Because, for all our cynicism about politics, we want them to succeed. We wanted Darrell Dexter to succeed, and our unrealistic expectations for his government never recovered from its series of early missteps. Despite a majority of comparable magnitude, Stephen McNeil comes to office with far lower expectations than his predecessor. His deliberately bland campaign included a few platform whoppers he'll be foolhardy to implement (one big health board, deregulation of electricity markets, defunding energy Efficiency Nova Scotia), but for the most part, he is free from extravagant commitments. This lowers the risk of early disappointments, though not necessarily missteps. McNeil has another...

23 October, 2013

The Dexter Government's decision to make a retroactive grab for disgraced MLA Trevor Zinck's pension should not pass without comment. It is a cynical exercise in pre-election pandering to public hatred of politicians. The pandering ploy reflects badly on the government as a whole, but especially on the lawyers among its ranks, including Darrell Dexter and Graham Steele, both of whom certainly know better. The courts should be left to deal with Mr. Zinck according to the evidence as it may be adduced at trial, and the law as it existed at the time his of alleged crimes and misdemeanors. His...

07 May, 2013

Wednesday's smoothly orchestrated cabinet shuffle could not hide the central fact of the event: It is a big loss for the Dexter Government. Graham Steele has been the strongest member of Darrell Dexter's cabinet, turning in a sterling job at Finance while displaying a rare knack for speaking plainly, persuasively, and with conviction. Bill Estabrooks's departure likewise represents a big loss. He was the cabinet minister with the commonest touch, a popular, unpretentious man who did solid work putting systems in place for rational decision-making about road work. The province's roadbuilding oligopoly was apoplectic over Estabrooks's decision to set up a civil service...

30 May, 2012

Early last month, Contrarian revealed that Nova Scotia's Chief Electoral Officer had deliberately made her latest report of political donations harder to use by publishing them in an image-based PDF format whose text could neither be searched nor copied and pasted into another document. With help from hacker-readers, Contrarian republished the data in the searchable, text-grab-friendly format McCulloch used for previous years' reports. I'm not done with this topic. Several generous readers have converted the open PDF file we published into an Excel database file, thus enabling much broader use of the interesting political data it contains. I will post that Excel CSV...

03 October, 2011

I don't know which is more disturbing: The NDP Government's success in persuading a Supreme Court justice to impose a $5,725 fine on a man found innocent of the crime with which he had been charged; or Finance Minister Graham Steele's crowing about this 'victory" in a news release. [caption id="attachment_8539" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Acting Justice Minister Graham Steele [not exactly as illustrated"]"][/caption]CBRM's finest didn't have the goods on John Joseph Reynolds.They raided his Sydney Mines apartment last February, seized a bit of pot and and some hidden cash, but they couldn't prove he was selling marijuana, and they knew it. So they withdrew...

22 September, 2011

Back on the last day of June, CBC Radio's Information Morning program put Justice Minister Ross Landry on the hot seat for the Dexter Government's embrace of the Civil Forfeiture Act, a right-wing scheme to short-circuit the presumption of innocence. More accurately, the program's listers put him on the hot seat. The act lets cops seize property from suspects as long as they can convince a court the assets probably came from criminal activity. No proof needed. Just probability. As a standard of justice, it's more Queen of Hearts ("First the verdict; then the trial") than Justice Blackstone  ("Better ten guilty...

15 August, 2011

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

Contrarian reader Cliff White, who perches somewhere to the left of our new blue NDP government, responds to our complaints about the Dexter/Steele spin on their foregone fiscal promises: Enough with the self righteousness already.  Of course they have to take responsibility for, and be brought to task for, their broken promises and misleading statements. On the other hand, dismissing them offhand and branding them all as liars, as some readers have, is not helpful. Lets face it: they didn't get into this predicament on their own. There are, for instance, the unelected workers and volunteers who craft strategies and policy statements...

19 November, 2009

CBC Cape Breton's Information Morning host Steve Sutherland did a deft job Tuesday Morning holding Finance Minister Graham Steele's feet to the fire on the NDP's no-deficit, no-tax-hikes, no-program-cuts campaign pledge. Steele had a well-rehearsed answer, including a far-fetched analogy about a family doctor whose honest diagnosis gets overruled by four specialists, but Sutherland was politely persistent. He pressed Steele twice more to explain the glib falsehoods at the core of the NDP's spring election platform. "The fact is that we were acting on the best information we had at the time," Steele said. "The fact is that now we are in...

17 November, 2009
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