The news that senior executives at Emera and its wholly owned, profit-protected subsidiary, Nova Scotia Power, topped their million-plus, one-per-center-club-members-in-good-standing pay packets with raises from 20 to 30 per cent last year prompts all sorts of intriguing questions.

For starters, how many of the company’s secretaries sat on the compensation committee? The short answer: none.

And how many of Emera’s little old lady shareholders clutching their 10-share legacies for their grandchildren were invited to weigh in this larcenous largesse? Ditto.

Given the usual corporate-speak, soft-shoe routine about how such increases—Emera president and CEO Chris Huskilson now tops $2.99 million, executive vice president Nancy Tower $1.4 million and Nova Scotia Power president and CEO Rob Bennett $1.15 million—simply reflect company performance, how likely is it that Emera’s 35 per cent drop in profits so far this year will show up in next year’s executive take home pay?

If you think it will, I have a Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project for sale cheap.

And, since the company’s board of directors obviously believes its top executives are worth dramatic pay increases, will it offer similar 20-30 per cent increases to its unionized work force when the next contract is up for renewal? Or will it tout the flip-side arguments: increasing fuel costs, the need for new capital investment, the general state of the real-world work economy to low-ball its waged workers. Two guesses. The first doesn’t count.

There are other questions too. How much better would Nova Scotia Power’s salt-fog, stiff-breeze, power’s-out-again response time be if it invested in hiring more linemen instead of underwriting the summer homes and sailboats of its top executives?

And one more, larger question. Why did Donald Cameron’s short-lived Tory government peddle Nova Scotia Power, then a successfully publicly-owned and operated public utility—to the private sector back in 1992.

The ostensible reason was to pay down public debt.

Our debt is higher now, and still rising.

And we no longer have a public utility that takes into account the public interest. Perhaps that was the real purpose.

Is it time for another “Encounter on the Urban Environment”?

In late February 1970, Nova Scotia’s Voluntary Planning Board invited a dozen disparate international experts—a black community leader, an industrialist, a labour leader, a journalist, an economist, an urban planner, etc.—to come to Halifax for a week-long “experiment utterly new to the western hemisphere.”

“Their assignment, although it was never explained to the 12 in precisely these terms,” noted a later report, “was to take a community of 250,000 and turn it upside down.”

They did. Given the freedom of the city, they spent long days and longer nights wandering from the Volvo auto assembly plant (Why are no blacks working here?) to the new container pier (Why is it in the wrong part of town?) to the school board office (Why is the education system so awful?) to the press club (Why is the media even worse?)…

Each evening, they staged a live televised town hall where they argued, debated, questioned, cajoled, harangued and listened to anyone who showed up. The powerless got to speak to the powerful and the powerful—in the glare of the spotlight—responded.

While the final Encounter report—cobbled together by 12 very different people between meetings, visits and late-night drinks over the course of one exhausting week—was understandably less than the sum of its parts, the process itself galvanized the city and engaged Haligonians in ways they’ve never been since.

Halifax at the time was at a crossroads, unhappy with its parochial present, trying to find a more interesting future for itself.

Although it would be unwise to heap too much credit on Encounter—the times were a changing everywhere back then—the reality is that Halifax became a much more interesting, engaged and dynamic city in the years that followed Encounter.

We could use a little of that involvement today.

Now that polarizing Peter Kelly’s decision not to re-offer for mayor has sucked the life out of what might have been a real debate over the future of our city, we need to find new ways to engage citizens in that discussion.

We could do worse than another Encounter.
 

In the all-too-brief interregnum between Thursday’s bad-news federal budget and tomorrow’s more-bad-news provincial budget, it’s worth noting the across-the-board, cost-cutting Kool Aid fiscal policy makers in Ottawa and Halifax have swallowed is not the only—or necessarily best—way to slay the deficit dragon.

The Nova Scotia branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, for example, a progressive think tank, recently released its annual alternative provincial budget. Its “Forward to Fairness” document calls for “strategic investments” while finding “creative ways to save money and increase revenue.” Instead of rushing to balance the budget in 2013-14 “to fit the timing of the electoral cycle,” the CCPA wants the government to stretch the back-to-balance timetable to 2015-16 to “reflect the actual fiscal situation.”

“Austerity does not come for free,” says the CCPA’s Nova Scotia director, Christine Saulnier. The CCPA says the government’s decision to cut $772 million in public spending over four years will mean the loss of “well over 10,000 jobs.”

By contrast, the CCPA’s approach involves investing $492.5 million in social infrastructure and programs, including everything from $40 million to establish 10 new community health centres, fund 10 more nurse practitioners and 12 more midwives, to $45 million to phase in an early learning and child care system and $21 million for rural public transit.

Where would the money come from to pay for all of this. Primarily by shifting the tax burden, says the CCPA, from low and middle-income taxpayers “to the upper 45 per cent of income earners, especially the top 10 per cent,” those who have gained the most in the past decade.

Graham Steele

Don’t expect to hear any of this on Tuesday. While the CCPA had what Saulnier calls “a serious and engaged exchange” with Finance Minister Graham Steeele, the finance department “has framed the problem and the solutions in a way that precludes our proposals. In other words, they see declining enrollment in P-12 as a way to justify cutting; we see it as an opportunity to finally catch up with the rest of Canada and begin to really address quality.”

Pity.

On Dec. 14, 2011, Sobeys announced it was swallowing whole every one of Shell Canada’s 250 service stations east of Ontario.

No big deal. The day before, Empire, which controls the Canadian super-sized supermarket chain, had reported a quarterly profit of $78.1 million. Sobeys had the cash to buy whatever it wanted. Buying Shell’s stations offered the company “an exciting opportunity” to expand its own already expanding retail gas bar-convenience store network. Fair enough.

What was most interesting about the deal, however, was what was unsaid. Twenty-three of the service stations were in Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia?

Five days before, the Nova Scotia legislature had passed “totally unnecessary” legislation Sobeys that declared would “do serious damage” to the province’s business investment climate. During a rare appearance before the legislature’s law amendments committee, the company hinted ominously that if the government passed its proposed business-busting bill, it would . . . well, “affect” how Sobeys (Nova Scotia’s largest retail employer) did business in its native province.

Take that, Darrell Dexter!

What had the NDP government done to wrap Sobeys’ knickers in a knot?

The legislation, known as Bill 102, provides for something called first-contract arbitration. It’s specifically tailored for those rare situations when newly unionized workers and their employers can’t reach a first contract themselves — perhaps because the employer refuses to negotiate, or the union demands the moon, or the company and workers simply aren’t used to bargaining collectively. If the two sides can’t settle their differences in a reasonable time, an arbitrator can impose a one-time contract.

Such legislation is commonplace. The first first-contract arbitration law in Canada was passed in British Columbia in 1974. “Employer-unfriendly” B.C., of course, is where Sobeys spent $260 million to buy up a rival supermarket chain in 2007. And Quebec — where most of Sobeys new Shell stations are located — has had such legislation since 1978.

Today, six provinces and the federal government all have some form of first-contract arbitration. Eighty per cent of Canadian workers, including the 15 per cent of Nova Scotians employed in federally regulated enterprises, are covered.

Those laws haven’t, as its Chicken-Little critics contend, encouraged workers to recklessly embrace evil unions. Canada’s unionization rate has been declining in every province for decades.

The law is rarely used. In Manitoba (the province on which Nova Scotia’s legislation is based), there were just six applications for first-contract arbitration from 42 newly unionized workplaces in 2009-10. Only two of those resulted in imposed contracts.

In fact, studies show the mere existence of legislation increases the chances of a negotiated contract and reduces work stoppages by a “statistically significant” 65 per cent. Not a bad outcome, surely.

And it isn’t just unhappy unions that apply. In British Columbia, fully one-third of arbitration applications come from employers.

So . . . why did Nova Scotia businesses wail “wolf” over first-contract arbitration?

“Fundamentally, every employer needs to be in the position of determining wages, benefits and working conditions,” the Nova Scotia Employers’ Roundtable says. A consortium of 21 of the province’s most powerful non-union employers (including Sobeys, Michelin, Irving, Nova Scotia Power, Wal-Mart Canada, Killam Properties and Oxford Frozen Foods), it wrote a lecturing letter to Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter last Fall insisting that companies alone “ultimately have the right to say ‘no’ if it in good faith considers that doing otherwise would adversely impact its interests.” (They apparently haven’t read Section 2(d) of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which includes collective bargaining rights, but that’s another story.)

Businesses want governments to butt out of their business — except when they don’t. Then they want governments to do their bidding.

In Nova Scotia, for example, where employers have traditionally wielded unfettered control over their workplaces, powerful, and powerfully anti-union companies like Michelin have been able to bully governments on several occasions to rewrite provincial labour laws to make it impossible for the company’s workers to organize, let alone bargain for a first contract. Those laws are still on the books.

First-contract legislation is now law. Will companies like Sobeys stop investing because of it? Will the union hordes descend? Will the sky fall? Stay tuned, but don’t hold your breath.

From the March/April 2012 issue of Atlantic Business Magazine.

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.