Is it 2013? Let the campaign begin…

Forget this year’s faux feints and fevered fantasies. Two thousand and thirteen will be the year we get to pass electoral judgment on the government of Darrell Dexter. Will we decide, on balance and measured against his less-than-stellar competition, that Dexter has earned a second majority term? Or will we, seeing more potential than performance […]

Pat Connolly, R.I.P.

I didn’t go to journalism school. In a day when informal apprenticeship was the norm, I was lucky to learn my trade from its best practitioners: Nick Fillmore, the crusading editor of the feisty local alternative weekly, the 4th Estate; Harry Bruce, one of Canada’s finest magazine writers and essayists; and Pat Connolly, the legendary […]

The mill has been saved, the question remains

I have rewritten this column three times in the past three days as the on, then off, then on-again deal to re-start the NewPage mill in Point Tupper played itself out in after-hours news releases and hastily convened press conferences.But my essential question hasn’t changed. How much is more than too much? It’s far from […]

Electoral boundaries and passion… only in Nova Scotia… only in summer

We are at the drain end of August when the non-news of summer just repeats itself—Mayor Peter Kelly still refuses to rule out running for his old Bedford council seat; Lance Armstrong still proclaims his innocence; Conrad Black still wants his day in court—and no one, wisely, pays any mind.So I was surprised last week […]

The politician, the judge and the sentence

You can—in a law-school-essay, sentencing-guidelines way—justify Justice David MacAdam’s decision to sentence disgraced former MLA Richard Hurlburt to house arrest instead of clapping him off to jail. But not in the real world. Richard Hurlburt repeatedly violated the trust of his electors while bilking taxpayers of more than $25,000, and then attempted—until the truth trapped […]

Time to say thanks to convention centre doubters

I’m guessing you won’t find Philip Pacey, Beverly Miller, or the Save the View Coalition on developer Joe Ramia’s Christmas card list this year. But they should be on ours—and perhaps his too. Last week’s city council vote approving a memorandum of agreement between HRM and the province to build the new convention centre was […]

Fearless summer election prediction…

You know you must be heading into the silly, nothing-better-to-write-about summer season in politics—not to mention in the shelf life of any government—when commentators begin to twist every announcement, pronouncement, silence, head nod, eyebrow raise and weather report into an earnest discussion of whether said announcement, pronouncement, etc., increases or decreases the likelihood of a […]

Putting boundaries on an electoral boundaries commission

Premier Darrell Dexter is right that the province’s Electoral Boundaries Commission was wrong to ignore its mandate to eliminate designated minority ridings. But his government was wrong to force that mandate on the commission in the first place. Let’s rewind. There’s a legal requirement that an electoral boundaries commission be established every so often to […]

Emera salary increases: some questions, some answers

The news that senior executives at Emera and its wholly owned, profit-protected subsidiary, Nova Scotia Power, topped their million-plus, one-per-center-club-members-in-good-standing pay packets with raises from 20 to 30 per cent last year prompts all sorts of intriguing questions. For starters, how many of the company’s secretaries sat on the compensation committee? The short answer: none. […]

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.” […]