Let us eat cake

Since 1971, Nova Scotians have been paying the price for Michelin’s success. And not just with grants and loans and the rest. We’ve been paying with our sovereignty and self-respect too. This column first appeared in the Halifax Examiner October 29, 2018. Granton, Nova Scotia: Michelin North America (Canada) Inc. today announced two new projects at […]

Thanks Stephen, Darrell, Rodney, et al… for ‘The Donald’?

If you want to understand the un-understandable appeal of Donald Trump, you could do worse than begin with Stephen McNeil. That is not as far-fetched as it might initially seem. We are not talking here about Stephen McNeil, the individual, but Stephen McNeil, the symbolic end result of far too many years of all-too-usual politics […]

Gary Burrill: the politics of hope, or hope for politics

Cast your mind back to October 9, 2013. The morning after the night before. Nova Scotia’s first ever NDP government had just morphed into Nova Scotia’s first one-term government in more than 130 years. The party that began its re-election campaign with 31 of 52 legislature seats hobbled across the finish line with seven shell-shocked […]

Principle v power and the NDP: discuss

So here’s the one-term wonder question. Why did Darrell Dexter’s New Democrats, who won so convincingly in Nova Scotia in 2009, lose even more convincingly in 2013? For NDP partisans, that question is more than academic. As they gear up to choose a new leader next February, they must divine what went so right we […]

Was Darrell Dexter right?

Metro/Jeff HarperThen Premier Darrell Dexter answers questions in this file photo. Perhaps Darrell Dexter was right. I mean the circa-2009 Darrell Dexter who — flushed with electoral victory and oozing political hubris — unleashed his freshly anointed pocket-calculator brigade on the question whether to keep propping up the Yarmouth-Portland ferry. The number of passengers had […]

State of the union

“SOMEONE TO SEE YOU.” Mike Hachey didn’t have time. Not today. He was in the process of sorting through paperwork dregs from last week’s Atlantic Lottery commercial shoot, planning a Canada Games event wrap-up, juggling planned/hoped-for/maybe pitches for future projects and overseeing – from the afar of Halifax – renovations at his company’s Moncton office. […]

Stephen McNeil, patronage and the benefit of the doubt

It is too soon to draw conclusions, but the patronage portents from Stephen McNeil’s first three months in power are not promising. First, there was the case of Glennie Langille, the defeated Liberal candidate and former party communications chief. Without benefit of a competition, McNeil handed her an $85,000-per-year plum as the province’s new chief […]

Will time tell on Stephen McNeil's new government?

One of the interesting early smoke signals from the new Liberal government is the one they aren’t sending — that the sky is falling. The Liberals did not, as the previous NDP government did, order up an immediate full-blown independent report on the state of the province’s finances, a report whose conclusions changed the course […]

What did the NDP do to deserve its electoral fate?

The question is why. Why — if you believe the polls — is Darrell Dexter’s NDP government heading for an ignominious defeat? Nova Scotia’s first-ever NDP government was hardly a disaster. It succeeded a Tory government that had careened out of fiscal control, stumbled into one of the world’s worst economic meltdowns, got sideswiped by […]

The leaders debate: Take it from me, I wasn't there

I confess up front I didn’t watch last week’s CBC leaders’ debate. There was a book launch — mine — at the same time and, well, you have to have your priorities. To make matters worse for a political columnist, I must also acknowledge I didn’t watch the full online, blow-by-blow, health-care-by-power-rates replay of the […]