Shocked and appalled stocking stuffer

With the pre-holiday spate of comment-worthy local news and the upcoming holiday absence of venue to vent my inevitable shocked-and-appalled-at-it-all spleen, today’s column will be an assorted stocking stuffer. No charges in Home for Coloured Children investigation: I’m less shocked than I’d like. But winning convictions when allegations date back decades, involve children and include […]

The auditor general, the convention centre and the premier

One can understand Premier Darrell Dexter’s aggressive/defensive, head-in-the-convention-centre response to last week’s auditor general’s report. That report—which damned the shoddiness of the business case Trade Centre Ltd. concocted to justify a new convention centre—called on the government to launch an independent review of TCL’s numbers. Dexter was having none of it. TCL based its conclusions, […]

Nice guy finishes first. Now what?

The race for HRM mayor really began on February 6, 2012, when former Liberal MP Mike Savage—surrounded by a fawning, hopeful who’s who of 300 of the city’s most influential business and political makers and breakers—declared he would challenge long-past-his-best-before-date incumbent Peter Kelly.The campaign effectively ended two-and-a-half weeks later when Kelly—already mired in myriad self-made […]

Mike Savage needs to be more than Not Peter Kelly

With nominations closing tomorrow and the municipal election 40 days away, it is time—past time—for the campaign for mayor of the Halifax Regional Municipality to begin in earnest.Even if one quibbles with the fine print of the latest poll from a research company whose CEO is a supporter of candidate Mike Savage—and which shows him […]

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 […]

Back to the future in figuring our future

Is it time for another “Encounter on the Urban Environment”? In late February 1970, Nova Scotia’s Voluntary Planning Board invited a dozen disparate international experts—a black community leader, an industrialist, a labour leader, a journalist, an economist, an urban planner, etc.—to come to Halifax for a week-long “experiment utterly new to the western hemisphere.” […]

Peter Kelly's stadium dream our nightmare…

The stadium is dead. Long live the dream. But let’s keep it a dream instead of the reality turning into a taxpayers’ nightmare. A brief history is in order. Peter Kelly, our in-search-of-a-legacy-to-match-his-longevity mayor, has long been eager to have the city to erect an expensive new stadium, most recently—and urgently—in the faint hope we […]

The rise and fall—and fall—of Richard Homburg

By 2009, Richard Homburg’s glitzy, buzz-worthy annual office parties had become corporate Halifax’s post-Christmas social hot ticket. Two hundred of the city’s elite investors, investment advisors, developers, lawyers, accountants and assorted corporate hangers-on would gather in the January freeze to mix and mingle at Homburg Citadel, Homburg Invest’s global corporate headquarters. A modern building insinuated […]

Time to make transit an essential service… no, really

It’s time to make transit an essential service. By that, I don’t—necessarily—mean it’s time to take away bus drivers’ right to strike. What I do mean is that, however the current labour dispute ends, it’s long past time city council made transit a can’t-live-without service. And not just for those who, because they can’t afford […]

Goodbye Peter, hello future

Peter Kelly’s final mayoralty meltdown announcement last week was not triggered by any of the many mis-governance issues that should have long since ended his political career. Ironically, the mayor was ultimately hoist on the petard of his own sloppy-and-perhaps-worse handling of the estate of a friend, a private matter unrelated to his duties as […]