shut down the police investigation. “No such crime was committed,” declared the Globe in January 2000. “The case must be formally and publicly closed,” chimed in the National Post.

They didn’t seem eager to find out how Karlheinz Schreiber — already facing charges in Germany for bribing politicians and tax evasion — had distributed $8 million worth of schmiergelder (grease money) Airbus had handed him to help grease the sale of their jets to Air Canada. Or why Schreiber had set up 10 secret Swiss bank accounts with crudely coded names of Canadian political figures.

Except for the Fifth Estate, no journalist asked what Schreiber meant when he boasted to the German magazine der Spiegel that “I could create the most horrible Watergate here in Canada when I want to.”

Instead in 2000, when the RCMP abandoned their investigation, the national editorialists pronounced themselves “relieved for Mr. Mulroney,” and thankful that the “baseless, unjustifiable intrusion on Mr. Mulroney's post-PM life, one bordering on harassment,” was finally at an end.

In 2003, when the Globe inadvertently tripped over the fact of the $300,000 payment, it did its best to slip it under the rug, burying the news in the 26th paragraph of the third installment of a series that actually focused on attacking journalist Stevie Cameron for her “vendetta” against Mulroney.

No wonder there were only two stories in the week following the revelation, one of which was a largely self-congratulatory report by the Star’s ombudsman, praising its lack of coverage of the Globe revelations.

In 2006, a week after The Fifth Estate broadcast a full-show documentary featuring the first sit-down interview with Schreiber, which neatly connected some of the missing dots between Mulroney and Schreiber’s Swiss bank accounts, I entered the names “Mulroney” and “Schreiber,” into Google Canada’s news library and came up with a grand total of just 13 stories about the Fifth Estate’s revelations. (That compared with nearly 10,000 hits about the Danish Muslim editorial cartoon controversy and more than 6,000 dealing with Wayne Gretzky’s connection to an alleged gambling ring, both of which were in the news the same week.)

Now that it is clear just how badly the news media blew this story, perhaps Canada’s major media organizations will engage in the kind of self-examination the New York Times offered its readers after reality caught up with its woeful early coverage of the war in Iraq. Perhaps…

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.