Ron is grinning… Dave is worried… And the Cup is in the House
So… did Percy really pop Keith? Is the premier going to pull the plug?
Can I get back to you?
I’m still in the Metro Centre. It's fun, frenzied Friday night. “The Cup is in the House,” and the house is bursting. Ten-thousand-five-hundred-and-ninety-five fans, plus media, scouts, officials, parents, friends of friends. Expectant, ready to implode, explode.
“We want the Cup!”
Will this — finally — be the night?
The puck hasn’t yet dropped and tonight’s 50-50 prize pot heads north of $20,000, double the usual regular-season end-of-game total. Feeling lucky…
Ron is grinning. Dave is worried. We’ve been coming to Moosehead games for 19 years. Ron knows how good this team is. Dave knows how often defeat has been snatched from the jaws of victory.
“Battle on the boards and the puck comes loose…”
At 5:32 of the first period — Stephen MacAulay, a 20-year-old from Cole Harbour whose mother recently died of cancer — wrists a hard shot from in front of the net… 1 – 0! We’re on our feet. Over in the next section, the “Pom-Pom Lady” — she’s been a fan as long as we have — shakes her pom poms. With vigour.
By the end of the first, it’s 3 – 0, the 50-50 pot is $30,000 and climbing (who had time during a period to buy tickets?) and the line-ups for the men’s washrooms snake like conga lines around the lower level. Heard inside the washroom: “Meet you back at the beer line.”
Ron is still grinning. Dave is still worried. “Don’t sit back,” he implores mid-way through the second period. “Skate!” He only looks like he’s not enjoying himself.
The final seconds tick down...
“We will… We will… rock you!” For once, arena rock isn’t necessary. The crowd is into this. With 10 minutes still to go in the third period and the Mooseheads only up by two, the we-are-the-champions chant starts in the upper bowl above. “Olé. Olé. Olé-olé, olé…” No one remembers it’s a Spanish football chant.
Some guy from Prospect wins the 50-50 draw, takes home more than $39,000!
Two more late goals, including a second MacAulay goal into an empty net, seals it. It’s over. Ron is still grinning. Dave smiles. Finally. High fives all around our section of bad-times-and-good-times fans. See you in September...
Percy Paris? An election call? Oh, right, I’ll get on that.
Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
Dexter’s budget tinkers at the progressive edges, but is that enough?
Did Darrell Dexter balance the budget?
Is the pope Argentinian?
Depends on which pope you mean.
And what you mean by balance.
Not to forget "the..."
The perhaps more relevant pre-election questions out of last week’s legislature exercise:
- Would the other parties have done anything different in either the budget’s broad strokes or in its jiggery-pokery, see-we-kept-our-promise presentation?
- And, setting aside for the moment everyone’s OCD-like obsession with balanced budgets, is there anything good, and/or different to be said about this NDP budget?
The answer to the first question is easy. No.
One of the lessons learned from electing our first “democratic socialist” government four years ago is how little party labels matter.
This NDP has continued the dream-big-or-go-home Tory-Gliberal tradition dating back to at least Robert Stanfield, doling out wing-and-a-prayer pots of taxpayer dollars to multinational corporations—can you say Dae Woo?—for jobs that never seem to materialize.
And, like governments of all stripes everywhere, the NDP claims to worry about deficit and debt while implicitly subscribing to reality-discredited tax-cutting-to-prosperity theories. It continues to cut corporate taxes that help fund programs it then has to cut in order to pretend to bring down the deficit.
Throw in the uncontrollable constraints of a high Canadian dollar, an aging provincial population, declining federal transfers, corporate non-re-investment and the torrent-down joblessness of the global non-recovery… and you end up with an NDP budget that, in its broad outlines, probably resembles what Stephen McNeil or Jamie Baillie would have presented.
And McNeil and Baillie would almost certainly have engaged in the same reality-adjusting, future-finessing, Pollyanna presentation as the NDP to peddle it.
Which brings us to the tinkers. Is there anything good, and/or different to be said about this NDP budget?
Even in the current slice-and-dice-to-balance atmosphere, the NDP did play at its progressive edges.
There were minor increases for those on income assistance, more funds for low-income housing, an upped age limit for free kids’ dental care, modest tax breaks for low-income seniors and laudable, targeted new spending from insulin pumps and newborn screening to head-start education programs for poor children.
It’s not much—maybe $12 million in a $9.5 billion budget—but, from a progressive point of view, it’s probably more than we could have hoped for from the Liberals or Tories.
As we head into an election, is it enough?
Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
Russell MacKinnon may be entitled to his entitlements, but…
If his latest poor-me pronouncements weren’t so outrageously obnoxious—not to mention flagrantly false—we would be wise to treat disgraced, and disgraceful former MLA Russell MacKinnon with the mocking contempt he’s richly earned.
The Finance Department made me do it… The Finance Department made me do it…
MacKinnon, one of four MLAs whose entitled-to-their-entitlements expense claims were so egregious they warranted actual criminal charges, arrived for his trial two week s ago, loudly proclaiming his innocence. Three days later, he copped a mid-trial plea like a common thief when it became clear he couldn’t sell his convoluted contortionist’s explanations for his bad behavior.
He pled guilty to one count of breach of trust and got a sweetheart deal. Four months’ house arrest, with numerous get-out-of-the-house free cards, four months’ curfew, a year’s probation.
Unfortunately for MacKinnon’s reputation—and our blood pressure—his sentence didn’t come with a muzzle.
MacKinnon has spent the past week playing the aggrieved. “I didn’t defraud the government of five cents, not a penny… I got the bejesus kicked out of me for the last three years over this, and I didn’t do anything wrong… I pleaded guilty to breach of trust because I believe MLAs are held to a higher standard, and I have to take responsibility even though the fault lies with the Department of Finance…”
Oh, let’s not bother responding to his truth twisting.
No wonder people are upset. No wonder the call by the we-hate-any-government-anywhere-anytime-anyway Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation to eliminate pension benefits for former MLAs convicted of crimes has traction.
But we need to pause, take a breath.
The real problem here isn’t with MLAs convicted of breaching their public trust continuing to draw pensions to which they contributed, and to which they—and, more importantly, their families—are legally entitled.
It’s with the MLA pensions themselves. By most anyone’s standards, they’re incredibly rich and wrongly funded out of regular operating revenues rather than investments.
By all means, let’s reform the MLA pension system.
But let’s not set a bad precedent by taking away someone’s legally earned pension benefits. There’s no telling where that could lead.
Let’s just accept that Russell MacKinnon’s behavior is beneath and beyond contempt—and move on to more important matters.
Like MLA pension reform.
Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
How Stephen McNeil will turn into Darrell Dexter…
Do you remember back in the dying days of the Rodney MacDonald regime when then-NDP finance critic Graham Steele threatened the then-deputy finance minister with contempt of a legislative committee for refusing to be forthcoming about the province’s finances? Remember when the deputy finance minister shot back that Steele’s criticism was all “political foolishness?”
Do you remember how quickly all was forgiven and forgotten just three months later when the NDP formed the government, Steele became finance minister, the deputy minister remained deputy minister and the new government casually assumed the former government’s penchant for secrecy?
Flash forward to the fall of 2013. Presume we’ve had our provincial election. Presume the polls hold. Presume now-Opposition leader Stephen McNeil is premier.
You remember Stephen McNeil?
Last week, McNeil was in high holy dudgeon after Irving shipbuilding CEO Jim Irving centred McNeil in his cross-hairs. Irving had taken offence at what he considered McNeil’s “cheap political shots” at Darrell Dexter’s NDP for having had the “guts” to loan his shipyard $304 million to cement the $35-billion federal shipbuilding contract.
The Dexter government’s loan, McNeil returned fire, may have “bought him the support of a billionaire CEO,” but the people’s tribune—which is to say McNeil—would continue to “demand accountability when our precious tax dollars are put on the line.”
Should McNeil do the thinkable and win the next election, expect he and Jim Irving to make similar kissy face, and for the Liberals—like the NDP—to cosy up to the usual assortment of billionaires and Michelin Tire executives.
Not to mention finding unexpected virtue in the too-far-gone-to-stop Maritime link to bring Newfoundland power to Nova Scotia. The Liberals, McNeil will parse, never actually said they opposed the deal, just the Dexter government’s failure to consider alternatives…
And so it will go.
This seeming hypocrisy is partly an inevitable result of our political system. Opposition parties oppose. Governments make deals. Partly, too, the reality that the real range of options for any government of any stripe is severely limited. And partly, of course, because we seem to prefer to elect politicians who lie to us to get elected just so we can complain later that they lied to us.
Such, it seems, is politics.
Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
Still no Desmond Day… or any day to honour African Nova Scotians
Another February. Another African Heritage Month. Another plaintive plea—from me and a few lonely others—for an official day to honour Viola Desmond’s contribution to the human rights movement in Canada.
On Nov. 8, 1946, Desmond, a pioneering black businesswoman from Halifax, found herself stuck in New Glasgow overnight. She decided to see a movie. The Dark Mirror, starring one of her favorite actresses, Olivia de Haviland, was playing at the Roseland Theatre. She sat, by chance, in a whites-only section. Informed she would have to move, Desmond refused. She was dragged from the theatre, clapped in jail, hauled before a magistrate, tried without benefit of a lawyer, summarily convicted of failing to pay a one-cent (!) amusement tax and fined $20.
Although an appeal of her conviction ultimately failed on a technically, Desmond’s spontaneous, principled stand helped energize the not-over-yet fight for equal rights in this province —nine years before Rosa Parks equally symbolic refusal to sit in her “proper” place on a bus is credited with sparking the American civil rights movement.
Desmond’s importance has belatedly begun to be acknowledged. In 2010, the Nova Scotia government publicly apologized and officially pardoned her for her “crime.”
That same year, a Tory backbencher introduced a motion in the legislature to make Nov. 8 Viola Desmond Day. The bill passed second reading.
And then…
Nothing.
African Nova Scotian Affairs Minister Percy Paris disappeared the bill into the black hole of “community consultation”—not on how best to honour Desmond but on the generically correct issue of “how to establish a lasting form of recognition that would honour the contributions and experiences of African Nova Scotians.”
No one seems quite certain what happened after that, except there is still no day to honour Desmond… or any other African Nova Scotian civil rights pioneer.
“We have an apology, a pardon and a Canada postage stamp,” notes Ron Caplan, the Cape Breton historian who published a book about Desmond written by her sister and continues to champion the idea of a Viola Desmond Day. “We have two books and we even have annual celebrations of a Viola Desmond Day at [Toronto’s] Ryerson University.” But we still don’t have our own, teachable-moment Viola Desmond Day here in Nova Scotia.
It’s past time.
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Copyright 2013 Stephen Kimber
Is it 2013? Let the campaign begin…
Forget this year’s faux feints and fevered fantasies. Two thousand and thirteen will be the year we get to pass electoral judgment on the government of Darrell Dexter.
Will we decide, on balance and measured against his less-than-stellar competition, that Dexter has earned a second majority term? Or will we, seeing more potential than performance in the past four years, rein him in, giving Dexter a second minority-government chance to make a better first impression? Or will we decide electing a first-ever NDP government was as historic a mistake as it was a milestone, and consign it to history’s dustbin?
Except for the most rabid of partisans—the my-party-right-or-wrong NDPers and their sky-is-falling-socialist-hordes counterparts—the choice will not be easy.
There are too many intriguing issues for one column but let’s start with economics.
The NDP inherited a fiscal mess mostly of its predecessor’s making, a global economic meltdown beyond its control and, worst, the ticking demographic time bomb of an aging, under-educated population.
None of those big-picture problems could have been overcome in a single electoral term by any party.
The NDP’s signature fiscal accomplishment—presuming they can pull it off—will be to have brought the province’s books back to balance in four years without completely devastating a precarious economy. No mean feat.
But the trick for the government now will be to convince its traditional base those against-the-grain sacrifices were necessary to allow for future social investment while reassuring those independents who voted for it in 2009 that that doesn’t mean a return to runaway spending.
The NDP’s broader economic development strategy has been the doomed-to-disappointment, tried-and-failed strategy Nova Scotia governments have touted since the days of Robert Stanfield: Dream big—and pray. Daewoo, IBM, Cooke Aquaculture, Irving Shipbuilding, the Lower Churchill… Throw the Hail-Stanfield pass...
The good news is the government has coupled those gambles with investments in training that—should they pay off—will keep more young people in the province. The bad news is that most of the bets will not pay off—and the government will have sacrificed other significant assets (gobs of public money, the environment) in the process.
No easy choices indeed. Let the campaigning begin. Happy New Year!
Copyright 2012 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.