Joe Ramia, government-financed promoter of Halifax's controversy-plagued convention centre, has persuaded 300 business owners to endorse his campaign to bully project opponents into submission on threat of financial ruin. The business owners added their names to a full-page ad in Wednesday's Halifax Chronicle-Herald that tacitly endorses Ramia's lawsuit against the non-profit Heritage Trust and all of its volunteer board members. Groups like the Heritage Trust must focus on their own mandate and leave the business of economic development to those who step up to advance our city. The business leaders of this region encourage economic investment and development that will boost regional prosperity. It's time to be bold. Leave...

02 July, 2014

Kate Kierfer Lee, pictured at right, an editor at MailChimp, offers a sound editing tip, one I should follow more consistently. I read everything I publish out loud. Last week I read several chapters of [Nicely Said] aloud and made a bunch of tiny changes in the process. Here's what reading your work out loud can help you do: Catch errors. You can scan something a hundred times and still miss an error. But when you read out loud, you can't help but stumble over typos and missing words. Improve your flow. Reading out loud helps you write in a way that reflects your speech patterns and...

02 July, 2014

On Facebook this morning, Halifax Councillor Waye Mason posted a link to my critique of Joe Ramia's lawsuit against opponents of the Nova Center, provoking a wide range of reactions—not all critical of Ramia. I believe Ramia's intemperate action has done lasting damage to his public image. It gives him the appearance of a man so thoroughly cocooned among people who agree with him as to have lost all perspective of the many who do not. However, it's also clear many Haligonians are fed up with the arduous process of getting anything past HRM's stifling bureaucracy and excessive regulation, and with the Heritage Trust's opposition to virtually anything new that...

25 June, 2014

I have stayed out of the debate over the Nova Centre because, to be honest, I have no idea who is right. There are obvious benefits to having a modern convention centre in the province. There are obvious drawbacks to having the province and the city single out one of the province's many developers for favourable treatment—especially if the favours put provincial and municipal funds at risk. So put me down as undecided on the main case, but not on tonight's surprise news that Nova Centre developer Joe Ramia has filed a lawsuit against the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia and each of its...

25 June, 2014

This afternoon I was browsing a fascinating new publication from Statistics Canada, Canadian Demographics at a Glance, when I came upon this shocking headline: Now we rural denizens are used to being reminded of our increasing irrelevance to all things economic and political in Canada, but my gosh, has it really been an unbroken, 163-year decline? As befits a statistical website, the report furnished a suitable, illustrative graph: But wait! When you get to the fine print, it turns out it's not the rural population that's falling, merely the proportion of Canadians who live in rural areas (defined as places with fewer than 1000 people and fewer...

19 June, 2014

Peter Spurway was for a time a member of the committee promoting HRM's aborted Commonwealth Games bid. He faults the logic underlying Jon Stone's relief, featured here Tuesday, that we dropped that bid (a sentiment I endorsed): So, Glasgow didn’t manage their CWG budget very well, and therefore we wouldn’t have, either. What has irked me through this whole thing was the natural assumption that Canada/Halifax wasn’t capable of managing within a budget. Then again, based on the mountain of evidence as to the experiences elsewhere (Olympics, World Cup, etc.), my belief may be misguided. Tim Bousquet thinks Stone understated the case against HRM's bid. He points to an...

19 June, 2014

This week, Tim Bousquet, the acerbic former news editor of The Coast, a Halifax weekly, launched his own venture, Halifax Examiner, a one-man, subscription-based news site featuring the proprietor's dogged investigative journalism. Tim is a talented reporter whose knee-jerk assumption of ill-motives on the part of businesspeople and politicians undercuts his work but finds favour with many readers. No one I know has ever accused him of humility. I hope he succeeds, because a range of informed voices is what keeps journalism exciting, useful, and contributing to democracy. You can count on Tim to uncover some bad shit. As with all journalistic projects these days, it will be a tough...

19 June, 2014

Faux-cranky BBC interviewer Jeremy Paxman joins Greater London Mayor Boris Johnson (not to be confused with the Lord Mayor of London) for a tandem spin to promote urban bike use. Where are Steve Sutherland and Cecil Clarke? Amy Smith and Mike Savage? C'mon boys and girls. H/T: Andrew Coyne...

19 June, 2014

Contrarian reader John Stone does: A few years back, a shadowy group of Halifax fat cats called The Bid Society, lead by Fred MacGillivray, tried to coerce three levels of government into supporting a $1 billion bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Fortunately the bid was withdrawn before we were committed as taxpayers to writing the blank check. It became the first time a Canadian city had ever withdrawn a bid for these games. I also remember the public chastisement Mr. MacGillivray gave the province and the city for backing out. The City of Glasgow, Scotland was "lucky" in winning the bid for those games. Seven...

17 June, 2014

Contrarian reader Michael O'Sullivan is unimpressed with the rationalizations offered by Irving newspaper ombudsman Patricia Graham for the company's failure to lift its paywall during the Moncton shooting crisis. (My initial jeremiad on the subject here, Graham's defence and a longtime Irving watcher's pithy counter-explanation here.) It's a matter of being part of the community during dreadful and traumatic events. The Irving papers pushed the community away. The argument that no one wanted printed papers to be free doesn't fly. It's one thing to buy a paper when you want one, another to subscribe to the online version for three or six or 12...

17 June, 2014
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