A fleeting moment on CBC radio this morning pointed to a disintegration of the social fabric in rural Nova Scotia that ought to be more clearly on our collective radar. Jim Morrow, proprietor of Victoria County's only newspaper and CBC Cape Breton's volunteer “party line” correspondent at municipal council, declined to name the public members of the newly created Victoria County Police Advisory Board. Justice Minister Ross Landry created the board to serve as liaison between the RCMP and the County Council. Host Steve Sutherland asked who was on it. Morrow: I don't know if I should really say that, because some of the...

14 February, 2012

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

Mount St. Vincent PR students looking for a case study on how not to do an interview may want to file away this CBC-Cape Breton year-end interview with John Lynn, CEO of Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation. Interviewer Steve Sutherland comes off as polite, patient, and persistent. Lynn's obvious beefs with local media coverage may or may not be valid, but he undercuts his message by appearing peevish and evasive. Anger rarely works on radio or TV. This guy needs to dial it back....

22 December, 2010

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