Now that transit buses are transiting the city and ferries finally ferrying passengers, let’s take one last, un-fond look back at what went wrong and where we go from here.

To begin with the obvious: problems at Metro transit predate—and go much deeper than—this latest dispute. Metro Transit is over-managed and under-performing, neither of which is the fault of the drivers, or even the previous contract.

Going into negotiations, management believed it needed to transform the traditional scheduling system to reduce overtime. But it appears they made few meaningful efforts to engage their employees in developing a better system prior to issuing their take-it-or-leave-it contract edict.

Metro Transit—in its unseemly haste to breeze past the formalities of offer, counter-offer, non-counter-offer and conciliation with little real bargaining—seems to have been spoiling for a grind-them-down strike from the beginning.

And Metro Transit did an abysmal job of explaining its side of “rostering,” the issue it deemed central to the dispute.

Then again, so did the union.

Which left the public with little understanding of why they suddenly didn’t have a bus service.

To say neither side distinguished itself during the strike is an understatement.

The union squandered what little public support it had—public sector workers are everyone’s favourite whipping boys these days—with its ill-advised decision to block, even briefly, management-driven Access-a-Buses. The drivers then compounded that faux pas by blocking—again only briefly—snow plow operators.

While one can understand their frustrations, the reality is the union needed public support to pressure city council to bargain in better faith.

They didn’t get it.

The deal they got—a promise Metro Transit will consult instead of simply imposing a new scheduling system—isn’t what either side wanted.

But it does offer the possibility of a fresh start.

Management must recognize its workers have a role in making bus service more efficient—they may have a few suggestions for which managers can go!—and the workers need to recognize they can’t just cling to the past.

Luckily, they now have five years to make it work.

So the sleuths at the Canadian (sic) Taxpayers Federation have uncovered the startling (to me, at least) fact I’m “on the CBC payroll.”

They appear to believe this is the only possible explanation why I—and other members of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting—could support public broadcasting in this country.

Perhaps that’s because the CTF assumes everyone else who supports a cause must be on the payroll of those with a vested interest in the outcome of the causes they support because… well, we’ll come back to that.

First some background.

I’m a volunteer—which is to say unpaid—member of the steering committee of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. It’s an independent watchdog group whose mission is “to defend and enhance the quality and quantity of Canadian programming in the Canadian audio-visual system.”

We do support public funding for the CBC, but we also often criticize the CBC for what we see as its failures to live up to its responsibilities as a public broadcaster. We criticize—and sometimes praise—private broadcasters for their roles in providing quality Canadian content to viewers. And we make presentations to the CRTC and parliamentary committees, arguing for more and better Canadian content.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation calls itself a “citizen’s advocacy group dedicated to lower taxes, less waste and accountable government.” It’s mostly run by ex-(or not so ex)Tory hacks and right-wing zealots who have never encountered a government expenditure (other than prisons and bombs) they wouldn’t bulldoze out of existence.

On its blog last week, the CTF wrote:

“Amongst the many Access to Information (ATI) enquiries we make each year was this tidbit relating to the CBC. Our National Research Director, Derek Fildebrandt got to thinking about the leadership of the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, the group that advocates for more funding for the CBC. ‘What if these people are actually on the CBC’s payroll?’ thought Derek. If it were true, it would go a long way to explaining their passion for public broadcasting. And it would be very, very funny.”

So they went fishing, filing a request to the CBC for records, “in Excel format, if possible” of all payments— “regardless of the reasons they were paid”— to the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, its spokesperson, Ian Morrison, or any of its 11-member steering committee, including me.

“As it turns out,” the CTF breathlessly reported last week in a post entitled “Friends With Benefits,” Access to Information documents had revealed that “three members of the ‘Friends’ Steering Committee actually were on the CBC payroll.”

Including me!

“Stephen Kimber was paid $675 as a ‘freelance[r].’”

Whoah. Be still my beating heart.

I earn part of my annual income as a freelance journalist, and have done so for the last 40 years. I’ve written newspaper columns, magazine articles, books, commissioned books, occasional government reports (for Tory governments, I might add) and even the 1989 Report of the Royal Commission into the Wrongful Conviction of Donald Marshall, Jr.. I’ve also worked on occasion for the CBC—and for CTV, and for what is now Global TV.

What is interesting about the $675 figure the CTF touts on its blog—and which even it behind-the-hand mumblingly admits involved “quite small sums of money”—is what the CTF didn’t say about its initial request for information.

The CTF didn’t mention that it had asked the CBC for records of all payments made “from 2001 to present” because including that inconvenient fact would make those small sums reported seem even more minuscule, and its argument even more ridiculous.

The $675, therefore, represents all of the income I received from the CBC for 10 years! That works out to $1.30 a week.

I may be buyable, but even I’m not that cheap.

Speaking of being bought, what—aside from the usual ideological zealotry—would prompt the CTF to attempt to turn this molehill of non-information into the mountainous revelation that I was “actually… on the CBC payroll?”

Who foots the bill for the CTF’s federal office in Ottawa and its regional offices in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Altantic Canada not to mention its seven apparently fulltime spokespeople?

Whose interests does the CTF really represent?

One might answer that question by asking who else has a vested interest in getting rid of the CBC? Can you say Quebecor? Sun Media?

Surprise, surprise. Quebecor has created its own not so mini-industry churning out similar access to information requests of the CBC, desperately seeking ammunition for its goal of convincing a too-easily-convinced Harper government to shutter the CBC screens.

Do Quebecor, Sun Media, their executives or board members contribute to the Canadian (sic) Taxpayers Federation?

If so, how much?

Is the CTF… ahem.. “actually on the payroll” of those vested interests.

I don’t know. The CTF doesn’t disclose the names of its donors or how much they give.

But I’m guessing those corporate interests would be far more generous in putting CTF on their payrolls than the CBC has been with me.
 

My assignment: “Explain the Occupy Wherever Movement in 15 Minutes.”

The occasion was a recent luncheon at the Halifax Club to mark Global Ivey Day, an annual opportunity for alumni of the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey School of Business to come together to celebrate their Iveyness. I’d been invited as the post-lunch speaker, even though I’m neither an Ivey graduate nor a business person. (I did once pile-drive a business into the ground, but I’m sure that’s not why they invited me. Besides, that’s a story for another day.)

My guess is the organizer, a thoughtful Windsor, N.S., lawyer-politician-businessman named Jim White, had been reading about the Occupy movement, fretting those Wall Street tenters were on to something important and wanted someone else—me—to jolt his fellow Iveys into confronting the question too.

I was happy to oblige. But I wasn’t sure I would require 15 minutes.

Just as Bill Clinton had used his it’s-the-economy-stupid mantra to become U.S. President in 1992, the essence of Occupy boils down to four words: It’s the Inequality, Stupid.

Thanks to the three g’s—go-go globalization, government de-regulation and corporate greed—the traditional gulf between rich and poor is becoming an unbridgeable chasm.

Consider. The Conference Board of Canada—hardly a hotbed of socialist radicalism—reports the top 10 per cent of the world’s population now gobble up 42 per cent of its income, leaving the bottom 10 per cent with one per cent of their crumbs. That gap has widened dramatically since the mid-1980s. In Canada, the divide is growing even faster than in the United States.

If you made $3 million in 2005—lucky you!—you paid, on average, 25 per cent less in taxes than you did in 1990. Luckier you! The poorest 20 per cent of Canadians, by contrast, paid a higher percentage of their income in tax in 2005 than they did in 1990. Unlucky them.

Luck, in fact, has little to do with it. Capital gains, the mother’s milk of the better-off, is taxed at just 50-cents on the dollar. Why is a dollar earned speculating on the stock market taxed less than income earned educating children or caring for the sick? A hint. Child care workers and nurses don’t have powerful lobbyists to write tax rules for them.

Governments tell us we’re in a fiscal mess. We can no longer afford basic, opportunity-leveling services like health and education.

Meanwhile, those same governments slashed corporate taxes from 28 per cent to 15 per cent between 2000 and 2012, and promise more to come.

No wonder we can’t afford public services. The rich can pay for their own health and education, thanks. And their legacies.

A few days before I spoke at Ivey Day—the business school is named for Richard Ivey, who was rich enough to give enough to get the place named after him—Nova Scotia businessman Ken Rowe donated $15 million to Dalhousie University’s business school.

I respect Rowe. He’s a business builder and signifcant employment generator. But let’s look at his generosity through other lenses.

How many years would it take the average Nova Scotia worker to earn what Ken Rowe chose to give away in an instant?

Three-hundred-and-nineteen plus!

How much of that $15 million—thanks to tax benefits the giver gets—will ultimately be paid by the rest of us?

More than you’d probably guess.

So why does Rowe alone get to choose which good is greater? There are 59, mostly generously endowed business schools in Canada. Why a Ken Rowe School of Management, but no Ken Rowe School of Social Work, or Education, or Child Care?

No wonder people are frustrated and angry—and not just the Occupy tenters. Look around. At the race to the bottom that only benefits those at the top. At skyrocketing education debts and youth unemployment that is robbing the next generation of a future...

Even if the Occupy Movement’s tents get flattened, the issue they raise will not go away. And the consequences of not righting that balance will only get worse.

It really is the inequality, stupid.

(From the January-February 2012 issue of Atlantic Business Magazine.)

And then consider this.

On Thursday afternoon, Bedford Councilor Tim Outhit posted on his Facebook wall: “$20 million to widen Bayers Road, or $25 million to launch an initial commuter rail service?”

He invited his Facebook friends to weigh in. By Saturday morning, he’d had 67 responses.

Most—perhaps no surprise—favoured rail. Far more interesting—and perhaps surprising—was the quality of the discussion.

Outhit’s question followed a February staff report he’d asked for on the scheme’s feasibility. Staff estimated a five-stop service between Windsor Junction and the VIA station through existing rail corridors would cost $31 million to launch plus $6.5-million annually.

Starting the service initially at Bedford, of course, would make it cheaper—and therefore comparable to the controversial scheme to widen Bayers Road to accommodate more gas-guzzling, on-the-road-to-no-place-to-park, one-rider automobiles.

During the Facebook exchanges, official reports and blog posts were referenced and linked, significant questions asked and answered.

John Wesley Chisholm posted a link on the history of a Truro-Halifax commuter rail system that operated until the Halifax Explosion. “This is not a dream or fantasy,” he wrote. “This is Halifax as it was planned and intended to work… We could make it happen.”

“Start with Bedford to Halifax,” allowed Waye Mason, but then add more stops “and a huge park-and-ride terminal at Duke... Let’s get low-floor rail that can operate as streetcars, like Austin, Texas, but can go on freight rails, and then drive a rail down Hollis, all the way to and through [the] dockyard.”

Even those, like Mike Flemming, who argued “we do not have the population base to make [commuter rail] service economically viable,” pushed for a more “efficient transit system that brings commuters from the outskirts to transit hubs.”

“Let’s invest in the future of transportation instead of extending the agony of the current inefficient and doomed mode of transportation that is the single-commuter car (or SUV),” summed up Tom Servaes, adding wistfully: “I’d love to zip along the Basin reading my email on the way into the city.”

Would that city council sessions sounded so sensible.

Peter Kelly has become the journalistic gift that keeps on giving, our local, 21st century version of those famous “Franco-is-still-dead” Saturday Night Live sketches from the mid-1970s.

Breaking News just in. Peter Kelly is still the mayor.

And will be for at least another year. If not for life. And perhaps after death…

So is it time—as the mayor’s defenders (and there are, inexplicably, still too many of them) would argue—to get over it? Or is it past time, as the columnist spinners, Facebook fulminators, talk-show talkers and letters-to-the-editor writers insist, to get on with getting him gone?

None of this would likely even be a matter for discussion today if the mayor—when the news broke in February he was up to his eyeballs in a City Charter-violating decision to secretly front cash to a concert promoter whose shows were so singularly unsuccessful he couldn’t pay it back—had acknowledged his wrongdoing and apologized.

Peter Kelly

I blew it. I got so caught up in competing with Moncton for big concerts I went too far. I was sure the concerts would be a success, the advances would be paid back and we would all benefit. But I violated the Charter and kept council in the dark. I was wrong. I’ve learned my lesson. I apologize.

Genuine mayoral apologies being as common as common sense at a city council meeting, of course, that didn’t happen.

And Concertgate has assumed a larger-than life of its own, puffed up beyond bursting after each new mealy-mouthed, weasel-worded non-apology from the mayor.

In the last week alone, Kelly has faced—and faced down: the embarrassing council vote on calling in the cops to investigate his actions; the spectacle of an ex-cop personally filing a criminal complaint against him; the slap-in-the-face of a retired provincial auditor-general publicly asking him to resign; the salt-in-the-wound declaration by the I-don’t-owe-the-city-a-penny concert promoter that the mayor was a “professional;” and, of course, the modern ignominy of a “Peter Kelly—Resign Now” Facebook group.

This still in… Peter Kelly is still the mayor.

The real joke will be if we have to keep saying that after the October 2012 mayoral election.

It just won’t be funny. 

What a short, strange, sweet trip it’s been—made all the sweeter because not a single politician, party insider, pollster, pundit or person predicted it. Including me. My first post-election-call column was a lament that—in a campaign focused so tightly on just 50 swing ridings—the votes of the rest of us wouldn’t count.

Uh, right…

What happened? The short answer is Canadians took back their politics—on social media, in vote mobs, in their own minds. They rose up—though not the way Michael Ignatieff hoped—and told pollsters they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore.

“It” was Stephen Harper and his smarmy, controlling politics of fear and loathing of any other. But it was also the Bloc Quebecois and the Gilles-one-note clanking call to non. And Michael Ignatieff, who ran a mostly solid campaign but couldn’t escape his pre-election Tory tarring as the outsider-other, or the reality his so-recently-discredited Liberals represented a tired alternative that wasn’t.

This negative, none-of-the-above frustration almost certainly fed the tsnunami that has swept the NDP from its nadir of 13.2 per cent in polls two weeks into the campaign to the giddying heights of official opposition, perhaps even minority government territory today.

But if the NDP surge is, in part, a negative response, it is also—in perhaps larger part—a reflection of voters’ hope for better.

Jack Layton isn’t new, and neither is the NDP platform.

But after 4.6 million of us watched his performance in the leaders’ debate, the ground under this election began to shift seismically.

Why?

The NDP engaged Canadians in discussions about their issues, and the avuncular, unflappable Layton steered clear of the personal negatives—our attack ads, he joked, are about attacking poverty—that were other parties’ staples.

The NDP’s sudden surge, of course, means its platform—and how it gets paid for—hasn’t been scrutinized nearly carefully enough (although the Globe Friday trotted out 10 bank and business economists who concluded “no one appears to be shaking” at the prospect of an NDP government).

However it all turns out, Canadians have already shaken conventional political assumptions. That is reason enough to hope.

But stay tuned. This trip may not be over yet.

So let me see if I have this straight.

The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, which prides itself on being the fists-up, fang-baring defender of downtrodden taxpayers, has its knickers righteously twisted because the province says it can save taxpayers $4.7-million a year…

Uh… this does not compute.

Or perhaps it does.

Some background. Nova Scotia’s Transportation Department believes private companies are over-charging—by up to 50 per cent—for roadwork in some rural areas because there was no, or little competition.

The short version: they were profiteering because they could.

So the Transportation Department decided to get back into the business—to provide competition in places where there wasn’t any, save taxpayer bucks and have more funds to do more roadwork on more roads.

The wounded howls from the Nova Scotia Road Builders Association—some of whose members, one would assume, had happily licked that honey pot—were predictable.

So too was the predictably Pavlovian, “government-bad” response of the so-called Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.

Instead of upbraiding the road builders for ripping off taxpayers, the Federation hopped into bed with them, then snuggled up close.

It accused government of “colluding” with its highway workers’ union because the department had asked the union in advance how its new public paving scheme might affect the collective agreement. Sounds prudent to me. (When government talks with corporate lobbyists, the Federation calls it “consulting,” and thinks it’s a fine idea.)

It also attacked highway workers personally. The Federation claimed private sector flag workers earn $12 an hour—probably even if their employer has inflated a bid—while a public sector flag person sucks up a bloated $16 an hour from the public teat.

But let’s ask ourselves: what’s so bad about that?

Perhaps the still-hardly-rich flag worker will use her extra $4 extra to buy groceries or school supplies locally, not to forget contributing a few thousand extra in taxes to the public good.

Compare that with what might happen to the bloated profits a paving company can skim from uncompetitive bidding, which is as likely to be spent on a Caribbean cruise as school supplies, and more likely to be sheltered from the tax man.

Thanks for nothing, Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.

After spending the last three weeks in Havana researching a book—and avoiding winter—I have reached a few modest conclusions.

First, there are things Haligonians could teach Habaneros.

About pooper scooper laws, for example. Havana’s sidewalks are a canine-created minefield. That becomes more understandable, of course, when you realize Havana has a shortage of plastic bags. But still...

A living, belching car museum.

Just as it understandable that—largely because of the 50-year-old U.S. trade embargo—Havana is a living, belching, vintage car museum. Still, Cuban lungs could benefit from a few North American-style exhaust emissions regulations.

And 21st century Canadians—for whom recycling is now routine—might be appalled at how casually Habaneros dispose of their disposables. People eat on the run, buying snacks from sidewalk vendors. When they’re done, they’re more likely to drop the remains than look for a waste bin. (That said, the nightly scouring of Havana’s streets and sidewalks is magical. By dawn, the city is pristine again—yesterday’s remnants swept into block-sized green bins and carted off—and ready for another day’s droppings.)

But Halifax could learn from Havana too.

Consider downtown redevelopment.

Though much of Havana still resembles a bombed-out city—there are daily reports of building collapses—the Cuban government is investing a huge chunk of tourism revenues in renewing its historic core.

The billion-dollar rebuilding of Havana Veija—the five-square-kilometre district founded in 1519—only began in earnest in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union forced the country to turn to tourism.

But unlike most North American urban redevelopment schemes—in which history becomes tourist artifact and ordinary life is eliminated—the guiding philosophy behind Havana’s historic restoration has been that “the inhabitants become the beneficiaries.”

Esculia Primeria José Marti in session.

Wander through the pedestrians-rule side streets of Old Havana. Kids play soccer, dogs sleep where they please. Glance into open doorways. You’re as likely to see a family gathered around the TV as a souvenir shop. On Obispo, Havana’s main tourist artery, there’s a primary school. In lovingly restored Plaza Veija, there are trendy restaurants, even a popular micro-brewery. But if you look up, you’ll see a family’s laundry drying on a balcony.

During the restoration process, Plaza Vieja's residents were relocated to other apartments. But as soon as the work was completed, they were allowed to return—only to much improved accommodation.

In Halifax, when we renewed our historic core, we pushed traditional residents out of the inner city—and, in the process, sucked the life out of downtown.

Havana has seemingly found a balance between its history and life.

Halifax should take something from that.

Oh yes, and a little sunshine too.

That is the question for which we still have no conclusive answer, despite countless millions of dollars spent on RCMP investigations, legal proceedings, an out-of-court libel settlement and, most recently, Justice Jeffrey Oliphant’s tightly circumscribed (No Airbus please, we’re Canadian) but nonetheless reputation-damning-to-hell $16-million public inquiry.

Thanks to that inquiry, we now know that the $300,000 (or $225,000, depending on which liar you choose to believe) in cash-stuffed envelopes convicted German tax evader Karlheinz Schreiber secretly handed over to former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney at meetings in Montreal airport hotel rooms and New York coffee shops came from Airbus Industrie.

We know Airbus, the gigantic European aircraft manufacturer, paid Schreiber $25 million to peddle—by whatever means necessary—its planes to Air Canada at a time when Brian Mulroney was the prime minister of Canada.

Thanks to Schreiber’s friendships with two Nova Scotians— Elmer MacKay, a Mulroney cabinet minister who generously relinquished his seat temporarily so Mulroney could get elected after he won his party leadership in 1983, and Fred Doucet, Mulroney’s college-days confidant turned political fixer turned chief of staff turned well-connected lobbyist working for, among others, Schreiber—we now also know the German-born bribe-master had what Oliphant described as “almost unlimited access to Mr. Mulroney while he was prime minister.”

We know Doucet-the-lobbyist wrote letters to Schreiber-the-bribe-master seeking the latest on the cash Schreiber was shelling out in Airbus “commissions.” We now know one of those letters was written the same day Brian Mulroney accepted his first cash payment drawn from Schreiber’s Airbus Industrie grease-money account.

And we know that it was Doucet who arranged that clandestine rendezvous where the envelopes began crossing palms.

Given all of that, is it really fair to say, as Justice Oliphant does, that “there is no evidence to demonstrate that Mr. Mulroney had any knowledge as to the source of the funds paid to him by Mr. Schreiber?” Adds the judge: “The only way to link Mr. Mulroney to the Airbus matter is to speculate or to endorse the concept of guilt by association.”

While Oliphant understandably concludes he can’t go there, he does not publicly ask why—given what he has already learned—he was explicitly forbidden from asking the real questions that might have finally answered the only remaining question that really matters: What was the money for?

Only in Canada could we be so uninterested in learning where $25 million in bribes went, and for what.

The legislation is far from perfect, of course, the not unexpected result of all the far too many messy compromises needed to cajole and barter the 216 votes required to pass it. And the resulting outcry over what the bill actually accomplishes—or not—may cost Obama the chance to push other items on his reform agenda and, worse, endanger not only the Democrats’ hold on Congress but also his own hopes for a second term as president.

Despite all of that, Robert Gibbs, the president’s press secretary, told reporters this week that passing the health care legislation “meant more to [Obama] than any election night could have because… he understands just what it will mean.”

He had a vision in other words, and he was prepared to risk his electoral future to make that vision reality.

Can the same be said of our new New Democratic Party government?

While one can’t begin to compare the globally game-changing election of America’s first black president with the mere electoral victory of Nova Scotia’s first ever social democratic government, there is no question the NDP’s win last June (just six months after Obama’s) raised expectations—and hopes—here too.

Could Dexter’s NDP really do politics differently, or would it offer more of the same-old, same-old under a different brand? Did it a have a vision of a better tomorrow, or would it become another government with no higher calling than its own re-election?

The first six months have not been encouraging. Thanks to the MLA expenses scandal, the NDP has lost control of the governing-differently agenda. Whatever it does now will be seen as playing catch-up to public opinion. And it has allowed whatever higher-calling agenda it may have had to devolve into a dreary debate over raising taxes versus cutting spending.

The New Democrats are right that we must first—finally—get our financial house in order. But if that is all they accomplish, they will end up like the Chrétien-Martin Liberals who slayed the deficit dragon… but then? Good, but not game changing.

Yesterday’s throne speech was the government’s opportunity to “recalibrate,” to set out its own ambitious “more-than-any-election-night” agenda. Despite occasional rhetorical nods to tomorrow—“difficult choices now to ensure a better future later”—the speech itself was mostly a laundry listing of small accomplishments and modest expectations that could have been authored by a Liberal or Conservative government.

And not a defining moment in sight. Opportunity lost.