If the admirable Ellen Page* wants to contribute to the environment of her home province, she might consider pressuring the Dexter government to rethink its politically expedient decision to delay regulations to control mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. Mercury is a dangerous element with well-known impacts on human health, especially the health of young children. The province and Nova Scotia Power have known about their obligation to clean up mercury emissions for years, if not decades. [Disclosure: both NSP and the NS Govt. have been my clients.] The government's decision to back away from that legislated commitment in the...

17 August, 2010

Reflecting on the Halifax Seaport Farmers' Market's opening day (previous posts here and here), Contrarian reader Jeff Pinhey writes: You are kidding me.  An American Homeland Security regulation, the one requiring a Port Security plan in all ports with ships leaving for a US port, causes that silliness?  Let me see, if I were a terrorist trying to sneak into Canada so I could board a ship bound for the states, and I could get as far as the waterfront in front of the market, I certainly could get as far as...

08 August, 2010

Friends and admirers gathered in the Midtown Tavern's antiseptic new digs Thursday evening to honor journalist-businessman David Bentley's 50 years of afflicting the comfortable. Among the crowd were foot-soldiers of the late, lamented Halifax Daily News (née: Bedford-Sackville News), the once salacious Frank magazine, and the meaty, fact-packed AllNovaScotia.com, which today ranks Nova Scotia's premier newsgathering organization. As Frank might put it,  all three began life as Bentley organs. In 1974, Bentley, his wife, and two partners founded the weekly B-S News, modeling it after the sordid tabloids of his native England. Five years later, he took the enormous gamble of moving the paper downtown, transforming it into...

30 July, 2010

Docking fee: $150 if you're from around here; $250 if you're not. So the summer residents who return year after year — buying goods in our stores, attending our concerts, paying property taxes for services they don't use, spreading the word about Cape Breton to folks back home — let's stick them for an extra 67%. Wouldn't want them to think we're neighbourly, or appreciative of their commitment to Cape Breton, now would we? Mean-spirited. Dumb....

22 July, 2010

The Whitest Kids U'Know present Matt Clint for Senator: Money Quote: For the last 15 years, I've lived my life in such a bland, uncontroversial, and repressed manner that it's almost unnatural. Why? Because I've been preparing to be your representative since I was a child....

26 June, 2010

Aside from a small issue of geography, reader Ivan Smith says the Globe and Mail's take-out on racism in Nova Scotia, got it right. The popular notion that racism has disappeared from Nova Scotia is just as wrong as that geography. Racism is still here. Not as bad as it was in the 1960s or even the 1980s, but we still have a long way to go. How many Nova Scotians know that there were black slaves here? Smith recommends Simon Schama's Rough Crossings, a book and subsequent film depicting the treatment of blacks in Nova Scotia in the 1780s, available...

19 June, 2010

In the wake of February's cross-burning in Hants County, the Globe and Mail did what Nova Scotia newspapers ought to have done: assigned a top notch reporter to research and write a searching report on Nova Scotia's unfinished history of racism. Many of you will have seen Les Perreaux's piece when it appeared last month, but I missed it. He began by noting African Nova Scotia's unique backstory: [N]o other region on this side of the 49th parallel has Nova Scotia's long history of a black-and-white divide. Until the immigration reforms of the 1960s, 37 per cent of Canadian blacks lived...

16 June, 2010

Graham Steele and I had a further email exchange. I suggested he had not answered the question at the heart of my original query: Why didn't you (or, if you wish, why didn't [Cabinet Clerk Greg] Keefe) simply waive solicitor client privilege in these cases? [caption id="attachment_5552" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Canny Mandarins"][/caption] I added: A second question that I didn't ask, but which still hovers over this: Is this a sign that the NDP government, with its very small cabinet, is falling prey to a classic malady of new governments, especially new governments whose ministers have no experience in government: that of being unduly led...

04 June, 2010

At first blush, Auditor General Jacques Lapointe's refusal to issue an audit opinion on the province's two largest business loan funds looks like another in the lengthening string of Dexter Government screw-ups. This is the NDP, for heaven's sake, perennial champions of openness and accountability, withholding 281 documents and redacting a further 32 on grounds of cabinet confidentiality and solicitor-client privilege, thereby thwarting independent scrutiny of the corporate welfare trough they once scorned. Solicitor-client privilege protects communications between a lawyer and a client from being disclosed without the permission of the client. It binds the lawyer, not the client. In the...

04 June, 2010

Sharon Fraser is a Halifax journalist, women's rights advocate, and the wife of Dan O'Connor, the chief of staff to Premier Dexter embroiled in a controversy over inaccurate reporting by the Chronicle-Herald over the weekend. She describes the events at the heart of the Herald's misreporting: I have no desire to keep this going eternally but I wrote this summary this morning and thought you might be interested. Here's what happened: On Friday, the Herald published a front-page story reducing an important government initiative and its announcement to the amount of money that was spent over several months in its preparation.  The headline...

25 May, 2010
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