Mike Savage, Peter Kelly, Rob Ford and keeping the bar low

Perhaps it’s as simple as the fact Mike Savage is not… oh, there are too many to choose from. His predecessor, for starters. Peter Kelly, the unlamented former mayor of Halifax whose major lasting legacy was his longevity in an office for which he was so obviously unsuited. He, belatedly, had the good sense to […]

The Home for Coloured Children: Time to Muzzle the Lawyers

For the lawyers, of course, it is about protecting the client, lessening liability, mitigating damages. In that context, perhaps, it makes lawyer sense to niggle over nouns, to parse phrases like “as if we were slaves” for literality, to offer up a bookkeeper’s balance sheet to contradict allegations of underfunding, to use all the lawyers’ […]

06/17/2013
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A mayor we can laugh with… Hey, it's a start

The good news — for all concerned — is that Mike Savage is not Brad Pitt. The better news is that he isn’t Bruce Banman either. Banman is the beleaguered mayor of Abbotsford, the currently virally — not to forget bacterially — in-the-news B.C. community where city officials recently scattered chicken manure around a homeless encampment […]

06/10/2013
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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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Promising promises on open government, but…

“People haven’t turned away from public affairs,” Mike Savage rightly told reporters recently as he unveiled the first official plank in his platform to become mayor of the Halifax Regional Municipality. “They’ve been turned away by secrecy, by lack of true accountability, by political self-interest and by lip service to real, honest and open public […]

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.” […]