After yesterday's post endorsing shared responsibility for crosswalk safety. I expected an inbox full of passionate screeds from car culture critics. Instead, I heard from people who share my view. From a reader in extreme rural Cape Breton: I wholeheartedly agree that roadway and crosswalk safety is a shared responsibility, but I'd emphasize that this is an inclusive responsibility and include cyclists in the discussion. Too often when in Halifax, I've been forced to re-brake at intersections due to a thoughtless pedestrian sauntering after-the-fact into the shared space without looking up from his/her phone. Further, though, the number of cyclists who switch lanes...

17 November, 2016

  Yesterday was Crosswalk Safety Awareness Day. Halifax marked the occasion with a campaign called Heads Up Halifax, urging motorists and pedestrians to stop and lock eyes with each other before proceeding. Predictably, this produced a column* by Halifax Examiner transportation critic Erica Butler decrying the proposition that motorists and pedestrians share responsibility for crosswalk safety. The crusade among young Halifax pedestrians and cyclists to persuade each other they bear little or no responsibility for their own safety when crossing a street is murderously reckless. Butler, who continually encourages this utopian fantasy, ought to knock it off before she gets someone killed. The typical passenger vehicle weighs...

16 November, 2016

Nova Scotia Community Services Minister Joanne Bernard today proposed an Accessibility Act that was supposed to fulfil a Liberal campaign promise to "appoint an Accessibility Advisory Committee with a mandate and a strict timeline to develop accessibility legislation for NS." In reality, the committee thus established spent two years consulting with stakeholders and came back with...

02 November, 2016

Human rights lawyer David Fraser has filed an action in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia seeking a review of the NS Human Rights Commission's refusal to accept a complaint against the province by five prominent disability rights activists. The complaint is a tad complex, but it aptly illustrates Nova Scotia's stonewalling of people with disabilities: the failure of municipal building inspectors to enforce barrier-free requirements of the building code; the political failure of provincial and federal governments to give those regulations teeth; and the inexplicable failure of the Human Rights Commission to show leadership in this area—or even accept complaints about it. In brief, the...

27 October, 2016

  [caption id="attachment_16635" align="alignwrap" width="600"] Family man Peter MacKay holds son Kian. Wait! What's that tartan?[/caption] In this morning's Halifax Examiner, Tim Bousquet celebrated Peter MacKay's decision not to run for the Conservative Party leadership by recalling the day MacKay breezed into Halifax to announce funding for the new convention centre. The then-Defence Minister said the Nova Centre would “take the ‘no’ out of Nova Scotia.” Bousquet calls this "MacKay's greatest legacy," but surely that's a hasty judgment. Picking the low point in Peter MacKay's public career—by "greatest legacy," Bousquet meant "low point"—is admittedly a challenge, given the rich trove of disgraceful material to choose from: To...

13 September, 2016

  I have mentioned before that I grew up in a New York City suburb listening to then-twenty-something Vin Scully call Brooklyn Dodger baseball games on a tube radio. Now 88, Scully is still at it—in his 67th season calling the play-by-play for Dodger home games, these days performed in Los Angeles. In a tribute published in today's Washington Post, columnist George Will calls Scully, "the most famous and beloved person in Southern California." [He] is not a movie star but has the at-ease, old-shoe persona of Jimmy Stewart. With his shock of red hair and maple syrup voice, Scully seems half his 88 years. More than the...

07 September, 2016

  The things a person stumbles upon vacationing in Nova Scotia.  ...

29 August, 2016

  It's just 19 characters (22 if you count the spaces) in all-caps Helvetica, painted Highway Yellow against an industrial green girder. Yet, somehow, the "Welcome to Cape Breton" sign on the Canso Causeway swing bridge maintains a deep iconic grip on Cape Bretoners. Just this morning, it showed up in my Facebook feed when Megan MacDonald, a CB ex-pat home from Toronto for a few days' R&R, re-posted this meme from the "Meanwhile in Cape Breton" group:     Years ago, riding a bus from Halifax to Cape Breton, I compared notes with the woman in the next seat about the point in the journey when it finally...

11 August, 2016

  The following is a statement from Karen Guss, communications director for the City of Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections: In view of the City's commitment to public health, safety and basic common sense, we will not issue permits for block party dumpster pools. And while you would think this decision would not require an explanation, three days of press requests have proven otherwise. So, Philly, here's why you shouldn't swim in a receptacle most often used for waste: First and foremost, this could reduce the amount of water available should a fire break out in that neighborhood. So if you would like...

06 August, 2016

  Yesterday, talk show host Rick Howe and I were chatting about Marilla Stephenson's appointment to a civil service position based on a fake competition in which she was—by design—the only candidate. Howe said it was the sort of behaviour Stephenson herself might have condemned when she was a political columnist for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald. "Unless it was the Liberals who did it," I quipped. It was a cheap shot—and as it turns out, dead wrong. When Premier Stephen McNeil did something uncannily similar shortly after his government's election in 2013, then-columnist Stephenson denounced his patronage abuse in ringing terms. Twice. [caption id="attachment_16593" align="alignright" width="223"] Appointee Langille[/caption] McNeil's friend Glennie...

27 July, 2016
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