Stephen Kimber

Loyalists and Layabouts

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

About the book

The few hundred Loyalists who gathered at Roubalet's Tavern in New York one night in 1782 shared a nightmare of the past and a dream for the future.

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, they found themselves abandoned by the king to whom they had promised their loyalty, and unwelcome in the land that had so recently been theirs. They had no choice but to flee, but they were determined to build a new and better home for themselves elsewhere.

On the rocky shores of Roseway Bay on the south coast of Nova Scotia, beside one of the best harbours in the world, they would found a new and improved New York City. It would be cosmopolitan, but more refined, more royal, more loyal and certainly more exclusive than the place they were leaving forever.

At first, all seemed to go according to the dream. Shelburne, as it was called, quickly became the fourth largest city in North America. At the time, Nova Scotia Governor John Parr grandly described it as "the most considerable, most flourishing and most expeditious [city] ever ... built in so short a time...”
Within the decade, however, the Loyalists’ dream city was well on its way to becoming a ghost town.

This extraordinary and yet little-told episode from our nation’s past is brought to exciting life by award-winning journalist Stephen Kimber. Combining painstaking research, strict adherence to the facts, and a novelistic flair for narrative, he charts Shelburne's "rapid rise and faster fall" through the intertwined experience of an eclectic collection of its early settlers.

Meet Benjamin Marston, the acerbic surveyor who chronicled Shelburne’s first tumultuous year, William Booth, the British army captain whose later journals described its decline, David George and Boston King, freed slaves who helped make — and then break — the community, steadfast Sir Guy Carleton, the loyalists’ initial benefactor, and ever-vacillating Governor Parr, their eventual nemesis.

Published to mark the 225th anniversary of the arrival of the Loyalists to Shelburne, Loyalists and Layabouts is essential — and entertaining — reading on the shaping of our country.

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Selected web links

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Read the Introduction
Read the Prologue

About the Author
Stephen Kimber is an award-winning writer, editor, and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel, Reparations, and five non-fiction books, including the bestselling Sailors, Slackers and Blind Pigs: Halifax at War.

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Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, Canada.

Praise for Loyalists and Layabouts

"Impeccable research, along with Kimber’s eye for detail and engaging style, make Loyalists and Layabouts a must-read."

— Joyce Glasner
The Beaver
August-September 2008

"A lively and surprising account... a comprehensive and at times poetic narrative."

Michael Goodfellow
Atlantic Books Today
Fall 2008

"Kimber provides a vivid portrait of men and women — from once-wealthy gentry to former slaves — and their struggles to make their lives over are both comic and tragic... He has drawn not only on secondary sources, but on the diaries and correspondence of a wonderfully mixed cast of characters, from British army administrators to literate former black slaves, freed by the British for fighting on their side in the Revolution... Burgoyne, Clinton, Cornwallis and Carleton all make cameo appearances, but what really makes Kimber's storytelling especially effective is his use of the papers of the central figures, like the versatile businessman Benjamin Marston, the passionately Christian ex-slave Boston King and John Parr, the gout-ridden, hot-tempered governor of Nova Scotia. Their stories are skilfully combined to make an integrated account of a colourful pilgrimage, taking his heroes and heroines from their uneasy days in the triumphant and hostile new revolutionary America, to their hopeful and energetic strivings in Shelburne, to what became of them when the once ambitious colony began to disintegrate. He offers a fascinating might-have-been in the history of Canada."

— Neil Cameron

Montreal Gazette/National Post
August 23, 2008

"Stephen Kimber can bring life to long-dead figures of history and give long-forgotten events a 'breaking news' quality... It is one thing to build a life and setting around one or more historic figures and places but imagination needs to be firmly rooted in at least some fact. Conjecture has its limits. As well, not all historians, thorough though they may be, can write entertainingly of their work... Kimber set out to 'reconstruct' Port Roseway/Shelburne. He looked at the details of Shelburne’s Loyalist history from a journalist’s perspective. The result is almost as though he had interviewed such figures as Benjamin Marston, Sir Guy Carleton, and others who played key roles in the early days of the town."

— Lorna Inness
Halifax Chronicle Herald
July 20, 2008

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"A thorough gallop through the town's history, and a lovely romp it is, with the town and its sad-sack history front and centre... Kimber tell this story with great panache. The characters he has chosen all contribute lively bits to the tale.... A tale well told."

— Marq De Villiers
The Globe and Mail
July 19, 2008

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"Always entertaining and informative, Halifax journalist-extraordinaire Stephen Kimber marks the 225th anniversary of the Loyalist landings in Canada with a colourful account of the decades-long hopes, dreams and decline of those who chose to settle on Nova Scotia's south shore. Told through several narrative voices of early settlers, Loyalists and Layabouts is a fascinating perspective on all that went wrong and right at one of the world's foremost harbours near Roseway Bay."

— Stephen Clare
Halifax Magazine
June 2008

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"If you want a book that evokes an era of Canada's past that is dramatic but little known, this is an enjoyable entry into a fascinating world."

— William Christian
Guelph Mercury
June 28, 2008

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"Kimber achieves a surprising intimacy and helps us understand that the reactionary at times requires as much courage and imagination as the revolutionary."

— Ben Fried
Canadian Geographic
July/August 2008

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“What a splendid tale of our Loyalist and our layabout ancestors, summed up in the tragicomic settlement of Shelburne… Kimber's eye for diverse and fascinating characters is an overdue reminder of the price white Loyalists paid for the choice to remain impoverished but faithful subjects of George III. Black slaves paid an even higher price, gaining freedom at the cost of justice, equality or respect. No one who reads this book can ever again be comfortable with ancestral stereotypes.”

— Desmond Morton
Hiram Mills Professor of History (Emeritus)
McGill University
(and descendant of Captain Nathaniel Frink who arrived at Saint John from New York in 1784 as aide de camp to Major-General Benedict Arnold)

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"Using the narrative style popularized by nineteenth
century historians, Kimber draws us through an engaging – and sometimes very painful – non-fiction accounting of the awkward birth and sad decline of a town which never filled the great, optimistic promise held for it 225 years ago. His ease and familiarity with the material is obvious and his genuine interest in the lives of his subjects shines though in the 300-plus pages... Kimber deftly threads their individual stories into a very workable tapestry of the first tumultuous decade of the town, we see glimpses of Sir Guy Carleton, Stephen Blucke, David George, the Robertson and Sword brothers, Gideon White, Edward Winslow and dozens more. The fast-paced narrative moves between characters and time frames and we watch as best intentions of seemingly earnest people often come to calamity or other unproductive ends... Stephen Kimber’s Loyalists and Layabouts should be essential reading for anyone who has a real interest in how Shelburne became the place we now call home."

— Timothy Gillespie
South Shore & Shelburne County Today
May 2008

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"This book is a must read for anyone wanting to better understand the forces that shaped our country, Canada and our neighbour to the south, the United States of America, and as well, Great Britain."

— Logan W. Bjarnason
President, Regina Branch
United Empire Loyalists Association

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“Prodigious research, a dash of imagination and an engaging literary style make Loyalists and Layabouts an interesting and informative romp through the American Revolution and Shelburne's first decade. Extensive use of diaries, letters and first-person accounts allows Stephen Kimber to present his narrative from the perspective of the historical actors themselves. Visitors to Shelburne and townsfolk alike will be enchanted with this vigorous tale of the city's hopeful rise and precipitous decline. The book is a delightful and satisfying read and a serious contribution to Loyalist studies, with appropriate attention to the formerly enslaved Black Loyalists who built much of Shelburne's initial infrastructure.”

— James W. St.G. Walker,
University of Waterloo,
author of The Black Loyalists:
The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone

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"In Loyalists and Layabouts, Stephen Kimber explores the immigrant dream gone spectacularly wrong: how 15,000 Americans flowed into Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in 1783 to build ‘the envy of the American states’ — only to see their aspirations ebb away like the Nova Scotia tide."

— Christopher Moore
Governor-General’s award-winning author of The Loyalists

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"... Opening the pages of this book is the type of thing H.G. Wells dreamed of when he wrote The Time Machine, but without actually disturbing the time continuum... [He] uses the actual diary entries, memoirs or letters written by those who appear in the narrative. He peppers the quotes so effortlessly into the events, we can hear the actual voices of people like Sir Guy Carleton - General George Washington's British adversary. [He] follows a wide range of figures in his narrative, from David George, a freed slave who became a Baptist preacher, to Edward Winslow, a Mayflower descendent who petitioned Sir Guy Carleton for grants of land due to the British regiments on behalf of the men who had fought for the king. We meet Margaret Watson, a camp follower (army wife) whose first husband died in battle and who remarried his friend, a fellow captured soldier. And John Parr, Governor of Nova Scotia, a veteran of the Battle of Culloden in the Scottish highlands, a career soldier and eventual colonel promoted to Major of the Tower of London, and then on to the governorship of Nova Scotia.

— Julia M. Smith
A Piece of My Mind
May 28, 2008

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Kimber's Nova Scotia (Dec 30, 2007)

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

By Stephen Kimber
December 30, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.

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

Putting the Christ in Santa Claus (Dec 27, 2007)

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Happy holidays… er, Christmas… oh whatever

By Stephen Kimber

Perhaps it was that last, oh-just-one-more-thank-you eggnog at the holiday… er, Christmas party the other night, but I somehow found myself staring at my daily newspaper on Monday morning and nodding in surprised almost-but-not-quite agreement with our resident right-of-radical, right-even-of Don-Cherry, conservative Christian curmudgeon columnist Charles Moore.
Moore was railing on — and on — about the fact that “more and more seasonal observances are [being] purged of Christian references for fear of annoying or offending someone by mentioning the person whose nativity Christmas commemorates.”
It isn’t that I buy Moore’s larger argument that the War on Christmas, as he calls it, is being waged by a bunch of “militant secular humanists and atheists of the political left [who] cynically use religious pluralism as a strategic arguing point in pressing their anti-Christmas agenda.”
There aren’t enough oh-just-one-more eggnog-thank-yous in the entire season for me to buy that!
But after reading the latest war-on-Christmas dispatches from Ottawa’s Elmdale Public School, I couldn’t help but agree that something has gone terribly wrong with the noble notion of inclusiveness.
For this year’s Christmas… er, holiday concert at that elementary school, a few teachers decided to change one of the lines in Silver Bells, a seasonal, secular chestnut — you know, the Jesus-less one about “Santa’s big scene” in which “strings of street lights, even stop lights, blink a bright red and green as the shoppers rush home with their treasures” — from “soon it will be Christmas day” to “soon it will be festive day.”
Yuck.
My first, very different encounter with holiday multiculturalism came about 25 years ago when our oldest son, Matthew, who is now 30 and a hip-hop musician on the west coast, performed in his own first Christmas concert — at least I think that’s what they called it in those days — at L’Ecole Beaufort, Halifax’s then-only French immersion public school. The giddy, freshly-scrubbed, best-behavioured elementary school students sang Christmas carols, Hanukkah songs, songs in celebration of the Muslim festival of Eid, a haunting rendition of the traditional native Huron Carol and even — for the more militantly milquetoast secular humanists among us — a bring-tears-to-the-eyes version John Lennon’s wishful, wistful Imagine.
It was a wonderful event — an unembarrassed celebration of difference within a shared sense of community.
What went wrong?
In Ottawa, the principal of Elmdale School says her choir teachers decided to change the Silver Bells lyrics to “reflect a more generic flavour” because they wanted “to be as inclusive as they can be because not everybody is celebrating either Christmas or Hanukkah.”
Whatever their goal — and my guess is that these weren’t the militant secular humanists of Moore’s more fevered imaginings — it clearly all went horribly awry. There was a national outcry after an irate parent squealed to the press, the school’s telephone answering machine then filled up with messages that “were not pleasant” and school officials found themselves denounced on radio call-in shows and websites. Before it was over, someone had even called in a bomb threat on the day of the concert.
In the end, the choir dropped Silver Bells from its repertoire entirely, replaced it with the supposedly less offensive Frosty, the Snow Man, and not only closed the concert to the media but also, perhaps accidentally, to some parents too.
The problem, it seems to me, is that those probably well-meaning teachers at Elmdale confused inclusive with generic, their desire to be blandly inoffensive with the consequence of being offensively bland.
Christmas, like Hanukkah and Eid, is not generic. It is not only a symbolically significant religious celebration for believers but also a secular occasion for feasting, family and generosity for the rest of us.
Even those who don’t celebrate “either Christmas or Hanukkah” — or, in my case, who celebrate both — can acknowledge the spirit and reality of the celebrations of others without in any way diminishing or demeaning our own festivities.
The answer is not, as Charles cheers in his column, for militant pro-Christian groups like the Alliance Defence Fund and the Campaign Against Political Correctness to up the silliness ante by turning well-intentioned but misguided folks like the Elmdale choir teachers into “cultural fascists.”
We just need to lighten up, pour oh-just-one-more eggnog-thank-you and have ourselves a happy… whatever! Cheers.

http://www.stephenkimber.com

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.

Kimber's Nova Scotia (Dec 23, 2007)

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

By Stephen Kimber
December 23, 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.

SOURCES: AMHERST DAILY NEWS, CAPE BRETON POST, DIGBY COURIER, PORT HAWKESBURY REPORTER, SOUTHSHORENOW.CA, THETELEGRAPH.CO.UK.

Kimber's Nova Scotia (Dec 16, 2007)

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Kimber’s Nova Scotia

By Stephen Kimber
December 16, 2007

The lawyers’ Christmas present
There has been yet another flurry of new legal developments and even newer un-developments in the always developing, ever stranger-than-last-week saga of Nova Scotia’s development-promoting South West Shore Development Authority.
In one of the most recent incidents, the SWSDA’s executive finally struck a deal with Australian movie producer Steve Gilmour to sell him the former Shelburne military base at Sandy Point for use as a film studio.
But within hours of that agreement, Gilmour says SWSDA lawyers began piling unanticipated conditions on the sale — including provisions that Gilmour pony up a $50,000 non-refundable deposit and agree to close the close-to-$3-million deal within five days of the receipt of any other competing offer arriving prior to the planned end-of-January closing.
Gilmour isn’t amused. The former Australian MP says SWSDA boasts “the most toxic business environment I have ever witnessed,” and added that the new provisions effectively change “the terms of the agreement which is in place, with terms so onerous as to jeopardize any sensible negotiations on the sale.”
While dueling lawyers sort that one out, on another front, the SWSDA and its CEO are now threatening to sue Shelburne Mayor Parker Comeau and the Halifax Herald over published comments about the sale, earlier this year, of the former Shelburne Boys’ School — which was also in the care and keeping of the SWSDA — to a Halifax developer.
The mayor had suggested it may be time to call in the RCMP “fraud squad” to do a forensic audit of that deal and find out what happened to the proceeds from the $550,000 sale of a property that was, at one point, appraised at $20 million.
Meanwhile — OK, you can stop and catch your breath if you need to — there are reports the developer of the boys’ school, who just finalized that purchase this summer, is not only now trying to peddle two parcels of the property for $320,000 — “What a deal!” is the heading for the real estate listing — but that he’s also asked the local council to take over responsibility for road maintenance.
And, of course, there are those other unsettled lawsuits still floating in the ether, waiting to be dealt with.
Only in Shelburne, you say. Pity… for Shelburne.

Thanks for the snow
Kevin Thompson, the owner of Pictou County's Best Christmas Trees, says he is on track to equal his best-ever tree sales season — which would be the 2,800 fresh-cut ones he sold in 2005.
Despite the growing popularity of fake trees — including ones with the lights already strung and ornaments already hung — and the flip-side proliferation of U-pick Christmas tree lots for those who feel the need to cut their own, Thompson says people are still streaming onto his lot outside the Aberdeen Mall in order to buy their own real but pre-cut and selected tree.
   For that, he gives thanks to the season’s early snows. “It does help my business,” he told the New Glasgow News. “Who wants to go to the U-picks when there's that much snow on the ground?”
Who wants to go out in the snow at all? Or is that just me?

They do, they do
Ski Wentworth opened for the season this weekend. Again, thanks to all that earlier than usual snow.
“This is one of the earliest opening days we’ve had in 10 years,” enthused Leslie Wilson, Ski Wentworth’s general manager, in an interview with the Amherst Daily News. She predicts the Sissy, Rosebowl, Bunnyhill and possibly the Beaver and Chickadee will all be operating this weekend for over-eager skiers and snowboarders.
   The ski hills usually don’t open until after Christmas when the province experiences its first major snow storms.
Where’s global warming when you need it?
Bah, humbug.

Deck the Hall with Vince
   Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s Vince Hall won’t be legally forced to resign as a municipal councillor following his recent second guilty plea for impaired driving. But Mayor John Morgan says council may want to take another look at paying Hall his $140 weekly “local” travel allowance.
   Hall, who was fined $1,200 and banned from driving for two years for his latest driving offence, which occurred last spring in Halifax, is supposed to get the allowance for traveling within the municipality on council business. But Morgan says Hall not only works at CompuCollege in Halifax — five hours by car from Sydney — but that he also already had a spotty attendance record at council committee meetings.
So why should he get the travel allowance?
“There is a section in the Municipal Government Act that allows council to reduce salaries in circumstances in which committee [meetings] are not attended,” Morgan told the Cape Breton Post.
How much is the bus from Halifax anyway?

Zero tolerance
Three East Pictou junior high school students — aged 14 and 15 — are facing criminal charges of intimidation and assault in connection with what the RCMP says was a three-and-a-half week campaign of teasing, taunting and threatening a fellow student.
While Sgt. Law Power conceded “there was no big physical assault where someone got punched in the mouth,” the bullying involved “a number of pranks over a period of time… Individually, these pranks would have been considered minor in nature. But all the incidents combined make the offence much more serious.
”In general,” he added, “if there is an alternative solution to judicial action available we'll exercise that. But in this particular case arresting these males was in the best interest of the victim and the school.”
The teens are scheduled to appear in court in New Glasgow next month.

Fish scraps and…
   There is finally a company that actually wants to buy Canso’s shuttered Seafreez fish plant. The catch — it doesn’t want to use the facility as a fish freezing and processing operation.
   In fact, Eastern Scrap and Demolition Services wants to dramatically transform the plant by scrapping part of it, installing a marine slipway and making the rest over into a marine salvage operation that it claims could employ up to 40 people.
   Last week, council and local residents met with company representatives to discuss the proposal.
   Mayor Ray White admits there are concerns: the environmental effects it would have on the waterfront and the harbour, for example, as well as how it would fit into the existing community and last, but certainly not least, how many jobs it might really eventually create.
   The proposal hasn’t yet been finalized, he said, but added that the public will get the chance to have their say before any deal is done.

Oh, Christmas tree
   Vandals in Argyle aren’t easily discouraged. But then neither are the residents.
   On Dec. 2, the night of Argyle’s popular annual ceremonial lighting of its community Christmas tree, vandals tried and failed to douse the Christmas spirit by trying — and failing — to set the tree ablaze.
They did it twice more before finally succeeding in destroying the tree early last week.
   But Argyle warden Aldric d’Entremont told this week’s municipal council meeting residents would not allow vandalism to ruin its Christmas spirit. So, on Thursday, there was another tree and another ceremony.
   Three young people are facing charges in connection with the tree torchings.

I’ll have a blue… lobster
Once in a blue lobster, it turns out, is a much rarer event than once in a blue moon. Blue moons — two full moons in the same month — happen roughly every two-and-a-half years. But only one in two million lobsters will turn out to be blue.
Now you know…
All of which may — or may not — explain why 45-year veteran Pubnico fisherman Réal d’Entremont was startled recently when he hauled up his traps in (where else?) Lobster Bay and discovered he’d caught a “perfect market-size” blue lobster, which was blue through and through. “Even the antennas,” he marveled to the Yarmouth Vanguard, “are perfect and blue.”
   The good news for the lobster is that it’s enough of a novelty that it will remain in the fish tank at the seafood department at Barrington’s Atlantic Superstore — at least until the novelty wears off. The blue lobster will share swimming space there with another unusual specimen, a yellow lobster caught by a Cape Sable fishermen.
   In the end, of course, their unusual natural colours won’t matter much. When they’re cooked, which they will be, the heat changes the pigments, releasing that lovely red we associate with cooked lobsters.
   Makes the mouth water…

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College. His column also appears in Thursday’s Daily News.

SOURCES: Amherst Daily News, Cape Breton Post, New Glasgow News, Port Hawkesbury Reporter, Queen’s County Advance, Shelburne Coast Guard, Shelburne County Today, Southshorenow.ca, Yarmouth Vanguard.

Mulroney-Schreiber (Dec 20, 2007)

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Why we still need an inquiry

By Stephen Kimber

According to the most recent public opinion poll, most Canadians don’t want a public inquiry into the strange, fact-is-fantasy, fantasy-is-reality, no-really, tall tale of Lyin’ Brian Mulroney, Sleazy Karlheinz Schreiber, the incredibly shrinking $300,000, the sadly bloating $2.1 million, the globe-trotting lobbying effort on behalf of world peace, light tanks and the dietary benefits of pasta in fighting obesity to a who’s who of conveniently dearly departed world leaders, and… oh yes, the Airbus affair and that $20 million in grease money Schreiber once spread around political Canada like jam on toast on behalf of his corporate clients.
Oh that…
The Globe and Mail’s resident contrarian, Margaret Wente, wrote this week that we should all just move on. William Kaplan, the lawyer-journalist who once wrote a book proclaiming Mulroney’s innocence, discovered he’d accepted $300,000 in cash payments and then turned around and wrote a second book criticizing him, agrees. “We should probably call it a day,” writes the obviously weary Mr. Kaplan.
Brian Mulroney, perhaps not surprisingly, now shares that view.
Prior to last week, Mulroney had loudly proclaimed he wanted a full-scale public inquiry to clear his name (almost as loudly, it should be noted, as his chief spoke-spinner had once insisted our former prime minister never took money from Schreiber).
But then Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised Mulroney his public inquiry, and Mulroney got called to testify before the Commons Ethics Committee, and… oops.
Mulroney may have belatedly realized a public inquiry with a judge, lawyers and testimony-under-oath might not turn out to be another fawning memoir-promotion in high-definition, low-content, full colour with the likes of Lloyd Robertson. Or even another talk-until-they-drop partisan parliamentary committee appearance.
A real public inquiry could subpoena Mulroney’s bank and tax records. It could follow the Schreiber money trail to that secret Swiss account code-named “Briton,” then trace it back to Canada and on to The Pierre hotel in New York, even into that secret New York safety deposit box where Mulroney says he kept the cash. Records there could show exactly when the box was opened, how many times it was visited, etc. The inquiry could tell us how and when what was left of the cash came back to Canada, even whether the man who gifted us the GST actually paid it on what he now says he belatedly claimed as income.
A real public inquiry might compare Mulroney’s claims about his meetings on behalf of Schreiber with all those late and/or unidentified world leaders with any records — transcripts, notes, recollections of others present — that still exist in order to determine whether Mulroney was telling the truth about what he did to earn his $300,000… er, $225,000 retainer.
A real public inquiry would force Mulroney’s many friends and enablers — including key friends-of-both like lobbyist Fred Doucet — to testify under oath about Mulroney’s relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber.
No wonder Mulroney doesn’t want a real public inquiry.
And no wonder his many media apologists don’t want one either.
But what about the rest of us?
According to a recent Harris-Decima poll, only 32 per cent of Canadians now want Harper to call the public inquiry he promised.
That’s not to suggest they think Mulroney is telling the truth. The same poll showed only 21 per cent believed Mulroney was telling the truth when he testified last week.
Perhaps they believe they already know all they really need to — or will ever find out — about what actually happened. Perhaps they think an inquiry will cost too much and change too little.
Which is true — and not. The process of reform in politics is slow and inevitably stuttering. But it does happen. Stephen Harper’s Conservative swept into office on a promise to clean up after the sponsorship scandal. Their Public Accountability Act doesn’t go nearly far enough, but it is a step.
Beyond better legislation, the key to discouraging political bad behaviour is the knowledge there is no statute of limitations on misdeeds. The sponsorship inquiry took us back a decade; this inquiry could answer the still largely unasked questions about which politicians got what and why from Schreiber’s $20-million “grease money” accounts.
Politicians and their media apologists have been quick to say there’s no need for a public inquiry, no need to dredge up the past because it’s in the past and could never happen again.
Don’t buy it. There are only two pauses between a politician and scandal — legislation and the fear of getting caught.
Bring on the public inquiry.

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.

Anticipating Mulroney (Dec 13, 2007)

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Waiting for Brian

By Stephen Kimber

The problem is that we already know what he is going to say, and even — thanks to the usual carefully parceled out hints from his high-priced, prepare-the-way PR team — the broad strokes of how he is going to say it.
When he appears before a parliamentary ethics committee this morning to explain away how he came to take $300,000 in cash from German-Canadian lobbyist and influence peddler Karlheinz Schrieber, Brian Mulroney will be flanked by his dutifully doting family. This will, of course, include telegenic son Ben, the Canadian Idol TV star, and loyal, loving wife Mila. (Mila, it will inevitably be noted by one of the TV commentators, convinced Brian to curb his woe-is-me drinking after he’d lost his first leadership bid so he could focus all his prodigious energies on becoming the prime minister he was meant to be. Which he eventually accomplished, it will probably not be noted, with a little financial help from Karlheiinz.)
Mulroney will inevitably invoke the memory of his own late father, Ben Mulroney, Sr., a working stiff who understood the value of a buck and the importance of a man’s reputation in this world, and who raised his son right.
Brian will then cast himself in his usual role as the poor electrician’s boy from Baie Comeau who, by dint of ambition, talent and hard work — and, oh, yes, the love and support of the family you see behind him (close up, please) — rose to occupy the highest office in this great and glorious land of ours.
And how gosh-darn proud he is of that.
Which is why it is so important for Canadians to know their former two-term, back-to-back-majorities prime minister is not a crook.
Yes, yes, we’re getting to the guts of it now.
No, not quite yet…
Brian Mulroney will then remind us once again that he does not come from a wealthy background like some pampered, Nazi-sympathizing wastrels he could — but won’t — name (take that, Pierre Elliott Trudeau); that he worked his way to the very top of the Iron Ore Company of Canada through good connections and long lunches; that he earned buckets full of money, flew in a company jet and had his own personal chauffeur; that he had to take a whopping cut in pay and circumstance in order to serve his country as prime minister (not that he’s complaining, of course, but those are the facts); that, by the time he left Ottawa after 10 incredibly successful years in office — he won back-to-back majority governments, you may recall, the first time in Canadian history that a Conservative prime minister had achieved such distinction, and he… but he digresses — Brian Mulroney was still a relatively young man with a large and growing family who all needed to be fed, clothed and educated in the finest private schools and universities America had to offer.
It was at this traumatic, difficult, uncertain, vulnerable time that the Evil Karlheinz Whatshisname approached him to entice him to serve as his legal representative in a number of totally legitimate future businesses that Schreiber was in the process of cooking up. What businesses? Pasta, maybe… I think he mentioned pasta…
Since Mulroney had no job to go to and no prospects to speak of (other than a gazillion offers of appointments to multinational corporate boards of directors and multi, multi-thousand-dollar invites to share his wisdom with various and sundry well-heeled groups), he reluctantly, hesitantly, warily agreed to take on Schreiber, who he only knew vaguely as a Conservative party supporter to be a client and accept a small retainer from him to represent those legitimate business interests in the future and blah blah blah…
How was he to know that the guy would try to pay him in cash? With money he got for peddling Airbus planes to Air Canada? At secret meetings in hotels. And before he’d even quit his job as a member of parliament.
Mulroney was shocked, of course, but he accepted the envelope so as not to insult the man. And he kept taking envelopes stuffed with cash because… well, that was a terrible mistake. Brian Mulroney knows that now.
It was — it’s mea culpa time — a colossal mistake, the biggest boo boo in his long and distinguished career… Did he mention the back-to-back majority governments?... The important thing is that it really, really was a mistake, an oversight, a goof of the sort anyone might make, and that Brian Mulroney is not now nor ever has been a crook…
Whew…
Listening to Brian Mulroney finesse the facts later today will almost make me long for more of Conrad Black’s brutally arrogant, I-did-it, so-what honesty.
Almost.

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.

Revisiting Khadr (Nov 1, 2007)

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Choosing values

By Stephen Kimber

   So let me see if I have this right.
   The U.S. State Department has promised immunity from prosecution to a group of rogue American private security agents who were involved in an alleged massacre in west Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September. Seventeen unarmed Iraqis were killed and two dozen others wounded in that attack, which witnesses say was unprovoked.
   On the other hand, this same U.S. government remains bullishly determined to prosecute Canadian Omar Khadr for allegedly killing one U.S. soldier and wounding another in Afghanistan in 2002 during what was, in fact, a firefight between armed U.S. forces and almost-as-armed Afghani fighters.
   This does not compute.
   Or perhaps it does.
   In the topsy turvy, enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend, what-me-worry-about-reality world of American geopolitics, it must all seem perfectly reasonable.
And, of course, equally explicable in Stephen Harper’s Canada. We’ll get back to Harper.
   Let’s start with the Americans. During the 1990s, the U.S. government supported Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, in the process helping to pave the way for the Taliban takeover of that country. After 9/11, the Americans invaded Afghanistan in order to wipe out the now evil Taliban and kill or capture the satanic Osama — without ever once acknowledging their complicity in creating the mess in the first place.
   The American government also supported — at the same time, incredibly — both Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the Islamic fundamentalist government of Iran during their bloody, decade-long war with each other, only to turn on each of them (Saddam became the Butcher of Baghdad, Iran a member in good standing of George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil) when it became convenient to do so for American foreign policy purposes.
   That shouldn’t surprise, I guess, considering that this administration still can’t comprehend the striking similarities between those brave American lads who drop bombs on unwary, unseen civilians from thousands of feet in the air and those cowardly terrorist insurgents who plant improvised explosive devices along roadsides to kill and maim unsuspecting American soldiers.
   And that doesn’t understand the incongruity of disparagingly referring to non-Iraqi insurgents as “foreign fighters” while forgetting that that is how most Iraqis see them.
   Not that we have much to brag about in the area of intellectual or moral consistency in our foreign policy.
   This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with the Dalai Lama, partly to exchange small talk and white Tibetan silk scarves — the one made for the Dalai Lama was embroidered with the Canadian maple leaf — and partly to make a political point with the Chinese government about Canada’s unhappiness with its well-documented human rights abuses in Tibet.
This week’s get together with Harper was the first time the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader has met formally with a Canadian prime minister in his own office.
   Perhaps not surprisingly, Jason Kenney, Harper’s secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, was quick to praise his boss.
“This prime minister, obviously, is someone who has placed a real emphasis on human rights and Canadian values in our foreign policy,” he told CTV.
   Uh, yes… but what about Omar Khadr? Oh, him.
   Khadr, who is a Canadian citizen, was just 15 when he was captured by the Americans in Afghanistan and whisked off to the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison compound where he has languished, without trial, for five years.
   While other countries — including such steadfast American allies as Britain and Australia — have publicly protested the detentions of their citizens at Guantanamo and even managed to get them released or at least returned to their home countries, Canada has been worse than silent on Khadr.
   The Harper government, in fact, is still fighting to prevent Khadr’s lawyers from seeing secret files it compiled when the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Department of Foreign Affairs interrogated Khadr — without a lawyer — shortly after he was captured. Canada passed on summaries of those sessions to the Americans.
   Last May, the Federal Court of Appeal ordered the government to hand over to the court uncensored copies of all records relevant to the case, but Ottawa refused and is now appealing that decision.
One of the key issues, incredibly, will be whether Khadr, as a Canadian citizen, actually has the right to a fair trial under the Charter of Rights.
   Khadr’s Edmonton-based lawyer, Dennis Edney, says Ottawa’s refusal to disclose the information “shows the extent to which Canada has been prepared to violate the rule of law when it comes to Omar Khadr.”
   A prime minister “who has placed a real emphasis on human rights and Canadian values in our foreign policy?”
   Only, it seems, when it suits our other interests.

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.

Media and Mulroney (Nov 15, 2007)

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Canada’s media have some answering to do

By Stephen Kimber

   There are still way more questions than answers. The first, and most important, of course, is why did Brian Mulroney, a former prime minister of Canada, accept $300,000 in cash in brown envelopes at clandestine meetings with Karlheinz Schreiber, a shady German-Canadian influence peddler?
   A second question is when did Stephen Harper, the current prime minister of Canada and a recent friend of Mr. Mulroney’s, first discover that Schreiber was claiming the arrangements for the $300,000 payout were made while Mulroney was still prime minister, and what did Harper do about it?
   But there’s a third question — not much asked on editorial pages. How and why did Canada’s paper-trained parliamentary puppy press gallery and their bosses in most major news organizations manage, for close to a decade, to not only ignore but also actively, dismissively dismiss what will ultimately be one of the great scandals in Canadian political history?
   That last question, one hopes, will not be part of the public inquiry Stephen Harper has now commendably, if belatedly, set in motion — it will have more than enough on its plate — but it is our subject today.
   And it should be the subject of soul-searching in most major newsrooms in the country.
   While there were a few exceptional exceptions — the CBC’s dogged Fifth Estate (though not its national news division), the late-awakening but now finally-fully-in-the-game Globe and Mail and the much-maligned freelance journalist Stevie Cameron pretty much exhausts the short long list — the reality is that Canada’s news media embarrassed themselves by their kiss-the-canvas collapses on this story.
   In 1995, conveniently on the same day the story leaked that the RCMP was investigating Mulroney, Schreiber and former Newfoundland premier-turned-premier-lobbyist Frank Moores in connection with the 1980s sale of Airbus aircraft to Air Canada, Mulroney launched a pre-emptive multimillion dollar lawsuit against the federal government.
   Perhaps predictably, the news media chose to focus on the politics of the battle and steer clear of the substance of the allegations to avoid being drawn into Mulroney’s legal crosshairs.
   But, in fact, they did much more — and less — than that.
   They even applied editorial pressure on the government and the RCMP to shut down the police investigation. “No such crime was committed,” declared the Globe in January 2000. “The case must be formally and publicly closed,” chimed in the National Post.
   They didn’t seem eager to find out how Karlheinz Schreiber — already facing charges in Germany for bribing politicians and tax evasion — had distributed $8 million worth of schmiergelder (grease money) Airbus had handed him to help grease the sale of their jets to Air Canada. Or why Schreiber had set up 10 secret Swiss bank accounts with crudely coded names of Canadian political figures.
   Except for the Fifth Estate, no journalist asked what Schreiber meant when he boasted to the German magazine der Spiegel that “I could create the most horrible Watergate here in Canada when I want to.”
   Instead in 2000, when the RCMP abandoned their investigation, the national editorialists pronounced themselves “relieved for Mr. Mulroney,” and thankful that the “baseless, unjustifiable intrusion on Mr. Mulroney's post-PM life, one bordering on harassment,” was finally at an end.
   In 2003, when the Globe inadvertently tripped over the fact of the $300,000 payment, it did its best to slip it under the rug, burying the news in the 26th paragraph of the third installment of a series that actually focused on attacking journalist Stevie Cameron for her “vendetta” against Mulroney.
   No wonder there were only two stories in the week following the revelation, one of which was a largely self-congratulatory report by the Star’s ombudsman, praising its lack of coverage of the Globe revelations.
In 2006, a week after The Fifth Estate broadcast a full-show documentary featuring the first sit-down interview with Schreiber, which neatly connected some of the missing dots between Mulroney and Schreiber’s Swiss bank accounts, I entered the names “Mulroney” and “Schreiber,” into Google Canada’s news library and came up with a grand total of just 13 stories about the Fifth Estate’s revelations. (That compared with nearly 10,000 hits about the Danish Muslim editorial cartoon controversy and more than 6,000 dealing with Wayne Gretzky’s connection to an alleged gambling ring, both of which were in the news the same week.)
Now that it is clear just how badly the news media blew this story, perhaps Canada’s major media organizations will engage in the kind of self-examination the New York Times offered its readers after reality caught up with its woeful early coverage of the war in Iraq. Perhaps…

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.

Mulroney and the money

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0400

We need an inquiry now

By Stephen Kimber

   “This is not a route that I want to go down,” our prime minister declared last week in response to Liberal calls he appoint an inquiry to find how, why and what-for Karlheinz Schreiber, the German-Canadian wheeler-dealer lobbyist and influence peddler, handed former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney $300,000 in cash in 1993 and 1994.
   But then Stephen Harper went even further, adding ominously: “I don't think that if the Liberal party thought twice about it, it is a power they would want to give me.” If he was forced to investigate Mulroney, his mentor, Harper explained, he might just have to launch his own probes into the business dealings of former Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. And who knew where that could lead? Even suggesting the need for such an inquiry, suggested Harper in his best imitation of a thuggish schoolyard bully-boy, was “really extraordinarily dangerous.”
   Earth to Stephen Harper. Canadians aren’t interested in your petty playground politics. If there is evidence that either Chrétien or Martin had their fingers in the cookie jar or illegally used their power to influence decisions to benefit themselves or their friends, by all means, bring it on.
   But even if such cases can be made, they do nothing to answer the still legitimate — and very troubling — questions about Brian Mulroney’s now well documented but still unexplained business dealings with Scheriber, a man he once claimed publicly he barely knew and had never had business dealings with.
   That was simply not true.
   Schreiber and Mulroney have known each other for 30 years. In the late seventies, in fact, Schreiber helped bankroll Mulroney’s campaign to overthrow then-Conservative leader Joe Clark and grab that prize for himself.
   Certainly, that was not a small favour in political terms. And not one that could easily be forgotten
   Consider also what we know — and don’t — about Schreiber, Mulroney and the mysterious $300,000.
   During the late eighties, Schreiber’s lobbyist job description included spreading “grease money” to anyone who could help his German clients sell Airbus jets to Air Canada. In 1993, three years before Mulroney testified he barely knew him, Schreiber used one of those secret, Swiss grease-money accounts — this one code-named “Briton” which Schreiber says was a reference to Mulroney — to withdraw $300,000 in one-thousand-dollar bills, which he then stuffed into envelopes and doled out to Mulroney at various clandestine meetings around North America. Mulroney did not pay taxes on the $300,000 until years after he got it and then only after journalists had begun asking questions about the payments. Schreiber now claims the former prime minister’s advisors even tried to convince him to lie about what Mulroney had actually done to earn his money.
   To complicate matters — and make the need for an inquiry even more obvious to all but the most partisan — we also now know that Mulroney’s blatantly disingenuous (to be kind) declaration that he had only had coffee “once or twice” with Schreiber and that he “had never had any dealings with him” helped convince the federal government to turn tail and run from Mulroney’s massively hyped civil suit against it, publicly apologizing for maligning his good name and agreeing to pay him $2.1 million to make it all go away.
   When it finally became clear last year — thanks to diligent investigative reporting by the CBC’s Fifth Estate, one of the few media outlets to take this scandal seriously — that Mulroney had … ahem … not been entirely forthcoming about his relationship with Schreiber, non-political officials in the federal justice department began an investigation to determine whether there were grounds to seek the return of the settlement they had paid Mulroney.
   Those inquiries were summarily squashed by Harper’s justice minister, raising even more questions, including whether Harper’s government is engaged in continuing political interference in the case.
   While the same sycophantic parliamentary puppy press gallery that has done its best to downplay this story for years was at pains again last week to make clear there are still no dot-to-dot connections among Mulroney, Airbus and the $300,000 — “There is no evidence that Mulroney knew that the source of the money he got from Schreiber was potentially tainted,” as Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hebert wrote for the majority — the evidence is already damning enough. We have a right to know the whole story. And Harper has a duty to make sure we know it.
   This is not a matter of partisan politics but of public trust. Unfortunately, our prime minister, as is all too usual with him, seems to have confused the two.

Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College. His column, Kimber's Nova Scotia, appears in The Sunday Daily News.