Selected dispatches from last week’s “whoopsie” file

How many Conservative cabinet ministers does it take to mislead Canadians? Last weekend, Stephen Harper trotted out his own trusty troika — Defence Minister Rob Nicholson, Veterans Affairs Minister (sic) Julian Fantino and Justice Minister Peter MacKay — for a $200 million photo op/announcement during the Halifax International Security Forum, a.k.a. Peter’s Playground (official cost: […]

Leo Glavine: Mis-speaking oneself while saying the same thing

On Thursday, in the warm afterglow of a Throne speech that zeroed in on “unsustainable [public sector] wage increases” and promised a “hiring slow down and steps to achieve a more sustainable wage pattern,” Health Minister Leo Glavine was clear as glass. Premier Stephen McNeil’s government had had it up to here with recalcitrant health […]

AIMS aims to cover its…

“The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in Halifax has not responded to questions.” That nugget was nested in the last line, last paragraph of a Globe and Mail story last week about the Harper government’s efforts to “intimidate, muzzle and silence its critics.” Ottawa is spending $13.4 million so its tax auditors can descend, lotus-like, […]

The government’s craven; we’re stupid. I’m OK with that

“Nova Scotia’s shale potential will remain in the ground,” harrumphed Financial Post columnist Terence Corcoran. Blame “growth-killing theories and activists.” “The McNeil Liberals have nailed shut one more economic doorway,”fretted Chronicle-Herald columnist Marilla Stephenson. “It’s a sorry day for Nova Scotia,” tut-tutted her editorial overlings. “Fear is trumping science,” piled on the Toronto Sun’s Brian […]

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 […]

NSP and the convention centre: failures to communicate

What we have here, suggested Nova Scotia Power President and CEO Bob Hanf, is a failure to communicate. Lack of manpower? Don’t worry. Storm-unhardened infrastructure? Be happy. Despite close to a week to prepare for the Hurricane Arthur that had whooshed into a post-tropical shell of itself by the time it made landfall, NSP’s communications […]

Revolution rising

As the poor keep getting poorer, global uprisings get closer and closer. You have been warned. I’m a university professor. I make better than your average income. Although ours is not a union shop, our salaries reflect the successes of traditionally strong faculty unions at bigger institutions around us. I’ve also been teaching for […]

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 […]

Thanks for the apology, but it’s not enough

The federal justice department’s 19-page internal review into its role in the the Fenwick MacIntosh extradition process — Aug. 15, 1997 (“Nova Scotia Public Prosecution Service contacts the International Assistance Group to discuss potential extradition request”) to July 14, 2006 (“Canada formally requests extradition”) — has no named author. The review itself — which followed […]