Beware taxpayers defenders defending corporate rip-offs
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.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
What Havana could teach Halifax
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.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
The question that matters goes unanswered
So what was the money for?
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.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
NDP throne speech no defining moment
Pundits are calling passage of Barack Obama’s health care legislation last weekend historic, and a defining moment for his presidency.
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.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Africville apology an historic moment
Wednesday’s historic agreement between the City of Halifax and the former residents of Africville, which was intended to turn the page on their bitter 40-year dispute, did not please everyone. How could it? The old wounds run too deep; the new hurts remain too raw.
Make no mistake. There are legitimate questions to ask about what is—and isn’t—in this deal.
Should the former residents have received individual compensation, for example, for what the city now acknowledges was a mistake that “disrupted” their lives and whose “repercussions [continue to] haunt us in the form of lost opportunities for young people”?
Should there be a public inquiry that could explore and expose what really happened? And why?
And there are other issues. Will the Seaview Baptist Church be rebuilt on its former location or, as some fear, on the edge of what is now called Seaview Park? On the outside again. Looking in.
Will the promised “African Nova Scotian Affairs function” within HRM be a genuine effort to improve the lot of black Haligonians? Or yet another game of smoke and mirrors?
Those are reasonable questions. They need to be asked and answered.
But not today.
Today, it is worth pausing briefly to savour the historic and profound nature of what actually happened this week in a basement gymnasium at the north end Community Y.
The City of Halifax, on behalf of all of us, said it was sorry.
As Mayor Peter Kelly explained to the hundreds of people gathered in the gym, many of them former Africville residents and their children: “You need someone from government to stand before you, to look you in the eyes and to say from the bottom of our hearts, ‘We are sorry.’”
This was not a weasel apology, not a we’re-sorry-if-we-hurt-your-feelings non apology. Nor was it an explanation-apology, one of those, those-were-different-time-and-we-meant-well-and-we’re-sort-of-sorry faux apologies.
In the course of 309 words over three minutes and 14 seconds, Mayor Peter Kelly used the word “apologize” seven times. He also said “we are profoundly sorry” and “we ask your forgiveness.”
While not glossing over the past, he made the point that, while “history can not be rewritten… the future is a blank page and, starting today, we hold the pen with which we can write a shared tomorrow.”
After last weekend’s Hants County cross-burning and this week’s city hall protest by municipal employees protesting racism in the workplace, a blank page would be nice.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Tracey turns 19
“You’re wearing my sneakers.” The voice—hard, flat, insistent—is coming from behind us in the line at the A&W in the food court at Scotia Square. I turn to see who it is. She’s a big girl, probably in her late teens, blonde hair pulled back tight against her skull, a belligerent, don’t-fuck-with-me look permanent-markered onto her face. She pays no attention to me.
“I want my sneakers,” she menaces Tracey. “Take ‘em off. Now.”
Tracey doesn’t flinch. She’s half the other girl’s size, almost waif-like, delicate but not really. How could she be, considering? She looks the other girl in the eye. She’s not defiant, but not cowed either. “Heather said I could wear them,” she replies evenly. “Until I get my own.”
Heather, it turns out, is Belligerent Girl’s sister. Heather’s letting Tracey stay in her apartment until Tracey gets her first welfare cheque next week. She also let Tracey borrow her sister’s sneakers because… well, because Tracey’s last boyfriend gave away all her clothes.
That’s another story. There are lots of other stories. We’ve come here today so I can hear a few.
By the time Tracey’s Crispy Chicken Burger combo arrives, Belligerent Girl---seemingly uncertain how to respond to Tracey’s Zen-like calmness---has retreated to a nearby table where she continues to complain loudly about the sneakers to a seatmate.
Despite the fact Tracey has no money for food and probably hasn’t eaten all day, she picks at the meal I buy her. She’s lost 50 pounds in the past two years, she tells me. “I moved from place to place a lot,” she explains. “And I didn’t eat.”
“So,” I ask Tracey, not sure where to begin, “why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to since the last time we met?”
That was more than two years ago, in the summer of 2007. I was researching a story for The Coast (“Lost Children,” Oct. 25, 2007) about kids who’d fallen through the cracks in the child welfare system. At the time, Tracey was just 16, and a poster child for the gaping abyss that system had become.
Back in 1999, when she was eight, Nova Scotia’s Community Services Department took Tracey away from her mother because---it claimed---it could do a better job raising her.
That shouldn’t have been hard. Tracey’s mother Alison was in foster care herself when she became pregnant for the first time at 15. By the time she was 21, she’d had four children by four fathers. Tracey, her third, was the only one she parented for long. During Tracey’s first few years, they lived in five provinces with more men than Tracey can remember, at least two of whom Tracey witnessed assaulting her mother.
When Tracey was six and living in a Dartmouth welfare hotel with Alison and an ex-husband who wasn’t supposed to be there, social workers scooped her up and placed her in temporary care. Two years later, a judge made the provincial custody order permanent.
But Community Services did no better---perhaps worse---than Tracey’s mother as her “parent.” She was shuffled from foster home to foster home (six or seven by her count), and when those options were exhausted, into one group home after another.
At first, authorities refused to allow Tracey and her mother to see each other. When she was 12, they finally gave Tracey permission to write letters to her mother, but didn’t let her read her mother’s replies---or even tell her she’d written back.
Mother and daughter finally found each other in the winter of 2005---to the chagrin of social workers who got a court order to keep mother and daughter apart, and then threatened to charge Alison with kidnapping after Tracey ran away from her group home to be with her.
That’s when Tracey started acting out. Though she’d never been in legal trouble before, Tracey began racking up criminal charges soon after she was returned to the group home. By the spring of 2007, she was facing 32 criminal charges, all related to her behaviour at the group home.
In court, her lawyer told the judge Tracey needed intense, daily psychiatric treatment on a long-term basis. Since that treatment wasn’t available in Nova Scotia, the lawyer said, the only person “who can do anything” to help Tracey was Judy Streatch, the then-minister of community services and the official legal guardian for all of the 2,000 children in care in Nova Scotia. So the frustrated judge ordered Streatch to personally attend a case conference to discuss how to make sure Tracey got the help everyone agreed she needed.
Demanding a cabinet minister personally come to court to deal with the case of an individual child created the predictable political firestorm; the order was rescinded.
In the end, Tracey eventually pleaded guilty to the charges and was placed on probation until December 2008.
After that… she disappeared again, and—though no one would admit it—the simple truth is that the authorities gave up wanting to find her. She’d become more trouble than she was worth.
At first, Tracey tells me, she moved in with her boyfriend’s family in Spryfield, but “we were fighting too much and the police got called,” so the family told her to leave.
She ended up—briefly—at her mother’s apartment. Her mother kicked her out in the middle of the second night. “We were sharing the pullout couch—her boyfriend was sleeping on the mattress—and she got mad because I was rubbing my feet together. That’s how I get to sleep. But it made her mad.”
Tracey had to walk barefoot back to Spryfield where her now ex-boyfriend’s family let her live in a tent in the backyard. But she wasn’t allowed into the house to shower or wash her clothes. “I had to go downtown for that.”
To make matters worse, she and the ex-boyfriend got into another fight. “There were, like, six police cars and they had police dogs.” The police packed her off to Bryony House, an emergency shelter for abused women and children. Then to Adsum House, which provides housing and support to women and children, as well as young girls over 16 with no place to go.
“It didn’t work out,” Tracey tells me simply.
So she went to Alberta to spend time with a sister she’d never met before. That lasted three weeks. “I got blamed when $1,700 disappeared, but I never took it,” she insists. After that, Tracey made her way to Ottawa to renew acquaintances with the father she hadn’t seen in 10 years.
“It felt weird at first,” she tells me. “He looked way different. I thought he was tall, but he wasn’t. And he’d gained a lot of weight. And lost a lot of hair.”
Still, she recalls those two months with her father with what now seems like nostalgia. “We’d walk the dog together everyday,” she says. “And then in April we went to Weed Day on some hill up in Ottawa. After, we went to one of his friends’ houses and he made us burgers. Then we went home and watched TV.”
But Tracey missed her friends back in Halifax—the street kids who are the only real family she’s ever known—so one day in late June she simply hopped a bus back east. “I left my dad part of my welfare cheque for rent,” she tells me.
Back in Halifax this past summer, another boyfriend gave away all her clothes after she decided to break up with him. Now she spends Monday and Friday afternoons slowly replenishing her wardrobe from the bins at a local shelter. “I’m particular about my clothes,” she tells me.
Today, she’ll need to look for sneakers.
But her main task is to apply for her first adult welfare cheque. In early October, Tracey turned 19, which meant she was finally, officially, free of the child welfare system.
Where was child protection services while she was wandering, unprotected, across the country, I wonder?
Tracey says she met with her social worker a few times a month whenever she was in Halifax, mostly to get her cheque—roughly $150 a month. “We’d have coffee and sometimes she’d drive me to wherever I was staying,” Tracey explains. “And I could call if I needed help.” Her last social worker, a woman named Jackie, “was the best one.”
What’s next? “I’m a woman now,” Tracey says simply. “I have to take care of myself.” But she admits she’s “scared… it’s going to be tough.”
Once she gets her first welfare cheque, she says, she plans to find an apartment, and then apply for a passport and her beginner’s licence, and begin looking for a job.
It won’t be easy. Officially, she dropped out after Grade 9; unofficially, she admits she’s tested at a Grade 5 or 6 reading level. She’s tried alternate school programs but gave up. “I’d rather be with my friends,” she tells me.
Part of the problem is that Tracey can’t concentrate—she never did get the help her lawyer said she needed—which will inevitably become an issue whenever she applies for a job. “I can’t work fulltime.”
It’s hard not to ask yourself whether Tracey, in the end, is any better off for having spent a decade as a ward of the state.
“Do you think you’ve gained anything at all, being in care?” I ask her finally.
She takes a bite of her burger, chews, considers. Finally, she shrugs. “Not really,” she says. “Not really.”
Copyright 2009 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.