The Cat, the commitment and the costly complication

“Let me be clear,” Stephen McNeil said clearly last August even after Nova Star’s cash-sucking Yarmouth-Portland ferry had taken on sinking-level financial water. “As premier I’m committed to that link to the New England States… to a ferry service from Yarmouth.” Our question today. As Nova Star’s replacement — Bay Ferries high-speed Cat — sails […]

Trinity Law School: ‘discomforting’ our comfortable bar society

The Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society is pondering appealing July’s Nova Scotia Court of Appeals decision green-lighting graduates of Trinity Western University Law School to ply their trade in Nova Scotia. But, in a post-decision interview, the society’s president almost seemed to be making the case for the conservative Christian university, which requires students to sign […]

Taxi sexual assaults: Is there too much focus on what women ‘can do’?

Last week, Halifax police outlined what women who take cabs “can do for their own personal safety.” The warnings follow a spike in reported sexual assaults in taxis: five in the last year, three in the last month. Women should: telephone, rather than hail a taxi so there’s a record of their call; note […]

Yarmouth ferry: We pay money, Portland makes money

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 […]

Do elections toll for us?

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 […]

Do teenage athletes playing for for-profit teams deserve the same protections as other workers?

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 […]

Robertson’s independent facilitator’s report: independent? facilitator?

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 […]

P3s: Do we trust the McNeil government to act in our interest, or in the interest of its own re-election?

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives recently released an evaluation of the 1990s private-public partnership (P3) program under which four private contractors built 39 public schools they then leased back to Nova Scotia. P3 shell-game deals are “typically used to conceal government expenditures and provide guaranteed long-term profits for contractors.” In Nova Scotia, the CCPA […]

Dr. Gabrielle Horne and the lessons not learned

Call it vindication. But — after 14 years, four premiers, three changes of government, the merging of nine regional health authorities into one and a there-must-be-an-end, 33-day trial — don’t call it victory. On Friday in a landmark decision, a seven-member civil jury awarded Halifax cardiologist Gabrielle Horne $1.4 million in damages, her legal fees […]

Journalism: From Howe to how-not-to

There is, it is fair to say, nothing new in the incestuous relationship between journalism and politics. Joseph Howe was a journalist — can you say freedom of the press? — before he (belatedly) became our father who art in confederation. The 27th premier of Nova Scotia — a.k.a. Darrell Dexter — trained as a […]