Politicians’ snake oil hopes and dreams meet economic, environmental reality

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner May 7, 2018. You can draw a neat, straight line. Start with the October 5, 1971, front page of the Halifax Chronicle Herald, with its photo of a beaming Premier Gerald Regan holding a tiny vial of oil supposedly sucked to the surface during offshore drilling off Nova Scotia. […]

What a difference a minister makes

What a difference a minister makes. When he was Nova Scotia’s minister of the environment, Randy Delorey presided over a public consultation process to determine what Nova Scotia should do next about what we discard. His department received 260 written submissions, the majority of which focused on what environmental bureaucrats like to call “extended producer […]

Northern Pulp, the Sobeys and the lessons unlearned

Nova Scotia is a small, interconnected, even inbred political, economic and social ecosystem. So it was intriguing last month to hear former Empire CEO Paul Sobey publicly rail against the dense “haze of emissions” spewing forth daily from Pictou County’s Northern Pulp mill, stinking up the community in which he lives and in which his […]

Dear Darrell… unsolicited advice

Dear Darrell, As you begin your second full year—summers don’t count in Nova Scotia—as premier of all you survey, allow me to offer some gratuitous, unsolicited and unlikely to be appreciated advice. (But given your government’s precipitous free-fall from electoral grace, you need all the advice you can get.) First, stop trying to be a […]