Convergys diverging: Don't pay us, we won't call you

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

Convergys diverging: Don't pay us, we won't call you

On Tuesday, 300 employees at the Convergys call centre in Cornwallis got the bad news. Their employer—in the euphemistic-speak favoured by bad-news-delivering companies everywhere—had decided to “transition” their jobs elsewhere “to better serve its clients by increasing efficiencies and reducing costs.” They’d been fired. The reason: a six-year government payroll rebate program that initially lured […]

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

Weep not for 'unrepresented' business interests

So here’s my question. Who speaks for workers in the 82 per cent of businesses in Nova Scotia whose employees are not represented by a union? I ask this in light of the recent foofarah over Bill 100, the innocuous-sounding Act to Establish a Unified Labour Board. The Dexter government claimed it was merely tinkering—merging […]

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

And the rich get… tax cuts

Last week, news reports about three economic reports thudded into my electronic in-basket. The first had to do with Canadian Business Magazine’s “The Rich List,” an annual compilation of who’s-worth-how-astronomically-much this week. Toronto’s Thomson family topped the list again with a net worth of $23.36 billion—yes, billion! As allnovascotia.com noted proudly, Maritime titans were well […]

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

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 […]

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

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 […]

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

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 […]

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

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 […]

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

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 […]

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

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 […]

Stephen Kimber’s freelance journalism appears in local, regional, national and international publications.

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 […]

Stephen Kimber

Freelance