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Did you know The Coast’s homepage won’t accept swear words in headlines? We didn’t until trying to publish this Voice of the City by “asshole with a shovel” Paul Vienneau. The photographer and ice-destroyer was one of several voices whose input was sought, then ignored by the consultant report on what went wrong in municipal operations last winter. Vienneau has a lot to say on the subject.
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Where there’s a Goodwill, there’s a way, reports (vacationing, stop writing please!) life editor Allison Saunders. Halifax’s first Goodwill thrift shop will be opening on Brownlow Avenue in Dartmouth. The 17,000 square-foot space will house a thrift store, an in-store cafe and a Goodwill Career Centre to help overcome barriers to employment. Great work, Saunders. Now get back to the beach.
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Renowned for their psychic powers, groundhogs are also a growing problem for some HRM neighbourhoods. CBC’s Yvonne Colbert reports that calls about the fuzzy little guys have dramatically increased in the Hammonds Plains, Tantallon and Waverley-Fall River areas. They’ve burrowed into septic systems, tunnelled under driveways and eaten Sandy Balcom’s hostas. Still, as far as pests go, you could do worse for cuteness.
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In other animal news, “Celebrity doe returns to NB community.”
Bella, a deer but “not a regular deer,” has found her way back to Juniper, New Brunswick after being relocated by wildlife officials. CTV reports that Bella is a regular visitor to the community, whose residents view her like a dog or “a mascot.”
“’Yesterday I arrived from my grocery shopping and my driveway was full of people to come to see Bella,’ she says. ‘We had people from Moncton, we had people from Fredericton.’Not everyone, however, has been happy with Bella’s fame. She’s devoured gardens and frightened parents with small children.”
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The Ecology Action Centre is disappointed with the province for cancelling Nova Scotia’s Community Feed-In Tariff program. The COMFIT energy program encouraged community-based renewable energy projects with a guaranteed rate per kilowatt-hour for whatever energy was fed back into the public electrical grid. But this week the government announced the project was being shut down because it was too successful.
“We are now at a point where the programme could begin to have a negative impact on power rates. Nova Scotians have told us they want stability and affordability when it comes to power rates, and industry wants clarity on the future of the Comfit programme,” reads a press release from the province.
The EAC’s energy coordinator Catherine Abreu writes in a statement released last night that the program’s exceeded expectations should be a cause for celebration, not cancellation.
“While pressing pause on any new applications makes sense until more renewable capacity can be affordably accommodated on Nova Scotia’s grid, ending the program outright is an unnecessary step backward.”
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Members of Direct Action Everywhere—an international network of animal rights activists who call for total animal liberation—staged a protest inside the North Street Sobey’s meat section this week. The group held signs and loudly comments that “there is on way to humanely kill someone who does not want to die.”
Remember, eating chicken is morally worse than killing Cecil the lion. The “DxE” activists left peacefully after their protest, escorted by store security.
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Can New Brunswick and Nova Scotia teach Maine a lesson about consolidation?
“In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, economically moribund provinces that have been losing rural population for decades, provincial authorities forced many municipalities to merge – or “amalgamate,” in Canadian parlance – in the 1990s. Halifax effectively annexed sister cities Bedford and Dartmouth to form a metropolitan area of 400,000, half of Nova Scotia’s population and six times the size of Maine’s largest city, Portland. In New Brunswick, the eastern towns of Chatham and Newcastle – facing each other across a river – were melded with nine rural hamlets to forge the new city of Miramichi, while the border town of Edmundston, across the river from Madawaska, absorbed 11 rural neighbors. (Schools weren’t affected by the changes, as education is a provincial function in Canada.)As in Maine, proponents of these and other 1990s mergers argued amalgamation would save money by eliminating redundant administrators, reducing the number of elected officials, and achieving economies of scale in both the purchase of infrastructure and the delivery of police, fire, trash collection and other services. Those who’ve studied or participated in the changes say it didn’t always turn out that way.”
Amalgamation may provide for some efficiencies, argues University of Victoria, British Columbia professor of public administration James McDavid, “but the argument falls off the rails when you’re dealing with functions involving human beings interacting with residents.”
McDavid studied the cost and quality of Halifax’s amalgamation on HRM’s police services. In the three years after 1996’s supercity was formed he found “higher costs (in real-dollar terms), lower numbers of sworn officers, lower service levels, no real change in crime rates, and higher workloads for sworn officers.”
Fine, but that was 1999. Over the last decade or so crime has dropped over 30 percent and the number of sworn officers has increased by six percent. So, who the hell really knows.
