Tagged: Marilyn More
Unholy angels
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That schools in the Cape Breton-Victoria School District will close is obvious. Enrolment here has dropped 22 percent over eight years, with no end to the decline in sight, while costs have risen 25 percent over the same period.
That Holy Angels High tops the list of candidates for closure is equally obvious. The geriatric Catholic order that owns the school wants to unload it, and has offered it to the board for $750,000. The board estimates it would need another $8 to $10 million in repairs, while newer schools nearby have lots of space.
The prospect of closure has provoked the usual outcry from students, grads, and parents, but the province faces a budgetary crisis brought on by previous governments, and made worse by its own senseless campaign promises. Reality requires deep cuts to P-12 school budgets, not new spending to keep decrepit surplus buildings in service.
That’s the factual background to last week’s visit by Holy Angels students to the legislature to protest against closure. Here is what the students encountered:
- Manning MacDonald, a Liberal on the verge of retirement, who represents the school’s catchment area and seems bent on a scorched earth campaign to ensure his replacement will not be a New Democrat.
- Cecil Clarke, a neighboring Conservative MLA openly embarked on a quixotic campaign for the federal seat that encompasses Holy Angels.
- Marilyn More, the Education Minister, whose party knows MacDonald’s seat will be up for grabs in two years and harbors the illusion that a New Democrat might take it.
It was a recipe for pandering on a grand scale.
“Keep them there, buy the school, and let them continue with the excellent programs they’ve had there since 1885,” thundered MacDonald, who knows perfectly well this would be lunacy.
“The NDP’s abysmal failure to support excellent young women and the Sydney community [is just another example of] this failed NDP socialist experiment,” railed Clarke, trying out the Tea Party rhetoric that will be expected of him as a Harper flag-bearer. (Clarke did not explain how resisting political pressure for reckless spending constitutes socialism.)
Minister More spoke vaguely of innovative solutions, and hinted that the school might be kept together as an administrative unit sharing premises with another school.
When Nova Scotians complain about a lack of leadership, this is the sort of thing they mean. MacDonald, Clarke, More, and the other 49 MLAs all know keeping Holy Angels open would be foolhardy, but they perceive a short-term interest in pretending otherwise, so pretence is all they offered.
The students got a dishonest display of faux outrage before going home to a school the glad-hands of province house know will close, as well they know it should.
That suppressed gambling report – update
A source I trust tells me the consultant’s report on gambling Labour Minister Marilyn More won’t release truly is substandard. Let’s assume that’s the case, and More was right to reject it after many attempts to get the contractor to fulfill the his obligations. Barring public access to the report is still the wrong thing to do.
In effect, Minister More is saying interested Nova Scotians aren’t sophisticated enough to understand or evaluate the report. It might cause them “anxiety” and “confusion.” Such matters should presumably be left to their betters—people like More, and the Gambling Corp. honchos who talked her into this foolish course (and won’t even let her commission another study).
Is this really how Nova Scotia’s first NDP administration wants to govern?
Liberal critic Leo Glavine has the sensible answer to More’s patronizing stand: Release the report to anyone who requests it, together with a detailed account of its deficiencies.
Bureaucrats humiliate a weak minister
When you bring $145 million a year into the treasury of a province as deeply in hock as Nova Scotia, you swing a big bat.
So when a consultant hired by the banished Tory government delivered a cost-benefit analysis of gambling in Nova Scotia to the newly elected NDP government, it stands to reason that the big bat wielders at the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation*, the agency that administers the provincial government’s addiction to gambling revenue, had first dibs on reviewing it.
Marilyn More
Whatever the report said about the human toll exacted by provincially sponsored gambling, we can surmise that Gaming Corp. honchos didn’t take kindly to its conclusions. If the Labor Department harbors any panty waists who fret over such trifles as suicides, bankruptcies, child neglect, and marriage breakups caused by the corporation’s activities, they were no match for the gaming execs.
On Tuesday, Labor Minister Marilyn More announced that the report had been scrapped, the consultants who wrote it fired, and the citizenry spared exposure to its malign conclusions.
“It just doesn’t seem to make any sense to create anxiety and apprehension around information that just isn’t accurate,” More told reporters, setting a new standard for patronizing voters.
Not to worry, said More, the corporation will get right on a cost-benefit analysis of its own, presumably one showing less cost and more benefit.
“You can be sure that the next study will have clear accountability and criteria, and that the information will be publicly released, and it will answer a lot of your questions.,” she said Tuesday
That ringing declaration apparently set Blackberries jangling, because the very next day saw More execute a humiliating about-face. There will be no such study because (in a revelation sure to surprise economists and social scientists) no one knows how to do a cost-benefit analysis of provincially promoted gambling addiction.
At least now we know who runs The Department of Labor, and it ain’t Minister More.
This is a classic illustration of how canny bureaucrats can manipulate an inexperienced minister in a newly elected government. Too bad so many gambling addicted Nova Scotians will have to pay the price for More’s weakness.
So much for social democracy.
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*Nova Scotia Gaming Corp. is the agency’s official name, but I use it reluctantly, because “gaming” is a euphemism designed to disguise the outfit as some benign Department of Parcheesi and Hopscotch.
