Bad week for Nova Star; worse weeks to come for us

It was not a good week for Nova Star Cruises, the operators of the Yarmouth-Portland ferry. But it may turn out to have been an even worse week for Stephen McNeil’s Liberal government. Let’s start with Nova Star. Last Tuesday, CEO Mark Amundsen announced it had reached a multi-year deal with Euroferries Express Ltd. to […]

Privatizing public services: electoral gain for economic pain

So, let me see if I understand this correctly. Nova Scotia’s Department of Motor Vehicles takes in $120 million a year to register vehicles, peddle license plates, test drivers, promote highway safety, etc. The DMV costs $30-35 million a year to operate, meaning it nets the provincial treasury $85-90 million a year. But the DMV’s […]

Stephen McNeil thinks we need electoral reform; just don’t ask him to do anything about it…

There is something rich — and richly ironic — hearing Stephen McNeil fret about the number of voters who didn’t bother to cast ballots in last week’s three provincial by-elections. McNeil, after all, chose the date. He could have called the by-elections for late spring when voters might conceivably have been more engaged. Instead, he picked […]

Why haven’t we Evolved?

Let’s begin with a worst-case-scenario hypothetical. A young woman attending last weekend’s Evolve Music Festival — Antigonish’s three-day “celebration of music, culture, and social awareness” — decides she wants to alter her mind with some mind-altering substance. She asks around, discovers a guy selling what she thinks she wants to buy. She buys. She takes. […]

Who killed Mills Brothers?

Who killed Mills Brothers? The iconic Spring Garden Road women’s retailer — which launched in 1919 when “carriage trade” was still more literal than metaphorical — shuttered its sliding doors Tuesday. It disappeared into receivership, putting 20 employees — some of whom had greeted customers for 30 years — out of work. Perhaps it’s because […]

To keep grads in Nova Scotia, we have to first attract students

The Halifax Partnership, the community economic development organization set up to — ta-da! — “bring private and public sector stakeholders together to create prosperity,” says Halifax needs to “focus on creating opportunities for recent graduates, both domestic and international, to enter the local labour force.” That’s the key take-away — perhaps penetrating glimpse into the […]

Nova Scotia’s generational highway mega projects: an idea whose time has gone?

On Friday, the government issued a request for proposals for a $1.5-million study to figure out whether to twin eight sections of 100-series highways and — as importantly — how to raise the $1.5 billion that will be needed to complete what Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal Minister Geoff MacLellan calls a “once-in-a-generation set of mega-projects.” […]

Abolish the senate? Ask the people

Quick now. Name me 10 things Nova Scotia’s 10 partisan, unelected senators have done in the past 10 years to influence federal laws or policies to protect Nova Scotia’s interests in ways that, say, our 11 partisan, politically elected members of parliament have not. Okay, five things in five years? One in one? Too difficult? […]

When the United Way stated the obvious, the CFIB hit the fan

Really? Last week, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, a progressive think tank, published a meticulously detailed, 62-page, 72-footnote report commissioned by Halifax’s United Way. Its purpose: to determine how much it takes for someone in Halifax to be “Working for a Living, Not Living to Work.” Which is when the small business hit the […]

So long, Peter, we knew you too well

Is Peter MacKay resigning from federal politics to spend time with his growing greeting-card-perfect family? Or to grease a personal private sector future filled with lucrative corporate board memberships and international consulting gigs, nicely anchored by a 20-year MP’s pension worth almost two-and-a-half times the average Canadian salary? Or to jump the listing Harper ship […]