NEWS
1. Coastal Protection Act
“Hundreds of people rallied in front of Province House on Wednesday afternoon, demanding the government change course and implement the Coastal Protection Act it axed in February,” reports Yvette d’Entremont.
Waving placards and banners and cheering loudly as passing vehicles honked in support, the crowd packed the sidewalk in front of the legislature as well as the sidewalk across the street. The rally was organized by the Ecology Action Centre (EAC), Nature Nova Scotia, and the Nova Scotia Coastal Coalition.
“In case it’s not clear from this energetic crowd, we are part of a groundswell. The response to this incomprehensible decision by the government has been overwhelming,” EAC executive director Maggy Burns told the crowd.
“I’ve been working in the environmental movement for over 20 years in Nova Scotia and I have not seen anything like this before.”
Burns pointed to the deluge of calls, emails, social media posts, news articles, and letters to the editor expressing anger at the provincial government’s decision not to proclaim the act.
“In February the government abandoned the Coastal Protection Act. Yet here we are, in May, still talking about it,” Burns said. “Why? Because it matters to Nova Scotians.”
Click or tap here to read “Hundreds rally to demand that province change course on Coastal Protection Act.”
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2. Problems at Community Services
This item is written by Tim Bousquet.
On Tuesday, Jennifer Henderson reported on the latest auditor general’s report, which “shows growing numbers of vulnerable children are being placed in youth homes or ‘temporary emergency arrangements’ with little or no oversight from the Department of Community Services.”
We’ve since received a submission to the Law Amendments Committee of the legislature that was made on March 25, by Brian Crawford, a retired social worker who worked with the Department of Community Services in its Child and Wellbeing Division. That submission echoed the concerns raised by Auditor General Kim Adair in her report.
In particular, Crawford told the committee of the “very negative and stressful work environment” in the department as a result of low pay and the resulting under-staffing. And Crawford elaborated on the temporary emergency arrangements as follows:
The Department does not have the resources it requires to meet the high needs of many of the youth that are in its permanent care. The Department has chosen as a consequence to enter into agreements with private entities who provide unlicensed placements to some of our most vulnerable and traumatised youth. The Department refers to these unlicensed placements as Temporary Emergency Arrangements (TEA). The fact that these placements are unlicensed means that the staffing education and training qualifications for employment are much lower than would be the expectation in a licensed child caring facility.
These unlicensed placements are very costly. When I worked at one point there were 70 such placements province wide, each caring for one child, at a cost in excess of $40,000 per month. The Department intends that these be temporary emergency placements but due to a lack of resources to meet these youth’s complex needs I have known of youth who have been in these temporary placements for 2, 3 and 4 years.
Again the loser in this scenario is Nova Scotia’s most vulnerable and traumatized youth. Youth that are ill served by their legal guardian, The Minister of Community Services! Clearly Child Protection Services are not a government priority. The costs to Nova Scotian society are high as these youth tend to do poorly in school and make up a disproportionate number of youth involved in the Youth Criminal Justice system.
You can read Crawford’s entire submission here. It should be noted that in March he spoke of frozen income assistance rates; since then, income assistance payments have been raised and pegged to inflation, starting next year.
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3. Africville
“Halifax regional council declared two lots of land in Africville as surplus so a trust working to preserve the history of the former Black community on Bedford Basin can acquire the land for visitor parking,” I reported on Wednesday.
In December 2023, the Africville Heritage Trust (AHT) wrote a letter to the municipality looking to buy HRM-owned land on Africville Road. There are two portions of the parcel named H3 that the trust wants to purchase. One of the lots is currently vacant, while the water lot is in use.
The vacant lot abuts the current property on which the Africville Church Museum stands, and the trust wants to use that lot for extra visitor parking.
…
In a report regarding the two lots, municipal staff said selling the vacant lot to the trust for less-than-market value “is an opportunity to assist AHT with their aspirations, and to further extend HRM’s good will in the name of reconciliation, underscoring HRM’s 2010 apology.”
The estimated value for the two lots is $446,000. The purchase price is $1.
Click or tap here to read “Municipality transfers land near Africville Church Museum to Africville Heritage Trust.”
This park is a beautiful spot. I spent some time there on Tuesday taking many photos. Several people were sitting on the benches or picnic tables. This park is also the site of the Africville reunion each summer. As Tim Bousquet wrote in November, the park is a place of reflection for many, including the descendants.
But the park is next to a site that is highly industrialized and overlooking an area that’s been infilled and busy with transport truck traffic.
There are a couple of sections in that staff report I want to highlight. There’s this section about the history of Africville:
Basic amenities such as sewage systems, clean water, and proper garbage disposal were lacking, and the City of Halifax consistently denied municipal services to the community.
By the mid-1850s, industrialization encroached on the community as railways began running through the area. The city designated Africville and immediate surroundings as industrial land, inviting with it — in the mid-1950s — an infectious disease hospital, a prison, and [relocation of] the city dump.
Then there is this section from the letter written by the Africville Heritage Trust to HRM about the lands it wants to purchase:
The former lands are located on the shores of Bedford Basin in a highly industrialized area. Neighbours include, the Halifax Port Authority, CN Rail and Irving Shipbuilding. Access to the Site is very limited as there are no sidewalks on Africville Road and access from Barrington Street is difficult. In addition, Halifax Transit does not provide bus service to this area.
As one commenter on the article yesterday noted, “Must say the lack of reaction any statements from council on the infilling by Africville is telling. Immediate outcry when it comes to Dartmouth Cove or the Northwest Arm though.”
The city that failed the Africville community is now failing the people trying to preserve the lands and history of that community.
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4. Halifax cop charged in domestic assault
“A Halifax Regional Police officer has been charged by the provincial police watchdog in an alleged domestic assault,” I reported yesterday.
In a media release on Tuesday from Erin Nauss, the director of SIRT, she wrote that Const. Robert Baird was charged with committing an assault against the woman who is known to him between Jan. 1, 2020 and Sept. 21, 2021.
Baird will appear in a provincial court in Dartmouth on May 14.
Click or tap here to read “Halifax cop charged in domestic assault on woman.”
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5. Northern Pulp
“Premier Tim Houston says he believes the Northern Pulp plant, shuttered by the company in January 2020, will never reopen,” reports Jean Laroche with CBC.
Houston made his comments while campaigning for the PCs in Pictou West in advance of the May 21 byelection.
“I don’t even know how that mill could be reopened after just sitting there for that amount of time,” Houston said Tuesday. “It’s not on my radar, it’s not something that, as a province, we would be in favour of.”
Houston said traditional industries such as forestry, fishing and farming have their place, but not just anywhere.
“These are important industries to our province, but they all have to be at the right place,” said Houston. “They all have to be in the right communities.”
Of course, Joan Baxter has reported extensively on Northern Pulp. You can read her work here.
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6. Greenwashing Hydrogen Education Challenge
Remember to share our contest with any high school students you know:
Open to high school students in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador, entrants must create a 5-minute video explaining how ‘green hydrogen’ is a problematic approach to climate change, how profiteer billionaires are mining public subsidies to increase their already obscene wealth, and why Atlantic Canada is once again being targeted for exploitation.
Here’s the link with all the details.
And thank you to those who donated for the prizes!
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Am I the asshole? The great philosophical question of our time
Tim Bousquet has many turns of phrases, including this one: “There sure are a lot of assholes on the internet.”
That came to mind on Wednesday when I was listening to The Current on CBC. Host Matt Galloway interviewed social psychologist Daniel Yudkin, a visiting scholar at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies morality and how people decide between right and wrong.
Yudkin did a study on the popular Reddit forum “Am I the Asshole” or AITA for short. The forum, which started in 2013, now has more than 16 million followers.
Now, I don’t read much on Reddit since it’s easy for people to have opinions on all kinds of issues when they don’t use their real names. But posts from AITA make their way onto other social media platforms, so that’s where I see them once in a while. Here’s the description of AITA on the forum page: “A catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in an argument.”
Some of the most recent questions include “AITA for evicting my brother and his family from the house I have inherited so my daughter can live there?“, “AITA for not getting my daughter anything for her birthday?“, and “AITA for firing my time blind niece from babysitting over the phone?”
Then other users can weigh in with their feedback and judgments. I noticed some of the posts have a button that says “Not the A-Hole,” so I guess someone on the forum made a final ruling.
“What we can learn from Am I the Asshole is to better understand how people are dealing with moral situations in their daily lives in ways that actually happen,” Yudkin told Galloway. He said asking AITA is a colloquial way of someone asking if they are in the wrong.
Yudkin and his co-authors scraped the AITA forum for more than 370,000 posts and eleven million comments, and then used several mathematical methods to categorize the kinds of dilemmas people posted and what patterns they shared. Here are the six categories:
From the research, Yudkin said they found that people think they’re not the asshole about two-thirds of the time. He told Galloway there are a few reasons for that.
“One could be that really people are more concerned and worried about things that actually aren’t so bad from an external perspective,” Yudkin said.
“Another reason could be is that they’re presenting their side of the story and conveying themselves in a good light that makes them look better than they actually might be. Another could be just that people, you know, want to give people the benefit of the doubt. The majority of the time, commenters say what they’re doing is okay.”
Yudkin said AITA differs from the big universal questions philosophers ask in that the AITA forum deals with people’s everyday relational obligations or the “complex web of interpersonal relationships in our lives.”
“Really, the most common experienced moral dilemma has to do with questions with what I owe the people in my life and how can I be a good person and treat them fairly and in the right way,” Yudkin said.
Yudkin said forums like AITA on Reddit are popular because we’ve all had to deal with such dilemmas. Maybe we don’t post them on AITA, but we ask friends, colleagues, advice columnists, and therapists instead.
“There’s something about ourselves we see in these posts. Who hasn’t been in a situation where we’re conflicted about what the right thing to do is or we feel like we’ve upset, disappointed, or offended somebody, and we’re trying to figure out if what we did is really wrong,” Yudkin said.
Yudkin told Galloway that even though fewer people are following religion, they are still looking for direction, and AITA is one of the ways they do that.
“This could be one way that people form a community to make sense of moral questions that they might not otherwise be able to,” Yudkin said.
Yudkin said he and his colleagues would like to next research the kinds of comments people post to questions on AITA.
In March 2022, I wrote this Morning File about community Facebook groups and the entertaining posts and dilemmas people share. That bit was inspired by a post in a group for my community in which a woman complained about the noisy kids and dogs that lived next door to her. Then the mom of those kids and dog weighed in.
Then last night, on a community group in Bedford, I saw this post:
Hello everyone! Good Morning. I caught a rat at home and really don’t want to kill it.
Two questions:
1. Is it legal to release a rat into the wild in Nova Scotia?
2. If it’s allowed, where’s a good place to do this? I know it should be more than 5km away, but can it be anywhere in the wild or specific types of areas?
Quite a dilemma and the comments didn’t disappoint. They include “it needs to be dead”, “Thank you for caring & doing the best thing for the rat. Your amazing,” “This dude can’t be serious,” and “There’s on average 75 per street block so don’t worry just let it go.”
There are lots of posts about politicians as rats. One now-deleted comment said something like 95% of us are ugly and no one is getting rid of us.
The last time I checked, an administrator of the group turned off commenting for the post.
Too many a-holes, I guess.
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2. The last responders
On Monday, my daughter, the funeral director in training, went to this education conference hosted by Tema for first responders and frontline workers. When she got home, she was telling me about some of the speakers whose talks she enjoyed the most. They included Tyler Smith, a 21-year-old survivor of the 2018 Humboldt Broncos bus crash, and Sarah Plowman, a reporter with CTV National News who is based in New Brunswick.
Plowman recently joined the national team after working with CTV Atlantic for years where she reported on Hurricane Fiona, the 2014 Moncton shooting, and the La Loche shooting in Saskatchewan in 2016. It was those events Plowman spoke about in her speech.
But my daughter said while the event was about the mental health and wellness of people who work on the frontline of tragedies, there weren’t any speakers who are funeral directors. I didn’t know this, but she told me funeral directors and embalmers are known as the “last responders” to tragedy, often attending crime scenes and, of course, supporting grieving families who are burying their loved ones. (As the mom to a funeral director, I do worry how her work will affect her).
So, of course, I got to researching this topic. There’s this article from TalkDeath about the “forgotten last responders” of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that piece, several funeral directors talk about how the pandemic changed funeral services, how funeral homes had to store bodies in separate COVID freezers, and how funeral home staff had to deal with the grief of losing their own loved ones to the pandemic while helping families whose loved ones died from the virus, too.
Here’s what Kate Davignon, an apprentice funeral director in Massachusetts, said:
I really believe that people think we are just in suits, pushing papers and have ‘sorry for your loss’ on repeat… It broke our hearts to say to people that they couldn’t grieve how they needed to. We weren’t only exhausted by the amount we were working, we were exhausted because we were emotionally drained. We were going into places and homes that had COVID-19 and we were putting ourselves and our families at risk.
Here’s another comment from an anonymous “death worker” in the U.K.
Working in and around death is hard. In this line of work we have all seen things that most people couldn’t handle, couldn’t conjure up in their worst nightmares, and then to throw a pandemic into the mix is crazy. We all need to remember just how bloody amazing we are. I’m proud of the job that I do, and I’m proud of each and every one of you that work in death care and have managed to survive this pandemic and still have a smile on your face at the end of the day.
Four years ago, the Associated Press spent a day with Tom Cheeseman, a funeral director in New York. He told AP he was picking up at least 10 bodies a day during those early days of the pandemic.
“We’re running out of space in all the funeral homes,” he said.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve lost my sense of time because four years seems like it was ages ago now.
Oh, there’s also a band called The Last Responders, too. I’ve never heard of them before either.
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NOTICED
Magnolia map
Yesterday, Philip Moscovitch sent me a link to this Magnolia Map on Substack organized by someone in Halifax. The map is a community-sourced project to document where in Halifax magnolia trees are in bloom. From the description:
The intent of this map is to enjoy the blooms while walking and biking around your neighbourhoods, either during your everyday errands and commutes, or just to get some fresh air and exercise.
The main reason I created this map was to get to know Halifax better on foot, create connections with neighbours, and of course see/smell as many magnolia trees as possible.
You can view the map here. It also includes magnolia trees outside of the downtown core. You can also contribute to the map at this link. So far, there are more than 130 trees documented on the map, and the person behind the map also created a few short walking routes, including in the south end, north end, and is working on one for Dartmouth.
Here are rules:
Please respect both the trees and the privacy of neighbours who may have magnolia trees in their yards. Don’t pick the blooms, enter other people’s property without permission, and be mindful of taking and sharing photos of trees where people’s home addresses are visible.
This is so clever and a great reason to get out in the spring.
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Government
City
African Descent Advisory Committee (Thursday, 6pm, HEMDCC Meeting Space and online) — agenda
Province
No meetings
On campus
Dalhousie
A no-nonsense talk about science communication (Thursday, 9:30am, Theatre A, Tupper Building; Room 102 DMNB) — David Smith from the University of Western Ontario will talk
Alan Syliboy: The Journey So Far | A Retrospective (Thursday, 11am, Dalhousie Art Gallery) — until August 11; more info here
In the harbour
Halifax
06:00: Sea Challenger, platform, arrives at outer harbour from Ponta Delgada, Portugal to pick up pilot, en route to Sheet Harbour
06:00: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, moves from anchorage to Fairview Cove
06:00: BF Fortaleza, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Mariel, Cuba
06:30: Volendam, cruise ship with up to 1,718 passengers, arrives at Pier 22 from Sydney, on a seven-day cruise from Montreal to Boston
12:00: Bakkafoss, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Portland
15:30: Volendam sails for Bar Harbor
19:00: BF Fortaleza sails for Vilagarcía, Spain
20:00: Nord Logos, cargo ship, sails from anchorage for sea
22:00: Bakkafoss sails for Reykjavik, Iceland
Cape Breton
16:30: Seaways Rio Grande, oil tanker, arrives at EverWind from Arzew, Algeria
Footnotes
A joke I read on the internet: An alligator can live up to 100 years, which is why there is an increased chance they will see you later.
Problems at Community Services
So there seems to be a capacity problem here
1) too many cases for the workers or
2) is a personal capacity problem with some of the workers?
3) or a combination of the two.
What does it take to write down a phone call, or a text message sent? not much, only when you never did neither! Never have I ever heard a provincial government employee say they were unworked. The are a small percentage who are extremely competent, absolutely terrific and would be a star in the business world, but alas not many. The real good ones are great, the rest not so much. Two very sad realities here the children are the ones suffering and we expect a political to fix it.
That is not negativity that unfortunately is reality.
All I know is that being a social worker is one of the most demanding jobs I have witnessed. It’s incredibly difficult, and you couldn’t pay me enough to do it. We often have lots of sympathy for doctors, but social workers get very little. It is often a thankless job.
THANKS