Archive: July 2016

Transportation Minister Geoff MacLellan doesn’t want you to jump to conclusions. If he had his way, you wouldn’t know enough to jump to even the most preliminary conclusions. Unfortunately for him, Portland, Maine, requires Bay Ferries, operator of the Yarmouth-Portland ferry service, to submit a monthly accounting showing just how many passengers the Nova-Scotia-government-funded ferry […]

It is interesting — and perhaps instructive — to compare the McNeil government’s stealth, stroke-of-a-pen, done-and-dusted announcement it had clawed back a basic human right (a minimum wage) for teenaged hockey players with its aw-shucks, no-rush, we-just-want-what-you-want chorus for last week’s release of a study on twinning the province’s 100-series highways. The study itself was […]

Bobby Smith, majority owner of the Halifax Mooseheads, wasn’t available to talk to reporters last week about government changes to labour laws exempting his QMJHL team from paying its teenaged hockey players minimum wage, or vacation pay, or limiting the hours they work. No matter. The government’s press release helpfully quoted Smith, declaring teams like […]

Between playing a key role in putting down the Jacobite uprising at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 and being named Governor of Gibraltar in 1761, British Lieutenant General Edward Cornwallis served a three-year stint as the first Governor of Nova Scotia and, in the process, became the de-facto founder of Halifax, my hometown. For […]

It’s been a year since the Government of Nova Scotia’s surreal slashing of its film tax credit. Why did they do it? What did they hope to accomplish? How has it impacted production? Stephen Kimber investigates.  “Mr. Speaker, the tax credit is important, and it is a powerful tool to our economy… The film industry […]

If you failed to submit written objections to Judge Heather Robertson’s “Facilitator’s Report” on proposed Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Regional Park boundaries by 3 p.m., Monday, July 4, forget it. If your written objections ran to over three pages and you failed to submit 35 copies, no one will read them. No matter. It was too […]