Stephen Kimber

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

The problem with health care solutions

By Stephen Kimber
January 17, 2008

    Later today, Health Minister Chris d‘Entremont is scheduled to release the results of a provincial health services operational review he commissioned two years ago. The purpose of the $1-million report, which was prepared by outside consultants Corpus Sanchez, was to provide “a snapshot” of the province’s existing health care system and offer, as d’Entremont explained at the time, “a number of recommendations to mull over on how to make our system much more efficient.”
    Though the report is still officially under wraps, some of its more than 100 conclusions and recommendation have already leaked. The Chronicle Herald reported yesterday, for example, that Corpus Sanchez concludes “not all small hospitals should be providing emergency care.”
    What was as interesting as that certain-to-be controversial recommendation was the government’s almost instantaneous and even-more-certain-to-be-political response to it.
“I can say with certainty there will be no ERs closing,” the premier’s spokesperson, Joe Gillis,  declared flatly. “The minister has said that in the legislature, and again I can say that with certainty.”
    Just so there can be no misunderstanding.
And that, in a nutshell, is our problem.
    We have a problem — actually, plenty of problems — in our health care delivery system. Health care costs already gobble up more than 40 per cent of the province’s budget and an expensively aging population is only going to get older. There are too few nursing home beds, too-long wait times for too many critical procedures, not enough physicians in the rural communities where we desperately need them, the highest death rates from cancer and respiratory disease in Canada, and, of course, those seemingly never-ending closures at rural emergency rooms — a day at the Roseway Hospital in Shelburne here, a week at the Digby General there — usually because the local health authorities can’t find doctors to staff them.
    In fact, the emergency room closures are really just the tumbling-into-turmoil end result of some of those other problems. That lack of nursing home beds,  for example, too often transforms emergency rooms into overcrowded, temporary holding tanks for elderly people with no other place to go. And the shortage of rural doctors not only means too few physicians are available to keep ERs open but it also forces patients who can’t find family doctors of their own to turn to ERs for their primary health care.
    All of that makes the notion of a comprehensive review of the sort d’Entremont initially described an important and necessary exercise.
    Whether Corpus Sanchez was the right choice to conduct such a review is another matter.
    As Liberal health care critic Dave Wilson pointed out in the legislature after the government first awarded the contract, Corpus Sanchez has a history of taking the easy cut-and-then-cut-some-more approach to whatever ails health care. On a previous contract for the IWK, for example, it “recommended that beds for children with cancer should be closed and wait lists for children's mental health services should be allowed to grow.” It also once advised Capital Health that “acute care beds should be closed at the QE II as soon as patients occupying them are moved to nursing homes.”
    While it is too early to know for certain the overall thrust of Corpus Sanchez’s recommendations this time, the initial portents are not encouraging. One of the report’s other leaked conclusions is that putting more money into the current health care system is “not an option.”
    In fact, some critics, like the Nova Scotia Citizens' Health Care Network, have suggested the government commissioned the Corpus Sanchez report to provide “a blueprint for systematically dismantling the public health care system in Nova Scotia.”
    That may be harsh. The more likely scenario — given this government’s dithering track record — is that it commissioned the study when it did primarily to avoid dealing with what it knows is an un-winnable, hot-button political issue for Nova Scotians. In such a scenario, privatizing health care is just a side-benefit.
    In the best of all possible Tory worlds, the next provincial election would now be history, the government would have been re-elected (in part by arguing it couldn’t discuss the contentious issue of health care reform because it was waiting for the consultants to report) and possibly with a majority of seats — this after all the best of all possible Tory worlds — which would then allow it to blame Corpus Sanchez for whatever unpopular decisions it decided to take, hoping no one would remember by the next election.
    But in the real world, the Tory’s electoral prospects did not improve and the election did not happen so Rodney MacDonald’s still-minority government now has to make the political best of the sow’s ear of what will be an unpopular report.
    No wonder the premier’s spokesman was so quick to dismiss even the idea of closing emergency rooms.
    No wonder our health care system is in such a mess.

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 13, 2007

Oil in troubled water?
Although it happened nearly 38 years ago, ripples from the infamous Arrow oil disaster can still create waves in the Strait of Canso.
In February 1970, the Liberian tanker Arrow grounded on a rock in Chedabuctou Bay, spilling 9,000 tonnes of bunker C oil. Though the immediate impact of the accident — fisheries shut down, beaches closed, more than 7,500 seabirds coated with tarry sludge — was devastating enough, local residents are now asking whether there are reasons to be concerned about the remnants of the clean up. Oil left over from the 1970 incident remains in seven local storage sites.
In November, Richmond Municipal Council asked the province’s Environment Department for the results of any well and water tests done around the sites as well as for information on how the sites are being monitored. They also want to know the government’s long-range plans to prevent any leaks into the groundwater.
Local Liberal MLA Michel Samson, who raised the issue in the legislature last fall, says part of the concern is that there are no municipal water systems in any of the affected communities, many of which have seen increased development in recent years.
“People are left wondering… how close are they living to those sites now… We certainly know of the high rates of cancer and other illnesses that exist in Richmond County to start off with, so we want to make sure that these sites are in no way playing a role in contributing to those high rates.”
Last week, representatives of the provincial department met with their federal counterparts to discuss the current system and decide what — if anything — needs to be done.
“If further action is needed, we’ll be sure it’s carried out,” department spokesperson Bruce Nunn told the Port Hawkesbury Reporter, “but it’s impossible at this early stage to determine what action would be needed at this time.”

Is it something in the water?
The Dalhousie University researcher who is trying to figure out why as many as 25 per cent of girls in Yarmouth between the ages of 15 and 19 end up pregnant — and, more importantly, what to do to reduce those numbers — has completed the first year of the three-year project.
Don Langille, a professor of community health and epidemiology at Dalhousie, says his researchers have completed in-depth interviews with 23 young men and women, some of whom experienced teen pregnancy.
Though he can’t talk about the contents of those interviews yet, Langille says the findings will help shape the questions they’ll ask future focus groups of parents, teachers and healthcare professionals.
The teen pregnancy rate in Yarmouth is among the highest in the province.
Langille says “the ultimate goal is to say, ‘Well, here in Yarmouth, the factors that seem most important to sexual health are this, that and the other thing — and then, ‘What can we do about it?’”
Good question.

The deed is done… we think
The board of the South West Shore Development Authority has voted unanimously in favour of a deal to sell the former Shelburne military base to film producer Steve Gilmour for $2.75 million.
The acrimonious on-again, off-again, maybe-maybe sale only finally became a reality just before the new year when the board decided to take control of the negotiations from the authority’s controversial and often secretive excecutive director, Frank Anderson.
Anderson and Gilmour, not to put too fine a point on it, didn’t get along.
Which may explain why the board has also agreed that if some else comes forward with another offer for the property before Gilmour’s deal closes, the board — and not Anderson — will deal with it.
Gilmour, who is already planning his first production at his new film studio, told the Shelburne Coast Guard, “we are quite sure we can make it into the Hollywood of Nova Scotia.”
We can’t wait.

Slow boat to the budget
Digby residents may have to wait until at least the next federal budget in March to learn whether their economically critical Digby-Saint John ferry service will continue beyond January 2009 — and it may take even longer to get a final answer on the ferry’s fate.
Bay Ferries, which operates the service, announced plans in July 2006 to abandon it as uneconomic, but relented after Ottawa coughed up cash to keep it going until January 2009 while a working group of federal officials investigated the service’s viability.
Their report is apparently complete but no one is certain what it recommends.
Which frustrates Mike Gushue, executive director of the Annapolis Digby Economic Development Agency, who says businesses and tourism operators need to know whether to include the ferry in their business projections for the next few years. “Not knowing may be as bad as a bad answer,” he told the Digby Courier.
One study predicted that ending ferry service could cost the local economy as much as $40 million a year.
To make things even more frustrating, there’s another very political wrinkle. Even if Ottawa promises to underwrite the ferry service in its budget, there’s no guarantee that will happen. Rumblings out of Ottawa suggest the opposition may defeat the budget and trigger an election.
And then all bets are off.

Debate? What debate?
The next time consultant Jim Gunn sits down to write a report for the South Shore Regional School Board, it “will be to name those schools that I feel should be closed.” Before he does that, however, Gunn wants to spark is a real debate about his preliminary School Utilization Study, which looked not only at how local schools are used not but also how they might best be utilized in the future.
Generating that debate won’t be easy. When Gunn launched the first of seven public consultations to discuss his report at Forest Heights Community School earlier this month, only 11 people showed up. All of them were either school staff or members of the board. And — despite the fact Gunn conceded his report “said some things that are debatable and I am looking for that debate” — there was little in the way of disagreement during the session.
Paul Shields, communications director for the school board, says he isn’t discouraged. “We don't take the lack of attendance here as disinterest,” he told southshorenow.ca.
    We shall see. Five more public meetings are scheduled between now and the first week of February.

Pass the salt
    The good news about our recent winter thaw is that it’s allowed Pugwash-based Canadian Salt Company to catch a breath — and catch up to demand for its product.
    Usually, the plant closes down over Christmas and New Year’s but, thanks to this year’s early, snowy, colder winter weather, the company has been forced to operate 24/7 in order to — in the well chosen words of Joe Wojgonik, a spokesperson for Canadian’s parent company,  Morton Salt of Chicago — “meet the challenges the weather has thrown our way.”
    How nicely put.

Read this
What do country music legend Dolly Parton, Academy-award-winning actress Olympia Dukakis, Nova Scotia fiddling sensation Natalie MacMaster, mega music star Keith Urban, Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus, figure skating champion Kurt Browning, children’s author Robert Munsch and… a family from Cape Breton’s Waycobah First Nation have in common?
The short answer is that they’re all going to be featured in a one-hour documentary on literacy that Halifax-based Emotion Productions is currently preparing.
The film, called The Book Lady, will focus on Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that mails out age-appropriate books each month to preschoolers to encourage their interest in reading. Launched in her home state of Tennessee in 1996, the program has since provided millions of books to kids in communities across the U.S. and Canada — including Dartmouth and Whycobah.
The documentary makers interview a Whycobah mother whose children have been getting books through the program,  as well as local health centre staff who administer the local program.
Brad Horvath, the film’s Sydney-born producer, says he hopes The Book Lady, which will be broadcast nationally on the CBC will “inspire people to get involved in this initiative.”

The attack of the Mutant Ninja Lobsters
Oh no, not another one. First, there was that one-in-two-million blue lobster caught in Lobster Bay in southwestern Nova Scotia in early December. Then, barely a week later, a fishermen in Saint Marys Bay hauled up another one. Two in four million?
Now, a Concession, Digby County, fishermen named Edward Pothier is reporting  an ever rarer catch — a one-in-50-(or-even-100)-million, two-toned black-green and orange lobster that’s so neatly halved “the line dividing the two colours down the middle of the carapace and tail is so straight you’d swear a ruler was used.”
It may even be more rare than we initially suggested. According to lobster researchers, two-colour lobsters are always half male and half female. This one is all female.
Pothier’s wife Nora has already been in touch with Ripley’s Believe It Or Notin Florida, which hasn’t had a two-coloured lobster in its collection since the last one — their fifth — died 51 years ago.
“They might do up a cartoon of it,” Ms Pothier told the Yarmouth Vanguard. “We would be number six in their data base.”
In the meantime, Pothier and his wife plan to lend their lobster — now named Jay — to the Bedford Institute in Dartmouth for tests.
We can only hope Jay doesn’t end up in Robert Bayer’s lab. Bayer, a professor at the lobster institute at the University of Maine, told the Vanguard he’s top find out what would happen if the lobster breeds.
Now that could be scary.

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: Cape Breton Post, Port Hawkesbury Reporter, Southshorenow.ca, Shelburne Coast Guard, Shelburnecountytoday.com, Yarmouth Vanguard

Today’s primary storyline is…

By Stephen Kimber
January 10, 2008

    The U.S. presidential selection process has become a bizarre, Byzantine and peculiarly American system in which a small, unrepresentative sampling of folks from a few small, even more unrepresentative states — with the connivance of a relentless, salivating media pack fixated on their own self-serving dramatic, sun-is-shining-sky-is-falling storyline du jour — do their damnedest to make and break presidential hopefuls.
    Last week, that storyline was Barak Obama’s “stunning” victory in the Iowa caucuses. That a black man could win in such a white state became irrefutable evidence of a cataclysmic shift in the American body politic.
    “Whatever their political affiliations, Americans are going to feel good about the Obama victory,” opined David Brooks, a conservative commentator writing  in the New York Times. “[His success in Iowa] is a story of youth, possibility and unity through diversity — the primordial themes of the American experience… When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say ‘No?’”
    The pollsters certainly didn’t. “Obamamania,” they claimed, had created unstoppable “Obam-mo.” Going into Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, in fact, virtually every public opinion poll claimed Obama would defeat his main rival,  the once-Democratic heir-presumptive-but-now-suddenly-passé Hilary Clinton. A USA Today/Gallup poll went so far as to report Obama would get 41 per cent of the New Hampshire vote to Clinton’s 28 per cent.
    On the eve of the New Hampshire vote, the Los Angeles Times even reported, only slightly tongue in cheek, that Hollywood’s elite, a presumed Clinton bastion, was also planning to cut and run. “On desks all over Hollywood, there's a note this morning waiting to be sent,” it claimed. “‘Memo to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: We think you're aces. Really. And we love your husband. But we're running off with Sen. Barack Obama. Hope you understand. It's all about being part of history. We'll do lunch after the inauguration.’”
Was Hilary finished? the what’s-it-all-mean TV anchors eagerly asked their commentator-colleagues who, sipping from their own lukewarm bathwater, sagely nodded in the affirmative.
    Uh… Hold the memo. History will have to wait.
    The new storyline is Hilary Clinton, the “comeback kid.” Remember  how her husband Bill Clinton won an unexpected-to-the-pundits victory in New Hampshire in 1992 and revived his own flagging presidential bid. History, the new conventional wisdom claims may now be repeating itself for Hilary.
Barak Obama may have been able to briefly energize the young and the independents, as the bloody-but-unchastened commentators offer up the new reality, but they will quickly fall back into their non-participating stupor, and Obama himself has clearly “not yet won over the solid base of the Democratic party… which does not appreciate and has no intention of being shunted aside.”
Hilary can still win.
    Yeh, OK…
   Perhaps all of this is inevitable. Back in the sixties when I started following American politics, only about 30 per cent of the delegates to the party’s presidential nominating conventions were chosen in primaries. Which meant that the real news happened in the hothouse of the summer conventions where delegates were wooed and won and lost, and candidates chosen in a few frenzied days of real news.
One of the goals of expanding the primary process was to give the rank-and-file more say in choosing their presidential candidates. Whether having 22 primary states choose 55 per cent of the delegates over the course of a long month-and-a-bit is really more democratic is debatable.
    What is not is that this new system has made the conventions themselves dull, antiseptic affairs.
So the media, perhaps not surprisingly, has had to transform each small primary race into the momentous, portentous event of the primary season — until, of course the next one comes along. (It’s worth remembering that, in the primary season so far, only 400,000 Democrats — half of one per cent of the U.S. population — have had a chance to have their say on who should be their party’s  next candidate for president.)
    The good news for journalists, of course, is that they can’t lose. When they get tired of the storyline of the day, they can always (like me) fall back on that old chestnut about just how bad the media coverage has become.
    On Tuesday night, just before the polls closed in New Hampshire, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs announced the results of his program’s daily viewer poll. The question: “Are you tired of the national media reporting on the presidential race in terms of charisma, change, dynasty, momentum and likability instead of the candidates' positions on the issues?” The answer? Ninety-four per cent or respondents, Dobbs reported, answered that question the affirmative.
    And then he immediately turned the microphone over to Wolf Blitzer “and the best political team on television,” so they could do it all again.
    And so it goes. Until the next time.

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.


The debate we still aren’t having

By Stephen Kimber
January 3, 2008

    The real problem is that there is no single “best” solution — not even any remotely good one — to the quagmire that Afghanistan was, is and will remain. And yet the reality is that our government must soon decide whether to continue, change or abandon our current costly military mission in that war-ravaged country.
    It’s easy to understand why Canadians  are telling pollsters — and Stephen Harper — that they want the government to withdraw our troops. The latest Angus Reid survey, which was taken even before last week’s casualty brought the total number of Canadians killed to 74, merely confirms that. Sixty-one per cent of us don’t want the Harper government to extend our military commitment in Afghanistan beyond its current official end date of February 2009, while fully 53 per cent — a majority of those polled, in fact — believe we should get out right now.
    It isn’t that Canadians, in the prime minister’s dismissive view — want to “cut and run” at the first sign of trouble. Or that we don’t support our troops. Or that we oppose transforming tribal Afghanistan into a hopeful new beacon of democracy. Or that we want to abandon its future to the corrupt warlords and drug barons who control it now. Or hand it back to the Taliban, and return Afghan’s women and girls to their not-at-all tender mercies.
    It is simply that we have never had a thoughtful, considered public debate about why we are there in the first place — why Afghanistan, say, instead of Darfur or some other global trouble spot? — what it was we hoped to accomplish on the ground, how we can our measure success or failure, and when we will know that it is time to leave. Is Afghanistan the best — or even most logical — place to deploy our limited military, diplomatic and development resources?
    The reality is that we went into Afghanistan to curry favour with the Americans (who had invaded, conquered and then abandoned it) because Jean Chrétien had miffed George Bush and company by refusing to join their Iraqi misadventure. And then we ended up in Kandahar, the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, more by accident than design.
Rather than engaging in peacekeeping or nation-building, our soldiers have ended up as just one more group of foreign soldiers in a country that has seen way too many of them. We are fighting a counter-insurgency war in a country where we can’t tell our friends from our enemies and where civilians far too often get caught in our crossfire; where our official friends in the government in Kabul are lining their pockets and torturing many of the prisoners we hand over to them; where our ostensible friend in the war on terror in Pakistan is offering safe haven and weapons to our enemies on the ground; and where our supposed allies in NATO are reluctant to send their own troops into the fray to support us.
The result is that we are fighting a war we can’t win, and fighting that war is diverting resources from the larger and longer-term job of rebuilding the country.
No wonder Canadians want out.
And yet the reality is that we are there. Can we simply walk away now and leave the mess for others to clean up? Or do we have to stay the course wherever that takes us, and for however long it takes? Or is there some other, more useful, more palatable role we can play?
We still need to have that debate. We didn’t have it when the then-Liberal government backed us back into the conflict in May 2005. And we certainly didn’t have it a year later when Harper’s Tories played politics during a supposed six-hour parliamentary debate on extending our mission to February 2009.
It is unlikely we will get it from this month’s report of the politically bi-partisan but ideologically single-minded and very politically constructed Manley commission either. John Manley’s so-called blue-ribbon panel of eminent Canadians has not held public hearings. It has conducted most of its business behind closed doors. Given the pro-American cast of its characters and the process it has followed, no one will be surprised by the outcome. It will recommend that Canada stay the course in Afghanistan, a result Stephen Harper will then use to batter the opposition parties for being partisan if they don’t accept the findings of his hand-picked panel.
That is not the pre-determined, end-result “debate” we need now.

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 6. 2008

Creative financing 101
When the community-based Digby Harbour Port Association wanted to buy out the private owners of its troubled fishermen’s wharf last fall, it knew it had to come up with $1.2 million.
It first went, sou’wester in hand, to local councils for funding help. The town and municipal each agreed to ante up $50,000.
Then it turned to the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, the federal economic development agency, which is where things got complicated. ACOA considered the group’s proposal but concluded “we’re tied by our own regulations” and couldn’t become directly involved.
So it got creative instead.
ACOA’s local agent in the area — the Digby-Clare Business Development Centre-Growth Opportunities — could provide funds to the Association, but its loan limit was just $150,000. So ACOA agreed to up the BDC’s loan limit to $1 million in this particular case and then advanced the extra $850,000 to the Centre to cover the loan.
With all that cash in hand, the Association was able to borrow the rest of the purchase price — plus a little extra for operating capital — from a local bank.
And the deed — long overdue — was done.

Speaking of fishy
The minister in charge of ACOA and all he surveys in these parts, Peter MacKay, is expected to touch down in Digby early in the new year to claim credit for the wharf deal.
Soon after word leaked last month that the sale had been finalized, local Senator Gerald Comeau called The Digby Courier to share the good news… of MacKay’s impending visit.
Comeau told the paper that MacKay and fellow Tory MP Gerry Keddy, who is still busy polishing his image after last year’s Atlantic Accord fiasco, “have made this a high priority at the federal caucus, and there is still a lot of work to be done.”
There is.
The Maritime Harbours Society, a private company that bought the wharf from the previous Liberal government in a sweetheart privatizing deal in 1999, had allowed the wharf to fall into disrepair.
A recent engineering report says it will cost $9.1 million to do needed renovations and repairs.
Hope you’re bringing your wallet, Peter.

Strait school board facing challenges in 2008
While the Strait Regional School Board was in the news last year for all the wrong reasons — can you say conflicts among members, conflicts with staff, conflicts with the minister of education, conflicts over codes of ethics? — the reality is that the board will have to come to grips with some very real issues in the coming year.
The biggest is how to continue to deliver programs across sprawling Inverness, Richmond, Guysborough and Antigonish counties while dealing with some of the largest declines in student enrolment in the province.
By 2012, board chair Henry VanBerkel told the Cape Breton Post in a recent interview, the district will have half as many students as it in 1996. “There are big implications, especially for our smaller schools and our smaller centres.”
Though many schools have already been closed or consolidated, VanBerkel says closing more is not an option. “We couldn’t close them down, they’re absolutely necessary,” he said.
But that means delivering provincially mandated programs to small rural schools with small teacher-student ratios while footing large bills for transportation. And doing it all on a budget that is mostly based on per-cpaita funding.
So the first item on the board’s agenda when it meets next week? Oh right. That would be a motion to eliminate entirely the board’s newly amended code of ethics. Of course.

Play ball… er, soccer…
Mahone Bay’s controversial proposed housing development is now even more controversial
One of the criticisms of the project, slated to be built on a former school property, is that it will eliminate one of two soccer fields used by teams in the Mahone Bay Youth Soccer Association.
Town council thought they’d solved that one when they signed a deal to take over operation of the field at another school and announced plans to turn it into a multi-purpose field.
Not so fast. The Mahone Bay and District Softball Association, which currently uses that field, appeared before town council last month to complain that the changes needed to make the field suitable for soccer will make it unsuitable for softball. “If we lose this regulation field,” softball head Jamie Graven told councilors. “we may never have the opportunity to host a regional or national event.”
Mayor Joe Feeney now says officials will have to rethink their solution. “We have two people saying they both want the field, and one saying you need to do it this way to serve our needs and the other saying you need to do it this way to serve our needs. We're going to have to try to do our best to adequately respond to everybody's needs.”
Good luck.

Beds for votes
They’ve yet to submit their final plans to the provincial department of health — let alone break ground on a proposed expansion and renovation at the Queens General Hospital — but officials say work has already begun to figure out “who should have a workstation and who needs an office.”
In December 2004, the province announced it would provide $2.5-million for a health care centre at the site of the “old nurses’ residence behind the hospital in order to would bring doctors, nurses, pharmacists, mental health professionals, dieticians, and other health care providers under one roof. Then, in June 2006, the South Shore Health also proposed  putting a new, two-storey addition to the hospital to provide about two dozen new beds.
South Shore Health Operations Vice-President Phil Langley, who is chairing the “Queens Project,” says he hopes final plans will be forwarded to the government before the end of March with construction to begin the following spring or summer.
The province has yet to approve the total price tag — now expected to reach $10 million — but it probably will. Premier Rodney MacDonald, who desperately needs to win back the Queens seat it lost to the New Democrats, has already said publicly that he supports the proposal.
Go figure.

Don’t go there… yet
It appears that a combination of too many snow storms too close together too early in the season and a too healthy economy have conspired to creat treacherous driving conditions in Chester and environs.
A too healthy economy?
Department of Transportation area supervisor Eric Gillis says he’s been operating with just nine snowplow drivers this season instead of the usual 14, partly because “we’re losing drivers to the private sector. We offer 16 weeks of employment. You can’t blame someone for taking full-time work if it’s available.”
The good news — sort of — is that not everyone has a job. The department recently called for applications from prospective operators. “We had a batch of applicants and we did some interviews,” Gillis told southshorenow.ca “All that remains is to test the drivers.”
With five planned hires, driving in Chester should soon be less treacherous.

Halifax police should be so lucky
    Last year’s big crime trend in the Annapolis Valley appearsed to be the “alarming number of livestock that are attempting to live on the lam.” The good news is that our Mounties still get their man… er, animal.
    According to the Annapolis County Spectator’s annual round-up of local criminal activity reported to the local RCMP detachment, there were at least five separate incidents of runaway livestock. On May 28 at 11:58 a.m., two draft horse pulling a buggy spooked an proceed to run roughshod over a parked car, demolishing it. The perpetrators were arrested at the scene. Then, on June 19 at 8:51 a.m. — don’t you love police blotter reports —a local farmer reported three calves and a donkey missing. The animals were later recovered. On Aug. 10 at 4:04 p.m., police corralled and returned to paddock three horses running free on Highway 1. In December, there were two more cases — two horses galloping west on Highway 201 on Dec. 12, and a dozen cattle roaming the range that is Highway 101 on Dec. 14. The newspaper reports all were “successfully detained.”
     RCMP Cpl. David Fraser deadpanned to the newspaper that if these trends continue, new officers may soon have to undergo training in livestock management.

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: ANNAPOLIS COUNTY SPECTATOR, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, QUEEN’S COUNTY ADVANCE, SOUTHSHORENOW.CA