The Dominion - Halifax

Halifax Rallies for Cultural Connections for Aboriginal Youth

dawn — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 07:09:19 +0000

Campaign to reverse cuts to Mi'kmaq Native Friendship Centre's Kitpu Youth Program ramps up

K'JIPUKTUK (HALIFAX)—The shutting down of the Mi'kmaq Native Friendship Centre's Kitpu Youth Program, and subsequent campaign to reinstate it, was the catalyst for a national day of action last Thursday against the federal government's decision to freeze funds for Cultural Connections for Aboriginal Youth programs across the country.

The Halifax contingent held a rally in Grand Parade Square, which opened with a Mi'kmaq honour song and drumming. Indigenous elder Billy Lewis said a few words, followed by Kitpu Youth Program coordinator Glen Knockwood. Local MP Megan Leslie was also present, providing her take on the federal government's decision.

Most touching, though, were the testimonials from those directly affected by the program: Tayla Paul, a local Indigenous woman who experienced a difficult childhood and is thrilled her teenage children can benefit from Kitpu; and three youth whose lives were, in their words, irrevocably changed by the friendship centre's doors being open to them.

Following the speeches, the group marched through downtown Halifax holding candles. "Walk with fire and light," is the campaign slogan. The participants held posters, beat drums and chanted as they wound their way to the friendship centre.

The campaigning didn't end with the rally. The Halifax support group has several emergency fundraisers planned, and there is also discussion about making the twelfth of every month a day of action for this cause until the government reverses its decision.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the July 12 action in Halifax.

Natascia Lypny is a regular contributor to the Halifax Media Co-op, where this story originally appeared.

Rally to Save Kitpu

Poem to Raymond Taavel

Miles — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:44:27 +0000

For Raymond, and for all of the Raymonds, which is to say: for everyone

Editor's note: In the early morning of April 17th, prominent gay rights activist Raymond Taavel was fatally assaulted as he tried to break up a fight outside a popular Halifax nightclub. Later that day, as rumours swirled that the murder was a hate crime, hundreds gathered on Gottingen Street, in Halifax's North End, to collectively mourn and pay respect to Taavel. Tanya Davis, Halifax's poet laureat, recited the following poem.

There are words that spring to mind
like sadness
like violence
like senseless crime
like how this affects all of us
like how every tear in every eye falls from all of us
and today Halifax is an ocean of anguish
a sea of angry
beside the Atlantic.

And how do we handle this
what happens next
how do we manage the sorrow and the stress?
This afternoon I walked the sidewalks
not so different than the one where he met his death
where no person should ever have to lay their head
both concrete and Raymond were innocent.
I walked the sidewalk and every person I met
I tried to look into them

Do you know? Do you know?
Do you know what we're supposed to do now,
'cause I don't

I won't hate more
I won't love less
so many people - maybe even his killer - are loveless
not unloveable
maybe ignorant, definitely sick
and probably he shouldn't have been let out to walk around
and probably he was hateful and homophobic
but what's painful
besides this loss, besides all death
is the simple fact of it that remains:
this isn't over yet
- people left behind for every step we gain

I walked down the sidewalk that is in the city where I live and love
I look for eye contact
for allies in the right to live and love
I wore black and tough
as it is complicated stuff
how to protect oneself and yet open up

I stumble here
it isn't clear
I put my ear to the ground to listen for the sounds of people's fear
being taken down by other people's fear
who are guilty for their deeds but do not live in isolation here

There are systems failing us everywhere
prisons and education and mental health care
there is separation stark and severe
we reach out our hands to make connection
but some are all mixed up
bring death and destruction
it's all fucked up
like when he struck him, here

And, now, a being from the tribe of Love is gone
and we are one less strong
in a battle we are tired of fighting in the first place
lay down your arms
peace is your birthright

One more time we pick up the pieces and we keep loving
struggle for freedom
for all beings
Gottingen street gets another beating.

Well, we'll love it harder
reach our arms out further
to encircle all of our neighbours
'til we work through all of the hating

this is for all of you
this is for the pain in our city today
this is for Raymond

Tanya Davis is Halifax's poet laureat

Remembering Raymond Taavel on Gottingen Street, Halifax

The Case for Permanent Free Public Transit

Miles — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:32:19 +0000

HALIFAX—Public transit will be running again in the Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) this week, and until the end of March transit users will enjoy unlimited free rides on buses and ferries.

Metro Transit says the free fares are a way to “welcome our customers back on board and thank everyone for their patience” during the 41-day strike. The Coast, Halifax's alt-weekly, also reports that free fares may be a way to protect drivers from angry riders.

While there’s been no shortage of criticism of city council and Metro Transit management recently, the city does deserve credit for this rather enlightened decision. Besides giving bus riders a break from searching for exact change or buying tickets or passes, the move creates space to discuss what might seem like an out-there idea—moving to a permanent zero-fare public transit system.

Of course, as HRM councillors are fond of reminding us, running a public transit system isn’t truly “free.” Fares account for 37 per cent of the cost of running Halifax’s buses and ferries, according to soon-to-be ex-mayor Peter Kelly; the rest comes from general tax revenue. Kevin Lacey of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation apparently opposes the current no-fare deal, tweeting that “there’s no free ride your [sic] paying for it anyway!”

Still, an impressive handful of small to mid-sized cities around the world have deemed it worthwhile to implement some degree of free transit for commuters.

Removing fares from public transit encourages more people to use it, and more people riding buses, ferries, and streetcars is undoubtedly a good thing. Transporting 40 people on a bus is much more efficient than transporting those people in private cars, meaning less traffic congestion, less air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, and less public spending on road infrastructure and parking lots.

Presumably, Metro Transit is aiming to stem a decline in bus ridership, which is a typical consequence of a transit strike. Ridership declined four per cent after the last bus strike ended in Halifax 14 years ago, according to Metro Transit’s own figures.

Indeed, long-term zero-fare transit systems have been shown to increase ridership by up to 50 per cent, according to a 2002 study by the US Department of Transportation (DOT).

Of course, notes the study, removing fares on its own likely doesn’t result in fewer motorists on the road. Where public transit is slow, inconvenient, or unavailable, commuters stick to their cars—ridership increases in fare-free zones are partly due to people taking the bus when they otherwise might have walked or cycled. Transit consultant Jarrett Walker told Halifax Magazine recently that when Metro Transit increased the frequency of the number 1 bus, ridership increased 17 per cent.

“Frequency is freedom,” Walker said.

It’s important to note that going fare-free can also save money for public transit systems, who no longer have to pay for ticket printing; farebox collection, maintenance and personnel costs; and insurance.

The DOT study says that fare-free systems can work especially well in smaller transit systems, and lists several success stories from around the U.S.; other lists of cities can be found on Wikipedia and at http://freepublictransports.com (a list that includes Halifax for its summer FRED service).

Interestingly, the DOT study recommends against free fares for larger centres, noting that zero-fare experiments in the 1970s led to “dramatic rates of vandalism, graffiti, and rowdiness due to younger passengers who could ride the system for free,” and the “presence of vagrants on board buses [who] also discouraged choice riders and caused increased complaints from long-time passengers.”

Putting aside the offensive question of who the study considers a "choice rider," it’s true that a poorly implemented free-fare plan might be worse than none at all. (The study notes that some free-fare experiments caused a backlash from drivers experiencing more difficult working conditions, and ended up driving away customers.) That doesn’t mean it can’t, or shouldn’t, be done. There are movements toward free public transit in Toronto and New York (mayor Michael Bloomberg apparently supports the idea in principle), and just last week the idea was raised at a talk sponsored by the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce.

Should we be talking about it in Halifax too? Don’t forget that car travel is heavily subsidized as a matter of course, with governments across the country spending billions each year on highways, bridges, tax breaks for car companies and business that use vehicles, and the like. Construction of the Halifax Washmill Lake Underpass was approved by council last year even though it was $8 million over budget—$2.4 million more than the net increase to Metro Transit’s budget over the next five years, after the new contract negotiated with the transit workers’ union.

Let's keep free transit on the agenda after March 31.

Ben Sichel is a teacher and writer in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Burning transit ticket

The Case of Wally Fowler

Tim McSorley — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:05:20 +0000

Racism and possible cover-up in Canadian military see light of day with exclusively released documents

HALIFAX—In 2001, with a wife and her three children in tow, Private Wally Fowler, an African-Nova Scotian, was assigned to Traffic Tech training at Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Esquimalt, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It was not an auspicious match by any account, and since then Fowler has clung tirelessly to the assertion that he and his family were the frequent victims of racism and discrimination in Esquimalt.

The experience has cost Fowler dearly. He lost his wife, his career and in 2004, after leaving the military, he became mentally unstable and was hospitalized for an extended period.

Fortunately, an encounter in 2011 with Sergeant Rubin Coward, a military administrative specialist known to some as “the only man who can beat the military,” has given the Fowler case new life and a new direction.

Coward’s reputation can be traced back to 1993 when he single-handedly fought and won his own discrimination case at CFB Greenwood, where he was the first African-Nova Scotian Non-Commissioned Officer to be the chief clerk in 404 Maritime Patrol and Training Squadron. It took Coward over six years to advance his own case and he is adamant that the chips are stacked against anyone who tries to take on the military with charges of discrimination.

Coward's administrative acumen has yielded a trove of documents on Fowler’s case under the Privacy Act. These documents show that Fowler's initial accusations of racism were well known and corroborated by his military superiors at CFB Esquimalt. These documents also point to a series of mishandled opportunities and a possible cover-up that implicates a wide swath of persons, some among the upper echelons of the Canadian military establishment. If the nation had known what some within the military had known, Wally Fowler’s story would have become a national scandal.

In Esquimalt, in 2001, Fowler and his family attracted all manner of attention—but of the negative, racist sort. His daughter was spat on in school. The bus driver called his young son a “nigger.” His wife had bananas thrown at her while walking home from work and was frequently refused service at local stores. For several months, Fowler filed complaint form after complaint form with the military, but nothing came of them.

“He filed these forms with the appropriate military administrators,” says Coward. “As of late 1990, we have a policy of 'zero tolerance' within the military. Several of these instances happened on the base, and involved members of the PMQ [Personnel Married Quarters]. So these should have been investigated.”

Fowler says no resolution ever came.

“It was always just 'being looked at,'” says Fowler. “Even the bus driver was only relocated to a different route. That was it.”

As the racist incidents and the inaction of the military continued, Fowler requested that he and his family be transferred back to Atlantic Canada, where they would have support of the African-Nova Scotian community. In response to Fowler's request, a variety of sources, including Fowler's military superiors at CFB Esquimalt, began to confirm in writing what Fowler had been saying all along. There was racism at CFB Esquimalt and Private Fowler had felt its effects. In a social work report dated May 1, 2002, Captain DH Wong, the base's Formation Social Work Officer, noted:

“Pte Fowler and his family appear to have been victims of racial discrimination on a number of occasions...It is recommended that Pte Fowler be posted to a Halifax area unit and that his employment be restricted such that he be available to provide his family with a stable home environment, and facilitate their attendance in a program which would heal the harm done by the racial discrimination experienced in his current posting.”

In a move request dated May 31, 2002, Commander RK Taylor, the Base Administration Officer, confirmed Captain Wong's assessment.

“[Fowler] and his family have consistently experienced racial discrimination outside of the military workplace. Specifically, his children have been taunted and harassed at school and in the PMQ area where they live...Such unpleasant living circumstances have greatly affected the quality of life of this serviceman and his family...I wholeheartedly support the recommendation that he and his family be posted to Halifax or as a secondary preference another base in the Atlantic region...While he and his family will undoubtedly need to heal and learn coping skills, it is my assessment that the Fowlers will achieve this goal without career restrictions placed upon him.”

Lieutenant Commander DF Ohs, the Chaplain BRT, also confirmed the situation. In a memo dated July 3, 2002, Ohs noted that Fowler had provided him with “ample evidence that this is not just a hunch or a personal feeling, but in fact a reality.” He went on to express his concern for the family's well-being:

“They are not coping well with their present reality. Their trust level with the local community is non-existent and they are truly miserable...For all our good intentions, our national and world image could be deeply stained on just one accusation of failing to take care of one of our own families, facing severe discrimination [to them] because they are from a visible minority, and because 'no one would listen to them.' If the member were to seek the assistance of his racial community, I believe this could be perceived a national scandal.”

David Wong, now retired from the military, does not remember the details of the Fowler case, a case he dealt with 10 years ago. The retired captain does, however, remember what he would have done in order to have written the aforementioned social work report.

“I would have verified the instances of discrimination that he and his family would have reported to me,” said Wong in an interview with The Dominion. “I would have followed up on that, making an assessment on whether they had in fact suffered this discrimination, and tried to assess the impact...that it was having on the family...I would have written that in a report to his commanding officer, with a recommendation in his case of a posting to a community where he could get the support of...a community which was probably more multicultural, more accepting of people of colour.”

When asked if Fowler's case would have been unique in the Canadian military in 2002, Wong replied, “Hardly. That would be naive to say that. There's no doubt that other people were subjected to racial slurs and racial comments, racial insults, and racial discrimination of one sort or another.”

In May and June of 2002, National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa began to take interest in the events unfolding at CFB Esquimalt. On June 24, 2002, Chief Warrant Officer Levesque from Human Resources in Ottawa, sent an email to Captain Wong, asking him if he knew of any “other persons in similar circumstances in the Esquimalt/Victoria area.” That same day, Wong replied:

“I can count myself in that number...How many such people do we have here? I can't give you a number. However, colleagues tell me that they have recently started to take notice and ask the question, and they are alarmed at the high number of people who are reporting having suffered instances of prejudice and discrimination.”

Fowler's original request, dated April 16, 2002, was for a “compassionate posting” and not a “contingency move.” The difference between the two is important. A compassionate posting implies that there may be something wrong with the requester, rather than the circumstances. A compassionate posting risks affecting a soldier's career in that a caveat will be applied to their file.

A “contingency move” is granted when the military acknowledges that the requester is dealing with circumstances beyond the capabilities of the individual involved. So it is telling that when Commander RK Taylor, the Base Administration Officer, made his recommendation, it was for Fowler to receive a contingency move, rather than a compassionate posting.

As National Defence was considering what to do with Wally Fowler, a tangled thread of internal emails circulated. On July 8, 2002, Colonel Wauthier at National Defence Headquarters suggested a half-dozen possible locations available for transfer, including Greenwood, Nova Scotia. In the same email, Wauthier noted that should Fowler insist upon a move to Halifax, “we will consider [it] at that time.”

In correspondence the following day, all but two of those locations seemed to have disappeared. In an email dated July 9, 2002, Master Corporal Guy, stationed at CFB Esquimalt, noted:

“I received a phone call from CWO Levesque [Traffic Tech career manager] and he told me that in regards to Pte Fowler, he did not have any positions available in the East Coast and the only choices are Winnipeg and Trenton...Pte Fowler said that he would not want Winnipeg as he feels he would be harassed again there. The CWO said now that the options are now limited to simply Trenton.”

This transpired in spite of the fact that CWO Levesque was copied in the original Wauthier email. Clearly, as of July 8, Levesque was aware that there were postings available in Greenwood, NS. Levesque would have been aware that Commander Taylor from CFB Esquimalt and others had specifically requested that Fowler be posted to Halifax, or at the very least to Atlantic Canada.

The final decision was made by Fowler's “career manager,” Chief Warrant Officer J. Melancon.

Instead of honouring the recommendation coming from CFB Esquimalt to re-post Wally Fowler to Atlantic Canada, CWO Melancon confirmed that Fowler had only two possible transfer options. Fowler was told to chose between CFB Winnipeg or CFB Trenton, Ontario.

Rubin Coward finds CWO Melancon’s decision troubling, especially considering the extenuating circumstances that led to Fowler's request for a move.

“In totality, the reasoning behind Commander Taylor's strong recommendation to send Wally and his family back east was twofold,” says Coward. “One: to allow the member to be reintegrated with Black people in his own milieu. And secondly: to allow the individual a chance to heal. And I would say, under normal circumstances, having put sixteen years into the system myself, there's no way normally that a Chief Warrant Officer could veto the recommendation of a Commander, unless he himself had an agenda.”

In the summer of 2002, faced with what he perceived as his only option, and wishing to be as close to his support network in Atlantic Canada as possible, Fowler chose the location farthest east: Trenton.

Then something even more curious happened.

CWO Melancon transferred himself from his Ottawa office, and posted himself as Base CWO of CFB Trenton. The former Base Chief Warrant Officer in Trenton transferred into Melancon's position in Ottawa, inheriting Fowler's career file. The logic behind such a transfer, in effect a self-demotion for Melancon, is difficult to understand.

Very little documentation is on hand concerning Fowler's posting at CFB Trenton. Coward suspects that staff at CFB Trenton may have “closed ranks” and that future information requests may yet reveal another series of documents from this time period. The only documentation available is Fowler's own testimony about his treatment, which he describes as “hell.”

“Melancon's puppets were everywhere,” claims Fowler. “I was starting to get written up over everything. They'd keep a log on my actions, sometimes minute-to-minute. They kept me in a basement, ironing flags. Or I'd be driving around, sorting through trash.”

At present, no documentation can confirm these allegations.

Coward suggests that even before Fowler’s transfer to Trenton, Fowler was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of racist treatment while at Esquimalt, and he was in an even more fragile mental state in Trenton.

In fall 2002, Fowler began to experience a steady mental break down. In December 2002, he went on extended sick leave. In mid-January he was examined by Dr Bodden, a psychiatrist with Area Support Unit Toronto.

In a consultation report, dated January 16, 2003, Dr Bodden noted:

“Wally identifies a number of problems with his mood. Since arriving at Trenton, he has experienced a number of difficulties which have ultimately culminated in his mood being down most of the time, frequent ruminations about his difficulties, impaired concentration, decreased energy, decreased interest, significant initial insomnia of four to five hours duration...increased appetite with a 45-pound weight gain, and feelings of guilt. He denies suicidal ideation. He feels very helpless and hopeless.”

Notably, Dr Bodden mentioned that Fowler's posting to Trenton, and not Atlantic Canada, was possibly “redressable.”

“In other words,” says Coward, “if Wally were to have the knowledge and had somebody who would assist him in putting together a redress, he could have very easily been moved to Nova Scotia. But being a private, and not having that knowledge, he was subjected to whatever agenda Chief Warrant Officer Melancon had.”

A social work report, dated February 3, 2003, noted that members of the military consulted Captain DN Penley (a Social Worker stationed at Trenton) about Fowler five times between November 2002 and January 2003. In one communique between Penley and the Commanding Officer of 2 Air Movements Squadron, 8 Wing Trenton, Penley notes:

“Several other helping professionals involved in this case were consulted by WSWO [Wing Squadron Warrant Officer]...CFMAP [Canadian Forces Member Assistance Program] counsellor indicated that racism experienced by s/m and family in Esquimalt was highly traumatizing, which may have disadvantaged s/m's introduction to his military career at a critical juncture.”

With his mental state beginning to suffer greatly, and his family becoming increasingly depressed, in early February Fowler requested discharge from the military.

Captain Penley, in a communique written on February 3, again suggests:

“[A] compassionate posting to Nova Scotia could be considered as an alternative in order to attempt salvaging the s/m's career.”

CWO Melancon's motivations in blocking recommendations to post Fowler to CFB Halifax or Greenwood, and then re-posting himself to CFB Trenton once Fowler was posted there, remains a mystery unlikely to be resolved. On February 13, 2003, Jean Melancon passed away suddenly while stationed at CFB Trenton.

Once dismissed, it appears that the loose ends of Fowler's file were quickly “cleaned up.” By April 2003 there was no trace of the original documents from CFB Esquimalt, documents that suggest mistreatment of Wally Fowler and his family, and a subsequent mishandling of their case. In April of 2003, in response to discrimination charges brought to him by Fowler, Lieutenant Colonel Romanow noted in a memo:

“Pte Fowler alleges that he and his family have been subjected to discrimination and racism at each of the postings (Borden, Esquimalt and Trenton) he has had since rejoining the CF in 2000. It is noted that there is no substantiation or evidence supporting his allegations on the file. Consequently, there does not appear to be any immediate risk to the CF of having to respond to a grievance or human rights complaint, based on discrimination...It is recommended that Pte Fowler be released from the CF under item 5d as proposed.”

Romanow's statement that no substantiation or evidence supporting Fowler's allegations flies in the face of what is now known: Captain Wong had undertaken an investigation and came to the conclusion that Fowler was the victim of racism; Base Command had interviewed Fowler, was attempting to resolve one specific incident and was taking steps to “reinforce the Good Neighbour Policy to include racial tolerance” on the base; and, in 2003, the Canadian Forces Members Assistance Program counsellor had found the racism that Wally Fowler had experienced while at Esquimalt was “highly traumatic.” According to Romanow, however, as of 2003, all this evidence had disappeared.

It is troubling to contemplate where the original documents from CFB Esquimalt might have gone. Retired Captain Wong is equally baffled.

“Good question,” said Wong to The Dominion, when asked where the documents might have gone. “I guess it would be relevant to a subsequent investigation, wouldn't it? I couldn't tell you...I suppose as a journalist you can put that question to the Minister [of Defence].”

At press time, neither the Minister of Defence nor the Department of National Defence had any comment regarding the missing evidence.

In June of 2003, with his step-children still attending public school, Wally Fowler was given a 5d dismissal—a dismissal with no pension attached. He was given seven days back-pay, although he had to wait to move until the end of June in order for his step-children to complete their school year.

Three years after the move to Esquimalt, Fowler and his family returned home to Halifax, to the support of his community. For several months Fowler attempted to get compensation or a pension from the military, but to no avail. He solicited then-Minister of National Defence David Pratt. Fowler penned a letter to Pratt on February 2, 2004. Pratt responded on March 12, 2004, saying he was “disturbed” by Fowler's account of the racism he had “allegedly suffered,” and said he had ordered a review to determine if Fowler's treatment by the armed forces negatively impacted his career, and whether this treatment was related to Fowler's “ethnic origin.”

There is reason to believe that a review of Fowler's career would have turned up the original documents from Esquimalt—documents that show the extent of the racism to which Fowler and his family had been exposed. A review would have also found the potentially redressable posting to CFB Trenton, and the decision of CWO Melancon to go against Commander Taylor's recommendation that Fowler be posted to Halifax, or elsewhere in Atlantic Canada.

Nothing was found.

On February 12, 2004, as the military began to search for information on Fowler in response to Pratt's career review, a flourish of internal emails erupted. All of them were written by individuals looking for Fowler's case file, but none of them being able to find it. A message from Captain Jackson noted:

“I looked in NGRS and Excel and could not find it. How about you?”

To which Warrant Officer Laing replied, 11 minutes later:

“Not at this level. Nothing in the “I” drive either.”

Lost files notwithstanding, the case continued, slated to be addressed in the House of Commons on April 19, 2004. That month, another flourish of inter-departmental emails ensued.

On April 5, Lieutenant Navy Green asked CFB Esquimalt:

“Nothing in your records for anything relating to the Fowler family in Mqs out there?”

MWO Ennis, in Esquimalt, the same day, replied:

“A records check does not indicate any investigation files/reports involving Pte Fowler at CFB Esquimalt. As noted below one file was noted CFB Trenton involving a Breach of Probation issue.”

Without the proper documentation, the case before the House of Commons was weak. Fowler, unhappy with the results of the investigation, solicited Pratt once more. Pratt again sided on paper with Fowler; writing to the National Defence Ombudsman on Fowler's behalf, he noted:

“I am informed that your investigator did contact Mr Fowler, but that he may not be prepared to fully support your investigation. Nevertheless, it is requested that your office conduct a viability assessment for the conduct of this investigation and provide your recommendations to me.”

On July 2, 2004, the final results of the investigation arrived in the form of a letter from Captain DJ Kyle, the Base Commander at Esquimalt, to the Director of Military Careers at NDHQ:

“A search of all documents relating to the investigation of racism and/or harassment concerning Private (Retired) Fowler has been conducted with negative results. The supervisor of Private (Retired) Fowler has confirmed that the Private was not involved in any investigation concerning racism and/or harassment during his posting to Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt.”

Every trace of wrongdoing in the Fowler file had vanished.

Wally Fowler then suffered a mental breakdown. In the late summer of 2004 he was found on the highway outside of Halifax, wandering naked. When the police cuffed him, he attempted to gouge his eyes out on the window of their cruiser. He was taken to the Nova Scotia Hospital, where he was kept under intermittent restraint and constant surveillance for the following month and a half.

Without a military pension, and with no income, Fowler's vehicle was repossessed; his mortgage also spiralled out of control. Fowler's partner and her three children, whom Fowler was raising as his own, left him. The psychiatry team at the Nova Scotia Hospital diagnosed Fowler with schizophrenia and asked the Department of National Defence to provide him with a pension. Finally, in winter, 2004, Fowler was granted a limited pension. At this point, having moved back with his parents, his life was in shambles.

Fowler, in a fragile mental state, continued his attempt to get a full medical pension, but to no avail. On July 28, 2005, the Canadian Forces Grievance Board (CFGB) recommended that Fowler's application for redress of grievances be denied. Notably, the CFGB's investigation justified Fowler's 2003 posting to Trenton, as Major Lionais noted:

“[I]did not support a posting to Halifax due to the fact that the city achieved notoriety in the late 1990s for racial conflict issues in one of its high schools.”

What a racial conflict at a high school in Halifax had to do with refusing the recommendations from CFB Esquimalt that Fowler be moved back to his community on a contingency move is not known.

In 2005, Fowler received a letter from the Chief of the Defence Staff, General RJ Hillier; it was a final response to Fowler's application for a redress of grievance. In the letter, Hillier noted:

“In its analysis, CFGB found that there was no substantiated racist conduct or harassment on the part of any Canadian Forces member towards you. I agree with the CFGB. I believe that the CF, given the circumstances, was sensitive and responsive to your situation...I am not prepared to grant the redress you are seeking. I am satisfied that you were not discriminated against and that you took your voluntary release.”

It was the same story as before, now handed to Fowler by the Chief of the Defence Staff himself. Fowler began to vacillate between continuing his pursuit of redress of grievance and giving up on what seemed to be a hopeless endeavour. His mental state again wavered; he suffered another breakdown in 2005. He began to shred much of the original documentation related to his military career, as it made him angry. He took work as a community service worker and drifted between jobs.

Years went by and nothing advanced beyond a bureaucratic shuffle. Finally, in 2011, Fowler met Coward. Coward believed Fowler; with 16 years in the system, Coward says he’s seen it all before.

“[In the military] racism is both systemic and institutional,” says Coward. “And it's clear to see how they operate. What they do at the end of the day, they inundate the individual with a plethora of documentation, in Wally's case some 4,000 pages, and most of it is fluff. And of course, even when Wally took it to his lawyer, the first thing the lawyer said was, 'I can't go through all that,' unless Wally had a quarter million dollars in his back pocket. And the military is acutely aware that there's a significant financial uphill battle to fight these buggers.

“The area where they try to defeat you is in administration. And if you're not as sound an administrator, you're easily defeated. Because you just don't know the system. For people like Wally who don't have that knowledge? They're dead in the water, and the system knows it.”

Armed with the “vanished” documents from CFB Esquimalt, Coward is confident that Fowler's case merits a second look. He wants a Ministerial Inquiry. He also wants a review of the Human Rights Commission, the means by which racism is reported on in the Canadian military. He wants compensation for Wally Fowler, who he says should have been enjoying a long and illustrious career with the Canadian military by now. According to Coward, Veterans' Affairs is now offering Wally Fowler a full medical pension. But at this late date, after years of disappearing documentation, a pension is not enough for Fowler and Coward.

“They're now offering a bun,” says Coward. “And what they don't know is he can get the whole bakery.”

Miles Howe is an editor with The Dominion and a member of the Halifax Media Co-op.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca

Wally Fowler and Rubin Coward

Closed to the Community but Open for Business

Miles — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:08:07 +0000

Botched Sale of St. Pat's-Alexandra School a Provincial Trend

HALIFAX—When a school is closed or given over to private developers, affected communities cry foul, and cry loudly.

But it's not just the loss of a building, or the inconvenience of sending children farther afield for their education, that strikes a community as unjust.

"When you take a school out of a neighbourhood...when you take away what holds and binds people together, the community falls away," said Reverend Rhonda Britton of Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, addressing a crowd of 150 people who gathered at St. Patrick's-Alexandra school in December. "We will fight to keep our neighbourhood."

Halifax City Council's acceptance of a private bid for the St. Pat's-Alexandra school, which closed its doors in June 2011 when students left for the summer, has been the subject of intense criticism from North End residents, neighbourhood organizations, media and the wider HRM community. Council's processes, both in its call for bids and its decision to accept an offer from Jono Developments, violated its own policies and showed lack of respect for the neighbourhood that can be only interpreted as racism, say community and media critics.

The fiery controversy around the sale of the North End school (to be replaced with condos) is not unique. The closure and privatization of schools and former school buildings in marginalized communities--a provincial trend--touch those communities in a particularly sensitive way, threatening their collective identities, and their very existence.

Rural communities are particularly vulnerable, as the provincial funding formula for schools is based on enrollment. Trends show declining enrollment in rural communities in Nova Scotia, translating into fewer education dollars, and eventually, the closure of rural schools.

Communities all over Nova Scotia have been resisting the closure of their schools. In the past two years, groups have sprung up to save schools in Weymouth, Antigonish and Halifax, as well as forming the Save Community Schools, a province-wide coalition of concerned parents.

When the Margaree Forks District School in western Cape Breton was slated for closure in 1990, citizens of the area mobilized with urgency. Recognizing that the enrollment-based funding formula would always work against schools in rural areas, citizens of Margaree undertook a lobbying and awareness-raising campaign to change that formula.

The Margaree Education Coalition (MEC) coordinated a series of three "Kitchen Forums," 88 neighbourhood meetings in all, that sought to identify the community's vision for education of its children. MEC drafted a strategic plan for community-based public schools, which would still use the provincial funding formula, but would also lean heavily on the resources of the community. It published the strategic plan in a 2000 report, The New Learning Guide: Education Opportunities, Alternatives and Enhancements for Maritime Communities.

The school in Margaree was eventually closed, and replaced with a Public-Private Partnership (P-3) school on the outskirts of the community.

The loss of a school in a rural community contributes to the decline of that community, which is already vulnerable to the forces of urbanization and economic restructuring, says Dr. Paul Bennett in his book Vanishing Schools, Threatened Communities: The Contested Schoolhouse in Maritime Canada. A rural community without a school is not particularly attractive to young families, who must consider long bus rides for their children and lengthy travel for themselves for parent-teacher meetings and extra-curricular activities.

The loss of a neighbourhood school threatens urban communities in a similar way.

"In the last few years, people who have written off the North End have begun to see that it is a prime location for people who work downtown," said Reverend Britton at the December rally. "They see it has a certain vibe that makes it attractive and a trendy place to live. And now we witness the gentrification of the neighbourhood as developers grab as much of the land as they can to build condos and high-rises, while our children do not have the necessary services that they need to survive--to thrive."

Reverend Britton reminded the crowd that the sale of St. Pat's-Alexandra was only the latest in a series of betrayals by city and school officials. The decision to close the unique school--one of the few in Nova Scotia with Africentric curricula--was fought hard by residents and neighbourhood groups. She didn't have to mention the history of Africville, where Black Nova Scotians, already living with toxic industries in their neighbourhood, were forced out of their community in the North End by city re-zoning.

"The city is robbing the North End of a $6 million asset, and putting it elsewhere," says Jane Moloney, executive director of the North End Community Health Centre (NECHC). The Centre, which has been serving the North End for 40 years, was involved in the bidding for the St. Pat's-Alexandra building. "The sense is, we have so little, and they're taking that away, threatening our existence."

"What we are hearing is that residents are afraid. A lot of people here are residents of Uniacke Square...and they worry that they will not be valued as neighbours [if condos are built on the school site]. They feel the value of keeping their community is under threat." Moloney speculated that condo-dwellers demand trendy cafes and expensive restaurants, which do not meet the needs of the North End community, which has no banking or grocery services. "To whom is the city responsive?" she said.

After St. Pat's-Alexandra was closed in June 2011, the city of Halifax opened its bidding process with a short time-line that already put community organizations--often operating on volunteer labour--at a disadvantage. The NECHC submitted an "expression of interest," which requested that the city, as a condition of the sale, require the successful bidder to turn over a smaller building on the site to the NECHC, which would meet the NECHC's growing need for space.

Neighbourhood organizations are permitted to pursue expressions of interest in light of their relative lack of resources to develop a full bid. But instead of evaluating the expression of interest as such, the NECHC's submission was scored as a full bid. The NECHC never received a response from council on its proposal regarding the smaller building.

It was discovered later that council had ignored another policy, put in place in 1999, that guaranteed community consultations on the disposal of closed school buildings.

Instead of voting to repeal its decision on the sale of the school in light of this new information, council voted to scrap the policy itself.

The Mi'kmaq Friendship Centre and the Richard Preston Centre for Excellence also submitted bids for the St. Pat's-Alexandra site.

When the decision to close a school is presented in terms of dollars and cents, the case seems clear: close schools with declining enrollment, transfer students to another school, and save money by sharing resources among more students.

The provincial per-student funding formula functions on a market model of supply and demand. With funding based on enrollment, a school's productivity is measured simply by the number of students it graduates, and says nothing about the quality of the education they receive.

Such a formula fails to account, for example, for the richness that keeping a school within a community can offer. According to a 2006 report by Dr. Michael Corbett of Acadia University and Dennis Mulcahy of Memorial University, "small schools do a better job of educating children."

After a school is closed, the municipality can sell it off, making money off the real estate and buildings.

In the case of the St. Pat's site, councillors were given information on the monetary savings a private sale would provide the city. This financial picture seemed to trump the sense that a city ought to follow its own policies.

Councillors were not asked to take into consideration the value of that infrastructure to the health of the neighbourhood--where public services and community groups could create a space of cohesion and empowerment.

"We were required under the [Request For Proposals] to answer the question: how would our proposal meet the mandate of the city?" said Moloney. The NECHC had to demonstrate that its use of the facility would conform to the vision outlined in HRM By Design, as well as energy and recreation guidelines set by HRM.

NECHC's "bid" scored 63/100. Since financial considerations were given 40 points, and NECHC's submission was not financially strong, Moloney reasons that the score reflects that the health centre's proposal must have otherwise met the city's own mandate for use for St. Pat's-Alexandra.

"If we moved into the school, we would be moving back into the heart of the community we serve," she said.

Bennett points out in his book that education is a key location for popular struggles--essentially people fighting to keep their homes and ways of life.

"We're scared [the city is] going to rush this process through and give a demolition permit [to Jono Development]," said Moloney. "The cost of a new building will be $15-20 million," putting further out of reach the possibility of community organizations purchasing the space. "We're worried they're going to knock it down, and knock it down fast, so we stop fighting it. And if I feel this way as someone who works here, I can't imagine what it must feel like for the people who live here."

Moira Peters grew up in Margaree and was involved in the mobilization to save the community's school. This article is the first in a series of articles about the closure and privatization of public schools in Nova Scotia.

St. Pats-Alexandra

Island Hopping With Emera

Miles — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:58:00 +0000

Barbados is the latest Caribbean island to feel the Emera squeeze

HALIFAX—On a small island north of Venezuela, 4,500 kilometres from Halifax, Barbados Light and Power (BLP) recently issued a news release. Energy use on the Caribbean island has hit a low not seen since 1974.

“Some people are now simply just turning off all the electricity in their homes, especially when they're not home,” says Carson Cardogan, a Barbadian ratepayer. “They're pulling out everything. Every plug. Including the fridge. People are living virtually in the dark, in order to not pay Barbados Light and Power the hefty electricity bills.”

While the average Canadian might applaud such a downward shift in power consumption, this is not a question of Barbadians “going green” by choice. It is the work of Nova Scotia’s Emera, BLP's new owner.

Emera, the Nova Scotia-based company, moved fast onto the scene in Barbados, purchasing a 38 per cent share in the largely nationally-owned BLP in May 2010, and another 41 per cent in January 2011. When shares in BLP were trading at $12 on the Barbados stock market, Emera offered BLP shareholders $25 per share—an offer they could not refuse. A few dissenting voices, on call-in programs and social media panels, urged caution against selling off the national power company to a foreign interest, but the deal went through unencumbered.

Later, an investigation by the Fair Trade Commission (FTC), Barbados' regulatory body, suggested that BLP shares were devastatingly undervalued, and should have been priced in the $40 to $50 range.

Writers at “Barbados Underground”, one of the nations' most read independent media sites, suspected something was amiss with the deal. The FTC, as regulator of BLP's power rates prior to the sale to Emera, would have been well-informed of BLP's assets and net worth. To emerge post-sale saying that Emera had purchased a more valuable company than they thought they had is suspicious indeed.

This isn't Emera's first Caribbean purchase. The company already has a controlling interest in the Grand Bahamas Power Company, the monopoly service provider to about 20,000 customers on the island of Grand Bahama. Purchased in 2009, its relationships on the island of Grand Bahamas have been anything but easy. Operation Justice Bahamas (OJB), a grassroots organization, has gathered over 5,000 signatures from disgruntled customers who have cried foul over skyrocketing power bills.

OJB's actions forced the Bahamian government into an ongoing investigation into Emera's business practices, including hundreds of allegations of overpricing, “guess-timation,” and destructive power surges. Sarah MacDonald, Emera's chief officer in the Caribbean, suggested that difficulties in meter-reading were related to the fact that over 8,000 Bahamians did not have a postal address, an allegation that OJB dismisses as a “slap in the face.”

OJB is hoping the governmental investigation is the first step towards a class-action lawsuit against Emera.

“They are, in my words, driving the people into poverty. And they are causing people to lose business,” says Troy Garvey of OJB.

Emera also owns a 19 per cent equity interest in St. Lucia Electricity Services Limited (LUCELEC). While Emera’s involvement in St. Lucia seems to be developing at a slow pace, the situation on Barbados is unraveling quickly.

In Barbados, public allegations of exorbitant power bills, based on incomprehensible calculations, are running rampant, and representatives from industry agree. Sir David Seale, chairman of RL Seale & Company, one of Barbados's largest rum bottlers, has publicly railed against Emera, calling the current situation “unacceptable for industry.” Seale has had to divert company money towards developing new energy infrastructure, and has shifted to diesel generators in an effort to get off the Barbadian grid.

Meanwhile, the government, in an attempt to keep electrical power flowing into some of the more impoverished homes in Barbados, instituted a plan in October 2011, known as Energy Cost Mitigation Assistance (ECMA). The ECMA is a one-off grant of $5 million for welfare-recipient Barbadians, which was created to offset the global increase in fuel costs that are supposedly responsible for BLP's steady rise in power bills.

Before Emera purchased BLP, there was no apparent need for an emergency-style government fund for the nation's poorest to pay their power bills.

Emera’s electricity rate increases, be it in Nova Scotia, on Grand Bahamas or in the Barbados, are all approved by a “third-party” regulatory body, and are thus granted some veneer of legitimacy. In Barbados, that regulatory body is the Free Trade Commission (FTC). In Nova Scotia, the regulatory body is the Utility and Review Board (UARB).

In Barbados, Malcolm Gibbs-Taitt, founder and director general of Barbados Consumer Research Organization, has brought into question the link between the FTC and the Barbados Securities Commission, the body meant to regulate the Barbados Stock Exchange. Both are chaired by Sir Neville Nicholls. The term “regulatory capture,” by which a regulatory agency meant to serve the common good is instead co-opted by private interests, applies here: one individual is overseeing BLP's sale, and also overseeing BLP's requests for rate increases (read: profit).

“My problem with the Fair Trade Commission is that it does not seem to have the ability to get the proper information before it,” says Gibbs-Taitt, “[or] to share that information with those that are involved in the process, to the extent that we can be reasonably assured that what it is doing in the names of the people, the consumers, [is something where] you could say, 'This is a job well done.'”

A similar instance of regulatory capture is at play in Nova Scotia.

Brennan Voegel, former Energy Coordinator for the Ecology Action Centre, notes that Peter Gurnham, largely responsible for the UARB's decisions on NSPI's rate increase requests, was formerly a lawyer in the service of NSPI.

“The major problem is that [NSPI] is guaranteed a rate of return...which allows them to usurp more money out of Nova Scotians,” says Voegel. “They have to make money, but there's very few industries in the world today that still enjoy that enshrined right to profit. And if it were an open market, like it should be, then electricity provided at the lowest cost, with the greatest degree of efficiency, would be the product that people would be choosing.”

The relationship between the UARB, the Nova Scotian government, and NSPI, which Voegel calls “the golden triangle,” has worked well for Emera's top brass. Executive salaries and bonuses have never been higher, with CEO Chris Huskilson taking home over $3 million in 2011. A new corporate head office on the waterfront in Halifax, a structure currently under construction, is slated to cost between $30 million and $40 million.

Executive salaries and bonuses aside, Emera's new-found role as Caribbean power boss begs the question: What exactly is afoot in the islands? Is this a case of classic Canadian snowbird syndrome? Or is a grander scheme in the works?

All of Emera's Caribbean purchases produce the vast majority of their power by burning oil or diesel —the weakest link in Emera's control of the situation. The company is not in the oil refinery or shipping business, and so is beholden to global market trends. Emera, however, is in the gas pipe building business, and already wholly owns Brunswick Pipeline, a 30-inch, 145-kilometre natural gas pipeline in New Brunswick.

Plans for an inter-Caribbean gas pipeline, with gas sourced from Tobago, have been brewing for several years. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez initially encouraged a pan-Caribbean oil pipeline, to run oil from Venezuela, but the Tobago bid for a natural gas pipeline appears to have won out in the minds of investors.

At the time of writing, there was a flurry of activity in the Tobago project: international investors were found after several years of relative dormancy. The company with the lead in the project, Eastern Caribbean Gas Pipeline Company, shares at least one member of its board of directors, Dr. Trevor Byer, with LUCELEC’s board.

If Emera were to involve itself heavily with the construction of an inter-island gas pipeline, it would eliminate one more middleman—the distributor—from its electricity monopoly in at least two Caribbean nations. Whether this gas pipeline materializes and, more importantly, what its impact will be for Emera's Caribbean clients, remain to be seen.

“People are crying out every day” because of the skyrocketing power bills in the Barbados, says Carson Cardogan. “They're writing letters to the newspapers and the call-in programs. And it's having a very deleterious effect on the lives of many Barbadians.”

For the moment, Bahamians and Barbadians, and Nova Scotians, find themselves beholden to Emera's bottom line, a situation that to some—such as the pulp mill owned by Abitibi, and the one formerly owned by NewPage, and their hundreds of out-of-work employees—has already become untenable. Nova Scotians certainly remember that two of NSPI's largest industrial clients, prior to massive downsizing and bailouts in the case of Abitibi, and bankruptcy in the case of Newpage, made very public mention of the fact that escalating power bills were driving them to ruin.

While critics of the two companies suggest mismanagement as the more likely cause of their dire straights, it does beg the question, in Nova Scotia and beyond: Is Emera simply bad for business?

Miles Howe is an editor with The Dominion and a member of the Halifax Media Co-op.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Bridgetown, Barbados

Early Life's Long Reach Forward

stephlaw — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:19:18 +0000

Can a parenting co-op in Cape Breton save the economy?

HALIFAX—A report released in January by the Canadian Paediatrics Society (CPS) outlines a simple adjustment in family services that would lead to an economic revolution in Canada, and it’s all about facilitating early childhood development.

The society’s 2012 status report, Are We Doing Enough, showed that for every dollar spent in the early childhood years, the government could see $4 to $8 in return to society. It noted, in particular, the provincially funded early learning and childcare program in Quebec, which undoubtedly played a role in increasing the number of women in the workforce by four per cent, and in increasing the provincial GDP by $5.2 billion.

But the report said that the federal government isn’t doing enough to advance early learning and childcare programs across the country.

A group of young women in Inverness, an old coal-mining town in rural Nova Scotia, are not waiting around for the government to catch on. With the help of a municipal councillor, the women have decided to start the revolution in their town.

“There is a lack of honouring the role of the child and the woman in building a pluralistic, empathetic world,” says Jim Mustard, a councillor for the County of Inverness. There is little in the way of public services aimed at enriching the lives of people ages zero to five, he notes, even though these are the people who determine the health and vibrancy of a community.

In an effort to support the county's population of young families, Mustard, along with seven mothers, formed the Inverness Early Years Co-op.

Inverness, population 2,000, is a little different from nearby villages in that it enjoys a critical amount of built infrastructure: a hospital, an arena, a school, a food bank and low-income housing. “Families don’t need two cars to survive here,” says Mustard. “It’s a nest for people to land in and stay.”

Still, to an outsider, a small town in an economically depressed region of Nova Scotia may not seem like the place such an initiative might flourish, but for Diana MacLellan, a 25-year-old single mother originally from Inverness, and a member of the co-op’s board of directors, it makes perfect sense.

“I always had a baby on my hip,” she says. “I have a large extended family: 22 aunts and uncles, 52 cousins. You know, someone to turn to, everyone to answer to.” The supportive dynamic of a large, tight-knit family was common when she was growing up, but it has faded as families moved away from their rural roots in search of more economically viable livelihoods in urban centres and in oil-rich Alberta.

“We’re trying to bring that [family support] back,” she says.

The Inverness Early Years Co-op is not yet operational, but its board has been meeting since June 2010, and plans are underway to partner with the Inverness Cottage Workshop to build a space for the co-op’s services. The centre will be 11,000 square feet, and “a model of energy efficiency,” says Mustard, using local energy sources such as biomass pellets from naturally regenerating alders and solar power. The town of Inverness has already raised $700,000—one-third of the building's cost—and hopes to raise another third from the province. The board hopes the co-op will be open in eight months.

“We’re creating a platform to grow a community,” says Mustard.

Like many other towns and villages in rural Nova Scotia, Inverness suffers from a constant cutback in support services for families, Mustard says. The obstetrics unit in the Inverness hospital was cut eight years ago. Now, women in Inverness have to drive two hours to the nearest obstetrics unit, in Antigonish, to give birth.

In addition to rural hospitals losing their services for young families, Nova Scotia has also closed dozens of rural schools over the past 15 years. Last year, the federal government further cut five Service Canada offices out of rural Cape Breton.

Because a child's health begins with the mother's, the Inverness Early Years Co-op is geared towards relieving the woman’s financial stress by offering training for employment skills, while providing a place to share childcare. In-kind payments will be an option for low-income families.

“We want to have licensed childcare, an informal drop-in, with prenatal [services], breastfeeding, a playgroup, and a place for families to convene with a specialist,” says MacLellan. “The centre has to be accessible to absolutely everybody.”

The gap in services for the early years of a person's life—from in utero to age five—is a national trend. Canada ranks last among 25 wealthy Western nations in its support for early childhood development policies, according to a 2011 report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and UNICEF. Canada also comes second-last among 34 OECD nations in spending on childcare and pre-primary education.

This is ironic, given the firm Canadian roots of the interdisciplinary research that led to the groundbreaking 1999 Canadian Early Years Study: Reversing the Real Brain Drain, done by the late Dr. Fraser Mustard (father of Inverness's municipal councillor) and Margaret Norrie McCain. The study called on the federal government to establish parenting centres to support families, beginning at pregnancy. Dr. Mustard was a world-reknowned pioneer in recognizing the impact of early brain development on quality of life, and he co-authored two follow-up early years studies; the most recent was released a few days after his death in November 2011.

These early years studies stem from neuroplasticity research, which is based on the principle that your brain is “plastic.” It can learn new things through practice, but it could also lose learnt things when they aren’t practiced.

During the first few years of life, this brain development takes place at an incredible rate; it triples in size by the time a child reaches the age of three. Early years, therefore, present "great opportunities and great risks that set trajectories across a lifetime," according to the Council for Early Child Development (CECD), founded by Dr. Mustard and colleagues to continue the work initiated in the first Early Years Study. The CECD ceased operations in 2010 due to lack of funding.

Dr. Mustard and McCain's first study in 1999 argued that parenting centres would save billions of dollars down the road.

Not only do early developmental deficits, caused by poor health and environment, devastate the lives of the children in question, but they also cost Canada dearly through welfare, health care, prisons and remediation, and result in lower contributions to society, according to six economists writing for the Journal of Public Health in 2010.

"The country now tolerates an unnecessary brain drain that will dramatically deplete our future stock of human capital,” write the economists, of Canada’s lost opportunities for productivity by lack of investment in its citizens’ early years. Over a quarter of Canadian children enter kindergarten not fully prepared to learn, they report.

Early child development programs also significantly reduce the cost of mental illness, the second-leading cause of disability and premature death in Canada. Mental illness costs $51 billion per year in Canada due to costs in health care and loss of productivity.

Canada was on the road to becoming an international leader in early child development programs with a national childcare strategy, to which the federal government committed $5 billion over five years in 2004. Agreements were signed between the federal and provincial and territorial governments, which would receive transfer payments for establishing early learning and childcare plans.

But when Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power in 2006, that plan was scrapped.

The 2004 vision for a national framework on early years development was crucial if Canada wanted return on its investment in early child development, according to Dr. Danielle Grenier and Dr. Denis Leduc from the Canadian Paediatric Society in a 2008 article.

"The belief that such a system can create itself in the absence of national leadership is simply flawed," they write. "At best, Canada's early childhood education and care 'system' is a patchwork of policies and programs—creating geographical and income inequities."

Nova Scotia, says Mustard, falls behind other provinces in its commitment to strategize around the link between maternal health and childhood development—it puts the least resources, out of any province, into early child development. In fact, in spite of CPS's recommendations to invest in early years education, the province's Department of Education announced on February 3 its "Kids and Learning First" plan, which would invest $6.7 million in initiatives such as a Discovering Opportunities for Grade 9, virtual courses and skilled trade courses geared to shipbuilding. But none of the funds will be dedicated to early development initiatives. The department did not respond to requests for an interview.

The Inverness initiative demonstrates an alternative angle on economics in the choice to form a co-op, distinct from a profit-driven enterprise.

“The co-op model is most responsive when trying to develop something as open as an early years centre,” says Mustard. “The model makes sense.”

“This is not about targeting families with problems,” says Councillor Mustard, “but building a centre in the community to support all parents, where all issues are put in a holistic perspective.”

Twenty-five-year-old single mother Diana MacLellan agrees with Mustard and believes the co-op model will work to improve her child’s development and health.

“The community has to have ownership in the centre, and be able to make changes and decisions,” says MacLellan.

With this co-op in place, MacLellan says women might be able to regain the community network that once existed in Inverness.

“If anything ever happened, I could walk into any house for help and support,” she says. “It's about feeling safe.”

Moira grew up near Inverness, and now lives and bikes in Halifax.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca.

Baby co-op

Homeless in Halifax

hillarybain — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:49:03 +0000

A first person account

HALIFAX—I’m fixing dinner on another damp Halifax evening and enjoying the momentary peace in my large kitchen.

Behind me, a middle-aged mom is trying to persuade her two-year-old that milk tastes better than juice and, not surprisingly, losing that argument for the moment. To my left, a younger woman is perched on a stool, engrossed in a third-year university chemistry text—heck, at Dalhousie University, I never made it past the first page of that book, which is why I promptly switched back to psychology. From the living room, I hear laughter about some of the latest signs to appear in our home:

Please do not dry cigarettes in the Microwave. Thank you, Staff

Please do not open window – it will fall out. Thank you, Staff

Squash stew for breakfast – enjoy! - Your Staff

Welcome to my new home. Welcome to a Halifax Shelter for Homeless Women.

Hannah, making dinner for her daughter, has been unable to find affordable rental accommodation that also accepts children in Halifax, which is where she moved after she lost her job in Cape Breton. “I borrowed the money to take a bus here, just because we figured there were more jobs in the Halifax,” Hannah explains. She had not expected that when she arrived, she would be unable to find housing that she could afford, with or without her child. And she still can’t.

Hannah has now become a member of an exclusive club, which, for want of a better label, might be called the CAE Club—the “Chicken and Egg” Club, where I too am now an unwilling member.

You may be part of the CAE Club because you need housing to get a job—a place to get dressed, receive mail, communicate with employers, store your belongings, do laundry, have meals. But you need a job in order to get that place and pay for that home. That job will provide the rent to get a place to live, or to satisfy a landlord that you are working and can afford your rent. For many of us at a shelter, the question of getting a job, or getting a home first, no longer makes any difference. We currently no longer have resources to make either happen.

In 1998, the Big City Mayors Caucus of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) declared homelessness in Canada a national disaster.

That was thirteen years ago.

By conservative estimates, there are over 200,000 people in Canada who are homeless today, according to organizers of November’s Housing and Homeless Conference in Halifax. Women, youth, and families are the fastest growing groups in the homeless and at-risk populations.

In the kitchen on this rainy night, my chemistry-text-loving friend, Denise, and I are now looking for the best place to put her cane so I don’t keep tripping over it. Denise represents another audience needing shelters; she has a health issue. In her case, a stroke that she suffered a year ago. Denise’s subsequent inability to walk unaided was something that her new husband could not cope with. In spite of some great health care agencies which worked with the couple to create Denise’s successful transition from a wheelchair to her cane, “he just didn’t expect to be looking after me,” says Denise of her husband. He kicked her out of a home where her name was not on the rental agreement. Her husband since left the province, along with their car and bankbook.

I remember Lenore, another health “victim” at another Halifax shelter with a similar story, but she faced even greater problems—she not only could not walk properly, but a stroke had affected her speech. Lenore’s move to a shelter came after she discovered that the mortgage for the home she shared with her partner of 20 years did not include her name, and he “no longer wanted me anyway,” she says. She could not afford to hire a lawyer or use Legal Aid options, none of which she qualified for. Lenore did, however, qualify for her current shelter residence which is where I got to know her, and where I finally discovered someone who could beat me at a game I had ruled all my life: I am no longer the Maritime Scrabble Queen.

I asked Stephanie, a staff member at a Halifax shelter, what the hardest part of her job was: “The hardest part of my job is telling a homeless woman who is already facing the worst day of her life, that she has to move, whether she has a place to go or not. Her time to use a shelter for a roof over her head has run out. Whether she has a place to go or not, there is someone who also now needs that her space.” There is no longer a "room at the inn."

I continue to be amazed at how “up” most residents are in these situations which are so often just unbearable: no home, sometimes limited food, cramped surroundings. It seemed to go without saying that residents usually give incredible support to others also living at the shelter. A house-mate will offer an exhausted young mom some down time from her cranky baby. Today, one the residents who has stayed at the shelter the longest dropped a pile of books off by my bed after a great discussion about best authors; she had seen how much I enjoy a good read. This weekend, I also received an unsolicited Tim Hortons’ gift card when another housemate passed along the card which had been given to her to share.

There are, of course, downsides to living at a shelter and, for me, noise is my greatest challenge. I am used to a pretty quiet life, but that does not necessarily fit with the in-the-gene-pool gift of gab we Maritimers are inevitably born with. Nor is waiting to do laundry, or the other rules that can come with communal living. Still, there are success stories celebrated at women’s shelters every day—and celebrate we do.

A former shelter roommate, Barb, has just been accepted into a community college chef program and her application for financial support, allowing her to move forward with her life, was also approved. The mother sharing the kitchen with me, Hannah, thinks she has found an apartment where children are allowed, although she will need another roommate to help with the rent.

I’m about to take this evening’s dinner to the living room and join in a twelve-woman, lively discussion about the Grey Cup game and the Lions’ victory. Yes, this is a women’s shelter. And yes, a sports-focused conversation about football may not be what one expects in a place for homeless women. But surprises are definitely part of my current life. I am just looking forward to the happy surprise of having a new home again, but I am so glad I have this shelter, and the amazing company of these new friends, until that home finally happens. And it will. To date, staff tell me, no one has ever been here forever.

*The author's name has been changed.

L.D. Steeves is currently living in a shelter for women in Halifax.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Gottingen St

Affordable Houing

Outsourcing Community

hillarybain — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 05:59:34 +0000

Divisions of class and labour on King’s College University campus

HALIFAX—Zona Roberts is looking for a way to get her motorbike to Newfoundland. After a frustrating summer of disputes with her employers at King’s College University in Halifax, Roberts quit. This fall, for the first time in 11 years, she has not resumed her position as King’s' most beloved canteen attendant. Instead, she is heading to St. John’s, Newfoundland, to find work and spend time with her son and daughter-in-law, who are about to have their first child. Though Roberts is excited about becoming a grandmother, her departure is bittersweet. She loved the job and hoped to leave the college on more amicable terms.

“I planned to work there until I was 95,” Roberts explains. For over a decade, Roberts has been a fixture at King’s. If you spent any time in the Day Students' Lounge, you knew her. At the canteen, she knows most of the “kiddies” by name and greets them all with affection. When I talked with Roberts about her situation, we were standing outside the campus bar on the night of her goodbye party. She is a short, sinewy, almost ageless woman. At work, her grey hair is always pulled back in a hair net. Today, it is down around her shoulders and I am struck for the first time by how pretty she is. As we talk, students stream past us, stopping to kiss and hug Roberts before going down into the basement bar. From the turnout it is clear that Roberts is well loved. The students buzz around her to say their goodbyes and she makes every one promise to come visit Newfoundland and sleep on her couch. For 11 years, she has taken care of these people: she is a friend and a valued member of the King’s community.

“I know what it was like when my kids went to school,” Roberts explains, “and so I treat these kids the way I would want to have my kids treated.” Something like the mother’s golden rule, I suppose. Roberts is one of the nicest women you will ever meet. If you don’t have a reusable coffee cup, she’ll give you an earful but you’ll also get to borrow one of hers. If you don’t have enough for lunch, she’ll make up the difference by fishing quarters out of her tip jar.

“If I’m at school, I have to go to the Wardroom and visit Zona,” one student tells me, “even if I’m not buying anything.” One would think that having these sorts of relationships with her customers would make Roberts the ideal service employee. Yet, it is precisely this sort of “unprofessional” behaviour that got Roberts into trouble with her employers at King’s.

Last spring, Roberts found out that she would not be working in the canteen during the following school year. She was moved to the kitchen, where she could no longer interact with the students she loved. Though Roberts was not fired, she feels that being moved from the canteen to the kitchen was a punitive measure. For the duration of the summer, she fought to maintain her post at the canteen. She received support from then university president, William Barker, as well as the King’s Student Union, but to no avail. Finally exhausted with what she perceived to be a hostile and frustrating work environment, Roberts quit. Though she is reluctant to discuss the details of her situation, she makes it clear that she is not happy to be leaving her job.

***

Like most Canadian universities, King’s has adopted the practice of outsourcing its food and cleaning services in order to reduce costs. The multinational food and cleaning services company, Sodexo Inc, employs all kitchen personnel on campus. The company is based in Paris but employs over 330,000 workers in over 80 countries (of which only 13 per cent are unionized), and makes roughly $7.9 billion in annual revenue. Until a month ago, Sodexo had a monopoly on food distribution on campus. The kitchen staff at King’s is not unionized and never has been.

Outraged at the conditions of Roberts’s departure, the King’s Student Union (KSU) organized a boycott of Sodexo. “I knew that this wasn’t something that students would be okay with,” says Student Union President Gabe Hoogers. “Sodexo’s seemingly arbitrary removal of Zona from the job she worked for 11 years was completely unjust in my view and the more I spoke to students over the summer, the more I became aware of the vast support that Zona has.”

On most campuses where food services are outsourced, the food is notoriously lousy. As local and ethical food movements continue to grow, it becomes more and more apparent how out of touch service providers like Sodexo are with the student bodies they serve. However, the nature of the outsourcing contract is such that, though students and faculty are by and large the ones who consume food on campus, they are not the direct clients of the food service providers. Sodexo’s contract is with the University; their client is the administration and that is whom the company aims to please. For the most part, this means providing a no-hassle service at the lowest possible price. However, the goal of the university is to provide satisfactory services to its students, whose tuition fees and attendance are the institution’s raison d'etre.

On September 5, 2011, the boycott officially began. The KSU issued a press release and sent a letter with demands to the new University President, Anne Leavitt, and to Sodexo’s District Manager, Anne McFeteridge. Roberts became the face of the boycott, serving coffee from a rogue canteen set up in the KSU office. The KSU had two chief demands: that a student committee be implemented to give students more say in food service contracts, and that the Day Students' Lounge canteen be managed by students to “reflect students’ needs and wants, namely ethical and sustainable food.” Effectively, the KSU wanted mechanisms put in place to ensure that future students would have input into how food services are run on campus. Hopefully this would guarantee that student demands for more ethical working standards for campus employees would not be made in vain.

“We have a lot of sway with the administration,” says Hoogers. “When I advocate to the board, I advocate with thousands of students behind me.” It is a testament to the influence of students and the potential of student-based movements that the KSU’s demands were met less than two weeks after the boycott started. The KSU is now working to create a food advisory panel to oversee the 2013 renewal of Sodexo’s food service contract, and a business plan to take over the canteen is being formulated. Sadly, Roberts will not be returning to King’s. Even before the boycott began she had decided she no longer felt comfortable in the Sodexo work environment. Hoogers is optimistic that the guarantees won by the KSU will ensure that what happened to Roberts will not happen again.

****

This was not the first time that students have supported King’s staff in their struggle for better working conditions. However, not much has changed at the school in terms of labour practices. As I discovered, the university has a disappointing history of anti-unionism, though it is not a widely publicized one. In particular, what happened to Roberts echoes another incident that took place roughly 10 years ago, in which Sodexo staff were penalized for organizing themselves and getting too close to students.

I spoke with Darlene McNeil, who was employed as a custodial worker at King’s between 1999 and 2004. At that time, Sodexo held both the cleaning and the food services contracts at the university. When Darlene began work at King’s, there were no unionized employees on campus. She was one of eleven workers responsible for cleaning all academic buildings and dormitories, making a starting wage of roughly six dollars an hour. She described Sodexo as a “mean” employer with insidious intimidation practices. Darlene says that it wasn’t uncommon for people to cry in the workplace because of the verbal abuse they’d received from their superiors. Darlene explained that Sodexo employees receive pay increases on an individual basis, as opposed to having wages rise in yearly increments. As she explained, this allowed management to play favoritism or settle scores with workers.

The work was physically strenuous and the pay was lousy, but there were other reasons to like the job.

Like Roberts, Darlene explains that she and the other mostly female custodians were in it for the students. In those days the cleaners were still responsible for tidying dormitory rooms. This made for a lot more contact between cleaners and students and bonds inevitably formed. Echoing Roberts almost word for word, Darlene explained that she tried to treat the students the way she wanted her kids to be treated in their first year away from home. She says she can’t remember the number of times she brought students soup when they were sick or listened to them recount their problems. The relationship was reciprocal: students would bake her a cake on her birthday, and invited her to meet their parents and attend their graduation ceremonies.

The students were also supportive of the cleaners when they began to speak out against the unfair treatment they received in the workplace. In November 2001, The Watch, King’s campus magazine, published an expose on Sodexo’s mistreatment of their workers and encouraged students to take action. “Stifling unionization, strategically laying off workers, and paying disgracefully low wages—these are not practices that King’s students should be supporting—but we do...As students, we are the clients of Sodexo, and we have a right and an obligation to ensure that their employment practices reflect our values.”

“We must take responsibility,” reads an open letter from the editor, “They need our support.” The student union executive echoed this sentiment and quickly began organizing in support of the cleaning staff. According to an anonymous Sodexo worker quoted in one Watch article from November 2001, Sodexo managers were worried by the mounting student support and told cleaning staff not to speak to students, in order to prevent things from getting “blown out of proportion.” That spring, when Darlene and some of the other cleaning staff started a union drive at King’s, the student body mobilized to support them, even going so far as to contact a union on their behalf. The cleaners also received support from some faculty members and residence advisors, including one man who allowed them to host organizing meetings in his dormitory apartment.

Before an official vote could be made, a certain percentage of union cards would need to be signed, at which point the prospective union could present the demand for unionization before the Department of Labour, where it would be put to vote. Darlene recalls that it took some convincing before all 11 cleaners signed their cards. Many of the women had worked at King’s for 20 or more years and feared the loss of their livelihoods.

At the time, Darlene worked both in the kitchen and as a custodial worker. As the drive gained momentum, she says that she started to be assigned the worst jobs in the kitchen, such as cleaning the floors on her hands and knees. She describes this as a common tactic used by Sodexo to break union drives. The managers would get more neutral employees to assign punitive tasks to those who were seen as troublemaking. Darlene and the other cleaners tried to get the kitchen workers to sign union cards, but she says there was a culture of fear there too strong to penetrate. Darlene recalls that the head chef and kitchen manager at the time had a way of playing favourites and pitting workers against each other. Workers were threatened with termination during the drive, and Sodexo brought in “a guy from Toronto,” as Darlene described him, to stand over them as they punched in and out of work. Those who did sign cards were ostracized, while others were rewarded for siding with management. Darlene recalls that Roberts, for example, was supportive of the organizers but feared losing her job and would not sign a card. Sadly, she would later be subject to these same intimidation tactics, which ultimately forced her to leave the job she loved.

Despite all this, the cleaners persisted and eventually won. On January 11, 2002, after the 11 workers voted unanimously in favour of the union, Sodexo sent a letter to the union stating its recognition of the house-cleaners as members of Local 968 of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE). From 2002 until the spring of 2004, the Sodexo cleaners won some wage increases (the starting wage increased from six to nine dollars) and job quality guarantees. During that time only one grievance was filed, in regard to wage disparities amongst the workers. Other than that, things were pretty quiet.

In the spring of 2004 however, the short-lived union experiment came to an end at King’s, when Sodexo lost the cleaning contract and the entire cleaning staff was laid off.

What exactly happened with the Sodexo contract, and whether or not this was an intentional attempt to squash the spirit of unionism on campus, is subject to some debate. Antioni Wysocki was one of the cleaners who lost his job that spring. He now works at Dalhousie and is president of NSUPE Local 21, which represents all custodial, trades and security employees on campus. He suspects that Sodexo’s loss of the cleaning contract resulted from some collusion between the company’s management and King’s administration. Wysocki explained that Sodexo had always lost money on cleaning contracts. He says it was common knowledge at the time that Sodexo had been unofficially bound to take the contract because it came bundled with the more lucrative food contract. Thus, it would be doubly beneficial for Sodexo to lose the contract: they would no longer have to provide a low revenue-grossing service and could eradicate the trouble-making union presence on campus.

It was customary for Sodexo to lay off its employees over Christmas and summer vacations. They might keep a couple of people on for basic maintenance, but the staff was significantly downsized. Though there was no promise that they would be rehired when school resumed, many of the staff had operated on that assumption for years. Now the cleaning staff, some of whom had been working at King’s for over 20 years, were told that there were no longer jobs for them at King’s.

It just so happens that this incident coincided with Spring graduation ceremonies. The KSU offered to organize a demonstration in support of the house-cleaners. It would have been a perfect time to draw attention to the issue, since campus would be buzzing with students and their parents. However, McNeil says that she and the other house-cleaners were unwilling to disturb the ceremonies. “It was their big day,” says McNeil warmly. McNeil attended the graduation ceremonies and says she was touched to see at least one faculty member sporting a “We support the House-Cleaners” pin. Other than that the issue was sidelined.

Both Wysocki and McNeil expressed dissatisfaction with the way the IUOE handled the incident at King’s. She says that she would not necessarily have chosen to organize with the IUOE, but that it wouldn’t have been right to reject the union that the KSU had contacted on the cleaners’ behalf. Wysocki explains that a big international union like the IUOE, whose membership consists mostly of skilled trade and craft workers, would not necessarily be invested in the struggle of 11 untrained blue-collar workers. Wysocki feels that the union failed the King’s cleaners just when it was most needed. He believes that more could have been done for the workers who lost their jobs but that, for whatever reason, the union was not willing to fight for them. That summer, everything lost momentum. With students no longer around to make a fuss, the issue receded from the public eye.

The IUOE did attempt to speak with Sodexo, but Darlene says the company would not return their calls. Then, following up on a promise made by President Barker that the old Sodexo employees would be first in line for jobs with the new cleaning company, Darlene tried contacting Sodexo, but they wouldn’t return her calls either. McNeil says she cried for weeks after losing her job. She felt terrible for encouraging her fellow-workers to unionize, since it had now cost them their jobs. She was also heartbroken to be leaving the students she loved, and says “it felt like losing a family.”

While it is clear how Sodexo could have benefited from losing the contract, the more difficult question is why King’s would want to do away with such valued and dedicated employees. In response to student backlash, the school administration claimed that it was not their responsibility to enforce employment standards on the companies they outsourced to. At the time, the university had a contractual obligation to its board of governors to choose the lowest-cost solutions with regard to service provision. Following this practice, called “tendering,” the university reviews a series of proposals before signing a contract with the most cost-efficient bidder. In the past, Sodexo had been all but guaranteed the contract. However, now that Sodexo had to pay unionized employees, they could no longer offer cleaning services at a low enough price.

University President William Barker was quoted in a September 2004 issue of The Watch, saying, “The reason that the company can offer [its services] at a lower price is because they do business their way...it’s not up to us to dictate conditions of employment.” Essentially, the administration was happy to relinquish responsibility for any employee mistreatment that took place on campus, so long as services continued to be delivered at the lowest possible costs.

However, soon after the 2004 incident, King’s changed its tendering policies. According to one King’s employee who asked to remain anonymous, the university realized it had to change its “race to the bottom” policy after the company hired to replace Sodexo provided such unsatisfactory services. According to this source, the current contract criteria favours environmentally-friendly cleaning services. This source also wondered why, if the university was willing to impose its environmental ethics on outsourcing companies, King’s would not hold its business partners to ethical standards when it comes to labour practices.

Although the university does not have an explicit anti-union policy, they support anti-union practices by refusing to hold their subcontractors accountable to decent employment standards. As it happens, Novacos, the company that secured the cleaning contract in 2004, rotated their employees to different locations throughout Halifax, making it difficult for them to organize or become acquainted with other workers or students at King’s. Despite this obstacle, the Novacos workers did organize with the Service Employees International Union. And yet again, King’s chose not renew its contract with Novacos and terminated all unionized employees.

What it comes down to is a question of community. In the same Watch article quoted above, King’s Bursar Gerry Smith is quoted saying, “What we’re seeing is a lobbying for people whom [faculty and staff] see to be in relationship with King’s, when actually they were in relationship with Sodexo.” What Smith articulates is a vision of the King’s community divided on the basis of who employs who. Though campus food providers and custodial workers spend as much or more time on campus than students and faculty, they are often overlooked when considering who makes up the “we” of the university. Like the administration Smith represents, he sees only contractual relationships and overlooks the genuine connections that develop between people who live and work beside each other on a day-to-day basis. In order to continue mistreating their workers, Sodexo relies on the fact that most of their business partners are, like Smith, willing to deny or overlook outsourced workers.

But the King’s cleaners and food services employees are part of the university community, regardless of who employs them. The reason students are willing to rally around Zona Roberts is because they love and know her. The same was true of the custodial workers from 2004.

Darlene loves working with students, at King’s and at her current position at Saint Mary’s University. She says being exposed to so many young people from such diverse backgrounds “keeps you young.” She can’t understand why Sodexo would want to punish employees for forming these relationships. “I don’t see a damn thing wrong with that, I don’t see what they’re afraid of.”

Perhaps it’s that they recognize the strength in numbers.

“As the Zona example illustrates,” Hoogers says, “it’s best when people have your back.”

With the significant exception of food service employees, all campus employees at Dalhousie University are employed directly by the university and are also unionized. King’s faculty and facilities workers are not unionized but are promised the same wage and benefit terms offered to employees working their equivalent position at Dalhousie. However, this means that King’s workers did not have recourse to collective bargaining or grievance processes.

McNeil and others hope that King’s will reconsider hiring in-house cleaning staff. In the past, the university claimed that size is what prevents them from hiring in-house workers. Indeed, King’s has recently been in serious financial trouble, running an almost $1 million deficit in 2009. But does this justify small-scale austerity measures such as union busting?

“There has been a culture that really attempts to break unions on campus,” says Hoogers. “It’s hard to say what Sodexo workers will want to do now. I think with the boycott it is made clear that Sodexo workers have the support of students. We think they do an excellent job. And if they do decide to unionize they will have the full support of students. We will do everything in our power to ensure that their rights are protected.”

In the past, every attempt made to change the way that outsourced services are provided at King’s has lost momentum, largely due to student turnover. One year there might be an active student union dedicated to progressive issues, but when they step down there is no guarantee that their successors will pursue these issues with the same dedication. The hope is that if the administration makes good on its promise to the KSU, then the infrastructure will be put in place to ensure that students have more say when it comes to food and cleaning services. If students prioritize workers’ rights as something they want to pressure the administration to improve, then this can lead to better working conditions at King’s. But without being certain that student support is there and that the administration is listening, we can’t blame the Sodexo workers for not wanting to speak out against their lousy employer. McNeil says that the 2004 incident made her all the more aware of what was at stake when organizing in the workplace. She works three jobs and understands what a crippling blow it can be to lose one’s livelihood.

But perhaps there are reasons to be hopeful about the labour situation at King’s. This past year, a new union was ratified on campus, the first since 2002. The King’s Tutors and Teaching Fellows, most of whom run tutorials with first-year students in King’s Foundation Year Program, are now organized with the Canadian Association of University Teachers. I spoke with Cory Stockwell, a tutor at King’s who was active in organizing the union at King’s. The tutors did not invite faculty to join their union because they felt that as contract workers, the tutors would have different employment concerns than permanent faculty. He says that for the most part, the tutors love their jobs but decided to organize on principle.

“The desire to unionize came from a basic belief that we should have a say in the terms of our employment,” says Stockwell. Right now, they are the only union on campus, but perhaps they will be able to foster more labour consciousness amongst students and faculty, in order to pressure the administration into amending its practices.

Ella Bedard is a recent graduate of King’s.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Zona Roberts

Camp Dismantled, But Occupy Nova Scotia Continues

hillarybain — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:18:16 +0000

HALIFAX—As has been happening at Occupy sites across North America, police moved in on Occupy Nova Scotia on October 11, seizing tents, supplies and protesters.

By the end of the day, 14 people had been arrested for peacefully trying to defend the site.

This video tracks the progress of Occupy Nova Scotia, from when it began on October 15, to its relocation out of respect for veterans on Remembrance Day, to the eviction, and beyond. The video also explores how day to day operations worked on the site, from consensus decision-making, to keeping safe, to feeding a hungry crowd.

Occupy Nova Scotia is currently not occupying a site in Halifax, but General Assemblies are continuing, and participants say the movement is far from over.

For more on the recent police actions against Occupy Nova Scotia, watch, Mini-Doc: The Eviction of Occupy Nova Scotia.

This video was produced by Glen Canning, a contributor to the Halifax Media Co-op. For more coverage of the Occupy movement across Canada and worldwide, visit http://mediacoop.ca/occupy.

"African People Pulling Together"

hillarybain — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:15:13 +0000

Black Nova Scotian community to join African Union

HALIFAX—“I’m a black man from a hostile environment,” says David Horne.

Horne is an international facilitator with the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus (SRDC), and was in Halifax in the summer to address a town hall meeting at Africville Park. Along with the other organizers of the event, Horne was hoping to gauge the interest of the African Nova Scotian community in becoming part of the SRDC—and, indeed, becoming leading members of it. Around 150 people attended the town hall, trekking through a major downpour to discuss their collective future under the ceiling of an event-sized tent.

As Horne explained, the SRDC is a new initiative of the African Union, an organization that links together 55 of 56 countries on the African continent and is intended to create a common voice for African people in international affairs. Until recently, representation in the Union was limited to African people living on the continent. The estimated 350 million Africa-descended people living in the worldwide diaspora were excluded. But the African Union now wants to reach further. In addition to the five regions of the continent, the Union aims to create a “sixth region”: the worldwide diaspora.

For Horne, the creation of the sixth region is an acknowledgment of the affinities and commonalities that have endured among African people, wherever they happen to live in the present.

“You aren’t an African because you were born in Africa,” he tells the town hall audience. “You’re African because Africa was born in you.”

The sixth region initiative, in offering the diaspora an official role in the African Union, finally promises to create a venue large and inclusive enough for African people to come together and plan a better, collective future. It's a vision that Rocky Jones, a presenter at the town hall and longtime Halifax-based activist, summarized as “African people pulling together.”

At this point, the sixth region is only an invitation. It remains to be accepted,* Horne explains, and that means “organizing ourselves to present ourselves and represent ourselves.” Canada is one of many countries with a significant African diaspora, and the sixth region initiative calls for African Canadians to decide if they want to be included in the African Union and, if so, to elect a set of representatives. Each recognized community within Canada is to elect a “community council of elders,” while the overall African Canadian population is to elect a single representative to send to the African Union.

Horne hopes that the African Nova Scotian community will play a leading role amid the Canadian-based diaspora. The province is home to 47 black settlements with a history that predates the founding of Canada, and North Preston is recognized as the largest black community anywhere in the country.

“This is where the black population started [in Canada],” Horne explained. “We can’t go to Montreal, we can’t go to Toronto, we can’t go anyplace else before we go here. You are the beginning.”

Participants in town hall seemed impressed, and often inspired, by what they heard. Loud applause from the audience followed many of the presenters’ propositions, and there was a tangible sense of excitement about the overall vision. For African people to “pull together” would seem to create a new, stronger approach to the challenges that Africans face, from Harare to Halifax.

David Horne hails from Florida, but the “hostile environment” that he mentioned exists in Halifax as well. In the last decade alone, the HRM municipal government has been criticized for a number of decisions, including: sanctioning police-force racial profiling; closing public schools with a relatively high proportion of black students; situating a waste treatment facility in a poor and racialized neighbourhood; and undertaking repairs to Lake ste Major Road that greatly inconvenienced the residents of North Preston, while making a shortcut available to a neighbouring white community. And this string of issues stems from one institution: City Hall. Discrimination in the school system, the labour market, and in housing remain serious issues as well.

For Horne, however, African people are not only defined by the common problems they face. In the communities formed in hostile environments, there is a rich cultural and political tradition that needs to be recognized, honoured, and carried forward.

“We’re here to talk about moving forward,” he concluded. “You’ve been given a choice: you can get involved in the organizing of your part of the African diaspora. And in this world, you’re not always given a choice.”

The choice will need to be made by the community itself, and the town hall concluded with the formation of a committee that will seek to spread information about the sixth region and mobilize community members for a vote on the initiative, at a later date. In the meantime, the organizers of the event—including Horne, Jones, and Halifax resident Denise Allen—headed off to other African Nova Scotian communities to spread the world and offer new choices.

*At a meeting in North Preston on August 22, 2011, the African Nova Scotian community elected a Community Council of Elders and agreed to establish the first chapter of the Sixth Region Diaspora Caucus in Canada.

Ted Rutland is a professor of urban studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is working on a book on the history of urban planning in Halifax, and travelled to Halifax in July to attend the town hall meeting at Africville Park. This article originally appeared in the Halifax Media Co-op.

African migrations

Nova Scotia NDP says “No” to Essential Services for Disabled

Tim McSorley — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 08:16:29 +0000

HALIFAX—Siphoning thousands of dollars from a special-needs program for the disabled while pumping tens of millions into a convention centre is a "betrayal" by Nova Scotia's New Democratic Party government, said many in attendance at a Halifax news conference on August 16.

People with disabilities and their advocates urged the government to cancel changes made on Aug. 8 to the Employment Support and Income Assistance regulations that cut essential health benefits to people living with disabilities.

"I rely on income assistance and have received special needs assistance for massage therapy to treat chronic pain and migraine headaches," April Keddy of Port Williams told the Halifax Media Co-op. She lives with a progressive genetic disorder.

"I need this therapy—it’s not a luxury. Without it I’m afraid I would end up in the hospital long-term," she told the news conference.

The change in regulations eliminates special-needs assistance for drugs and treatments not covered by the provincial Medical Services Insurance (MSI), such as massage therapy, psychological counseling and a range of alternative medications, said Dalhousie legal-aid lawyer Claire McNeil.

The government cuts, which affect fewer than 25 people, were made without notice, public consultation or input from health or disability rights groups, said McNeil.

A quick check of the health plan covering Nova Scotia MLAs and all employees of the provincial government reveals that all such treatments are recognized and covered for up to a total of $1,500 a year.

The government has said the changes are meant to clarify what is covered by law.

"They haven’t clarified the law, they’ve stripped people with disabilities of their rights by repealing laws that made it possible for those living in poverty to request services essential to maintain their health," McNeil said.

"This change undermines a human right that has been in place since national standards were put in place 45 years ago under the Canada Assistance Plan," she continued.

McNeil said the government cutback prevents provincial Department of Community Service caseworkers from using their discretion to accommodate special needs, and limits the caseworkers to a "cookie-cutter" approach with a narrow list of approved items.

"And the cuts won’t even save money," said Dr. Margaret Casey, chair of the board of directors at the North End Community Clinic.

"These cuts will create a gap in services which will increase demands on family physicians, pharmacare programs and emergency rooms, adding to the burden on the healthcare systems," Casey said.

"For individual patients living in poverty, it will mean no access to measures designed to alleviate pain and suffering," she explained.

Many attending the news conference expressed disgust that an NDP government they helped elect would take such a discriminatory and ill-advised approach.

Pamela Harrison said that, had these cuts been made three years ago, the audience of people protesting the cuts could have included many NDP MLAs and party officials. None were in attendance.

Another person wondered why the NDP government had millions of dollars for developers and business but were trying to save a pittance by hurting the disabled. "Are developers’ needs more special?" The province and Halifax Regional Municipality have each committed $56 million to have a convention centre built by Rank Inc. as part of a mixed-use $500-million project. The federal government recently added $51.4 million to the pot.

Jim Guild is retired from a staff rep. position with the NS Government and General Employees Union (NSGEU) and has been active of late with the Halifax Media Co-op.

This piece was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

NS disability rights press conference

April Keddy

TRANSitioning Spaces

hillarybain — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:50:15 +0000

Organizations slowly becoming more trans inclusive

HALIFAX—In July, Halifax had its first ever Dyke and Trans March, celebrating the identities of queer women and trans- people and challenging continued oppressions, particularly gendered oppression.

A similar march occurred last year; first called a Dyke March, then a Dyke and Trans March, the name was finally changed back to a Dyke March a week before the event. The flip-flop in names points to a larger trend in Nova Scotia: many organizations are moving to become trans-inclusive, but are struggling to figure out what that means.

Rebecca Rose, one of the organizers of both the Dyke March and Dyke and Trans March describes how the march evolved to be more trans-inclusive. Last year’s march was originally, “for women-loving-women,” explains Rose,“[but]a lot of folks understandably had some concerns because that definition is quite narrow and doesn’t encompass a lot of people in our community.” Organizers changed the name to the Dyke and Trans March, but some members of the trans- community felt that the “T” was simply being tacked on without adequate representation from trans- people.

This year, more members from the trans- community helped organize the march and the process was longer—including five meetings to settle on a name—making the event more trans-inclusive.

“I think that the work that went into the dialogue and the discussions were well worth it,” says Rose. It is important, she explains, “[because] people are complex and issues dealing with identity are complex. These things can be messy and uncomfortable and can take a long time and should take a long time because if not, you’re probably not doing it right."

Being a trans-inclusive space requires more than just adding “trans-” to the name and assuming that everything will be fine, says Ellen Taylor, the New Campaigns Co-ordinator at the Dalhousie Women’s Centre. Trans-inclusivity requires training and centering your mission and services to meet the needs of a diverse community.

The Dalhousie Women’s Centre is undergoing the long and sometimes uncomfortable process of becoming a trans-inclusive space. Taylor notes that part of that process is recognizing who the centre has been excluding. “The Dalhousie Women’s Centre has been in the past primarily a women’s space, primarily a white space, probably a middle class space and starting to think about how those things emerge through the services we provide or the events we hold as the centre...that is sending a message that [the centre] is primarily a women’s space and then we are just allowing other genders to be here," she says.

So, what is trans-inclusivity? What does that look like? What does it mean in terms of institutional structures? These are questions the facilitating team for the Tatamagouche Social Justice Youth Camp (SJYC) are tackling this summer.

In the past, sleeping arrangements at the SJYC have been sex-segregated into male and female dorms. Sex-segregated dorms are problematic, says Andy, one of the co-ordinators of the camp, “because it puts people on the spot and requires people to ‘out’ themselves. It can be a really horrible experience.”

“This year we decided to do it differently,” they* continue, “and a big piece of that is around queer and trans- stuff, and trying to make the space a safer, more accessible space for queer and trans- people.”

The team has been given the go-ahead from the Tatamagouche Centre to implement non-gendered sleeping arrangements this year. Participants will be given the opportunity to self-identify their gender and to choose whom they want to room with. “It’s pioneering in non-gendered sleeping arrangements for Nova Scotia,” Andy says. “I think it’s something other organizations, groups, or people should be encouraged to adopt or use.”

This is a great opportunity for structural change on a community level, says Andy, which is something you don’t hear about very often.

"As a trans- person, as a queer person, it's really important to me personally to address those things on a grassroots level where I feel like it can actually make a difference," they said. "It’s a really political decision that SJYC has decided to do...I don’t know if we all realize that it’s a political thing.”

*This article uses the singular, gender-neutral pronoun “they”. This is used interchangeably with the pronoun “he” because not all identities can be easily expressed in a two-gender, two-pronoun binary system. Andy requested that both of these pronouns be used in the article.

Shay Enxuga organizes with queer and trans- communities in Halifax. He was one of the organizers for the Dyke and Trans March, sits on the board at the Dalhousie Women’s Centre, and is a facilitator with the Tatamagouche Social Justice Youth Camp.

This article was originally published by the Halifax Media Co-op.

Dyke and Trans March

The "Trade" Agreement Ottawa and Nova Scotia Want Kept Secret

Martin Lukacs — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:06:28 +0000

Packed room hears Canada-Europe trade negotiations denounced

HALIFAX—A standing-room-only crowd packed a Halifax meeting room on a summer night to hear about a secret.

Two national speakers, Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians and Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) President Paul Moist, provided a harrowing account of the Harper government's "trade" negotiations with Europe that they said will transfer decision-making power from local governments to multinational corporations.

The vehicle for this wholesale corporate power grab is the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), said the speakers.

Unlike the earlier Free Trade Agreement and North American Free Trade Agreement, CETA would reach into provincial and municipal policy-making and purchasing, Moist said. It would seriously threaten local job creation and "Buy-Local" policies; it would encourage privatization of Canada's drinking water and waste-water services (no matter what local citizens wanted); and it would cause prescription drug costs to skyrocket by at least $2.8 billion per year.

CETA is essentially a corporate bill of rights which puts companies and their profits first and the wishes of local citizens last, said Barlow. For example, European corporations could seek compensation for business lost as a result of any government regulation or policy. This includes banning a carcinogenic additive to gasoline (this has already happened under existing "trade" deals) or paying millions to a pulp and paper company that abandoned Newfoundland and Labrador.

"We have nothing against trading with Europe and much of our trade is now free or becoming free of tariffs," said Moist. "But this deal goes well beyond trade issues into interfering with how local people can make decisions about how to run their communities."

A Nova Scotia speaker, Mark Austin, Executive Director of the Rural and Coast Communities Network, added a number of concerns. "This deal has huge implications for Nova Scotia, particularly rural areas, yet we have heard nothing about it," Austin said. It would likely result in overfishing, and would threaten food sovereignty through attacks on agricultural policies such as farm marketing boards, he added.

And buy-local initiatives, like one Austin is involved with in Truro, could become impossible.

"While there might be small short-term gains in trade with Europe, you have to give up control of your long-term local economic prospects. It's like the Canucks playing in Boston—you can score one goal, but you have to give up five."

CUPE Nova Scotia President Danny Cavanagh, who chaired Tuesday's event, said CETA negotiations would resume in Brussels on July 10. Prime Minister Harper hopes to sign a completed deal by the end of the year. Premier Darrell Dexter and other provincial premiers, who also need to sign off on the deal, are part of Canada's little-publicized discussions.

Barlow said that while it may be unrealistic to expect a provincial government not to sign the agreement, she hopes that public pressure motivates premiers to drive a harder bargain and seek exemptions from the most damaging aspects of the currently proposed deal.

Despite the devastating potential impact, the speakers noted that the Nova Scotia government has done nothing to alert citizens of what is at stake. Moist said that the Nova Scotia and Manitoba governments have agreed to talk in private with CUPE and the Council of Canadians research staff about the negotiations, but no consultations with the general public are planned.

The European Parliament receives regular status reports in public on the CETA negotiations, Moist said. "Why can't Canadians get such reports?"

Dartmouth MP Robert Chisholm, the federal NDP trade critic, was at the meeting, as was Halifax NDP MP Megan Leslie. No provincial politicians attended.

"It's not too late to stop the deal," Barlow said.

The speaking event was part of a national campaign entitled, "Canadian communities are not for sale.” More information is available as part of a “CETA toolkit” at http://cupe.ca/ceta, or at www.canadians.org.

This article was originally published with the Halifax Media Co-op.

Jim Guild, of Halifax, recently retired from a staff rep. position with the NS Government and General Employees Union (NSGEU) and has been active of late with the Halifax Media Co-op.

Barlow CETA2

Descartes Without Debt

hillarybain — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 12:12:52 +0000

Course teaches great books free of charge

HALIFAX—The Halifax Humanities 101 program graduated its sixth class at King’s College Chapel on June 4, reigniting the debate regarding the value of a humanities course for low-income people.

Over eight months, students of Halifax Humanities attended classes twice a week and read Plato, Homer, Dante, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Alice Munro, and Virginia Woolf—to name a few—in between lectures. The program is free, and books and reading materials are provided for students to keep. University professors, who volunteer their time, teach all the classes.

Raising funds for a course that does not bill itself as "employment training" for people on low incomes is not always easy, says Mary Lu Redden, the Director of Halifax Humanities. But according to the program’s participants, the opportunity to study classic works of literature, philosophy and art has a value that’s impossible to quantify.

“It opens up your mind and your heart,” says Bonnie Shepherd, one of the program’s first students six years ago. “You have more compassion and empathy when you realize what humans throughout the ages have gone through.”

“When the curriculum was first devised, I wondered if it might be better to be more practical and better suited to the students’ experience,” says Dr. Henry Roper, a volunteer professor from King’s University who has been with the program since its creation. That didn’t seem to be what the participants were looking for, explains Roper. He says the curriculum gets shaped by the needs and wants of the participants each year.

“The opportunity to learn from so many excellent and learned minds has been a remarkable, precious experience,” says Jan G., one of this year’s graduates. “Learning about the journey of humanity through the ages brings a better sense of understanding the world we live in. This experience has given me more confidence in my approach to life.”

“The great works of the West should be available to anyone who wants to tolle lege [take up and read], to bum a phrase from Augustine,” says Dr. Laura Penny, another volunteer professor with Halifax Humanities. “It's a real joy to be part of a program that makes it clear that reading, thinking, and writing are not elitist or superfluous hobbies, but a way to understand the world and the self.”

“There’s something about the core of Marxism that poor people get right away,” says Dr. Sarah Clift who teaches Nietzsche, Marx and others as part of the course. “There’s nothing theoretical about it. [The students] understand the alienation of labour immediately.”

It wasn’t Marx who first touched Kathleen Higney, but Socrates.

Higney remembers her first class in September 2007 on the Socratic method. "I remember wondering, ‘What the heck is [the professor] talking about?’ But I was hooked and carried on...listening, questioning, thinking, and writing.”

Higney has continued studying through the Seminar for Graduates, offered to people who complete the first course. “I highly recommend Halifax Humanities 101 to adults who love to learn but cannot afford the cost of university tuition and books,” she says.

The course is also an invitation to participate in the broader community—an invitation that is desperately needed and rarely extended, says Clift. “The barrier is real and it has social, spiritual and financial implications.”

Lauri Noye, one of this year’s graduates, brightened up her class by bringing her seizure-alert dog to every session. She has felt that isolation in her own life.

“I had become housebound a while ago and this [course] helped me to get out,” says Noye. “I learned a lot about myself and the community and I made new friends. My relationship to the community at large has changed. I found out about things going on that I can participate in and I’m more involved.”

Heather D., who was co-valedictorian of this year's class, had a similar experience. She noticed the change when she found herself attending several New Year’s Levees for the very first time in her life. “I would never have done that before. I have a wider sense of community. Not in a million years would I have come into contact with this group. It’s so outside your known world,” she says. Heather feels the benefits are not limited to those attending the course. “All the people around me have also been affected. It was a ripple effect. It’s not always a dollars-and-cents payoff.”

Halifax Humanities 101 will begin classes again in the fall.

Lamont Dobbin is a recent graduate of the Halifax Humanities course. He lives below the poverty line on a disability pension.

Halifax Humanities 101