Stephen Kimber

The Halifax Daily News: 1974 – 2008

By Stephen Kimber

    The end for the little tabloid-that-no-longer-could came suddenly, sadly and unceremoniously.
At 10 a.m. on the morning of Monday, February 11, 2008, Halifax Daily News reporters and editors were still filtering into the newsroom with their Tims and their notebooks, ready to begin what they assumed would be just another week at the office. Instead, they were greeted by “strange guys… with their hands folded and looking very stern.”   They were herded into the paper’s executive boardroom where Marc-Noel Ouellette, a Montreal-based senior vice president for the paper’s owner, Transcontinental Media,  was waiting for them.
He wasted few words. The Daily News, which Transcon had acquired from CanWest in 2002, was losing money — “millions,” he would tell other reporters later — so the company had had to make an “extremely tough business decision.” That morning’s edition, with its now ironic headline, Town Holds Its Breath, had been the paper’s last.
It was all over before it was even over.
Ninety-two fulltime employees — not to mention dozens of part-time columnists, freelancers and contract drivers — no longer had a newspaper to produce or deliver. There would be no goodbyes, no thank yous for nearly 30 years’ service. It was just over.
Before Ouellette had even finished speaking, the newsroom’s computer terminals had been shut down and email accounts cancelled. Technicians replaced the Daily News logo on the paper’s website with a splashy green Metro, a multinational, cookie-cutter, news-lite, freebie newspaper that Transcon — along with its new partners Torstar Corp and Metro International S.A. — would officially launch in Halifax three day’s later. Valentine’s Day.
The Daily News was history.
There would be no more editions of the newspaper, but there were still plenty of unanswered questions? Could the Daily News have been saved? Was its failure the result of peculiar and particular local conditions? Or was the demise of one of the last medium-sized two-newspaper  cities in North America just one more canary in the coal mine for print-on-paper newspaper publishing? What would its closure mean for Halifax? For journalism?

***

The Daily News was the brainchild of David Bentley, a British-born journalist with “an entrepreneurial thing”  who’d worked for Graham Dennis’s family-owned, 100-plus-year-old Halifax Herald during the sixties and early seventies before deciding to branch out on his own.
The Bedford-Sackville Weekly News, which Bentley launched with his wife and another couple as a modest suburban weekly in 1974, quickly morphed into a daily and then, in 1981, surprised Haligonians by opening up an office in downtown Halifax, dropping the Bedford-Sackville from its title and cheekily declaring a David-and-Graham war on the venerable but moribund Herald.
Bentley provided a feisty, sometimes outrageous British tabloid-style journalism. The paper touched off an international media incident with a 1983 front page story headlined Agonies of a Princess, which directly quoted, in violation of official media protocols, the visiting Princess Diana as she complained about her loss of privacy.
In spite of — or perhaps because of such coverage — the paper managed to attract a modest but loyal and growing audience.
By the mid-1980s, however, Bentley had reached the limits of his resources. He sold the paper to Harry Steele, a Newfoundland businessman, who reined in its tabloid excesses and made it more respectable, but still feisty.
The paper reached its editorial zenith during the late 1980s under Doug MacKay, a former Winnipeg Free Press editor. MacKay and Managing Editor Bill Turpin assembled a crew of bright young reporters and editors whose investigative scoops helped drive a scandal-plagued Premier John Buchanan out of office. The paper also gleefully pursued allegations of impropriety involving provincial cabinet minister Roland Thornhill, who just happened to be owner Harry Steele’s brother-in-law. It didn’t matter.
The paper was also fun, offering its readers an eclectic stable of columnists of all stripes and hues, who frequently and often loudly argued with each other in print. (Fire The Slithery Toad, shouted the headline over one column by curmudgeonly Harry Flemming;  it was a plea to the editor to get rid of me, another of the paper’s columnists. Thankfully, the editor ignored the call, though he happily ran the column.)
During this period, the paper also launched a Sunday edition, and the daily briefly flirted with paid circulation of 30,000, which many believe might have been the tipping point to make it an economically viable second daily in the marketplace.
It never tipped. Instead, a devastating early nineties’ recession wreaked havoc on advertising sales. The paper’s editorial and marketing budgets were eviscerated and its circulation began a slow, tortuous, inexorable, feed-upon-itself decline until, by the time it finally stopped publishing, paid circulation was less than 20,000.
In 1997, Steele sold out to Conrad Black’s Hollinger. During Black’s reign, the newspaper briefly became modestly profitable — thanks more to cutbacks than revenues — but those funds ended up being siphoned off to help launch Black’s own pet project, the National Post, instead of being funneled back into developing the paper.
Then, in 2000, Black, his own empire under financial siege, sold out to CanWest. Two years later, CanWest lopped off its apparently incidental eastern Canadian newspapers, including the Daily News, and peddled them as a package to Transcontinental, a successful printer with ambitions to become a real player in the newspaper publishing game.
With each change in ownership, the newsroom’s hopes would rise — “Black’s a newspaper guy,” “CanWest has the resources,” “Transcon wants us” — only to be dashed within a few months.
Inevitably, the paper’s journalists would soon wax nostalgic for their last, better bad owner.

***

Perhaps not surprisingly, many now cast Transcontinental in the role of Chief Villain. And, although there are plenty of black hats in this cast, there is little question Transcon merits top billing.
For starters, Transcontinental was a printer with little expertise or feel for the newspaper business when it bought the papers. It compounded its own lack of knowledge by hiring Jamie Thompson, an accountant who had no newspaper experience either, as its local publisher.
He and his bosses in Montreal shared unrealistic expectations that — by listening to market researchers and focus groups instead of editors — they could goose circulation back up to that magic 30,000 number within a year.
When that didn’t work, company executives panicked, replacing the editor they had chosen with another. And then another. In its five-and-a-half-years as owner, in fact, five different editors would occupy the position. And Thompson himself was eventually purged too. Nothing helped.
There were cutbacks. To save money, the paper lopped off its four most senior journalists — and lost their critical collective community memory.
One of the editors Transcon appointed — largely because he promised to shake things up in a newsroom Transcon had come to regard as the enemy — was so reviled that, during his tenure, virtually every reporter and editor had his or her resumé in circulation. By the time the paper closed, close to half of the 40-person newsroom Transcon had inherited in 2002 had departed, almost all reluctantly, many to government public relations positions.
Circulation, which had been sliding slowly for years, went into freefall.
Ironically, the paper’s last editor, Jack Romanelli, formerly of the Montreal Gazette, had begun to turn the paper around, editorially at least, during his brief 14 months at the helm.
During that time, the Daily News broke — and pursued — the story of a government-backed immigration scam that is still shaking Premier Rodney MacDonald’s Conservative administration. It launched a proactive, provocative series on coming to terms with the province’s ingrained history of racism. And it devoted a lot of editorial real estate to looking at possible directions for the city’s future development. Recalling the paper’s bolder history, its longtime city columnist, David Rodenhiser — who’d helped the newspaper earn a prestigious Michener Award for Meritorious Public Service in 1997 — even managed to attract international attention to the paper this fall after one of his columns so incensed Celine Dion’s husband that he cancelled a planned Halifax concert by the pop diva as retribution for Rodenhiser’s “negativity.”
    It was all too little too late.

***

    Though the specific causes of the Daily News’s decline and fall are more peculiar and particular than generic, they also, of course, played out against the backdrop of more cataclysmic changes taking place in the media business as a whole.
    For starters, there is the reality that more and more readers are getting their news for “free” from the Internet. Although the Daily News was one of the first newspapers in the country to embrace the web as a news delivery vehicle, budget cuts prevented it from ever building on its early success. But its availability online — at the end it had more daily individual visits to its website than subscribers — no doubt made it even harder to win back paying customers. Ironically, Romanelli himself had been musing in recent months about the notion of making the paper the country’s first online-online daily. He won’t get that chance.
    The web wasn’t the only outside force working against the paper’s survival. Ever increasing concentration of media ownership has also turned small-to-medium-sized newspapers like the Daily News into corporate road kill. While it would be naïve in a city like Halifax — where local ownership has at best, a checkered history — to suggest chain ownership is the root of all evil, there is no doubt that the Daily News became an interchangeable trading chip or a bottom-line afterthought for all but its early, locally-based owners.
Whether they were diverting local profits to support more important corporate objectives or replacing an existing flesh-and-blood newspaper with a pale imitation commuter giveaway, the reality is that the suits in Montreal and Toronto and Winnipeg who made those decisions cared little for the health of local journalism and less for their readers in Halifax.
    In the end, unfortunately, Haligonians — whether they subscribed to the Daily News, loved it or hated it — will be the real losers from its demise.
    The paper, even in its worst days, helped make journalism better in Halifax by being there and by providing an alternative to the Halifax Herald.
Before the Daily News arrived on the scene, the morning Herald and its identical twin-sister afternoon Mail Star were such awful newspapers that the 1970 Senate Report into the state of the mass media in Canada concluded: “There is probably no large Canadian city that is so badly served by its newspapers… There is probably no news organization in the country that has managed to achieve such an intimate and uncritical relationship with the local power structure, or has grown so indifferent to the needs of its readers.”
The Herald became a much better newspaper with the Daily News nipping at its heels. Will that continue, or will the Herald fall back into what the Davey committee called “uncaring, lazy journalism?”
Sarah Dennis, the Herald’s vice president and the daughter of publisher Graham Dennis calls such speculation “distasteful and nonsense really,” but she went on to say that, in light of the Daily News shutdown, “as any business does, we’re continuing to evaluate all our costs. But no decisions have been made about layoffs or cuts, or anything like that… whether it be pages or people.”
That’s hardly a ringing declaration of journalistic fervour.
Meanwhile, over at the hastily launched Metro, Ouellette was quick to suggest the absence of the Daily News wouldn’t mean very much to readers. Halifax, said the man who had closed one newspaper and was about to launch another sort-of newspaper, is “over-mediatized… There’s media here up the wazoo.”
    But more media does not necessarily translate into more reporters on the streets, or, certainly, more news.
“In this town and in this province after today,” veteran Daily News legislature reporter Brian Flinn told the CBC soon after Transcon’s announcement, “there will be one print source, so that's one set of eyes, that's one point of view that ultimately everything is being generated from. And that's not good for our society and that’s not good for our democracy.”
    The Halifax Daily News (1974-2008). Rest in Peace.

_____
Stephen Kimber, the Rogers Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College, is the Interim Director of the School of Journalism. He was a longtime columnist for the Halifax Daily News.

Originally published in Journalism Ethics for the Global Citizen

David Bentley: Journalist-Entrepreneuer

This is a reprint of a 1994 profile I wrote on David Bentley, the founder of the Halifax Daily News. The paper, which published my two weekly columns, ceased publication on February 11, 2007.

By Stephen Kimber

    "Journalists tend not to be that sort of people," David Bentley begins seriously, then adds almost pleadingly: "You know that yourself, Steve?" I'd called to ask for an interview but Bentley, at the other end of the line, was dancing around my request, sounding more like a boy who has to go to the bathroom than the key founding father of Canada's most notorious publication. "I like to keep my head down, you know," he says at one point, then asks solicitously, "What is that you think you want to know about me that you don't already know?"
    Everything.

***

    David Bentley is one of Canada's most interesting but least well-known journalists. In an era of bland chain publishing, where newspapers often co-exist cheek-by-jowl under the same corporate umbrella as soup makers and trucking companies, Bentley, 51, is a refreshing throwback to the days of Joseph Howe and the feisty journalist-entrepreneurs.
    In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bentley almost single-handedly created a daily newspaper - this one - out of the whole cloth of his own ambition. If that wasn't rare enough (The Daily News and the Toronto Sun are probably the only successful North American daily newspaper launches started by  journalists in the last 25 years), Bentley then helped launch Frank, a fortnightly gossip sheet that has transcended its sloppy layout, frequent typos and almost incidental paid circulation to become one of the country's most widely-quoted and controversial publications, regularly denounced by politicians and media critics.
    According to one recent estimate, nearly 100,000 people buy, beg, borrow or steal a copy of the latest Frank - now published every two weeks in Halifax and Ottawa - to find out the dirt on Canada's "equestrian classes."
    They find out plenty. About Brian Mulroney's drinking habits, Peter Mansbridge's marital woes, Pierre Trudeau's "love child," John Buchanan's trust funds, Karla Teale's banned court proceedings, Gerald Regan's alleged sexual peccadilloes, even what's supposed to be on some "sex videos" made by members of Sydney Academy's graduating class on their prom night.
    For all its in-your-face openness, Frank's readers won't likely find much in its pages about who "Frank" is and why he/she/it says nasty things about everyone.
    Although Frank is a collective venture, Bentley is clearly first among its equals. Sitting in the magazine's Halifax offices on a recent Saturday morning, dressed casually in blue corduroy pants and an open-necked shirt, Bentley resembles almost anyone but his swaggering, sniggering alter ego. In person, he is earnest, serious and thoughtful. "I tend not to be a social person," Bentley admits.
    Who is this guy and why does everyone say such nasty things about him?

***

    Born in 1943 in the south of England, Bentley grew up in an era when people followed newspapers like sports. "Bill Connors, one of the great tabloid columnists, was the kind of person who was a hero in our day," he recalls.
    Bentley quit school at 16, worked briefly at his local newspaper and eventually became a reporter for The Northern Echo, a small but influential paper edited by Harold Evans, an icon of modern British journalism. Evans, who later became editor of the London Sunday Times and now heads a major American book publisher, "would disassemble every paper the day after it was published," Bentley remembers, "and woebetide anyone who had cocked things up."
    Like most ambitious young British journalists, Bentley dreamed of a job on Fleet Street, but believed a few years' foreign seasoning might improve his prospects. "I planned to go to the States," he says with a laugh, "but my geographic sense was appalling."
    He arrived in Halifax in 1966 as part of an influx of English reporters who joined the Chronicle-Herald during its sixties flirtation with all things British. "I only planned to come for two years," says Bentley, "but I'm the kind of person who tends to bore down, to dig holes and plant myself in one place."
    Bentley did just that, developing an important network of contacts, friends and business associates he maintains to this day. He became friends with Lyndon Watkins, for example, another English import at the Herald. Bentley later hired him as publisher of The Daily News and then invited him to help him launch Frank. As a legislature reporter, Bentley also worked with Dulcie Conrad, another Herald reporter who became Frank's third founder.   
    Although regarded as a first-class reporter with a keen sense of social justice, Bentley says he's always had "an entrepreneurial 'thing.' But the UK is so buttoned-down I never considered the idea of going into business for myself until I came here."
    In the late 1960s, he and a fellow Herald reporter considered buying  the Lunenburg Progress-Enterprise but the asking price - $100,000 - "was more than we could afford." Instead, he joined the Financial Post in Toronto to learn about how business worked and make plans to start his own publication.
    In 1970, he returned to Halifax and started Fleur, a controlled-circulation fashion tabloid. "It was quite a good idea," says Bentley, "but poorly executed. We spent too much money up front. There were a lot of things about publishing we didn't know we didn't know."
    The publication soon "went down the tubes" and Bentley, tail between his legs, rejoined the Herald, which sent him to "Siberia" - its Port Hawkesbury bureau - as punishment for having left.
    "I loved it," Bentley says now. "It was a super area." His posting there coincided with a brief but newsworthy government-goosed local industrial boom and a bitter 13-month strike by area fishermen, giving him "a catbird seat to see Nova Scotia patronage politics close up."
    In 1974, still aching to be a publisher, he quit the Herald again and - with wife Diana, British school friend Patrick Simms and his wife Joyce- launched The Bedford-Sackville Weekly News. "This time we went about it quite differently," Bentley says. "We lived in adjoining duplexes and we didn't pay ourselves at the beginning."
    The sacrifices paid off. The newspaper built up circulation and advertising. In 1977, they bought their own printing press. Two years later, they transformed their successful weekly into a Bedford-Sackville daily. It was a risky move. Not only did circulation plummet - from 9,000 to 3,000 - but the decision risked the wrath of Herald publisher Graham Dennis. Since they knew he could scuttle their fledgling venture simply by starting an advertising price war, Bentley approached Dennis directly to assure him their new paper had no ambitions beyond Bedford-Sackville. Dennis obligingly left them alone.
    When reminded of those assurances today, Bentley turns sheepish. "How can I explain that?" he says, then changes the subject.
    Whatever his original intentions - "we eventually realized we just couldn't crack it by sticking with Sackville," Bentley insists - The (bold)Halifax(end bold) Daily News set up shop on Barrington Street in 1981 and began competing directly for Herald readers.       
    Although the paper - modeled on working-class British tabloids with plenty of crime reporting and sensational headlines - developed a small but loyal readership, the constant struggle to keep it going took its toll.
    In 1984, Simms and his wife left. "Partnerships are hard to steer," Bentley allows. "We'd been together for nearly 10 years. We disagreed on the question of expansion, and Patrick said the hell with it. He and Joyce got out." For one of the few times his career, Bentley found it impossible to maintain business and friends. His lifelong relationship with Simms was a casualty of the split. "We don't see each other any more," Bentley says with genuine regret.
    A year later, Bentley and his wife also sold their interest in the paper - to Harry Steele's Newfoundland Capital Corporation, which was then gobbling up newspapers and broadcasting outlets. In part, Bentley says they decided to sell because the paper had reached a critical point and needed a major infusion of capital to become viable. But he admits the decision was personal too. "Diana felt she would like to get out. She wanted security and she didn't want me and my ambitions to interfere with her security. She'd raised the kids, handled the financial end of the business, and the business had dictated her life for a long time. She was for selling it."
    Although he declines to say how much they got, he calls published suggestions of $4.5 million "absurd. Diana and I chopped our share down the middle.
     Today, the Bentleys are still married and "we do see quite a lot of each other," but Bentley concedes it "would be fair to say we pursue different interests." His wife spends a good deal of her time in the U.K.
    When they sold the newspaper, Bentley was only 41 and his fascination with publishing unsated. He moved briefly to Toronto where he launched and quickly folded a "local 'People' thing" called Who's News. "I made the same mistakes as with Fleur," Bentley says with a shrug. "I tried to do it top down, spending money up front."
    Returning to Halifax, he called his old friends Watkins and Dulcie Conrad and asked if they'd be interested in creating a local, low-rent version of the British satirical publication Private Eye(end italic.)
    The first issue of Frank appeared on newsstands in late 1987. In September 1989, Bentley started an Ottawa edition. The Ottawa Frank is editorially distinct but controlled by the Halifax-based company. Together, the two publications now have a combined paid circulation of about 25,000 every two weeks.
    Frank, which carries virtually no advertising, isn't making its owners wealthy - "we still each have to do other things in the off-weeks" - but Bentley says he's satisfied. "At this point, there's no re-sale value in Frank. And there probably never will be. So I'll never be financially secure. But that's all right. I have a small apartment, an old car. I don't need all that much."
    Why does he bother?
    "I don't think of this as my life's mission," Bentley says, "but I do think Frank serves a useful purpose. It's very unlikely someone else would take it up if we weren't doing it. Besides," he adds as if this explains it all: "It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I'm the kind of person who likes to bore down. I do one thing at a time. And that's it."

Afterword: Bentley has since become the publisher — and founder — of allnovascotia.com — a subscription-based online  daily business publication.

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

By Stephen Kimber
February 10, 2008

Moratorium less than more
    An Annapolis Valley anti-quarry group says the province’s decision to green-light a nine-acre quarry for Upper Granville flies in the face of a clear recommendation for a moratorium on such projects by the review panel set up to consider plans for a controversial mega-quarry on Digby Neck.
    B. Spicer Construction applied for a licence to operate its quarry on the North Moutain in May, nearly six months before the release of the panel’s final report. Its proposed project was also small enough that, under then-existing rules, it didn’t have to go through an environmental assessment.
    Despite that, area residents formed a lobby group called the West Annapolis Valley Ecological Society (WAVES) to fight plans for the quarry.
    In October, they were encouraged when the Digby Neck review panel coupled its conclusion that the government should reject that much larger quarry proposal with a number of other, more general recommendations, including a call for a moratorium on all quarry development on the North Mountain until a coastal management plan was completed and a proposal that environmental assessments be carried out on all quarry proposals, regardless of size.
The citizens group thought it had won.
    Think again.
    While the province quickly accepted the panel’s recommendation to scrap the Digby Neck proposal, it remained silent on the other recommendations.
Until its sudden, recent approval of the Spicer quarry, that is.
    A department spokesperson says the government is following up on at least one recommendation — an interdepartmental committee is being set up to come up with a coastal management plan — but the Spicer quarry won’t be affected even if the government imposes a moratorium. That’s because its application was already in the works before the review panel reported.
    So… there could still be a moratorium. But it won’t be a complete moratorium. Does that make it a less-atorium?

Signs of the times
    Facing increasing  competition from big box stores in what he calls the most competitive retail market per capita in the province, the manager of the Colchester Co-op has appealed to its more than 5,500 members to “remember us” when they go shopping.
“We’re battling for survival,” general manager Peter Steele told the Truro Daily News this week.
    The member-owned cooperative, which has been operating in the town for more than 50 years, used to send members an annual dividend cheque out of its profits. But there are no longer profits. “We want that to change,” Steele says.
    He also wants consumers to know “we are the local guy. We are the place where your money actually does stay in the community.”
So far, reaction has been positive. There was an uptick in sales this week, notes Steele, who sees it as a hopeful sign. “It lets me know people care. They… really want their Co-op to succeed.”

Can you say hanging chad?
King’s County Council is considering a proposal to take this fall’s municipal elections high tech.
Intelivote Systems Incorporated of Dartmouth — the same company that will be managing Halifax Regional Municipality’s electronic voting this fall — made its pitch to council last month.
The company’s vice president of market development, Michael Pollard, told councilors its system not only allows residents to vote by paper ballot, telephone or over the Internet but also saves the municipality the headache of having to manage its own voters’ list.
    Better, “you’ll get a participation rate increase,” he told them, adding that new voters “may come from a demographic section you’re not used to —young people.” Coupled with the fact that electronic voting can be easier for seniors and people with disabilities, he predicted 70–75 per cent of eligible voters would actually cast ballots.
    All that, and green too! Pollard said the cost — three dollars per voter — could be offset by government funding to support initiatives that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
    Council has asked staff for a recommendation by its February meeting.

Adding fat to the fire… regulations
    Community halls in Nova Scotia may be forced to shut their doors, or at least close their kitchens — which for many would amount to the same thing — if they’re forced to live up to the letter of new National Fire Safety Regulations.
    The regulations require that any “small assembly type buildings” that operate kitchens install a “fire suppression system.” That probably means putting in a $15,000 commercial cooking hood instead of a couple of fire extinguishers. Many local community halls, which depend on their kitchens to help raise funds to keep operating, won’t be able to afford the added expense.
     “This is a mighty big request,” Ellershouse Coun. Tom Brown told fire inspection officer Tim Leslie during a Hants municipal council meeting last week.
Leslie recently conducted 11 on-site inspections of local halls and had to tell some of them that their standard fire extinguishers “may not be enough” to meet the National Fire Codes.
“We’ll have to close down any hall that cooks,” Brown lamented.
    “It seems… we're asking ordinary citizens for too much,” added Coun. Shirley Pineo, who asked Leslie: “What if we don't follow what you suggest, who’s liable?”
But Leslie stuck to his guns, telling councilors: “It’s wrong for me to walk away now and do nothing… This was all supposed to have been done. Now it’s a big eye-opener for a lot of people.”
It could get bigger. Under the regulations, every small assembly building, including churches, is supposed to be inspected every three years. Hide the hot dogs.

Bring back the baby bonus
The good news is that the bad news isn’t as bad as it seemed. But it’s still not good.
Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s population is expected to fall from its current 106,000 residents to 93,000 by 2021. But that’s more than the 76,000 predicted in an earlier study.
“Things are looking a little better but they’re still declining,” CBRM planning director Doug Foster told the municipality’s planning advisory committee last week.
But even the modest good news isn’t really good, he added.
The reason for the projected population decrease is that there’s been a “startling decline in the number of residents of child-rearing age” as people in the 20–34 age group flee Cape Breton in search of better economic prospects elsewhere.
At the same time — and the reason that the overall decline is less than expected — the municipality is luring many over-40s, who’d previously left, back home. Which means the increasingly aging population is “going to put up our dependency ratio even faster in terms of an ageing population.”
Oops.
Colourful councilor Vince Hall told fellow committee members the municipality is “dying of a terminal illness,” He called on the province to develop “a provincial population strategy” instead of concentrating all its efforts on attracting immigrants to settle here.”
Sounds like a cash-for-babies plan to me.

Smoke and Mirrors
    They traded counter-proposals and then counter-rejections, and still couldn’t come to an agreement. So Amherst Town Council has now offered a short olive branch to its Cumberland County counterparts — its fire department will continue to answer calls from county residents for one more year, provided the county agrees to accept the terms of its last counter-offer.
    The current fire protection agreement between the two is scheduled to end in July.
    Money has been — and is — the issue. Amherst’s original starting point was that the county should pony up $280,000 a year to cover the extra costs its firefighters incur. The county’s first counter offer was for $55,000.
    Uh… Not even close.
    When the two sides sat down face to face last week, they managed to whittle the difference down to $100,000, give or take, but that wasn’t enough for any long-term agreement.
    So Amherst’s council made its in-the-meantime, one-year offer — provided the county agree to its revised $174,000 price tag.
    Even though its own last offer was for just $70,000, the county seems ready to take the bait. “It looks like it’s an opportunity to take advantage,” Warden Keith Hunter told the Amherst Daily News, noting that the county’s alternative is to set up its own fire department. “Rather than (the county having) to rent a fire hall, we can get them to provide the service until we can get our fire department up and running.”

The Apple Core
Thanks to dramatic increases in construction costs and a federal government that has zipped its purse, the group behind King’s County’s ambitious Apple Dome — a multi-million-dollar multi-multiplex supposed to feature a 1,200-seat arena, walking track, curling rink, library, banquet room, fitness centre and outdoor swimming pool — has had to rethink its construction timetable.
George Moody, the chair of the volunteer organizers, says the Dome — officially the Kings Mutual Century Centre — will now be developed in phases using what the architects calls a “modular concept.”
“When we started this project, it was going to cost $9 million to get everything we wanted,” Moody told a public meeting. That cost has now almost doubled to $17 million. The new budget for just Phase One of the project — the foundation, arena and installation of structural and electrical infrastructure for future phases —  will total $9.4 million.
The group has so far fundraised $5.2 million, including $2 million from the province. And Moody is still hopeful it can squeeze $3 million out of Ottawa before it’s over.
Perhaps then they can have the whole apple and not just the core.

www.stephenkimber.com

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.

SOURCES: Amherst Daily News, Annapolis County Spectator, Cape Breton Post, Hants Journal, Kings County Register, Truro Daily News.

It’s just a story

By Stephen Kimber
February 7, 2008

    My first published short story appeared in a 1976 anthology called Voices Down East, edited by the writer Silver Donald Cameron. The story was called Today I Went Crazy and told the tale of a man who had “come out of the closet of [his] craziness” and murdered his boss. “I cradle the gun in my outstretched arm, savouring his bewilderment,” my unnamed protagonist writes near the end of the story. “I squeeze the trigger. I am free. I am crazy.”
    Whatever the story’s literary merits — or lack thereof — it was never intended to be taken literally.
To be honest, perhaps there was some element of fantasy wish fulfillment lurking at the edges of my choice of subject matter. I had just recently been fired from the CBC, which was then — and may be now — the kind of workplace that nurtures occasional homicidal urges.
    But officials at the CBC did not report me to the authorities as a likely psycho. In fact, the CBC, being the CBC, offered me a job on a different TV program on the grounds that if I’d been fired from the first I couldn’t be all bad… but that’s another CBC story for another day. The Halifax police certainly did not show up at my door.
    It was just a story.
    I couldn’t help remembering that blessedly lost-to-the-ages short story this week as I read the tangled tale of 17-year-old Brendan Jones, a Grade 12 student at Heart Lake Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario, who wrote an essay as part of his final exam for his creative writing class. The five-page, handwritten essay was entitled Schools (sic) Out.
His equally unnamed protagonist is a 16-year-old girl who, at the end of the story, traps her science teacher in the basement of her house, picks up a baseball bat and says, “Sorry, Mr. Adams, but schools (sic) out.”
    Brendan did not get into serious trouble for mixing up his plurals and his possessives, or even — as his teacher was careful to note in her teacherly way in the margins — for using clichés and violating the inviolate “show-don’t-tell” rule of composition.
    No, Brendan’s real crime, as it turned out, wasn’t literary; it was that he had chosen “inappropriate subject matter.”
    The next thing he knew, a Peel Regional Police telephoned his father. “We need to come to your house to talk about your son.” Brendan says he was told he was no longer welcome at the school and would be arrested if he tried to come on school property. His father says the principal then called him to say that the matter was being looked into by the school board and he might even be expelled from all schools under the board’s jurisdiction, putting his graduation and his plans to attend university to study — what else? — criminology next year in jeopardy.
    The incident touched off a predictable firestorm. Two students started a Facebook group called “Save Brendan Jones,” which had 562 members as of yesterday morning; a student distributed “Save Brendan Jones” T-shirts (students who wore them were warned they could be expelled if they did it again); and the media, of course, was a dog on a bone. “Leave the kid alone,” opined the National Post.
    That prompted some frantic backpedaling by the school board, which insisted the Brendan hadn’t been suspended or expelled, just asked to stay home for a few days so the board could “make sure we're doing everything we can to help the student,” as a spokesperson explained. She didn’t explain what they would do to help, or even why Brendan needed help.
The issue, it seems to me, is that in our defensible desire to protect students from actual danger, we have become far too quick to see ideas as dangerous, to confuse imagination with reality.
And — at a broader freedom-of-speech level — to mix up the sort of hateful, dangerous speech (or, more accurately, the dumbass anti-Muslim provocations of right-wingnuts like Maclean’s columnist Mark Steyn and the late, unlamented Western Standard’s Ezra Levant) that can, and should be met with rational, logical argument with hateful, dangerous action that must be dealt with by legal sanction.
It’s enough to make want to reach for a … Ooops.

http://www.stephenkimber.com

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. He is also the author of six books, including one novel that should not be confused with real life. 


Kimber’s Nova Scotia

By Stephen Kimber
February 3, 2008

Can you say committee?
Nova Scotia's top Mountie came with an apology and left with a committee.
RCMP Assistant Commissioner Ian Atkins told a full-house public meeting at the Digby Elementary School on Tuesday night that he was “disappointed and embarrassed” by the actions of a former local detachment commander, who was accused in 2005 of racist and sexist behaviour. “I am here to apologize to you the community for that,” Atkins said.
Although the Mounties investigated the complaints against Wylie Grimm under the force’s code-of-conduct regulations and determined they were well founded, Atkins conceded they had been “unable to bring full accountability because of the retirement of the commander,” who apparently left the force with a full pension before the probe was completed.
    While residents seemed pleased with the apology, they insisted their frustration with the local RCMP was about far more than Grimm.
“We are not here because of a new phenomenon,” Brenda Clarke of the Black Educator’s Association told Atkins. “As of today, the black youth of Digby are experiencing differential treatment… We need to have these complaints dealt with. And we need to have them addressed quickly because they are happening regularly.”
    It was Atkins who then brought up the idea of establishing a local advisory committee. “If we have racist officers in Digby,” he told the crowd, “then Staff Sgt. (Phil) Barrett (the new local commander) and I want to know. The only thing worse than hearing bad news is not hearing it.”
    Barrett and resident Darlene Lawrence, who co-chaired the meeting, were soon busy taking names of those willing to sit on a steering committee to help set up the advisory board. That board is now expected to meet for the first time later this month.
After  the meeting, Clarke told the Digby Courier: “This was good… They have publicly stated their support for addressing our issues so now we have individuals we can hold accountable. Accountability is what’s been missing all along.”
Hope springs eternal.

Court in session… elsewhere
Residents of Baddeck are worried about the number of provincial services and staff quietly being transferred out of their village. The matter came up at municipal council last month after councilors learned the latest news: the Provincial Court, which traditionally holds sessions in Baddeck every Monday, will now switch locale to Sydney for one session per month.
While accepting the official rationale that there is a backlog of unheard cases in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, the Victoria Standard, the community’s newspaper, fretted that the decision will have a damaging effect on Baddeck’s economy.
“On Mondays,” the paper noted, “there is a pronounced influx of people for court. Lawyers, sheriffs, prothonotary personnel, witnesses and accused make their way to the shire town and partake of the goods and services that are available.”
To make matters worse, the court isn’t the only institution being relocated. Mapping services offered by the Registry of Deeds will now only be available in Sydney, meaning real estate lawyers and realtors will have to drive an hour each way to do their business. The Department of Community Services’ local manager has also been transferred to Sydney
And now residents have another worry. The province’s Utility and Review Board is considering whether the area’s current two regional school board representatives are one too many. The Standard says the county needs both of its representatives in order to continue “championing the students in a municipality that is geographically larger than (the Cape Breton Regional Municipality), which has 10 members.
“In a municipality with a vast geography and dwindling population,” the paper added, “any transfer of persons or services out of the County has a greater impact than in larger population centres.”
Duly noted. And, almost certainly, duly ignored too.

Yes, but…
Garfield Moffat of the Folly Lake Wentworth Valley Environmental Preservation Society says his group isn’t against wind power. In fact, “we are big supporters of it, but —”
There’s always a but.
In this case it’s scale and, of course, location.
Confederation Power Inc., an Ontario-based “renewable power developer, owner and operator, with hydro and wind projects located across Canada,” has already erected three test turbines on Higgins Mountain and has eventual plans for a 66-turbine project in the area.
Society member say the cumulative impact of all those turbines in close proximity to residential areas needs way more study. They are calling for a much more detailed environmental assessment of the project than the government has undertaken so far, and they want the province to impose a moratorium on all wind farm projects until those concerns are dealt with.
Moffatt says part of the problem is that there are no provincial standards for wind farms. That’s leaving too much regulatory power in the hands of “revenue-hungry municipalities, who don’t have the depth or access to resources to adequately come up with these reference points and governance.”
The society believes Cumberland County’s recent bylaw requiring that turbines be located at least 500 metres from existing dwellings, for example, isn’t enough. Their testing measured noise pollution from Confederation’s three small turbines as far as 900 metres upwind. “What’s going to happen when you start stacking one on top of the other and get 66, and go downwind?”
That said, Moffatt insists his group isn’t against the project. “We tried to come up with a position (that’s) not overly aggressive, and that the developer can hopefully deal with,” he told the Amherst Citizen. “We realize… that many want to see green power and sustainable, renewable power as quickly as it can get online, at any expense… We want it done right — right enough that it can become a blueprint for future projects.”
For projects not located in my backyard.

Sign of the times
Keata Pharma needed to hire 60 people to work in its soon-to-open contract pharmaceutical manufacturing plant in Sydney’s Northside Industrial Park. So last week the company decided to stage a job fair to gage local interest.
Six-hundred-and-twenty-six wannabes — more than 10 times more people than positions — walked through the doors.
“We were very impressed,” Keata Pharma president David Leonard told the Cape Breton Post. “I think we have definitely piqued people’s curiosity.”
Keata, originally an Ontario-based company, received $6.25 million in repayable government loans way back in 2004 to build its Caper Breton plant and is also eligible for up to $3.5 million in payroll rebates, depending on the number of people it hires.

A pound of prevention
    Shelburne’s Community Health Board isn’t buying Premier Rodney MacDonald’s promise not to close any of the province’s rural hospital emergency rooms. “Experience has shown that studies/reviews in the past have resulted in losses of services,” the board sagely noted in a letter last week to both the regional health authority and the Department of Health.
The board was responding to a controversial report by Corpus and Sanchez consultants that was unveiled last month. That report claims too many rural emergency departments are currently being used as substitute family doctors. It wants health authorities to rethink the way they staff ERs to determine if the services they offer are sustainable.
Which, to the community health board, sounds like code for closing them down.
    Last year, more than 16,000 patients visited Shelburne’s Roseway Hospital Emergency Department, and board member Harold Hart worries there would simply be no hospital left if its ER were forced to close.
    If the hospital had to shut its doors, the board points out, residents would have to travel 60-90 minutes just to get to the nearest hospital.
    As for the consultants’ suggestion that people with real emergencies should simply call Emergency Health Services (EHS), the board batted down that idea too. “Calling an ambulance… is an expensive solution most people cannot afford,” it explained in its letter.
“Our stance is no [emergency department] closure,” Arthur Blades, Chair of the CHB, told the Shelburne Coastguard. “It’s just not acceptable.”
But what about the premier’s promise not to close any ERs? “We can’t wait until they make a decision to try to change their minds.”
Good call.

Meanwhile…
A Halifax-based lobby group set up more than 10 years ago “to stop the privatization of the public health care system, ensure high levels of care and create a forum for people and communities to discuss issues in health care,” is taking advantage of the current controversy over the Corpus Sanchez report to broaden its base.
“There is a perfect storm working in this country to privatize our health care system,” Kyle Buott of the Nova Scotia Citizens' Health Care Network told the Queen’s County Advance. “Local communities need to come together to defend access to local services and stop privatization.”
Which is why Buott has been busily criss-crossing the province organizing local health committees. Last week, he added two more — in Yarmouth and Queens County — to the three his network has already established and says “we will be continuing our drive into the northern parts of the province by mid-February.
“Concerned citizens cannot stand by and watch our system be sold off to the profiteers. It is time to take a stand in defense of local access to services and the public health care system.”
To the ramparts!

Wasn’t that a party?… No
     A Prospect area fisherman has been fined $5,000, had his truck seized and lost his lobster fishing privileges for the first lucrative week of next season after pleading guilty in Bridgewater provincial court to catching undersized lobsters.
Fisheries and Oceans officers nabbed him with 156 too-small-to-keep lobsters in crates in his truck last May.
Judge Anne Crawford wasn’t buying his excuse that the crustaceans were for a family party. “Everyone has to make a living,” she told him, “and when you take an advantage by taking undersized lobsters you not only get an immediate advantage over other fishers, but there’s less lobster for everyone else next year and the year after that.”
    I guess the party was cancelled.

www.stephenkimber.com

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.

SOURCES: Amherst Citizen, Cape Breton Post, Digby Courier, Queens County Advance, Southshorenow.ca, Shelburne Coast Guard, Victoria Standard, Yarmouth Vanguard.

The whole truth and everything but

By Stephen Kimber
January 31, 2008

One of the conventional wisdom arguments in conventional-wisdom-ruled Ottawa is that even if Brian Mulroney did commit a no-no by accepting envelopes stuffed with cash from Karlheinz Schreiber — and, perhaps only in Ottawa, is that still in question — the reality is that such bad behaviour couldn’t possibly occur in today’s squealingly clean, Accountability-Act obsessed Ottawa.
In fact — or so goes the argument — Stephen Harper’s government’s response to the Liberal sponsorship scandal was so over-the-top over-wrought that this whole ethics in government fixation has become an albatross around the neck of good governance and is discouraging the best people from participating in the political process.
It is true that Harper’s Conservatives won the last federal election, in part, on the basis of their promise to clean up the way political Ottawa did business after Justice John Gomery’s investigation turned over the rocks and revealed the extent of the sleaze. And it is also true that the Tories did bring in a 214-page Federal Accountability Act as one of their first items of business.
But it is unfortunately true too — as Democracy Watch, an openness in government lobby group, points out — that the Tories only included in the Act 30 of the 50 measures they initially promised, and that they have only implemented 24 of those.
Among the loopholes Democracy Watch has identified: Anyone with the cash to do so can still donate an unlimited amount to help a candidate win a nomination or support a party leadership candidate ( so long as that candidate doesn’t use the money directly for their campaign). Politicians are not supposed to accept gifts that could influence their decisions but, under the current rules, they don’t have to disclose any gift under $10,000 — and those disclosure statements aren’t even audited. “As a result,” says Democracy Watch, “it is very easy for a federal politician or official to hide a gift worth up to $9,999.”
Secret lobbying is still legal so long as you don’t do it for more than 35 days in any six-month period, and even registered lobbyists don’t have to provide details of who they’re cosying up to, or how often. Even one of the most touted provisions of the Act — the one forbidding cabinet ministers and senior mandarins from attempting to influence their former colleagues for five years, after they leave office — has a Hummer-sized loophole, allowing ministers to exempt their staff from the ban.
“To give just one example to show how loophole-filled the system still is,” Democracy Watch concluded in an op-ed piece it says the Globe and Mail refused to run, “Karlheinz Schreiber and Brian Mulroney would still not be required to be publicly listed as in-house corporate lobbyists (as long as they lobbied less than 36 days every 6 months), and Schreiber could still give $300,000 in secret to some federal candidates, and to all federal politicians, political staff and public servants right after they leave office, either as a donation or as payment for lobbying services (and could give the same amount in secret to trust funds maintained by every federal political party and their riding associations).   

***

Speaking of our former prime minister, it has been instructive to watch Brian Mulroney’s lawyers sputter and threaten this week. They lawyers were responding to the Commons Ethics Committee’s plans for pursuing its investigation into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair.
After the committee asked the auditor general to examine Mulroney’s tax records to see whether they shed any light on the secret cash payments he received and, after Mulroney’s former chief of staff, Norman Spector, publicly promised to “identify the source of large quantities of cash” delivered to the prime minister’s residence when he testifies, lawyer Guy Pratte declared it all irrelevant and/or that “it breaches the most basic requirements of fairness,” and then threatened that Mulroney might refuse to reappear before the committee if it doesn’t change its plans.
It’s probably worth revisiting what Brian Mulroney had to say back in November when he called for a full public inquiry into the entire affair — all the way back to his government’s controversial 1988 purchase of 34 Airbus jets — so that the “whole truth [can be] finally exposed and tarnished reputations restored… I have come to the conclusion that in order to finally put this matter to rest and expose all the facts and the role played by all the people involved, from public servants to elected officials, from lobbyists to police authorities, as well as journalists, the only solution is for the government to launch a full-fledged public commission of inquiry.”
Since the Harper government’s announced public inquiry will be much more limited and circumscribed, Mulroney should be grateful that the Ethics Committee has taken on the difficult task of exposing the “whole truth” of what really happened.
That he suddenly isn’t may tell us more than we may want to know about that whole truth.

http://www.stephenkimber.com


Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.


Kimber’s Nova Scotia

By Stephen Kimber
January 27, 2008

Well, it’s a start
    Members of Cumberland County’s municipal council voted unanimously on Wednesday to say yes to a request from the towns of Amherst, Springhill, Parrsboro and Oxford to meet to begin to talk… well, about talking about the future of fire services in the region.
    The various governments have been trying and failing for months to negotiate a new deal so Amherst would continue provide fire services to county communities.
When the last deal was signed three years ago, the county paid just $122,000 a year to cover the extra costs for Amherst firefighters. Amherst says it now wants the municipality to ante up $286,000 a year while he municipality has countered with $190,000.
    And… Well, there the matter stands.
In December, Amherst council voted to cut off the fire hoses effective July 1, 2008.
Even as the clock ticks down, Amherst and municipal officials have continued to trade insults — some Amherst councillors think the county low-balled them because it wants to set up its own fire department “as a means of partially justifying the existence of its fire services co-ordinator position” — while not getting a deal done.
While local mayors expressed cautious optimism about the face-to-face meeting scheduled for next week, Municipal Warden Keith Hunter says Amherst’s latest offer of “minor alterations” to its original proposal won’t likely be enough to break the impasse.
“Unless Amherst is willing to give a lot more than minor [alterations],” he told the Amherst Daily News, “there are no negotiations to be had with the Town of Amherst.”
    Any other business? Meeting adjourned.

Good, better…
Health Minister Chris d’Entremont finally got to preside over a good news health care story last week — and perhaps reap a little political reward in the bargain.
“Here is where the quality of health care begins,” d’Entremonet told a crowd of 40 people who’d come to celebrate the official opening of the Harbour South Medical Clinic in his Yarmouth birthplace last week.
The clinic will employ up to eight doctors as well as nurse practitioners, and offer primary care as well as health education. The hope is that its presence will cut down on patient wait times as well as free up beds in the Yarmouth Regional Hospital.
    But its opening dovetailed neatly with a recent consultants’ report urging the province to rethink the way it delivers health care.
“Clinics like this are as important as big hospitals,” d'Entremont explained, adding that people are currently going to a hospital “for very basic services. We need to get them out and have services close to home. That's what this clinic is — it's in the community, it's more responsive to the needs for those patients.”
    “People who used to come here left feeling good,” Mayor Charles Crosby added in his remarks, noting that the clinic’s Main Street location once served as a liquor store. “Now, they'll leave feeling better.”
    After his week in the negative glare of the cuts-are-coming spotlight, we’re guessing that Chris d’Entremont sure did.

Meanwhile…
    Health care administrators, professionals and citizens around the province were still sorting out their reactions to last week’s far-reaching $1-million Corpus Sanchez report on the future of health care.
That report, two years in the making, not only came up with 103 recommendations for ensuring “sustainability through transformation” of the health care system province-wide, but it also added dozens of others aimed specifically at individual regional health care authorities and institutions.
Some of those recommendations will inevitably lead to reduced services in rural areas.
    Perhaps that explains why the immediate consensus reaction to the report seemed to be, “Yes, but…”
    The principles are fine, but don’t mess with our ER. And don’t rush into anything.
David Irvine, who heads a local physician-recruiting group called Medical Emergency-Digby in Crisis (MEDIC), told the Digby Courier his group made many of the same arguments for change — “like team approaches to primary care, and an end to doctors being the be all and end all” — seven years ago. But the government did little about them.
He says he’s surprised the MacDonald government is now suggesting it will implement all 103 recommendations in the report in just three years, especially since consultations on the report are expected to take at least a year.
“I have a copy of the report here beside me,” he explained. “It’s three centimeters thick, over an inch. There’s a lot of stuff in it, but the devil is in the details.”
Indeed.

Speaking of details
    Digby General Hospital administrator Judy LeBlanc has been busy this past week fielding angry calls from local residents who believe she’s kicked Dr. Roy Harding’s biweekly clinics out of the hospital.
    Not so, she insists.
    Harding, the hospital’s former medical director and a popular family doctor who resigned in June, has been operating walk-in clinics out of his own former offices in the hospital. In early January, LeBlanc told him he’d have to move because the hospital needed to renovate the space for soon-to-be hired nurse practitioners.
    LeBlanc says that using the hospital offices for the clinic was always intended as an short-term solution, and added that she’s already found a new home for Harding at the nearby Bear River Community Health Clinic.
    In fact, she says the Bear River facility — which she and Harding had discussed as a possible location from the beginning — is better suited for the kind of clinics he is providing.
Still, she knows some Digby residents aren’t happy with having to travel to Bear River. “I hope people will understand he didn’t get kicked out,” she told the newspaper hopefully.

Ah, country living
A loose coalition of Annapolis Valley towns, community organizations and residents has launched a campaign “to be able to enjoy our backyards and our families and not be invaded by unwanted intrusions.” Those intruders include ATVs, OHVs and all manner of noisy, motorized vehicles currently roaring along pristine wooded trails in their communities.
Bob Connell, the organizer of the fledgling Coalition for Quiet Living, told the Annapolis County Spectator he’s been “feeling out people that I felt were like-minded,” and discovered a lot of people are.
His own Cambridge-based Cornwallis River Pathways Society is currently trying to get permission to develop a six-kilometre section of an abandoned local rail bed as an exclsuively non-motorized trail.
It may not be easy.
    Annapolis Royal Mayor John Kinsella, whose council is on record supporting the idea of the pedestrian trail, says he was disappointed when the province’s Office of Health Promotion and Protection recently came out in support of allowing vehicles to share the walking path because, as officals explained in a letter to the town, “the geography does not readily provide for easy and inexpensive answers for an alternate route” for motorized vehicles.
“How is it that the office of Health Protection and Promotion is advocating for the use of ATVs?” asks Kinsella. “Is that a healthy activity?”

How do you define criminal?
Westville’s board of police commissioners says there are inaccuracies in a scathing provincial Justice Department report that criticizes the way it does its business, but acting board chair Ray Cameron wouldn’t say what those inaccuracies are. Board members also say some of the media reporting about the report itself has been inaccurate too but they refused to be specific about that either.
And that’s the way the board’s first public meeting to consider its response to Justice Minister Cecil Clarke’s report played out last week.
The report claimed the board — with seven members managing a six-member police force — was dysfunctional, that it meddled in day-to-day department operations and that two of its members had criminal records, which is a no-no under the province’s Police Act.
It was that last issue that seemed to dominate discussion at the meeting. In the end, the board agreed to write a letter to the Justice Minister asking him to “define” criminal conviction as well as to publicly identify the two individuals who tested positive for criminal convictions.
Despite its disagreements with the report, however, Cameron insisted to the New Glasgow News that “we certainly have to do what the minister asks, and we intend to do that,” adding, “I'm sure everything can be straightened out to everybody's advantage.”
    The board has until Feb. 15 to craft its response.
    It sounds like it will need every day of that time.

Home business
    A Shelburne County fisherman thought he’d found the perfect way to generate a little extra income.
    Using his home computer, he managed to create a much-prized — but also very much forged — Area 33 lobster license, which he then leased to another fisherman for $5,000, plus 20 per cent of his catch.
    The scheme was working just fine until Department of Fisheries and Oceans officers got suspicious while conducting a routine check of the man’s license.
Three days later, 10 officers swooped down on Joey Oikle’s house, seizing documents and a computer.
    Earlier this month, Oikle pleaded guilty to three charges including fraud and “fishing with a license without being named in the license.” The court fined him $8,150 and ordered him to pay back $8,850 he’d managed to make on his fake license scam.
    No word on whether officials gave him back his computer.

http://www.stephenkimber.com/

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.

SOURCES: Amherst Daily News, Annapolis County Spectator, Digby Courier, New Glasgow News, Shelburne Coastguard, Yarmouth Vanguard.

Manley report not the way forward

By Stephen Kimber
January 24, 2008

    In the first sentence of the second paragraph of its final report to the prime minister, John Manley’s Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan lays out the stark reality.
“This,” acknowledges Stephen Harper’s own carefully hand-picked, pro-mission group of former senior politicians and mandarins, “is a conflict of ferocious complexity in a region of violent instability.”
Unfortunately, the report is much better at describing that reality than it is in prescribing a way forward. And it is often as interesting for what it does not say as for what it does.
    That’s not to suggest that the 39-page document — plus colour maps, helpful glossary and various and sundry appendices — isn’t a useful contribution to the long-overdue full public debate we in this country need to have on our role in Afghanistan.
It is. But it must be read carefully — and skeptically.
    Manley’s panel, which Harper appointed last fall — partly to provide him with political cover on the decision about what Canada should do when its current troop commitment expires in 2009, and partly to make mischief for Liberal leader Stephane Dion — does present a balanced, if perhaps somewhat too-rosy view of what’s been accomplished in Afghanistan to date and the challenges we face going forward.
    The report correctly acknowledges, for example, certain important backdrop realities, including the fact that the current conflict there is actually just “a continuation of almost three decades of war involving many of the same players, not all of which are Taliban, resulting in a combination of anti-government insurgents and self-interested ‘spoilers’ who, for reasons of personal power or economic interests, have no desire to see rule of law or central authority spread.”
The report doesn’t say so, but it is clear many of those self-interested spoilers — warlords, drug dealers, arms merchants and corrupt officials — are now members of Afghanistan’s “democratically elected” government, the one we’re supporting with our soldiers’ lives.
    The report also concedes that the current insurgency is being directed “primarily from sanctuaries in Pakistan,” adding — correctly — that “few counterinsurgencies in history have been won by foreign armies, particularly where the indigenous insurgents enjoy convenient sanctuary in a bordering country.”
But then it never comes to grips with the critically important question that flows from that assessment: how do we sever the chain of command, guns and troops pouring across the border into Afghanistan to attack our troops?
The reticence to confront that reality, of course, is largely because doing so would involve taking on our supposed allies in the Pakistani government and army. Instead, the report tepidly suggests that Canada, “in concert with key allies, should adopt a coherent diplomatic strategy that addresses regional risks and engages all the region’s actors, in particular Pakistan, to establish a more stable security environment.”
That’s certainly worked well so far.
    Similarly, while the report recognizes that the insurgency is being financed in part by profits from the drug trade and accepts the need for NATO to offer “effective  economic provisions to induce would-be poppy farmers and middlemen to  prefer and find alternative lines of work,” Manley’s group still seems much more comfortable touting “justice-sector  reforms to tighten the prosecution of traffickers.” In fact, it appears almost embarrassed when it backhandedly suggests, “as one possibility, a limited poppy-for-medicine project might be worth pursuing.”
Again, its preferred solution has already proved an abysmal failure.
Where the Manley report really falters though is in its actual recommendations.
It wisely rejects the simple, simplistic solutions: either withdraw our troops immediately and leave the Afghans to fend for themselves, or stay the course forever if need be in order to “win” an unwinnable war.
And the panel is probably right — if frustratingly so — when it argues that, having gotten ourselves into this mess, we cannot simply set an arbitrary timetable for ending the mission.
The panel makes its key, and widely expected, recommendation — that Canada continue its combat role in Afghanistan beyond February 2009 — contingent on some other country’s willingness to add 1,000 combat troops to the mix in Kandahar. But the problem is that it offers no compelling evidence that 1,000 more soldiers — whether they are American troops or come from some hitherto reluctant NATO ally — will significantly change the situation on the ground.
And it does not even posit the possibility that Canada take the lead in seeking a diplomatic, negotiated settlement to the conflict that would allow Afghans to more quickly take control of their own destiny.
In the end, what all that means is that the Manley report is not a way forward but a path deeper. And that is a future we don’t need.

http://www.stephenkimber.com


Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.


Kimber’s Nova Scotia

By Stephen Kimber
January 20, 2007

Not so ‘weird’
    While provincial politicians loudly debate the future of health care, a rural Nova Scotia GP and his nurse-wife are quietly showcasing one possible option — for patients 5,000 miles away.
    Every Monday afternoon, Port Clyde physician John O’Connor and his wife Charlene travel to Yarmouth  to set up temporary shop in the regional hospital’s telehealth department. There, using a video hookup, O’Connor “sees” patients living on a remote northern Alberta community.
    The O’Connors, who relocated to Nova Scotia after nine years in Fort MacKay, say they’re delighted to be able to continue providing services to residents of the otherwise-doctor-less First Nations Reserve.
    Working with two on-site nurses who deal directly with the patients, operate the camera and handle the paperwork, O’Connor conducts the usual patient interviews — “Have you lost or gained any weight?” he asks one patient he suspects has hypothyroidism — and then directs one of the nurses to pan the patient’s skin so he can see how pale it is and to check for swelling on her lower legs. Later, he faxes a requisition for blood work to the clinic. He’ll get the results back in a few days.
The O’Connors do supplement their video care with in-person follow-ups, flying out to Alberta every six to eight weeks, and they have an arrangement with a Fort McMurray doctor to see patients who need more immediate care.
“Initially, there were a few people that said, ‘Oh boy, is this ever weird,’” O’Connor told the Yarmouth Vanguard, but added, “for the most part they are quite happy with it.”
Especially when the alternative is no doctor at all.
Barb Clairmont, the telehealth facilitator at Yarmouth Regional, says her facilities are normally only used for education purposes or for consultations between patients and specialists.  “It’s common for specialists to use this technology, but not general practitioners.”
Given the current doctor shortage in rural Nova Scotia, that may soon change.

Getting closure… or not
Meanwhile, Nova Scotia’s rural health authorities are still coming to grips with what last week’s sweeping recommendations on the future of health care in Nova Scotia will mean for their residents — especially in terms of emergency care.
In addition to the already much-discussed 103 province-wide recommendations for change, the consultants also conducted specific audits of the services each health care authority provides and made even more recommendations — 187 just for Pictou County, 43 for Cumberland, etc.. — for changing how local health care is delivered.
First-blush responses have run the gamut.
Pat Lee, CEO of the Pictou Authority, which hopes to have a plan to renovate the Aberdeen Hospital’s emergency department in place by April 1, was almost bullish, predicting implementation of the proposals will mean “better access to primary care, fewer residents not having access to primary care, and less patients in the emergency department because we will have more clinics open.”
Up the road in Amherst, Cumberland CEO Bruce Quigley was more cautious. Conceding that the report “sets out very clearly the burning platform for change,” the authority’s board unanimously agreed to accept the recommendations “subject to qualifications and questions we may have.”
The big one, Board chair Bruce Saunders told the Amherst Daily News, has to do with the mixed messages they’re hearing about emergency room closures. “[The government] made clear today there would be no ER closures, but does that mean there will be no closures, but you may be closing down so many hours a day or a week?... We have made it absolutely clear there will be no ER closures until we are satisfied that a proven method could be put in place to replace the existing status quo of these ERs.”
Let the haggling begin.

And they’re off
When the Queens Liberal Association met yesterday to choose a candidate to represent it in the next provincial election, only one name was expected to be on the ballot. But that would be better than the party managed in 2006 when no Liberal even contested the riding.
After 15 years on municipal council, Wayne Henley officially announced last week that he would be seeking the nomination. “It’s just something I have been longing to do,” he told the Queens County Advance, adding one of his key campaign planks will be to upgrade Highway 103 between Port Mouton and Shelburne County.
Having a Liberal candidate should make for an even more interesting race in what had once been a Tory stronghold. In the 2006 election, the original Liberal candidate was forced to withdraw for health reasons and the party, then in disarray, failed to replace him. That helped the NDP’s Vicki Conrad end the Tories’ 50-year hold on the riding. With many traditional Liberal voters switching to the NDP, Conrad eked out a victory over respected veteran Conservative cabinet minister Kerry Morash.
Can Conrad hold on to the NDP’s new rural outpost? Will the Tories sneak back up the middle in a three-way race? Can a well-known local Liberal politician bring the also-ran Grits back to respectability? Stay tuned.

Who’s a crook?
Westville’s mayor says town council and the local board of police commissioners will “act in accordance with the directives of Justice Minister Cecil Clarke” to fix what ails the town’s policing services. But that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it.
Last week, Clarke gave the town until Feb. 15 to respond to a scathing Justice Department investigation that described the police board as “dysfunctional” and “counterproductive.” The report claimed there were serious conflicts between some board members and the police chief, and that the board had meddled in the department’s day-to-day operations.
To complicate matters — and make some councillors and board members get their hackles up — the report also refers to two board members it does not name as having “criminal convictions.”
    Mayor Sandy Cyr, who told the New Glasgow News he’s disappointed the report’s innuendo has been generating speculation and misinformation among local residents, wants the minister to name names to remove the “umbrella of suspicion” now over everyone.
    Despite that, Cyr says the town will meet Clarke’s deadline for a response. It doesn’t have much choice. If it doesn’t, the justice minister has already threatened to take unspecified drastic action.

You say ecosphere, I say…
So how do you define an “ecosphere?” That’s the dilemma Berwick’s Planning Advisory Committee is trying to comes to grips with.
Two entrepreneurs with Nova Scotia roots, Barrie Wamboldt and Ron Turner, want to transform a former one-and-a-half storey wooden apple warehouse on the town’s Front Street  into a five-storey glass-and-brick greenhouse — and more.
“It just won’t be about apples anymore,” boasts Wamboldt. No kidding.
They call their first-of-its-kind idea an ecosphere and claim “environmental wonders will take place there.” For starters the facility will “oxidize, not burn” fuel pellets made from “waste material that is trucked to and buried in Lunenburg County.” The 200 tons of waste oxidized per day will create energy — electricity, natural gas and carbon dioxide — they can then sell as well as use to produce quick-grow crops, such as lettuce and beans. Even the waste ash will be used to produce construction materials.
Which makes it a…
Berwick planner Chris Millier isn’t sure. Part of his job is to help the advisory committee decide not only whether what he calls a “too-vague” proposal will work but also how to describe the property — currently zoned for commercial and warehouse purposes  —  in land use terms.
“What we have been told so far does little to narrow down the use of the property,” he says.
But Mayor John Prall — perhaps mindful of the 70 new full-time jobs whatever it’s called might create — is encouraging the advisory committee “not to think about how we can’t do this, but how we can.” He wants to keep the discussions with the entrepreneurs “positive, and make them feel at home,” he explained.

Breeding trouble
In 2005, when the home and school association at Amherst’s then-still-under-construction Spring Street Academy tried to warn the Department of Education that its shiny new $8-million elementary school building would be too small to handle all the students who would attend, officials pooh-poohed their concerns. The bureaucrats reassured them that declining population trends would take care of that little problem.
The bureaucrats obviously didn’t take into account the breeding habits of local residents.
Today the three-year-old school built to house 450 is filled to overflowing with 530 pupils. With a larger-than-usual primary class expected to arrive in September, “it’s at a point now that something has to be done now,” association president Molly Rose-Smith told the Amherst Daily News.
School board officials are scrambling to come up with options, including transferring some students to other schools.
Rose-Smith, who says the fact that the school is operating efficiently so far is a tribute to principal Barry Kelly and his staff, adds that school officials “have made it work up until now, but I can’t see how they’ll be able to do it in September.”
So much for population trends.

Butt check
Bridgewater residents will get a chance to let their elected officials know what they think of the town’s proposed anti-smoking bylaw during an informal  council “briefing” session tomorrow evening.
In November, council agreed by a razor-thin 3-2 vote — with two members absent — to draft a tough new bylaw that will prohibit smoking on all city property, including streets and sidewalks.
The decision generated national news, sparked a smoke-in protest on the town’s two bridges — provincially-owned structures that won’t be governed by the bylaw — and even prompted one protester to set up a Facebook site to protest the “blaitent (sic) infringement on our civil liberties.” The site now has more than 900 members and features a video of John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band singing Power to the People.
At tomorrow evening’s meeting, ordinary residents will finally be able to see the actual wording of the draft bylaw — which was prepared with legal help from the Canadian Cancer Society — and comment on it. Councillors will listen and ask questions, but won’t likely vote on the bylaw until their next formal meeting.

http://www.stephenkimber.com/

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.

SOURCES: Amherst Daily News, Kings County Register, New Glasgow News, Queens County Advance, Southshorenow.ca, Yarmouth Vanguard

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

By Stephen Kimber
January 20, 2007

Not so ‘weird’
    While provincial politicians loudly debate the future of health care, a rural Nova Scotia GP and his nurse-wife are quietly showcasing one possible option — for patients 5,000 miles away.
    Every Monday afternoon, Port Clyde physician John O’Connor and his wife Charlene travel to Yarmouth  to set up temporary shop in the regional hospital’s telehealth department. There, using a video hookup, O’Connor “sees” patients living on a remote northern Alberta community.
    The O’Connors, who relocated to Nova Scotia after nine years in Fort MacKay, say they’re delighted to be able to continue providing services to residents of the otherwise-doctor-less First Nations Reserve.
    Working with two on-site nurses who deal directly with the patients, operate the camera and handle the paperwork, O’Connor conducts the usual patient interviews — “Have you lost or gained any weight?” he asks one patient he suspects has hypothyroidism — and then directs one of the nurses to pan the patient’s skin so he can see how pale it is and to check for swelling on her lower legs. Later, he faxes a requisition for blood work to the clinic. He’ll get the results back in a few days.
The O’Connors do supplement their video care with in-person follow-ups, flying out to Alberta every six to eight weeks, and they have an arrangement with a Fort McMurray doctor to see patients who need more immediate care.
“Initially, there were a few people that said, ‘Oh boy, is this ever weird,’” O’Connor told the Yarmouth Vanguard, but added, “for the most part they are quite happy with it.”
Especially when the alternative is no doctor at all.
Barb Clairmont, the telehealth facilitator at Yarmouth Regional, says her facilities are normally only used for education purposes or for consultations between patients and specialists.  “It’s common for specialists to use this technology, but not general practitioners.”
Given the current doctor shortage in rural Nova Scotia, that may soon change.

Getting closure… or not
Meanwhile, Nova Scotia’s rural health authorities are still coming to grips with what last week’s sweeping recommendations on the future of health care in Nova Scotia will mean for their residents — especially in terms of emergency care.
In addition to the already much-discussed 103 province-wide recommendations for change, the consultants also conducted specific audits of the services each health care authority provides and made even more recommendations — 187 just for Pictou County, 43 for Cumberland, etc.. — for changing how local health care is delivered.
First-blush responses have run the gamut.
Pat Lee, CEO of the Pictou Authority, which hopes to have a plan to renovate the Aberdeen Hospital’s emergency department in place by April 1, was almost bullish, predicting implementation of the proposals will mean “better access to primary care, fewer residents not having access to primary care, and less patients in the emergency department because we will have more clinics open.”
Up the road in Amherst, Cumberland CEO Bruce Quigley was more cautious. Conceding that the report “sets out very clearly the burning platform for change,” the authority’s board unanimously agreed to accept the recommendations “subject to qualifications and questions we may have.”
The big one, Board chair Bruce Saunders told the Amherst Daily News, has to do with the mixed messages they’re hearing about emergency room closures. “[The government] made clear today there would be no ER closures, but does that mean there will be no closures, but you may be closing down so many hours a day or a week?... We have made it absolutely clear there will be no ER closures until we are satisfied that a proven method could be put in place to replace the existing status quo of these ERs.”
Let the haggling begin.

And they’re off
When the Queens Liberal Association met yesterday to choose a candidate to represent it in the next provincial election, only one name was expected to be on the ballot. But that would be better than the party managed in 2006 when no Liberal even contested the riding.
After 15 years on municipal council, Wayne Henley officially announced last week that he would be seeking the nomination. “It’s just something I have been longing to do,” he told the Queens County Advance, adding one of his key campaign planks will be to upgrade Highway 103 between Port Mouton and Shelburne County.
Having a Liberal candidate should make for an even more interesting race in what had once been a Tory stronghold. In the 2006 election, the original Liberal candidate was forced to withdraw for health reasons and the party, then in disarray, failed to replace him. That helped the NDP’s Vicki Conrad end the Tories’ 50-year hold on the riding. With many traditional Liberal voters switching to the NDP, Conrad eked out a victory over respected veteran Conservative cabinet minister Kerry Morash.
Can Conrad hold on to the NDP’s new rural outpost? Will the Tories sneak back up the middle in a three-way race? Can a well-known local Liberal politician bring the also-ran Grits back to respectability? Stay tuned.

Who’s a crook?
Westville’s mayor says town council and the local board of police commissioners will “act in accordance with the directives of Justice Minister Cecil Clarke” to fix what ails the town’s policing services. But that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it.
Last week, Clarke gave the town until Feb. 15 to respond to a scathing Justice Department investigation that described the police board as “dysfunctional” and “counterproductive.” The report claimed there were serious conflicts between some board members and the police chief, and that the board had meddled in the department’s day-to-day operations.
To complicate matters — and make some councillors and board members get their hackles up — the report also refers to two board members it does not name as having “criminal convictions.”
    Mayor Sandy Cyr, who told the New Glasgow News he’s disappointed the report’s innuendo has been generating speculation and misinformation among local residents, wants the minister to name names to remove the “umbrella of suspicion” now over everyone.
    Despite that, Cyr says the town will meet Clarke’s deadline for a response. It doesn’t have much choice. If it doesn’t, the justice minister has already threatened to take unspecified drastic action.

You say ecosphere, I say…
So how do you define an “ecosphere?” That’s the dilemma Berwick’s Planning Advisory Committee is trying to comes to grips with.
Two entrepreneurs with Nova Scotia roots, Barrie Wamboldt and Ron Turner, want to transform a former one-and-a-half storey wooden apple warehouse on the town’s Front Street  into a five-storey glass-and-brick greenhouse — and more.
“It just won’t be about apples anymore,” boasts Wamboldt. No kidding.
They call their first-of-its-kind idea an ecosphere and claim “environmental wonders will take place there.” For starters the facility will “oxidize, not burn” fuel pellets made from “waste material that is trucked to and buried in Lunenburg County.” The 200 tons of waste oxidized per day will create energy — electricity, natural gas and carbon dioxide — they can then sell as well as use to produce quick-grow crops, such as lettuce and beans. Even the waste ash will be used to produce construction materials.
Which makes it a…
Berwick planner Chris Millier isn’t sure. Part of his job is to help the advisory committee decide not only whether what he calls a “too-vague” proposal will work but also how to describe the property — currently zoned for commercial and warehouse purposes  —  in land use terms.
“What we have been told so far does little to narrow down the use of the property,” he says.
But Mayor John Prall — perhaps mindful of the 70 new full-time jobs whatever it’s called might create — is encouraging the advisory committee “not to think about how we can’t do this, but how we can.” He wants to keep the discussions with the entrepreneurs “positive, and make them feel at home,” he explained.

Breeding trouble
In 2005, when the home and school association at Amherst’s then-still-under-construction Spring Street Academy tried to warn the Department of Education that its shiny new $8-million elementary school building would be too small to handle all the students who would attend, officials pooh-poohed their concerns. The bureaucrats reassured them that declining population trends would take care of that little problem.
The bureaucrats obviously didn’t take into account the breeding habits of local residents.
Today the three-year-old school built to house 450 is filled to overflowing with 530 pupils. With a larger-than-usual primary class expected to arrive in September, “it’s at a point now that something has to be done now,” association president Molly Rose-Smith told the Amherst Daily News.
School board officials are scrambling to come up with options, including transferring some students to other schools.
Rose-Smith, who says the fact that the school is operating efficiently so far is a tribute to principal Barry Kelly and his staff, adds that school officials “have made it work up until now, but I can’t see how they’ll be able to do it in September.”
So much for population trends.

Butt check
Bridgewater residents will get a chance to let their elected officials know what they think of the town’s proposed anti-smoking bylaw during an informal  council “briefing” session tomorrow evening.
In November, council agreed by a razor-thin 3-2 vote — with two members absent — to draft a tough new bylaw that will prohibit smoking on all city property, including streets and sidewalks.
The decision generated national news, sparked a smoke-in protest on the town’s two bridges — provincially-owned structures that won’t be governed by the bylaw — and even prompted one protester to set up a Facebook site to protest the “blaitent (sic) infringement on our civil liberties.” The site now has more than 900 members and features a video of John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band singing Power to the People.
At tomorrow evening’s meeting, ordinary residents will finally be able to see the actual wording of the draft bylaw — which was prepared with legal help from the Canadian Cancer Society — and comment on it. Councillors will listen and ask questions, but won’t likely vote on the bylaw until their next formal meeting.

http://www.stephenkimber.com/

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.

SOURCES: Amherst Daily News, Kings County Register, New Glasgow News, Queens County Advance, Southshorenow.ca, Yarmouth Vanguard