Entitled to their entitlements, aboriginal edition

The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation is right. There, I’ve said it. And it only hurt a little. While I can—and do, and will—dispute the larger goals of this never-met-a-public-expenditure-it-can-stomach crowd, the CTF did discover real slime under its latest freedom-of-information rock. Though there are only a million aboriginals in Canada, 82 reserve politicians “earned” more than […]

Has the NDP found its governing groove?

Have Darrell Dexter’s New Democrats finally, belatedly discovered their governing groove? When Nova Scotia’s first democratic socialist government arrived at the governing starting gate in June 2009, they were already saddled with an embarrassment of their own making—how to renege, almost yesterday, on virtually every promise they’d made to get elected: a balanced budget, no […]

TYP: It all began in a duck blind

What became the “most important (educational) program ever” for Nova Scotia’s black and aboriginal communities began inauspiciously enough in a duck blind in the middle of the Nova Scotia nowhere. Dalhousie University’s Transition Year Program—a unique-for-its-time scheme to bring marginalized black and native students into the academic mainstream through a year-long process to “transition” them […]

Keep hate laws for real haters

It’s difficult to summon a scintilla of sympathy for the Rehberg brothers. Twenty-year-old Justin was convicted Friday of criminal harassment and inciting hatred against blacks by setting a two-metre cross ablaze last February in front of the Hants County home of a mixed-race couple. His brother Nathan faces similar charges this week. But since this […]

Best interests of the child (care system)

Remember that Cole Harbour kid who had so many complex emotional issues and acronym-saturated syndromes the province’s community services department decided the only possible solution was to put him in a residential care facility where he could be helped 24 hours a day on a long-term, continuing basis? And remember there wasn’t such an institution […]

Convention centre choices—with consequences

CBC Radio’s Mainstreet host, Stephanie Domet, had an interesting conversation last week with federal Liberal MP Scott Brison and former provincial PC leadership candidate Bill Black. The topic: taming Nova Scotia’s debt woes. While Black in particular had many thoughtful things to say, I was intrigued by his answer to one question. Does it really […]

The convention centre gamble that isn't

So Darrell Dexter’s government has decided to gamble $163.5 million of our tax dollars over the next 25 years on a spiffy new, super-sized, half-billion-dollar downtown-convention-centre-bunker-hotel-and-office-tower complex we may or may not be able to fill five years from now. That reckoning—conveniently and perhaps not coincidentally—will coincide nicely with when the bills actually begin to […]

Doing the right thing the wrong way

It has been a crazy rollercoaster of a pin-balling, ping-ponged week for those of us who get our knickers knotted about seemingly esoteric matters like public access to public information and government accountability. But all’s well that ends well… sort of. Let’s start with NDP MLA Howard Epstein’s “inadvertent” leak of confidential caucus information indicating […]

The troubled child and the vindictive state

Is it possible nanny-state community services officials have decided to punish the grandparents of a boy who dared question their decision to send him out of province for treatment by dumping him back in their laps with minimal supports, setting them—and him—up for I-told-you-so failure? That seems the most rational conclusion after reading the vague […]

Beware Canadian Taxpayer tea party

The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation is right to raise alarms about the growing inequity between generous pensions paid politicians and the reality too many in the private sector have inadequate, or no pensions … Uh… right… That isn’t exactly what the libertarian-when-it-suits-them CTF has its knickers in a knot about. The CTF—which bills itself as a […]