At the bottom of the Bridgetown theft, we’ll discover…
I don’t know for certain. But it would not surprise me to discover, when we finally touch bottom in the Great Bridgetown Financial Fiasco—when we get past the recent auditor’s report fingering a single trusted employee for looting $113,000 from the town’s treasury, past the ongoing police investigation and likely charges and even more likely conviction (the auditor’s report says she admitted taking the money), and on to her pre-sentence report—gambling was at the heart of the crime.
I have no proof. But I read the papers.
Consider these Nova Scotia gambling-related crime stories, all published since October 1.
A former financial secretary to the Lunenburg local of the Canadian Auto Workers’ Union is ordered to stand trial on charges he failed to pay back $29,000 he stole from the organization. His lawyer claims the man is addicted to video lottery terminal gambling.
The former president of a Royal Canadian Legion branch in Waverley is sentenced to house arrest after stealing $21,385 he gambled away over three years. “Gambling took hold of me,” he told the judge at his sentencing.
A Glace Bay man pleads guilty to robbing a local bank branch of $2,389 to “support his gambling addiction.”
And a Musquodoboit Harbour doctor is ordered to abstain from gambling, alcohol and non-prescription medications after the province’s College of Physicians and Surgeons determines she prescribed narcotics to a patient—and took them herself.
Most crimes associated with gambling addictions tend to slide under our radar.
But not all.
Last spring, Jason MacRae finally admitted he killed his wife, school teacher Paula Gallant, during an argument over a $700 online gambling debt.
And two of those charged in the MLA expenses scandal—former MLA Dave Wilson and current MLA Trevor Zinck—have been publicly identified as having “issues” with gambling.
In fact, a 2006 research report says 45 per cent of all inmates at the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Institution self-reported gambling problems; 20 per cent claimed to have committed gambling-related crimes.
We have a problem we’re not admitting. Perhaps it’s because we too are hooked—on the millions of dollars in government revenues gambling provides.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Beware Canadian Taxpayer tea party
The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation is right to raise alarms about the growing inequity between generous pensions paid politicians and the reality too many in the private sector have inadequate, or no pensions …
Uh… right…
That isn’t exactly what the libertarian-when-it-suits-them CTF has its knickers in a knot about.
The CTF—which bills itself as a “not-for-profit citizen’s group dedicated to lower taxes, less waste and accountable government”—opened its new Atlantic office last week with a splashy “study” claiming provincial taxpayers fork out $22 for every dollar MLAs contribute to their pension plans.
If that is true—the CTF is infamous for simplistic statistical jiggery-pokery—it is outrageous. Even if it isn’t precisely true-true, it reflects a larger truth. Over the past few decades, our politicians have quietly created a cocooned world of privilege for themselves. The CTF has been foraging in this fertile swamp of government waste and inefficiency since 1990.
But making governments work better isn’t the CTF’s goal.
The CTF—which takes its ideological cues from American neo-cons—sees government as the enemy.
Public spending on public services like education, health care, highways, social programs, industrial development? Bad. The CTF has never met a tax it thought couldn’t be reduced or, better, eliminated.
Except… the CTF is selectively libertarian. It campaigns against the ”expensive” long-gun registry, for example, but seems untroubled by Ottawa’s much more costly political-sop plan to build more prisons while actual crime rates decline.
The CTF made political hay with last winter’s MLA expenses scandal but barely acknowledged that the same provincial auditor general’s report flagged an extra $52 million Nova Scotia taxpayers shelled out to private contractors for so-called P3 schools.
Though it claims to be non-partisan, the CTF is a revolving door for right-wing Tory hacks. Jason Kenny was CTF’s CEO before becoming a Tory MP. CTF’s current national spokesperson was Reform Party leader Preston Manning’s Research Director. Kevin Lacey, CTF’s new Atlantic Director, previously worked for both Stephen Harper and John Hamm (the latter, interestingly, during the time when MLA pensions got their gold plating).
So, while the CTF raises a valid issue, we should be wary of being invited to its tea party.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
NDP Year 1: What went wrong?
On June 9, 2009—one year ago next week—Nova Scotia voters took a flying leap of faith and fate, sweeping out a tired Tory government, sidelining the faint comeback hopes of a still-recovering Liberal party and handing the keys to office for the first time ever to the New Democrats.
It is probably fair to suggest Darrell Dexter’s historic majority victory seemed at the time—even to many traditional Liberal and Conservative voters—a hopeful, optimistic sign of change in a province in desperate need of a few.
Today, though the jury is far from rendering a final verdict on Dexter’s first term, it is equally fair to suggest much of that optimism has dissipated.
What went wrong?
Some of it was inevitable, of course. The NDP’s actual performance could never have matched the sweet imaginations of its most long-suffering true believers, or even the more modest hopes of nervous switch voters.
There is no magic wand to rein in runaway health costs or keep emergency rooms open when there are no doctors to staff them. And governments sometimes make difficult decisions—turning off the taps for the Yarmouth-Portland ferry, fixing the pension mess, deciding whether to fund a new convention centre—many voters won’t like.
The fact the new government almost instantly abandoned its own solemn, cross-its-heart-and-hope-to-die campaign pledge not to raise taxes or cut programs, could not help but feed public cynicism, but I think it’s fair to say most of us expected that. And saw it as wiser than the alternative.
What we didn’t expect was that Darrell Dexter, so sure-footed in opposition, would lose his common-man touch in office.
His handling of the unanticipated MLAs expenses scandal, for example, was ham-handed. His own free-spending ways, along with his reluctant retreat from his insistence the public should pay his bar society fees, came to symbolize legislative entitlement at a time when the NDP was trying to prepare Nova Scotians for much needed tax increases and program cuts.
Thanks to the political distraction/public obsession with the expenses scandal, the NDP has seemed to lose control not only of its agenda but also of its temper. NDP Chief of Staff Dan O’Connor’s recent public spat with the Chronicle-Herald over an anonymous posting he made to their website, for example, indicates how frustrated they have become.
This was not the first year the NDP had hoped for either.
If ever there was a time for the NDP to—in the immortal words of Stephen Harper—“recalibrate,” it is now.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
The lynch mob meets the expenses scandal
The morning after the big semi-reveal—the auditor general had turned over to the RCMP expense-claims files on one current and four former MLAs, but he wouldn’t say which ones to avoid compromising the criminal investigation—CBC Radio Information Morning’s political panel weighed in.
The panelists—veteran freelance journalist Ralph Surrette and former newspaper editor and Tory cabinet minister Jane Purves—both have well-earned journalistic credentials for fighting political corruption. That may be why what struck me most about their comments was their undertone of unease at the seemingly insatiable media appetite for—and public obsession with—this scandal, to the detriment both of more important issues, and also of public faith in elected officials.
The reasons for their unease quickly became apparent.
Within hours, Kevin Gaudet, spokesperson for a self-appointed lynch mob—also sometimes known as the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation—was telling a reporter our legislators should forget the niceties of due process, innocent until proven guilty and all that inconsequential stuff, and expel forthwith any member even suspected of finagling or fudging an expense from the legislature.
“Perhaps,” he suggested—his tongue unfortunately not in his cheek but his foot firmly planted in his mouth—“that would raise the bar of integrity.”
Indeed.
In the same article—hopefully in response to a hypothetical question from the reporter and as a comment on tactics rather than ethics—Acadia University political science professor Ian Stewart mused on the likelihood that Independent MLA Trevor Zinck is the single still-sitting member of the legislature whose expenses the Mounties are now investigating. If that’s the case, Stewart argued, the other MLAs could easily bounce him from the seat to which he was duly elected as “a cost-free way of attempting to show they are on top of the integrity issue and they’re responding to the public’s outrage.”
Fanning the outrage flames, Gaudet weighed in with the self-fulfilling suggestion that the MLA expenses scandal “fuels speculation by the voting public, taxpayers, that too many politicians are a bunch of crooks and thieves.”
I’ve covered Nova Scotia politics for 40 years. I’ve met a few crooks and thieves. Most MLAs aren’t. But they are human; thanks to lax legislation and less oversight, some found it too easy to confuse private benefit with public interest. Outrage over the expenses scandal was a wake-up call; this winter’s legislative reforms make the system more transparent and less susceptible to expense-fiddling. Outrage worked.
But now it’s time to let the criminal process work. And move on to other more serious—and costly—political screw-ups. P3-schools, anyone.
Copyright 0610 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in 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 eight non-fiction books.