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

  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

  Four months ago, I leapt to the defence of former CTV Ottawa Bureau Chief Laurie Graham, whose appointment as principal secretary to Premier Stephen McNeil came under attack from anti-government scolds. Today there's a fresh kerfuffle about former Chronicle-Herald columnist Marilla Stephenson's promotion to a newly created civil service position as liaison between the Executive Council office and government departments. Since October 2014, Stephenson had been working on contract doing outreach for the One Nova Scotia Commission. The two hirings seem superficially similar, but they differ in one crucial respect. Graham received a discretionary political appointment. When Stephen McNeil's term as premier ends, so will her employment. Stephenson received a civil service appointment. She has a job for life, and...

26 July, 2016

Call me contrarian, but I don’t believe Nova Scotia will have an election this fall. Speculation about a fall vote has been rampant since Province House reporters and opposition MLAs raised the alarm back in May. The government's five-year mandate doesn't expire until October, 2018, and the usual four-year benchmark between elections is still a year off. But the latest Corporate Research Associates poll shows McNeil's Liberals with a commanding 59 percent to the PC's 21 percent and the NDP's 18. So the temptation to go early exists. Pretending to call an early election might be a smart strategy. It forces opposition parties into panicked preparations where methodical...

25 July, 2016

At first glance, it looks like one of those iconic shots of Sable Island horses, but it's actually a scene from Google Street View. This week, Street View added Sable to its Trekker program, which features virtual off-road tours of spectacular sights around the world. Danielle Hickey, Parks Canada Acting External Relations Manager for Mainland Nova Scotia, lugged Trekker's portable, backpack version of the Street View car camera around a central section of Sable last September, collecting a connected series of 360° images. The thick blue lines in the image below give a rough idea of the paths she followed. [UPDATE] Since posting this, I've learned the blue...

13 July, 2016
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