How does Emera afford to put its name on our skating oval?

It doesn’t You do. One way or the other… Solidarity Halifax’s quixotic campaign to rename the Commons skating oval isn’t likely to find many takers among cash-starved city councilors, but it should give the rest of us pause. How is it that Emera, the parent company of Nova Scotia Power, the private utility that keeps […]

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 […]

Graham Steele quits. And the most intriguing question is…

Last week’s surprise cabinet shuffle raises are all sorts of intriguing questions. For starters, did Finance Minister Graham Steele jump, or was he pushed? If he jumped, was it because of a tiff with Premier Darrell Dexter over the province’s fiscal future? Does Steele want Dexter’s job? If so, is quitting just a John-Turner/Jean-Chretien/Paul-Martin/Harry-Houdini return-to-win-another-day […]

Heath care contract: adding and subtracting

Last week’s to-the-edge-of-the-ledge, past-the-last-minute contract settlement between Capital Health and its 3,600 health workers raises all sorts of difficult but intriguing questions. The first, and most immediate, of course, is could the disruption—even without an actual strike, the anticipation cancelled 560 elective surgeries and emptied 172 beds—have been avoided? The short answer is probably not. […]

Debt? What debt?

The thing I don’t understand—one of many actually, but let’s start with this one—is whatever happened to the debt? Whenever governments decide to put us on short rations—as the NDP did after it came to power in 2009, as the federal Liberals did in the 1990s—they do their best to frighten us into submission with […]

Nova Scotia budget: the cost of cutting v the value of investing

In the all-too-brief interregnum between Thursday’s bad-news federal budget and tomorrow’s more-bad-news provincial budget, it’s worth noting the across-the-board, cost-cutting Kool Aid fiscal policy makers in Ottawa and Halifax have swallowed is not the only—or necessarily best—way to slay the deficit dragon. The Nova Scotia branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, for example, […]

Budget making 101… you be the finance minister

While not nearly as addictive as Angry Birds, spending a few hours with the province’s You-Be-The-Finance-Minister teeter-totter app—more prosaically known as backtobalance.ca—is entertaining. And depressingly, face-slappingly educational. The government created the interactive online budget-making tool as part of its pre-budget consultations. It allows taxpayers to virtually raise and/or reduce revenues and expenses—and immediately see the […]

When in Yarmouth… Politicians and the Hypocritic Oath

Progressive Conservative leader Jamie Baillie was in high dudgeon last week when he took his summer road show to Yarmouth to warn business leaders there about the terrible costs to our grandchildren’s grand kids because of our socialist-horde government’s “stubbornly… swimming-against-the-tide” tax policies. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but it’s summer. And Baillie himself was attempting […]

And the rich get… tax cuts

Last week, news reports about three economic reports thudded into my electronic in-basket. The first had to do with Canadian Business Magazine’s “The Rich List,” an annual compilation of who’s-worth-how-astronomically-much this week. Toronto’s Thomson family topped the list again with a net worth of $23.36 billion—yes, billion! As allnovascotia.com noted proudly, Maritime titans were well […]