Stephen Kimber

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

By Stephen Kimber
December 30, 2007

Winning the wharf war
More than eight years after Ottawa disastrously handed control of Digby’s vital fishermen’s wharf to outsiders and more than five years after frustrated locals first organized to buy it back, the wharf is finally in the hands of a community group.
In 1999, as part of its ill-conceived port divestiture program, the federal Liberals not only gave the wharf to an outside private company for a dollar but then handed it $3 million to maintain the structure. Instead, critics charge, the group used Ottawa’s money to pay salaries to its non-resident directors and foot the costs for unrelated ventures. To make matters worse, it turned out Ottawa couldn’t do anything about that because, as an arbitrator ruled last year, the contract it signed with the group “had the proverbial hole in it ‘big enough to drive a truck through.’”
Meanwhile, the wharf was — quite literally — falling apart.  The situation became so bad this spring local fishermen had put chains around a section of the wharf just to hold all the pieces together.
The Digby Harbour Port Authority, the local group that’s been negotiating to buy back the wharf, had intended to officially announce yesterday that it had finally finalized a deal, but word began leaking out earlier in the week.
Fishermen using the wharf “noticed that the fellow checking boats [for the wharf’s former owners] wasn’t doing it anymore,” Authority spokesperson Reg Hazelton told the Digby Courier, adding that even he found it “hard to believe” the deal was finally done.
The Authority managed to leap a final hurdle — a clause in the infamous original contract that would have imposed a $500,000 penalty on the private group if it sold the wharf before 2009 —  after Transport Canada agreed to waive the penalty clause.
The Authority will begin shoring up the crumbling structure immediately. An engineering report estimates the total cost of repairs at around $9 million.
Without being specific, Hazelton said the Authority has received promises — though nothing in writing — of financial assistance.
Let’s hope Ottawa’s negotiators do a better job this time.

Community dis-spirit
’Tis the season for giving… and giving… and giving. But Bowater Mersey’s unionized employees can be forgiven for wondering what, if anything, they’ll receive in return.
Last month, the 330 south shore workers voted overwhelmingly to take a pay cut to enable 49 of their fellow employees to retire early rather than be laid off. And, in February, their union executive will meet with other east coast union officials to discuss whether to open up their collective agreements to offer the company more concessions.
Despite that, AbitibiBowater, the parent company, won’t promise to keep its Nova Scotia operations open; in fact, it has already announced that more of its plants may close in 2008.
To add smack to punch, union president Courtney Wentzell says some in the local community are blaming the employees — particularly their “inflexible” work rules — for the problems at the plant.
While conceding there was a time when “you couldn’t screw in a light bulb without an electrician,” Wentzell says those days are long gone. The workers, he adds, didn’t agree to the pay cut just to help some of their members retire early. “We did it for the community to keep the mill here.
“We really hope the blame thing goes away,” he told the Queen’s County Advance. If local residents really want to lay blame, he added, they had “better start looking somewhere else.”
He says Premier Rodney MacDonald’s government should help the industry — perhaps by allowing Bowater to harvest crown land without charge, provided there are no layoffs, as has been done in Newfoundland and Quebec — but it’s up to the company too.
“We hope the community and the government and everybody else sees that the workers took a big hit and are willing to do their part,” Wentzell said.

Earth to Ernie
Should Cumberland North forgive Ernie? was the title of an editorial in the weekly Amherst Citizen published in the heart of disgraced cabinet minister, convicted MLA and turfed Tory Ernie Fage’s home constituency last week.
The paper didn’t pull any punches. “In less than two years, the veteran MLA has gone from being a respectable senior cabinet minister to becoming the laughing stock of his party,” it wrote, adding that his recent guilty plea to charges of leaving the scene of an accident came as “no surprise.”
Damning their veteran MLA with the faintest of praise, the paper allowed that “Ernie is a heck of a nice guy, and that popularity might get him re-elected. But does he deserve it? After all, if there is only one thing we can expect of our elected officials, it is that they demonstrate good judgment.”
Noting that Fage has said he intends to run as an independent candidate in the next provincial election, the editorial muses: “Why Fage would want to put himself through this is a question only he can answer, but whether or not his constituents want to potentially put themselves through another embarrassing situation is a question that will be answered come next election day...”
Ouch.

Experiencing history on the Internet
It was one of the most sport famous fishing trips ever undertaken in Nova Scotia — Albert Bigelow Paine’s two-week canoe adventure along the waters and through the woods of southwestern Nova Scotia at the beginning of the last century.
Now, to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Tent Dwellers, Paine’s account of the journey, local organizers are planning a summer-long festival of adventure-related events, including a guide’s meet and competition, canoe-building and fly-tying exhibitons, an outdoor arts festival and even a re-enactment of the historic two-week canoe trip.
Although novices are not welcome on that journey — there will be a public paddle in June along a section of the Shelburne River that was part of the original route — the experienced paddlers who will follow the original route will post photos and videos to the Internet each day so the rest of us can enjoy the trip vicariously.
Now that’s my idea of outdoor adventure.

I don’t C U
This week’s where-not-to-get sick alerts come from Amherst and Tatamagouche.
The Cumberland Health Authority has announced it won’t reopen its largest hospital’s intensive care unit until New Year’s morning at 7 a.m.
The Amherst hospital’s ICU has been shuttered since Christmas Eve — the third time in a month it’s been closed — because the authority couldn’t find a qualified physician to fill in for the hospital’s three regular specialists. Patients needing intensive care are being shipped to Moncton or Halifax.
Meanwhile, in Tatamagouche, the Lillian Fraser Memorial Hospital’s emergency department will be closed on New Year’s Eve from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. and then again on Jan. 4 from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Be well.

Fishing the bottom harder…
Having lobsters for New Year’s? Enjoy. Because tomorrow… well, who knows?
Lobster catches are down in southwestern Nova Scotia this winter, partly because gale-force winds not only kept lobster boats in port during the first week of the season. But only partly. Some in the industry are beginning to think there may be more to this season’s less. 
“We say it’s the weather,” Denny Morrow, executive director of the Nova Scotia Fish Packers Association, told the Yarmouth Vanguard, “but we know we’ve been fishing the bottom harder and harder every year.”
Though the industry has managed to supply its traditional Christmas and New Year’s markets, the next big concern is whether there will be enough inventory to last until spring. Eat up.

Oh, Christmas Tree
When the Greenwood Military Family Resource Centre called King’s County Christmas tree grower Steve Bezanson to ask if he’d be willing to donate 30 of his trees to give to families of Greenwood-based military personnel serving in Afghanistan, “I didn’t even hesitate,” he told the King’s County Register.
The national program, supported by the Canadian Council of Christmas Tree Growers, provided over 3,000 free Christmas trees this year to those with loved ones deployed to Afghanistan during the holiday season.
“Christmas can be tough when you have a family member deployed,” explained Margaret Reid, co-ordinator of deployment services for the resource centre, “and any act of kindness can ease that.”
Angie St. Nicolas, who was among the recipients of Bezanson’s trees, told the newspaper she and her two children, Emily and Owen, were planning to decorate their tree in time to welcome her husband, Shawn, home on a mid-deployment break the week before Christmas.

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, AMHERST DAILY NEWS, ANNAPOLIS COUNTY SPECTATOR, DIGBY COURIER, KING’S COUNTY REGISTER, QUEEN’S COUNTY ADVANCE, YARMOUTH VANGUARD.

Kimber’s Nova Scotia for Dec 23, 2007

By Stephen Kimber

They like us, they really like us
“It is a land of the great outdoors with breathtaking scenery: thousands of glassy lakes, pristine beaches and carpets of forest that draw tourists to see the autumnal reds and golds.”
That’s us that Britain’s widely read Telegraph newspaper is gushing on about. In a story in its property section last week, the newspaper — once owned by Conrad Black — claims that Nova Scotia (“the size of England, and yet with a population of just under a million”), is becoming an “increasingly popular and affordable destination [for] British second homeowners who crave tranquility.”
While touting our modest house prices and historic and psychic links to the mother country (Chester is “billed as the ‘Mayfair’ of Nova Scotia,” the paper explains, while adding delightedly that “there is even a town called Liverpool on the Mersey River”) and quoting happy British settlers (“I'd never go back to the UK,” says one. "Lunenburg has everything”), the article does offer a few cautions.
The weather, for starters. “Summer water sports are great,” says a Suffolk man who now calls Liverpool — the Nova Scotia one — home. “People are friendly and British people are welcomed, but a challenge can be the weather with heavy snowstorms in winter.”
We knew that.
And then, of course, there is that… tranquility thing. “It’s not a place for people who need to be constantly entertained,” explains Kilmeny Fane-Saunders of Second Home Nova Scotia, a new British-based real estate company catering to British buyers of chunks of Nova Scotia. Though 50 per cent of her clients are actually emigrating to the province, she says they need to be “outdoorsy, and crave peace and quiet.”
“Indeed,” adds the Telegraph’s reporter, “there is little in the way of cultural events or nightlife, aside from the odd ukulele festival.”
Uh… thanks for the kind words. And pass me my uke in which to...

Less cause, more effect
Nova Scotia’s Richmond County has a distinction it doesn’t want — statistics show the rate of kidney disease there is 10 times higher than the provincial average.
While researchers scramble to figure out the why, municipal councillors are more concerned with what Health Minister Chris d’Entremont will do to help them cope.
Researchers, who theorize Acadian families in Isle Madame are genetically predisposed towards high rates of kidney disease, are now in the early stages of a two-year study to determine precisely what causes the disease to be so prevalent among them. Residents have been providing the researchers with information on their family histories as well as DNA samples.
“We’ve identified a number of families and family members that have been diagnosed since we first started,” explains Cape Breton Regional Hospital nephrologist Dr. Tom Hewlett, “and the patterns we’re seeing are very suggestive of a genetic cause — there’s no question about that.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, local politicians are less interested in long-term cause than immediate impact. At their last meeting, Richmond municipal councillors voted unanimously to ask the health department for more dialysis machines as well as for better training for local nurses and doctors in how to deal with the disease.

The fire next time
When they last had a fire protection cost-sharing agreement three years ago, Cumberland County paid the town of Amherst $122,000 a year so its firefighters would respond to calls in the county. At the beginning of negotiations on a new deal, Amherst town council proposed upping that by a whopping $160,000 a year. The county countered with an offer of a measly $55,000 in total.
The two sides have been trading barbs and accusations ever since.
Some Amherst councillors now claim 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.”
Last week, Amherst council voted unanimously to stop providing fire protection to county residents effective July 1, 2008.
Currently 22 per cent of the calls the Amherst department responds to are in the county.
“If they want to establish another fire department, minutes from ours, so be it,” explained Amherst Coun. Ed Chitty. “If, on the other hand, they’d like to have a sensible, mature discussion about sharing real costs on some rational basis then we are up for that as well.”
Now that sounds like a starting point for …

Let the Capers freeze in the dark
Last week, a modern management tool — just-in-time delivery — smacked up against Mother Nature — an earlier, colder-than-usual winter — and created not only an immediate home heating oil shortage for Cape Bretoners but also a wake-up call for residents.
Imperial Oil, which now operates the island’s only distribution terminal, limited the amount of heating oil available for customers after one of its tankers was a day late in arriving with fresh supplies.
That, say critics, highlights the reality that the company’s just-in-time system — which is designed to keep inventories low — doesn’t maintain enough fuel in the tanks for emergencies. It also brings home the fact that Cape Bretoners are vulnerable because there’s no longer competition in the marketplace.
A dozen years ago, three companies delivered home heating oil to residents and businesses; now there is only one. Imperial, frets Liberal MLA Manning MacDonald, “could decide that Cape Breton might not be a priority at any given time if they’re experiencing a shortage themselves.”
But company spokesman Robert Theberge insists there was never an issue to begin with. “There were people who probably ran out of oil, and they had to get some, and the deliveries were not as large as they expected, but it’s something that happens,” he told the Cape Breton Post in an interview — from his office in Calgary.
Oh, right.

New year, old problem
The Digby General Hospital is starting the new year much the way it finished the old — with another announcement of emergency department closures. During the month of January, the ER will be closed every Thursday as well as on one Monday and one Tuesday.
Residents are advised not to need emergency medical attention on those days.

Good news in the bad
Mahone Bay residents and businesses could be paying more for their electricity after April 1 — but still not as much as thee or me.
The south shore town is one of several in the province that operates its own electric utility. While the town normally passes along increases from Nova Scotia Power directly to its customers, this will be the first time since the early 1990s that it has applied for a rate increase of its own.
But Mahone Bay CEO Jim Wentzell told municipal councillors that even if the town gets the 4.5 per cent increase it is seeking, local customers will still be “paying less than those buying directly from the provincial corporation.”
How does that work?

Strait strife
The Strait Regional School Board still has a code of ethics — sort of.
Back in November, you may recall, the board reluctantly agreed to change its bylaws and code of ethics to conform with demands from Education Minister Karen Casey. Casey, who wasn’t happy with the elected board’s decorum, had threatened to replace the entire board as she did in Halifax if it didn’t go along with her demands.
Immediately after that vote on the amendments, which barely got the two-thirds majority needed to pass, board member Brenda Gillis gave notice she would introduce a motion to abolish the code of ethics completely.
That has since sparked more procedural wrangling. West Guysborough representative Kim Horton called for Gillis’s motion to be tabled so the board could seek a legal opinion. Then East Antigonish board member Frank Machnik introduced a motion calling on the board chair to invite the minister to meet with them to explain herself, or at least hear what they had to say.
Superintendent Phonse Gillis, who says the board can eliminate the code of ethics with a simple majority vote if it chooses, isn’t keen on seeking a legal opinion. “It’s taking public money to use to get legal opinion to challenge the minister,” he pointed out, “and that may want to be looked at.”
Indeed.

Two blue
Last week, you may recall, we told you the story of veteran Pubnico fisherman Réal d’Entremont, who had hauled up a rare, “perfect market-size” blue lobster — blue down to the crustacean’s antennas — from his traps in Lobster Bay.
We told you this was a rare phenomenon that occurs in only one of every two million lobsters.
Today, we are here to tell you about lobster two-million-and-one.
Jeffrey Leeman caught the pound-and-a-half blue lobster in St. Mary’s Bay. He’s already named it — Boy Blue — and says he hopes to find it a good home, perhaps at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg.
“We didn’t want to sell it and we didn’t want to let anyone eat it,” explains Leeman’s wife Sherry, who was fishing with him at the time.
Why so many blue lobsters all of a sudden? Perhaps Blue Boy heard that the last blue lobster caught in these waters is still swimming around in a tank of cold water rather than a pot of boiling water, and decided to spray paint itself.

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, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, SOUTHSHORENOW.CA, THETELEGRAPH.CO.UK.