Box office scandal: change the contract, change the council

What are we to make of the latest tongue-clucking, finger-pointing, eye-rolling, so’s-your-old-lady response to last week’s auditor general’s report on the ongoing, never-ending screw-ups at the intersection of Halifax Regional Municipality, Metro Centre and Trade Centre Ltd.? Following up on last year’s cash-for-concerts scandal—let’s not revisit that—Halifax A-G Larry Munroe discovered a murky, virtually undocumented […]

Time to say thanks to convention centre doubters

I’m guessing you won’t find Philip Pacey, Beverly Miller, or the Save the View Coalition on developer Joe Ramia’s Christmas card list this year. But they should be on ours—and perhaps his too. Last week’s city council vote approving a memorandum of agreement between HRM and the province to build the new convention centre was […]

Punishing the "good guy" who did wrong

I don’t envy Justice David MacAdam. Between now and July 27, he must parse the image of Richard Hurlburt as presented in court last week by his friends and colleagues—the “all around good guy” and pillar of his community who never met a community cause he did not support—with the convicted felon who calculatedly bilked […]

Fearless summer election prediction…

You know you must be heading into the silly, nothing-better-to-write-about summer season in politics—not to mention in the shelf life of any government—when commentators begin to twist every announcement, pronouncement, silence, head nod, eyebrow raise and weather report into an earnest discussion of whether said announcement, pronouncement, etc., increases or decreases the likelihood of a […]

Peter and the secret handshake?

Why is Peter MacKay still in the federal cabinet? I mean, really. Let us traipse through the potato patch of what should have been the meteoric down and down, and down some more career trajectory of our man in Ottawa, a man most famous for his love life, his entitled-to-his-entitlements adventures on our dime and […]

Putting boundaries on an electoral boundaries commission

Premier Darrell Dexter is right that the province’s Electoral Boundaries Commission was wrong to ignore its mandate to eliminate designated minority ridings. But his government was wrong to force that mandate on the commission in the first place. Let’s rewind. There’s a legal requirement that an electoral boundaries commission be established every so often to […]

Graham Steele quits. And the most intriguing question is…

Last week’s surprise cabinet shuffle raises are all sorts of intriguing questions. For starters, did Finance Minister Graham Steele jump, or was he pushed? If he jumped, was it because of a tiff with Premier Darrell Dexter over the province’s fiscal future? Does Steele want Dexter’s job? If so, is quitting just a John-Turner/Jean-Chretien/Paul-Martin/Harry-Houdini return-to-win-another-day […]

Promising promises on open government, but…

“People haven’t turned away from public affairs,” Mike Savage rightly told reporters recently as he unveiled the first official plank in his platform to become mayor of the Halifax Regional Municipality. “They’ve been turned away by secrecy, by lack of true accountability, by political self-interest and by lip service to real, honest and open public […]

Emera salary increases: some questions, some answers

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. […]

The Great Yellow Jesus T-Shirt Fooforaw finally finishes

One hopes there was more to last week’s Great Yellow Jesus T-Shirt Fooforaw than we now know. One hopes. Otherwise… What we do know is that William Swinimer, 19, a Grade 12 student at Forest Heights Community School in Chester Basin, a born-again Christian and member of the Jesus the Good Shepherd Pentecostal Church in […]