The Nova Scotia House of Assembly Management Commission will meet Wednesday to clear up an injustice that should have been fixed decades ago. Its members will pass a new rule requiring MLAs' constituency offices to be free of barriers to wheelchair users. The commission reached all-party agreement on the change a month ago, but inexplicable last-minute foot-dragging by senior NDP officials threatened to deep-six the deal. Lobbying by the James MacGregor Stewart Society, a disability rights group,  embarrassed the government into action Friday. The new rule will come into effect after the election, at which time newly elected MLAs will have one year...

09 August, 2013

Last spring, a disability rights organization surveyed the constituency offices of Nova Scotia MLAs and found hardly any were fully accessible to citizens who use wheelchairs. In May, the James McGregor Stewart Society cajoled the House of Assembly Management Commission into meeting and considering ways to remove barriers from MLAs' offices. The campaign hinged on passing changes before the election, so newly elected MLAs could be required to find accessible space, while returning MLAs would have a modest grace period to comply. I was skeptical. I expected the inconvenience of modifying or relocating constituency offices might trump the obvious injustice of preventing...

05 August, 2013

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 that the Nova Scotia government's public relations system was generally 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...

27 February, 2011