Tim Bousquet

“Since we’ve passed the Act,” said Premier Rodney MacDonald, “people ask me “Do we really mean it?’…I’m here to tell you: “We really mean it!’” MacDonald was speaking of the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act, which was passed unanimously by the legislature in April and establishes real environmental targets as law of the land: […]

In his book, COLLAPSE, geographer Jared Diamond takes a historical tour of human societies that collapsed and disappeared under the weight of environmental crises (Greenlandic Norse, Easter Island Polynesians, the Anasazi culture, the Mayans), and those that successfully weathered the storm (Icelandic Norse, Highlanders of New Guinea). Successful societies, says Diamond, have responsible elites, who […]

“What are you doing to be more environmentally conscious?” That was the question for the day on CBC Radio’s Maritime Noon last week. The next day the CBC aired Ian Hanomansing’s new show, Feeling the Heat, which is devoted to helping people find “ways to balance practical and environmental concerns in their everyday lives.” You […]

Maybe you missed it, but last week Rodney MacDonald voted in favour of global warming. At a Moncton conference called in part to address environmental issues, Nova Scotia’s premier joined up with his counterparts from Alberta and Newfoundland to kill a plan to impose a national “cap and trade” system to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas […]

Some smart person named this newspaper “The Coast” because there’s nothing more emblematic of Nova Scotia than the coast—the actual coast, the seashore, the place where the continent meets the ocean. Truly, Nova Scotia is the coast. Our plucky forebears scratched out a living along the coast, building hundreds of fishing villages and a way […]

The dream that Halifax will become a megaport for Chinese trade to the American Midwest is laughably stupid, and yet Nova Scotia’s political and business elites are falling over themselves promoting the “Atlantica” idea in the name of our supposed economic future. Meanwhile, they ignore the best and fundamentally pragmatic way to build the local […]

Our political and business elites have been telling us that Nova Scotia’s economic future depends on Americans buying a bunch more plastic crap from China. But here’s a news flash: It ain’t gonna happen. In case you’ve somehow missed the sell of “Atlantica,” it goes like this: Despite being bankrupted by their fruitless imperialistic adventure […]

One Thursday night last month, a remarkable thing happened in London, England: At 9pm local time, the lights went out. For the first time since the blackouts of WWII, the neon advertising signs in Piccadilly Circus were turned off. The Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace went dark and building managers and home owners joined […]