Tagged: Darrell Dexter
Jobs and politics, NDP style — “That’s just wrong.”
Nova Scotia’s New Democratic Party is wasting no time making hay in the sunshine of its Bowater bailout with a direct-mail flyer that’s sure to infuriate opposition parties.
The one-page card, featuring a photo of Premier Darrell Dester and Queens MLA Vicki Conrad, will start appearing in South Shore mailboxes this week. It uses Chronicle-Herald headlines to highlight the Dexter Government’s rescue of the financially shaky newsprint mill, contrasting it with a jaundiced appraisal of opposition efforts.
The NDP government is protecting 2,000 jobs with an investment in the mill workers and the Bowater Mersey pulp and paper mill in Queens County by targeting help in training, energy efficiency, and productivity improvements….
During difficult times, the people of the South Shore stood together. And I am proud to say the Government of Nova Scotia stood right there with you. — Premier Darrell Dexter
But those opposition scoundrels?
The Liberals and Tories are still doing old-style politics.
They are opposing the deal to save 2000 jobs.
But they won’t put forward a plan of their own.
That’s just wrong.
Ouch. Could this be the first volley in the 2012 election campaign?
First contract legislation — rebuttal
Doing a little catch-up here after a week of long-distance travel on short notice. Scott Gillard, constituency assistant to MLA Howard Epstein, objected to the inference I drew from a brief first-contract strike at Summer Street Industries in New Glasgow, where professional union negotiators pursued rigid workplace rules with wilful indifference to the rights and sensibilities of the developmentally challenged men and women that organization serves.
The CUPE functionaries failed, thanks in part to pushback from their own members. Had the NDP government’s first-contract arbitration had been in place, I suggested, an arbitrator ignorant of disabilities issues could have effectively wrecked a wonderful non-profit organization. Gillard calls this the “my cousin Louise” argument:
No matter how valid the legislation, in this case, may be there will always be someone (my cousin Louise) who can share an exception to its effectiveness. I think it is a red herring. To oppose Bill 102 on the basis that, in a specific situation, it would not have served its intended purpose is a bit much.
Darrell Dexter - Throwing a bone (Tim Krochak phot/Chronicle-Herald)
You may have been able to provide and example of an exception to the benefit of the legislation but whether you are right or wrong on the implications of the legislation in this situation is irrelevant. Finding a specific situation where something may not work falls short of making a convincing case in opposition.
Good legislation is hopefully the goal of government. No government assumes their legislation is perfect. Frankly, it’s just this type of argument that reminds us of the complexity of a government’s legislative agenda. There’s always going to be a “my cousin Louise” type exception.
Gillard has a point. I was arguing from a very specific, though not unique, set of facts. and they have limited application to disputes involving conventional businesses. To be completely honest, I saw the first contract arbitration issue as an opportunity to lay out the disgraceful behaviour of a union that thinks of itself as progressive.
But what’s the case for Bill 102? What bad situation will it remedy?. Union people say over and over that collective bargaining works in Nova Scotia. For the most part, I think they are right. Why not let it play out? Why impose settlements on unwilling parties? After the jump, Gillard responds: Read more »
Ships start singing here
The Canadian Beaver Band offers a jaundiced musical view of Halifax’s spankin’ new ship contract [possibly NSW].
H/T: Charlie Phillips
Who cares about the presumption of innocence? Citizens, yes; Dexter government, not so much
Everyone knew the NDP, once in power, would have to put some water in its red wine. In fact, Darrell Dexter began the process long before winning the 2009 election, and most voters approve the moderating effect of incumbency.
But there’s a difference between moderating extreme views and abandoning core democratic principles as the Dexter Government has done in its embrace of the Civil Forfeiture Act.
The act gives police and prosecutors a way around the presumption of innocence that has guided civilized countries for centuries. Simply put, it lets police set aside the bother of building a criminal case and proceed, Queen of Hearts-like, directly to punishment. Along the way, the hard won safeguards to protect the innocent fall by the wayside.
In Cape Breton, where police have used the act to punish entire families — poor families — because they lacked the evidence to prosecute one suspect in a household, listeners have bombarded the CBC station with messages of outrage. The Dexter government may have swallowed Stephen Harper’s tough-on-crime agenda, but Cape Bretoners still hold dear the democratic principles Canadian soldiers fought and died for in two world wars.
Ross Landry was on CBC Cape Breton’s Information Morning program a few minutes ago, reading empty talking points to defend this disgraceful abuse of power.
Consider this post a placeholder until the interview goes up on the station’s website and I can find time to dissect in in greater detail.
Random thoughts on the Cape Breton North results
With the coal mining neighborhoods of Sydney Mines, Florence, Bras d’Or, and Alder Point, and the unionized workforce at Marine Atlantic in North Sydney, Cape Breton North ought to be fertile ground for the NDP. Instead, except for a single election in 1978, it has brought the party nothing but heartache.
In a 2001 by-election, it put an early end to Helen MacDonald’s term as leader, passing her up in favor of Cecil Clarke, who insisted the riding needed a member on the Hamm government’s side. In the 2009 NDP, it stopped 165 votes short of joining the massive NDP tide. Last week, it handed the NDP government a humbling defeat, knocking more than 1,000 votes off the party’s general election tally (or roughly 800 after adjusting for reduced turnout).
Some random thoughts on the implications for all three parties:
- The NDP retain their grip on Metro, but the they appear to have frittered away the gains they made elsewhere. Some of this is because they have taken necessary but unpopular steps, like grabbing the HST points abandoned by the feds, and insisting school boards start cutting their garments to fit their cloth. They may have been right to abandon subsidies to the Yarmouth Ferry, but they have been deaf to the hardship this imposed on the region. They were certainly right to abandon the foolhardy pledge to keep emergency rooms open, but having campaigned prominently on that cynical promise in the general election, how did they expect places like Cape Breton North to react where its ER is continually closed? By moving a planned jail from Springhill, where they have no member, to Pictou County, where they have three, the NDP have put that riding out of reach for a decade or more. Doing the right thing is hard. It requires persuasive leadership of a kind the cautious Dexter HQ has so far failed to exhibit.
- Everyone has been waiting to see whether Stephen McNeil or Jamie Baillie would emerge as the main challenger in the next election. The CB North results give Baillie a major boost toward premier-in-waiting status. Disclosure: I’ve known Jamie for years, both professionally and as a friend. I like him, and think he’d make a good premier, but his position on education cuts is irresponsible. It’s all very well to embrace education as a motherhood issue, but he knows as well as Graham Steele that continual budget increases in the face of plummeting enrolments are unsustainable. Instead of offering innovative solutions to that intractable problem, Baillie and his candidate pandered to the entrenched we-can-have-everything-and-not-worry-about-paying-for-it mentality, and the reprehensible tactics of the school boards and their fellow travellers in the unions. (See: Two ways NS could have better schools for less money.) Bill Black must be rolling his eyes.
- What was Stephen McNeil thinking? He had three party members eager to contest the nomination in a riding where the Liberals had been also-rans for the last several elections. What an opportunity to drum up interest and enthusiasm! So what did McNeil do? He accepted a longtime ward-heeler’s advice to cancel the nominations meeting and choose an establishment insider. For two years I’ve been struck by the contrast between McNeil positive public image, and the distain with which so many part members view him. I’m starting to understand.
One more word about the Dexter Government. In discussions over the last few months with friends inside and outside the Dexter inner circle, the insiders have insisted the government has no problems in the rural mainland or Cape Breton. The outsiders are increasingly worried, in some cases dismayed. The fact the government—any government—has problems two years into its mandate is no cause for alarm. They fact the government doesn’t think it has a problem is ample cause.
How the US views Darrell Dexter
Nice guy, as socialists go
When Darrell Dexter’s New Democrats swept to power in 2009, it fell to Harold D. Foster, the US Consul General in Halifax, to profile the new premier for his State Department colleagues. His assessment, in a cable sent one week after Dexter’s government took office, was among the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks Thursday. Moneyquote:
Dexter is highly regarded by friends and political foes alike as a nice, down-to-earth kind of guy who has the interests of his constituents at heart. However, his victory came about primarily through his skill as a natural consensus builder, evidenced early on by his ability to bring together several differing factions within own his party. When he became NDP leader in 2001, Dexter inherited a party that still had a heavy influence of what pundits like to call the “fiery, socialist old guard”–members who were bitterly opposed to people like Dexter who wanted to move the party to a more centrist position on the political spectrum.
Post has had a longstanding cordial relationship with Dexter and his inner circle of advisors who come from both the old and young guards of the party. All, like their predecessors the Tories, attach great importance to issues of interest to the United States: fostering bilateral trade, increasing energy exports to the United States, and working cooperatively with the Canadian federal government on secure border issues. Dexter is also a frequent visitor to the United States, primarily to play golf even if (as he has confided) it means going by himself when none of his golfing partners is available to travel with him. Overall, post anticipates seeing this cordial relationship continue and expand as this well-liked and respected Premier settles down to implementing an agenda overwhelmingly embraced by the voters of Nova Scotia.
Why school budgets keep growing
Kill the Friendly Giant.
That’s how Cape Breton University political science professor Tom Urbaniak describes the response of school boards and the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union when the Dexter government sought ideas for reducing the education budget.
That’s the tactic the CBC used a few years ago when the government announced a cut in its budget: The cuts would force it to cancel Canada’s favorite children’s show. Parents and children rose up, and the cuts got cut.
As former education bureaucrat Wayne Fiander wrote to Contrarian recently, “the school boards and the teachers’ union… know this play in their sleep.”
In the face of these tactics, the province held the boards to something better than a draw. Budgets will fall slightly in recognition of plummeting enrolments. If you want to know why this is hard, look no further than the following map:
Point A is Holy Angels High, a beloved but decrepit, energy-guzzling, half-empty, structure that’s currently the subject of an overwrought save-our-school campaign, featuring the usual litany of weeping schoolgirls, outraged parents, and posturing politicians. Point B is Sydney Academy, a more modern and efficient, but likewise half-empty high school 12 blocks away.
Two half-empty school, 12 blocks apart. Isn’t the solution obvious? Yet MLA Gordie Gosse and many others who ought to know better are lobbying the province furiously to keep both open and operating. Doing so would amount to mismanagement bordering on larceny, but how many times can governments be expected to face down a public conditioned to believe it can drink champagne but pay for beer?
When the latest effort to “save” Holy Angels came a cropper on the hard reality of costs, Cape Breton Victoria District School Board Chair Lorne Green tried to blame local contractor Danny Ellis. Ellis had offered to buy the school from the Sisters of Charity, and lease it back to the board on what looks to this outsider like a barely break-even basis, with the board picking up maintenance and operating costs.
That wasn’t good enough for Green, who told the Chronicle-Herald’s Mary Ellen MacIntyre: “It’s like you walking in and saying ‘I’ll save your school for you’ but you’re doing nothing for (the students) — it’s all for yourself.”
I happen to know Ellis, who has a long record of community spirited projects, including the conversion of a former school in Whitney Pier into an active and much-used centre for local business. It’s no surprise the board doesn’t want to be on the hook for operating and maintenance costs on a 55-year-old building that has outlive its usefulness, but it should have the gumption to say so, instead of blaming Ellis for not taking on a problem that isn’t his.
Messaged up the ass – feedback
In response to my post on the Dexter government’s obsessive management of routine government communications, Bruce Wark writes:
When I arrived in Nova Scotia in October, 1986, as CBC Radio’s National Reporter for the Maritimes, I found the Nova Scotia government’s public relations system third rate. I had just come from six years covering the Ontario legislature and was used to dealing every day with a professional civil service and public relations officers who provided accurate information quickly and efficiently. In fact, I realized during my years at Queen’s Park that the Conservatives’ decision to create a professional (and de-politicized) civil service was one of the main reasons they held power continuously in Ontario for 42 years. Journalists and the public trusted government information.
The establishment of Communications Nova Scotia in 1996 represented a big step forward. Over the years, I have found CNS officers (many of them former journalists) to be efficient and trustworthy providing unbiased information even when they suspected that the journalist receiving it might be building a case against government policies. Ultimately, the public judges both those policies and the journalists who report on them. The basis for that public judgment has to be accurate and timely information untainted, as much as possible, by partisan government spin and filtered though professional communications officers who are not forced to run everything by a centralized political authority….
Governments which put obstacles in journalists’ way and try to spin them to death will eventually pay a price for their attempts to message reporters up the ass. The provincial NDP and the federal Alliance-Conservatives ignore this at their peril. Your commentary and Paul MacLeod’s reporting is an early warning to the neophyte, political boffins at NDP central.
This is a matter of degree. There’s nothing wrong with a government trying to insure consistency in the way it communicates with the public, but when this effort reaches the point where everything must to be cleared with a Central Committee, it’s unhealthy for a democracy.
The media shares some responsibility, given how reporters pounce on a politician or official who deviates even slightly from party or government line. In pouncing, reporters don the mantle of heretic-fighters and orthodoxy-enforcers, with the unwelcome effect of sanitizing political discourse.
As Michael Kinsley purportedly remarked, “A gaffe is when you tell the truth.” That is, it’s not a gaffe when a politician lies but when a politician unguardedly says what she really thinks. Neither the media nor the premier’s office should make it their business to punish such truthfulness.
After sending the words above to Contrarian, Wark’s indignation apparently continued to rise. At week’s end, he emailed the premier’s press secretary, saying:
[L]et me tell you straight up that this issue is not about media convenience or efficiency. It’s about the right to factual, public information from the civil service, untainted by partisan political spin.
Plaskett: Somewhere with us.
Joel Plaskett performing in advance of a planned FlashMob on Halifax’s Celebration Square:
Mr. Plaskett was joined briefly on one chorus by Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter.
It occurs to me Mr. Plaskett’s songs cry out for bluegrass covers. They are made for that high lonesome sound.
Support our men in… Lucknow?
Arts activist and New Democrat Andrew Terris questions the province’s decision to rename the Hantsport Connector after William Hall, VC, the first African Canadian, and the first Canadian sailor, to receive the Victoria Cross. The son of slaves who escaped the American south during the War of 1812, Hall earned the honor for his exceptional bravery during the Siege of Lucknow in the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
On Monday, Terris wrote Premier Darrell Dexter:
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was also known as India’s First War of Independence, so in essence Nova Scotia’s social democrats are memorializing a black man who helped white imperialists subjugate the brown men of India. Perhaps you could enlighten me as to exactly what is being celebrated here.
Here Terris is making a mistake more often encountered among those on the opposite end of the political spectrum: that of conflating support for the young men and women who fight our wars with support for the political decision to go to war. How often have we heard right-wing demagogues invoke the rallying cry, “Support our boys” as a way to bully opponents of war into silence?
Terris also has the advantage of a sesquicentennial lens through which to view the morality of Britain’s efforts to retain her empire. If he wishes to redress these historic wrongs, perhaps he could start with a campaign to remove the Spring Garden Road statue of Sir Winston Churchill, who committed all manner of atrocities in pursuit of colonial control over South Africa and Ireland, instead of picking on a remarkable Black Nova Scotia farmer-shipbuilder-able seaman whose life played out in the age of sail.
