Nursing shortage? Why is the government making it worse?

So… Faced with a looming shortage of “several thousand” nurses over the next decade as our population both ages and also shrinks (read the Ivany Report; look around you), our new Liberal government responds by… Well, let me count the ways. The government alienates many current nurses by dismissing their concerns about patient safety as […]

Gas taxes, political hot air and the real questions

Given last week’s gas price gusher that propelled pump sticker shock beyond even the last record-breaking penny point set in 2012, it’s little wonder Premier Stephen McNeil rushed for the cover of a sort-of pledge to cut Nova Scotia’s portion of the harmonized sales tax it currently tacks on to the top of the taxes […]

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 […]

Welcome, Mr. Premier. And good luck…

Stephen McNeil doesn’t even have the key to the executive washroom — premier’s desk, top left-hand drawer — and his administration-in-eager-anticipation is already being sideswiped by economic events over which it has little control and less influence. Just two days after his Liberals were swept into office on an electoral toss-those-rascals-out-and-let’s-see-what-these-rascals-will-do roll of the dice, […]

What did the NDP do to deserve its electoral fate?

The question is why. Why — if you believe the polls — is Darrell Dexter’s NDP government heading for an ignominious defeat? Nova Scotia’s first-ever NDP government was hardly a disaster. It succeeded a Tory government that had careened out of fiscal control, stumbled into one of the world’s worst economic meltdowns, got sideswiped by […]

The leaders debate: Take it from me, I wasn't there

I confess up front I didn’t watch last week’s CBC leaders’ debate. There was a book launch — mine — at the same time and, well, you have to have your priorities. To make matters worse for a political columnist, I must also acknowledge I didn’t watch the full online, blow-by-blow, health-care-by-power-rates replay of the […]

Progressives and the NDP: making the hard choice

On June 23, 2012, 50 longtime NDP activists put the issue starkly in a j’accuse letter to Premier Darrell Dexter. “If the NDP now actually stands for anything fundamentally different, for any change from previous governments,” they wrote, more in angst than anger, “it is hard to see what it is. And if the NDP is […]

This is the campaign we spent 3 years waiting for?

What to make of Liberal leader Stephen McNeil’s plan to save taxpayers money by making Nova Scotia Power responsible for (and responsible for footing the bill for) what is now the regulated, arms’ length, non-profit — and working very well, thank you all the same — energy-reducing agency known as Efficiency Nova Scotia? The reality […]

The journalistic implications of fixed elections… dates

METRO LOGO GREEN Mr. Baillie, I must, respectfully, disagree. Last week, on the eve the possible election call that preceded the eve of the likely election call which was, thankfully, finally followed by the actual election call, Conservative leader Jamie Baillie declared that, if elected, he would introduce legislation to set fixed provincial election dates. […]