The Twitter feed of the Nova Scotia Archives posted this photo today, with the caption, "Loading supplies at Ciboux Island, ca. 1937." The supplies, one presumes, were bound for the manned lighthouse that once operated there, a facility long since replaced by an automated light tower. Ciboux is the more northerly of the two Bird Islands: long, narrow outcroppings described by steep cliffs, and lying in a straight line off Cape Dauphin in Victoria County. They comprise one of the most important seabird sites in Nova Scotia, and are home to the largest colony of Great Cormorants in North America. Numerous other...

30 September, 2014

Tuesday afternoon, Herald political reporter Michael Gorham's Twitter feed alerted me to Gordie Gosse's impassioned plea for fellow MLAs to talk to the union members protesting outside the legislature, to just hear them out; his pointed recollection of the courage former Liberal MP (and later, premier) Russell MacLellan showed during a union demonstration in the late 1990s, when he twice ignored security and plunged into a menacing crowd of enraged coal miners steelworkers* to face their complaints; his grateful tribute to the health workers who cared for him during his recent battle with throat cancer. Alas, by the time I tuned in to Legislature's live feed, Gosse had finished speaking, and House Leader Michelle Samson...

30 September, 2014

We have assumptions and guesses about why young people leave Nova Scotia, but not a lot of hard data. I think we should conduct exit interviews. When a student picks up a degree from one of our universities or community colleges, but decides to make a life elsewhere, let's find out exactly what factors led to that decision, and what might have turned it around. And not just university students: Exactly what work opportunity would keep a construction worker off the plane to Fort Mac? How many days work at what wage? What other considerations factored in? Writing in The Coast last December, David Fleming, Director of the North End Business Association, reviewed Nova...

20 September, 2014

It's easy to get worked up about environmental threats that directly impact your home or family. The news is full of protests against a gravel pit here, a wind farm there, a paper mill that blows noxious fumes through the middle of town. It's much harder to sustain protest against an environmental threat like climate change that is geographically dispersed, gradual in impact, and masked by natural swings in weather conditions—even though it presents an existential threat to humankind that dwarfs gravel pits, paper mills, and even fracking. The environmental movement has constituents to satisfy and operating budgets to raise, so it expends too much effort on issues...

19 September, 2014

As North Americans watch West Africa's Ebola epidemic with rising fascination and fear, an entirely preventable epidemic is tearing through the second largest US city, attracting little notice. So far, three children have died—all in their first two months of life. Of 8,000 reported cases in California, mostly affecting children, 267 have required treatment in hospital, 58 in intensive care. The illness is highly contagious, and antibiotics have little impact. “A number of them have been...

16 September, 2014

My friend and former Halifax Daily News colleague Shaune MacKinlay, now principal advisor to HRM Mayor John Mike Savage, thought my report of a newly opened Queen St. candy shop that bars entry to people in wheelchairs and discriminates against them in hiring gave short shrift to HRM's recent efforts on accessibility. She pointed to two measures recommended by the Mayor’s Conversation on Healthy, Liveable Communities" (an October 2013 meeting attended by 80 people), and adopted by unanimous vote of council. Along with establishing an orchard and fixing the bike lane at the Halifax end of the MacDonald Bridge, the meeting urged HRM to: Work with Business Improvement Districts to...

15 September, 2014

The Halifax-based Centre for Law and Democracy held a seminar Thursday, billed as an “open discussion” with federal Treasury Board employees where participants could “talk about problems with the current open government processes and how they can be fixed.” When Tim Bousquet of the Halifax Examiner showed up, well, that was the end of the seminar. Bousquet describes astounding (but sadly, unsurprising) incident in today's Morning File: [We] went around the table introducing ourselves...

12 September, 2014

If you work in business, government, politics, communications, journalism, or marketing, and you'd like a five minute primer on how not to botch a public policy issue, read CCL Group chairman Steve Parker's column in Thursday's Halifax Chronicle-Herald. I've been critical of the histrionics, self-righteousness, and personal attacks deployed by fracking opponents (see posts here, here, here, and here), but the truth is, Big Oil's behaviour in the fracking debate has been equally reprehensible, as Parker cogently explains: The seeds of the fracking ban here lay in the attitude and actions of industry who failed on two fronts: for years positioning fracking as essentially harmless and failing to respect and respond to the...

12 September, 2014

Dr. Dan Reid is a graduate of Dalhousie Medical School, a medical doctor, a general practitioner in both Pictou and Dartmouth, a former chief of staff at the Sutherland Harris Memorial Hospital, a former member of the Nova Scotia Legislature for Pictou West, a former Minister of Fisheries in the Gerald Regan government, a Liberal partisan, and a longstanding critic of the Northern Pulp Mill in Abercrombie. At a free concert Tuesday night to raise awareness about the emissions from the mill, Reid saw fit to attack former premier John Hamm for sitting on the board of Northern Pulp. He went so far...

11 September, 2014

Over at the Halifax Examiner, Tim Bousquet has a brief discussion on the history and extent of slavery in Nova Scotia, with links to an interesting monograph, images of ads from Halifax newspapers seeking the return of slaves who escaped from their Nova Scotia owners, and a book that touches on the subject. [caption id="attachment_14219" align="alignright" width="300"] (Click image for larger version)[/caption] When I first came to Nova Scotia, I spent time with older neighbours on Boularderie Island, many of whom were great storytellers and singers. One man, Donald MacDonald, known as Donald Bugle, a native Gaelic speaker, sang a song with a verse that went something...

10 September, 2014
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