As Canada Post prepares issue a new stamp next month to celebrate the life of Viola Desmond, our own government seems about to quietly take a pass on the opportunity to honour the Halifax woman whose personal courage remains a symbolic inspiration in the fight for human rights in Canada.

Viola Desmond Won't Be Budged

In 1946—nine years before Rosa Parks’ refusal to get off a Montgomery, Alabama, bus helped trigger the U.S. civil rights movement—Desmond refused to give up her seat in the “whites-only” section of New Glasgow’s Roseland Theatre. She was hauled out of the theatre, thrown in jail, charged, convicted and fined $20. She fought her conviction and lost, but the embarrassing publicity helped galvanize the fight against Nova Scotia’s state-sanctioned segregation and led to changes in the law.

Nova Scotians have only recently begun to acknowledge Desmond’s significance—and suffering. Two years ago, Premier Darrell Dexter publicly apologized for the “injustice” she’d suffered and his government issued a rare posthumous pardon.

In 2010, Tory MLA Alfie MacLeod introduced a resolution in the House of Assembly calling on the province to declare Nov. 8—the day of her arrest—Viola Desmond Day.

Some in the black community argued that date was inappropriate; others complained they hadn’t been consulted.

Fair enough.

The Dexter government consulted, but the question it asked— “how to establish a lasting form of recognition that would honour the contributions and experiences of African Nova Scotians”—seemed blandly beside the point of Macleod’s original motion.

No surprise its final report doesn’t even mention Desmond. Or that the idea for the Day now seems dead. “People,” explains a government spokesperson, “have been saying they want something that recognizes the broad scope of African-Nova Scotian accomplishments.”

Is there some reason we can’t have both?

As Desmond’s sister Wanda wrote in a recent letter to the government: “Naming a day after a popular and iconic figure does not lessen the larger ambitions of creating such a day… In fact they give the day an identity and create an entry point into an issue that otherwise may be ignored with a more generic title.”

It’s time we celebrated Viola Desmond Day.

Related links:

• Viola Desmond Will Not Be Budged Facebook page
• Sister to Courage: Stories from the World of Viola Desmond, Canada's Rosa Parks
• "Past Time for Nova Scotians to Honour Viola Desmond"
•  "Community Consultations Report," Office of African Nova Scotian Affairs

On Wednesday, local radio personality Bobby Mac launched a new Facebook group “for those of us who are tired of those whining people who don't want any progress in this great city of Halifax.” Its name? SCREW THE VIEW!!

By Saturday morning, STV had 163 members.

“We are tired of the groups that stop progress in this great city of Halifax,” he explained. “We want new buildings. No one goes up Citadel hill for the view. They go for the fort, and for sex at night.”

Acknowledging Bobby Mac probably knows more about sex on Citadel Hill than I do, and even accepting his dubious proposition no one goes there for the view, let’s analyze his most serious argument: whining, save-the-view-of-the-harbour-flotables crazies are preventing “progress”—by which I assume he means a forest of high rise office towers on the slopes of the Citadel.

Really?

Last year, Dalhousie’s Planning and Design Centre released a map showing 23 major downtown development projects, all of them approved, but almost none built or under construction. Who’s to blame for that? Heritage groups? Developers? Or perhaps the economy, stupid?

The convention centre? Despite the whinging from the all-things-ancient lovers, the city and province eagerly approved the proposed project and shoveled buckets of our cash in its direction. The first real delay came because Ottawa took its time to say yes.

By the time it did, the economy had gone to hell in a handcart. The developer is still scrambling to find financing and tenants to make the project viable.

Speaking of which, the whiners—who also raised Economics 101 questions about the convention centre—appear to have been right about that.

Consider this from the Dec. 31 Wall Street Journal, hardly a preserve of loony preservationists. There’s “a nationwide surplus of empty meeting facilities, struggling convention halls and vacant hotel rooms,” the paper notes. “How have governments responded to this glut? By building more convention centers, of course, financed by debt backed by new taxes and fees on already struggling taxpayers.”

Uh… Perhaps Bobby Mac’s next Facebook group will be to whinge about how all our tax dollars are being wasted on a white elephant.

Now that would be progress.

No problem.

When?

Not today. He’s on a panel at a national conference on public policy. Saturday, he’s in Truro, keynote speaker at an International Year for People of African Descent symposium. Then Ottawa for the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council; he’s on the private broadcast industry’s regional self-regulatory panel. And, finally, back to Halifax for the inaugural talk in Dalhousie University’s James Robinson Johnston Distinguished Lecture Series.

I thought you’d retired.

He laughs.

No one is better positioned to speak about the struggle for human rights in Nova Scotia over the past 50 years—and the next 50—than Burnley “Rocky” Jones. He’s central to that struggle.

During the mid-sixties, Jones and his then wife set up Kwacha House, a drop-in centre for inner-city black youth. It so frightened city fathers they lobbied to shut it down.

In 1968, he invited the Black Panthers to Halifax. In response, Ottawa quickly funded the “moderate” Black United Front just to undercut his growing popularity among “disaffected negroes.”

Someone set his house on fire—twice—and the RCMP began not-so-secretly following him.

In 1970, he helped lead a March on city hall by thousands of activists after city council secretly—some things never change!—hired a racist city manager. This time, the good guys won.

In 1970, he helped launch Dalhousie’s unique Transition Year Program to assist local blacks and natives succeed in university. Later, he developed innovative employment programs for ex-inmates, ran unsuccessfully for political office and launched a massive oral history project to record the stories of black elders.

After graduating from Dalhousie’s then-new Indigenous Black and Mi'kmaq law program in 1992, he went on to become one of Nova Scotia’s preeminent civil rights lawyers, arguing cases all the way to the Supreme Court.

Recently, he was in the news again—at 70—lobbying successfully against the appointment of a white outsider to head up the Africville Heritage Society.

Unsurprisingly, he has opinions on the current state—and future direction—of our province's human rights movement.

“But you’ll have to come to the speech for those,” he says.

I’ll be there.

Related posts:

• Encounter at Kwacha House. an NFB documentary.
• Dalhousie's Transition Year Program: It All Began in a Duck Blind
• The Unlearned Lesson of Africville
• Here's a 1995 profile I wrote on Rocky for the Halifax Daily News.

Information on the Lecture:
The James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University launches its Distinguished Lecture Series by featuring
BURNLEY ROCKY JONES,
Lawyer and Human Rights Advocate, speaking on
THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE AFRICAN NOVA SCOTIAN COMMUNITY, 1961-2011

Date: Wed. 23 Nov. 2011
Time: Reception: 6-7; Lecture: 7:15
Venue: Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building, Potter Family Auditorium, Dalhousie University, 6100 University Ave (at Henry St.) Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Admission: Free

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.

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.

The company intends to replace the venerable downtown landmark with a $60-million, triple-tower, hotel-apartment complex it says will generate “a lot more” street-level activity in the northern downtown while conforming to HRM by Design—and legislation protecting views of the harbour from Citadel Hill.

Ironically, a plan to redevelop the original two-storey Citadel hotel 40 years ago triggered the debate that led to creating those still-controversial views.

By the late 1960s, preservationists were winning the battle to protect the city’s historic waterfront from the wrecker’s ball, but they seemed to be losing the war to preserve Citadel Hill’s iconic harbour views one bigger-than-theirs bank tower at a time.

When the first of three view-blocking Scotia Square towers began to rise from the earth in 1969, Haligonians finally began to question the build-it-bigger-higher-better dreams of downtown developers.

The debate galvanized around the next proposed development. Ralph Medjuck, a bright young lawyer-developer, wanted to plunk an 11-storey addition above an existing low-rise hotel he owned on Brunswick Street.

Over the objections of staff and protests from residents, a divided city council ultimately voted 7-3—yes, Virginia, there really was a time when there were just 10 councilors—in favour of the project.

But the motion carried a crucial rider: staff had to come up with a proposal to protect harbour views in future projects.

Three years later, a talk-tired—“I am so sick of this damn view from Citadel Hill I could scream,” screamed alderwoman Margaret Stanbury at one point—but-no-longer-divided council voted unanimously to preserve 10 specific views protecting 300 acres of prme downtown.

Preservation activist Elizabeth Pacey later called it “a sweeping achievement in the pioneer field of environmental protection legislation.”

Thanks to the Citadel Hotel.

When SilverBirch’s new hotel opens in 2013, it will have a different name. Company president Steve Giblin says they considered maintaining it, “but we feel Citadel Hill—that’s where the name belongs, and it really doesn’t belong on a hotel.”

Perhaps. But we must at least preserve the memory of the vital role the old Citadel played in shaping today’s downtown.
 

Kirk Arsenault
Aboriginal Halifax School Board member

***

The Atlantic’s latest issue boasts a history-revisiting article about Cesar Chavez, a hero of my youth. I read it last week as our school board expunged the name of Halifax’s European founder, Edward Cornwallis, from a local Junior High.

During the sixties, Chavez—an iconic, Ghandi-following, Mexican-American union leader—organized 50,000 grape pickers and lettuce harvesters to challenge California’s all-powerful farm owners.

“Si, se puede”—Yes it’s possible—became his rallying cry. Inspired by Chavez, white liberals—me too—boycotted grapes for five long years until the farm workers finally won a contract. I can still recall the sweetly satisfying taste of my first post-boycott grape.

Chavez, who died in 1993, is rightly revered. His birthday is a holiday in California and seven other states. Colleges, schools, parks, streets, even a bowling alley are named in his honour.

The Atlantic piece focuses on an “exhaustively researched, by turns sympathetic and deeply shocking” new book re-examining Chavez’s life and legacy. It claims his saintly image masked “the take-no-prisoners, balls-out tactics of a Chicago organizer.” Chavez, for example, turned over to immigration authorities undocumented workers who didn’t support his union so they would be deported. Later, he fell under the spell of a “sinister cult leader,” became “unhinged” and even mocked his own farm-worker followers. “Every time we look at them, they want more money,” he complained in one recorded conversation. “Like pigs, you know.”

So… should California cancel its holiday, rename its schools and parks?

Cesar Chavez—like Edward Cornwallis—isn’t “unblemished.”

That appears to have become the Halifax school board’s new litmus test for having a school named after you.

But no hero—no human hero—can pass that test. Not Chavez. Not Cornwallis. But also not Martin Luther King, John A. MacDonald, Nelly McClung, even “Canada’s Greatest Hero,” Tommy Douglas...

Edward Cornwallis helped establish Halifax, a noteworthy accomplishment to those of us who now call it home. But during the English-French-Mi’kmaq struggle to control the territory, Cornwallis offered a bounty for any captured or killed Mi’kmaq, “or his scalp as is the custom of America.”

The notion rightly shocks our contemporary sensibilities, but Cornwallis wasn’t alone. Nor were the English. It was a nasty time.

We should be able to honour Cornwallis for his accomplishments while acknowledging not everything he did was honour-worthy.

Which is true of most of us.

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.

In its traditional year-end orgy of page-filling lists of accomplished Canadians—young, old, corporate, literary—the Globe and Mail this year named Peter Munk, 83-year-old chair of “multinational mining giant” Barrick Gold Corp., a finalist in its nation-builder category.

Though born into a well-to-do Budapest Jewish family in 1927, the Nazi occupation wiped out the Munk fortune. Refugee Peter eventually ended up at the University of Toronto where he studied electrical engineering and launched his business career in the 1950s.

The Globe said it chose Munk for using his personal fortune “to support Canada’s role on the world stage by focusing his philanthropy on education and health care.”

“It is your obligation to give back as much as you have taken from a country,” Munk said—though not, it should be said, from the Canada he’d helped to build, or even about that part of Canada from which he had taken much.

Speaking from his winter home in Switzerland, Munk explained: “I've made some money and I wish to give it back.”

He has.

Last year, he gave $35 million—the U of T’s largest ever individual donation—to expand its Munk School of Global Affairs, which an earlier Munk gift helped establish. His name—and generosity—also graces the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre at Toronto’s University Health Network.

Intriguingly, the Globe’s gushing profile makes only glancing reference to one of Munk’s formative business experiences, Clairtone Sound Corp.—an experience for which Nova Scotia taxpayers paid dearly.

In 1958—with $6,000—Munk started a small, innovative Toronto-based hi-fi manufacturer called Clairtone. Its success prompted Nova Scotia’s industry-parched Stanfield government to lure the company here with grants and incentives. The dream—to sell to the world.

The dream fizzled. By the time the nightmare ended, Clairtone had saddled Nova Scotia taxpayers with $20 million in debt.

Peter Munk? Well, we know he learned some lessons, which he clearly applied elsewhere. While he’s never forgotten Toronto's contribution to his success, Munk appears to have long since wiped Nova Scotia from his memory—and philanthropy—map.

Pity.

Pity too that Nova Scotia has never learned its Clairtone lesson. We’re still a sucker for someone else’s big dream.

***

Related: Peter Munk profile

Dalhousie University’s Transition Year Program—a unique-for-its-time scheme to bring marginalized black and native students into the academic mainstream through a year-long process to “transition” them into university—celebrated its 40th anniversary this past weekend with a reception, symposium, dinner and dance.

Its conception was decidedly more humble.

In October 1968, Rocky Jones, then a black radical student activist, invited his friend Jim Walker, then a freshly minted white Dalhousie grad student, for a duck hunting weekend. “Rocky is an avid hunter,” Walker jokes today. “I am not.”

They built a lean-to but it was so cold they zipped their sleeping bags together and even invited Rocky’s Labrador retriever into the bag to stay warm.

“I should mention,” Walker adds, “we had a bottle of rum we passed back and forth.”

They talked through the night—about Mississippi freedom schools, the fledgling American “head start” school programs, a recent report documenting the shockingly low numbers of black Nova Scotians in university…

At some point, remembers Jones, they concocted a scheme that—after two years of discussion and the perhaps surprising support of then-Dalhousie president Henry Hicks—became the Transition Year Program.

Today, Jones is one of Canada’s most prominent civil rights lawyers, Walker is a history professor and author of the seminal book on Nova Scotia’s black loyalists, and TYP is a model for programs across North America.

Its most important accomplishment, Jones suggests, is that it helped foster a cadre of educated local black and aboriginal grads who returned to their own Nova Scotia communities and became leaders there.

Is the program still needed?

Yes, says Jones. But it needs to return to its roots. In recent years, it has admitted more students from outside Nova Scotia. Many don’t stay after they graduate. “We’re losing leadership,” Jones says. Which is especially troubling, he adds, at a time when many local black and native communities desperately need a new generation of educated leaders.

So a toast to TYP. To what it was. And still needs to be.

***

If you'd like to read more of Jim Walker's recollections of the beginnings of the Transition Year Program, you can find his emailed response to my queries here.