The background: On June 11, Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse agreed to suspend her department's tender call to replace the addiction services formerly provided by Cape Breton's Talbot House Recovery Centre, and pledged to personally lead direct negotiations with Talbot's board for a new contract to deliver those services. Just 25 days later, without holding a single meeting with the board, Peterson-Rafuse told Talbot House she would not meet with them after all, and would instead proceed with the tender call. Talbot's board chair, Sydney psychologist John Gainer, issued the following statement Wednesday: The Board of Directors of Talbot House was informed in a letter dated...

19 July, 2012

For four months this spring, Community Services Minister Denise-Peterson Rafuse blindly defended her department's slandering of an innocent priest, and its incompetent intervention into the operation of Talbot House, a much-admired, 53-year-old community-built addiction recovery center forced to close after the department engineered the removal of its executive director on specious grounds. Then in June, when she finally deigned to meet with the Cape Breton institution's board of directors, she had a momentary and welcome change of heart. As I wrote then: Contrary to expectations expressed here Monday, today’s meeting between Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse and the Directors of Talbot...

18 July, 2012

When Paul Watson, the Canadian who heads the Sea Shepherd Society, attempted to disrupt a traditional pilot whale harvest on the Faroe Islands last year, canny local fishermen postponed the event until no whales appeared until after the HMS Brigit Bardot weighed anchor and departed the tiny country's waters. (See further update here.) This deprived Watson of gory footage for a TV series celebrating his latest charismatic crusade. Still, when the four-part series aired on US cable channels this spring, Faroese government officials braced for a backlash. What they got was something quite different: a flood of tourism inquiries. The documentary's B-roll footage of the...

08 July, 2012

Contrary to expectations expressed here Monday, today's meeting between Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse and the Directors of Talbot House brought the two sides closer together, and may lead to the reopening of Talbot House under the leadership of a vindicated Fr. Paul Abbass. Peterson-Rafuse, persistently criticized here over the last two months, took a crucial step back from the brink. For now at least, she has cancelled her department's plan to issue a tender for the addiction recovery services formerly provided by Talbot House. The two sides will negotiate terms for Talbot's reopening with government funding. The Cape Breton Post's...

12 June, 2012

Community Services Minister Denise Peterson-Rafuse will finally sit down with the Talbot House board of directors Tuesday, but only after her department's shrewd mandarins have pre-empted any actual purpose the meeting might serve. The Talbot board asked for the session months ago, seeking a peaceful resolution to her department's reckless assaults on the half-century-old, community-built addiction recovery center. Peterson-Rafuse readily agreed to the meeting in principle, then bobbed, weaved, and stalled until her officials rendered it meaningless. First she couldn't meet because the legislature was sitting. Then she postponed again, just long enough for the department to announce the RFP* it hopes...

12 June, 2012

NYU grad student Josh Begley wrote a simple program (technically, a processing script) to capture a Google Earth arial image of every prison in the United States, then used the images as tiles to build a huge mosaic he calls Prison Map. The complete image is so vast, and takes so long to load as a website, Begley's main site defaults to a 700-prison subset of the best images. The United States is the prison capital of the world. This is not news to most people. When discussing the idea of mass incarceration, we often trot out numbers and dates and...

06 June, 2012

On Tuesday, members of the Nova Scotia Legislature's Community Services Committee will get a chance to question the bureaucrat who promoted what turned out to be false allegations of sexual misconduct against an innocent priest, and to ask her superiors why they still haven't withdrawn a report containing slanderous innuendo against him. The department's actions led to the closure of Talbot House, which had for 53 years provided safe lodging, meaningful work, and successful treatment for some of Nova Scotia's most troubled citizens. Marika Lathem, Director of Family and Youth Services and the principal author of the error-filled report, will testify. The Talbot...

05 June, 2012

In four decades as a journalist, I saw many people do brave things, but I can't offhand think of anything more courageous than the letter I received last night from Sean McSween, a pharmacist and former resident of Talbot House, the addiction recovery centre now closed due to false allegations of sexual misconduct against its former executive director, Fr. Paul Abbass. To whom it may concern: I am a professional (pharmacist) married (since 1999) man. I had some difficulty in life, partly due to an abusive home life while growing up and partly due to poor choices of my own. I spent nearly...

15 May, 2012

Since Darrell Dexter has not yet decided to fire his Minister of Community Services, he is stuck having to defend her, and defending Denise Peterson-Rafuse these days requires saying some pretty silly things. That's just what Dexter did yesterday when he claimed Peterson-Rafuse was doing an "excellent job," adding, "The only people to release private information in this House are the members of the Conservative caucus." The tortured logic behind this argument, which Peterson-Rafuse has also used in her own defence, is that because the DCS report on Talbot House didn't use Fr. Paul Abbass's name, but only his job title,...

27 April, 2012

At the legislature Thursday, two key developments in the scandal enveloping the Department of Community Services and its minister, Denise Peterson-Rafuse. The Progressive Conservatives demanded the minister's resignation, arguing she had breached Nova Scotia's Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FOIPOP) Act by allowing the department to publish a report that violated Fr. Paul Abbass's privacy by repeating false innuendo against him even after the CBRM police looked into allegations advanced by DCS and found no grounds to open a criminal investigation. In a scrum with reporters from the Cape Breton Post and Halifax Metro, Peterson-Rafuse made a string of statements about...

27 April, 2012
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