Brad Johns won’t ban NDAs, won’t say why. Why? We thought you’d never ask

Nova Scotia Justice Minister Brad Johns chairs a meeting of the Law Amendments Committee in Halifax on Monday, April 3, 2023. Let me recap. It’s confusing. But perhaps not really. Last year, Justice Minister Brad Johns, under pressure from the opposition and others to bring in legislation to ban the use of non-disclosure agreements — […]

Politicians fixing freedom of information legislation? Don’t hold your breath

“I had hoped that more than halfway through my five-year term as Information and Privacy Commissioner for Nova Scotia, I would be able to report better news and not have to repeat that the same challenges continue to plague the [Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner] despite our best efforts to resolve them… Unlike […]

Making sense out of public opinion polling nonsense

Nobody asked me. But among those 605 Nova Scotians who are not me but who were asked in a Narrative Research telephone survey conducted between November 2 and November 28, 2002 — it apparently takes a long time these days to find 605 people who still have phones and will not only pick up their […]

Our new premier seems comfortable in his own skin

It’s early and it doesn’t mean we’ll like where he leads us, but Tim Houston’s human responses to his early missteps are refreshing when compared to Angry Stephen McNeil and his successor, the Puppet Masters’ Script Reader. It’s a… start. I was listening — but distractedly — to the latest provincial COVID briefing last week, […]

Time for full disclosure on how many public dollars we really paid private lawyers to defend healthcare bullies

Tim Houston’s new government deserves credit for releasing a blacked-out 13-year-old document showing how much a previous government claimed to have spent on private lawyers in the Dr. Gabrielle Horne case. Trouble is that number isn’t new — or anywhere near complete. It’s time for actual full disclosure. Jean Laroche, the CBC’s veteran legislature reporter, […]

Are you listening, Minister MacFarlane?

No one — not the overworked, understaffed social workers trying to cope with messes they didn’t make in a bureaucracy they can’t control, not the family court lawyers and judges tasked with enforcing the unreasonable, not the family and children’s advocates trying to change the unchanging, and certainly not the parents and children trapped inside […]

Border crossed

Iain Rankin closed a border, Elizabeth Smith-McCrossin courted the crazed and Tim Houston made his Hobson’s choice between principle and power. After which he dumped Smith-McCrossin. Oh, and then Rankin reopened the border after all. Welcome to another week in pre-election Nova Scotia. Tim Houston did the right thing, and it may cost him a […]

Hugh MacKay and our I-know-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing premier

Why is it so hard for Stephen McNeil to acknowledge mistakes were made, let alone admit he or anyone in his orbit ever does anything wrong? The latest Hugh MacKay drunk-driving allegations offer a premier case study in Trumpian counterattack, obfuscation and butt-covering. Stephen McNeil insists he knew nothing, his chief of staff did nothing […]

The Sackville-Cobequid byelection: seeking meaning in the meaningless

It is way too early to read anything of significance from a single constituency byelection in the muddling middle of any government’s mandate. But let’s give it a shot… “Steve Craig won the byelection for MLA in Sackville-Cobequid… The district has long been solidly NDP, so a PC victory is notable, but I wouldn’t read […]