Council neglect is making Halifax less accessible

Halifax Council’s Transportation Committee meets today to consider accessible transit, including accessible places on regular buses, the Access-a-Bus, and accessible taxis. City staff will make a presentation, and if past performance is any guide, they’re expected to wash their hands of efforts to increase the pathetic number of accessible taxis, currently at less than three percent—and falling.

Here, in graphic format, are the results to date of Halifax’s failure to  discrimination by taxi companies:

Has fighting among justice officials obscured a death in police lockup?

When an official story doesn’t ring true, a journalist with good instincts sometimes decides to tug at the loose threads—and keep tugging until the story unravels.

Thank you to Bill Turpin for continuing to tug the threads of the official story about a 41-year-old Spryfield man who died in the Halifax Police lockup one year ago last Friday.

Official non-story is more like it. The province’s Serious Incident Response Team (SIRT) has been investigating the man’s death, but neither it nor the Halifax police will say what happened—or even reveal the dead man’s name. This last omission constitutes an extraordinary and protest-worthy level of secrecy. One full year after a man died in police custody under circumstances warranting investigation, no one in authority has the decency to dignify him with a name.

Unusual secrecy often masks malfeasance. Turpin has tugged threads long enough to have developed a theory about why the case is dragging on. His thinks the man’s death has been caught up in a pissing match between SIRT and the Public Prosecution Service over a previous case in which prosecutorial dawdling allowed a dirty cop to go free—much to the dismay of his honest colleagues.

The cop was charged with theft, breach of trust, and obstruction of justice following an investigation that SIRT Director Rodney Ron J. MacDonald detailed in an unusually terse and blunt report after the prosecution decided to drop the case owing to its own untoward delays.

Take a moment to read Turpin’s latest post, then follow the links he provides to connect the background dots. If his theory is correct, the Minister of Justice needs to step in and insist on a resolution to the investigation, and a decent level of respect for the deceased. Not to mention accountability for those who let a dirty cop go unpunished.

Reporters for what’s left of our mainstream media might want to dig into this sorry tale as well.

Another hip new Halifax store shuns wheelchair users

In the Barrier Capital of Canada, your business can exclude customers using wheelchairs as long as it’s located in a building that never accommodated wheelchairs.

Take Fox Hill Farm’s trendy new Halifax outlet on Robie Street. The previous tenant sold computers. Selling organic milk and cheese is deemed not to be a change of use. The law, in its wisdom, says that if a property’s use has not changed, it’s refusal to accommodate wheelchair users needn’t change either.

Here’s Fox Hill’s front door. Two steps. No wheelchair users need apply.

But wait! A sign on the front door promises an accessible entrance to the side of the building:

And here it is. An accessible entrance with an out-swinging door, no automatic door opener, and no button to summon help. The narrow path to the door is built up, so anyone using a wheelchair would be hard put even to approach it from the side and knock on the door.

The sidewalk in front of the Fox Hill store is nice and wide. It would have been easy for the inspector who approved the renovations before Fox Hill moved in to press for construction of a small ramp at the front entrance.

Building inspectors don’t push accessibility because they are untrained in barrier-free construction, and because their supervisors don’t encourage them to push accessibility. Their supervisors don’t push accessibility because the Chief Administrative Officer doesn’t push accessibility. The CAO doesn’t push accessibility because Mayor Mike Savage and Halifax Council doesn’t exercise meaningful political leadership in support of accessibility.

Savage and his councillors content themselves with empty lip service.

If Fox Hill posted signs reading, “Jews and Negroes, please use the side entrance and call ahead for assistance,” a huge uproar would ensue. But it can effectively bar customers with mobility challenges, and no one in our fair capital bats an eyelash.

This should be socially unacceptable. Why does Halifax condone it.

If the Herald can buy more newspapers, why can’t it pay workers more?

The main complaint I hear about the Chronicle Herald’s purchase of Transcontinental’s Atlantic Canadian newspapers goes like this: If Herald owners Sarah Dennis and Mark Lever can find millions to buy out Transcon, why can’t they cough up more money for striking workers?

The answer is that those are completely different kinds of transactions, as unalike as buying a new car and buying gas to run it.

If you borrow to buy a new car, there’s a chance you’ll pay extremely low interest—as low as 0% if the carmaker is eager to move inventory. But if you borrow to fill the gas tank, you’ll pay credit card rates of 18% – 28%.

Transcon, whose core business is printing, was eager to move inventory. It’s been shedding newspapers all across the country at fire sale prices. The money the Herald borrowed to buy Transcon’s Atlantic papers was secured by a combination of assets the lender can sell if the business fails (chiefly printing presses and downtown buildings in cities and towns across the region), and a business plan that convinced lenders the company will be able to meet its loan payments.

Money to pay the Herald’s workers, by contrast, must come from future revenues sufficient to meet all the paper’s costs, plus a return on the owners’ investment. If Lever had tried to borrow money to cover the cost of a new collective agreement, the same lenders would have laughed him out of the room.

Newspaper revenues have been tanking since the turn of the century. All newspapers have cut costs in response to this reality. Some have folded, including the Halifax Daily News and several of TransCon’s Nova Scotia weeklies. The Post Media papers are said to be on the brink of closing.

The Herald had high costs by industry standards. The newsroom collective agreement pushed top salaries above $80,000, and limited management’s flexibility to cope with the internet tsunami. Lever has been candid that management’s 2003 decision to buy a $25 million press, just as revenues nosedived, made the crisis worse.

The Herald did not fold, but it did roll headfirst into a bitter, 14-month strike that shows no sign of ending. Many assumed Lever and Dennis were ruthlessly trimming costs to ready the paper for sale to the Irvings. Instead, they shocked the industry by doubling down on printed news. It’s a high-stakes gamble whose outcome will be fascinating to watch.

A ballsy move by Nova Scotia’s first family of newspapering

Sarah Dennis and Mark Lever, co-owners of the Halifax Chronicle Herald, have been showered with abuse for their handling of a 14-month strike by the Halifax Typographical Union. Today, they stunned critics and admirers alike by purchasing all of Transcontinental’s newspaper properties in Atlantic Canada.

A union spokesperson was quick to denounce  the purchase, saying it put the lie to the family’s claim it could ill-afford to settle with the union on less than harsh terms.

On the contrary. The surprise purchase demonstrates the couple’s commitment to local print news in our region, and puts the lie to addlepated, reality-averse commentary about the strike from Tim Bousquet, Steve Kimber, Graham Steele, and other members of Halifax’s lefty commentariat.

The union’s sympathizers have done the strikers no favour by turning an unseeing eye to the internet’s demolition of the newspaper industry revenue model. A cornucopia of free online news has eviscerated display and classified ad dollars, replacing them with online clicks that yield tiny fractions of a cent. Long accustomed to oceans of cash, this industry can no longer support $80,000 salaries with no heavy lifting.

The hard reality—the truth no one in the media will speak—is that neither side wants the Herald strike to end:

• Lever and Dennis are saving a fortune, putting out a paper with a skeleton staff, while incurring no obvious strike-related impact on circulation numbers.
• Most of the strikers have received layoff notices. They know they will never return to jobs at the Herald, but as long as they continue to picket, they will collect $600+ per week in strike pay. With a few exceptions, the most talented among them have already found work elsewhere, in journalism or communications.

Several union blunders ossified its untenable position in the early days of the strike. Despite knowing for at least a year that a strike was coming, the HTU took months to get its online journal up and running. Once launched, the LocalXpress proved a credible vehicle, but for additional crucial months, it refused to accept advertising.

Incredibly, the union actually picketed companies that might have supported it with ad revenue, denouncing them as “scabvertisers” for not immediately bailing on the region’s biggest daily. At one point it even picketed Halifax Mayor Mike Savage for attending a meeting where Lever was scheduled to speak. Instead of trying to build community support for a settlement, the union sought out infidels to expose and denounce.

Here are a few educated assumptions about the Transcon sale:

• Lever and Dennis got these properties for a ditty, because getting them for a song would have meant overpaying.
• They used borrowed money, because the Herald’s calamitous economics over the last decade had depleted the family fortune.
• Whoever lent them money saw a business plan that was credible enough to support a decision to provide financing.

All this reinforces my assumption that the couple’s unyielding strike strategy has stabilized the Herald’s operating statement.

Lever and Dennis have created a new entity, SaltWire Network, registered just three weeks ago, to run the 35 media properties they now control. The consolidated operations may yield some modest economies of scale, but to make this work in the long run, the new owners will be tempted, and their newly acquired union employees will be chastened, by the brazen example they set with the Herald strike.

A story posted on the Herald website today quotes Lever as saying all current Transcon employees will be offered positions “in the same capacity with the same salary and same benefits that they have now.” Successor rights leave him little choice but to do that. When current collective agreements expire, all bets will be off.

There will always be a market for news and stories, but a growing consensus doubts the longterm market for printed newspapers. Lever and Dennis are placing a big contrarian bet against that belief. They’re gambling the public appetite for local stories will support the newspapers they have snapped up at distressed prices.

I hope they’re right. It’s a ballsy move by a couple that has braved public obloquy with a string of ballsy moves.

The right to repair your own tractor

A few months ago, I went to print some now forgotten document when the HP inkjet that’s been kicking around my house for a decade or more signalled that one of its cartridges was out of ink.

I snapped in a replacement cartridge, purchased off the internet for modestly less than usurious price of a genuine HP cart from staples, and received an ominous message:

Unauthorized cartridge detected

It turned out HP had issued a firmware update that surreptitiously blocked the use of third-party or refilled cartridges. Organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation protested, and faced with a mounting public furore, HP eventually relented, issuing a firmware update that undid the block.

You might think this was a case of momentary over-reach by a greedy, customer-hating corporation, brought quickly to heel by mass consumer protest, but guess again. The campaign by giant corporations to control the products they sell you throughout their lifetimes in only just working up a head of steam.

Farmers in the American mid-west are buying cracked versions of the firmware for their John Deere tractors from invitation-only, black marker Ukrainian websites so they can carry out basic repairs without calling in overpriced mechanics from their authorized John Deere dealer.

Farmers have been repairing their own tractors nearly as long as mothers have been baking blueberry pie, but John Deere wants to put a halt to that. Its newest models come with baked-in computer firmware that shut a rig down if anyone attempts an unauthorized water pump replacement or homespun brake job. Said Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska:

If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it. You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can’t drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.”

DRM isn’t really a technology at all, it’s a law. Specifically, it’s section 1201 of the US DMCA (and its international equivalents). Under this law, breaking DRM is a crime with serious consequences (5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for a first offence), even if you’re doing something that would otherwise be legal. This lets companies treat their commercial strategies as legal obligations: Netflix doesn’t have the legal right to stop you from recording a show to watch later, but they can add DRM that makes it impossible to do so without falling afoul of DMCA.

Public health & human rights officials to wheelchair users: PFO

Wednesday in Halifax, six prominent disability rights activists will ask the Supreme Court to order Nova Scotia’s Human Rights Commission to do its job.

The activists want the court to order the commission to hear their complaint against Environment Minister Margaret Miller and Chief Medical Officer of Health Robert Strang for selectively enforcing Nova Scotia’s Food Safety Regulations in a manner that discriminates against wheelchair users—and puts their health at risk in the process.

The regulations require restaurants in Nova Scotia to have “washroom facilities for the public available in a convenient location” as a condition of their license. Many Halifax restaurants have summer patios accessible to wheelchair users, but do not have a washroom that is conveniently located, or even reachable, by such customers.

As lawyer David Fraser wrote to the court in a pre-hearing brief:

While one might presume this is solely about the ability to access a toilet, this complaint and the concern that motivated it is also about access to basic hygiene. Individuals in non-motorized wheelchairs spend most of their day with their hands on the handrims of the wheels in order to move the chair. These handrims are in close proximity to the ground and generally get dirty through the day. This dirt is transferred to the operator’s hands. Where no accessible bathroom is available, individuals in wheelchairs do not have access to hand-washing facilities and their health is placed at risk.

Early last year, Gus Reed, a wheelchair user and one of the appellants, wrote to Environment Minister Margaret Miller complaining that her inspectors were not enforcing the requirement. Miller’s somewhat obtuse reply acknowledged the regulation, but noted that restaurants are subject to many laws, including the building code, which she claimed takes precedence in matters of washrooms. She referred him to HRM’s bylaw compliance officer.

Reed then wrote to Strang, who replied that his concern “is best handled through the NS Building Code.” Strang referred him to the Fire Marshall.

Last August, Reed and five other wheelchair users—including Kelly McKenna, who led the successful 2009 fight to make MLA constituency offices barrier free, and Paul Vienneau, who is celebrated in Halifax as the Asshole with a Shovel—complained to the Human Rights Commission.

They cited four Halifax restaurants (Effendy, The Wooden Monkey, Le Coq, and The Five Fishermen) whose washroom facilities they could not use, but stressed that their complaint was not directed at the businesses, but at Miller and Strang for, “a pattern of discrimination in the enforcement Food Safety Regulations.”

To be clear, the Minister and the MOH devote significant resources to the enforcement of this regulation with respect to most Nova Scotians. They fail to enforce it only with respect to people using wheelchairs. This subset of the population—persons with a disability—is a protected category under the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act. The selective enforcement complained of is therefore a violation of the Act.

Human Rights Officer Tamara Powell tried to reject the complaint in a phone call. Only when Reed insisted did she follow up with a letter. It said the complaint, “falls outside the jurisdiction of the Commission because, based on the information you have provided, it is a matter of a provincial government department failing to enforce its own program or policy.” Powell referred Reed to the Ombudsman.

Reed appealed instead to the commission’s Intake Analyst, Darryl MacPherson, who confirmed Powell’s rejection in a rambling email. He claimed the Environment Minister is not responsible for Food Safety Regulations (in fact, she is); he said the grandfathering provisions of the building code, which exempt pre-existing businesses from new rules such as those requiring accessibility, mean the minister could not retroactively apply food safety regulations; he said wheelchair users are not the only group that, “experience challenges when trying to access such services,” citing, “older persons and persons with children [who] experience similar challenges when accessing certain establishments.”

Finally, MacPherson said the commission might hear a complaint against the restaurants, but not the government.

The substance of the complaint will not be at issue at Wednesday’s hearing, which will hear arguments about the commission’s process. As lawyer Fraser summarized in his brief:

In the Human Rights Act, the Commission has no discretion and no leeway to turn away complainants if the complaint is made in writing and it addresses subject matter within the Commission’s legal competence.

But sometimes process is substance, as citizens with disabilities, faced with a familiar parade of officials passing the buck instead of doing their duty, know all too well.

Twinning past the graveyard

I attended the highway twinning discussion in Sydney Tuesday night, one of a dozen sessions the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal is holding around the province to gauge support for highway tolls as a way to speed up seven highway twinning projects on the department’s wish list.

The core question: should we finance these highway projects in the normal way, out of gasoline taxes, in which case they will take decades, or by implementing tolls on our 100-series highways to generate revenue that would support much faster construction through public-private partnerships.

The department came armed with a detailed feasibility study from the engineering firm CBCL. It evaluates the seven sections of highway based on cost—a total of 2.4 billion—and potential reductions in collisions and travel times. A power point presentation summarized the results and posed questions for the public.

I make 20-25 round trips a year from Cape Breton to Halifax, another 100 or more trips to Sydney from my Victoria County abode. I much prefer driving on divided highways. I still don’t think we should do any more twinning, any time soon.

Nova Scotia has neglected highway and bridge maintenance for decades. Successive governments found it politically more palatable to rein in the province’s third-largest budget item, Transportation, than numbers. 1 & 2, Health and Education. Over the last half century, inadequate transportation budgets have produced a growing backlog of deferred maintenance and construction.

In 2001, the department carried out a study to gauge the size of this infrastructure deficit. It found the province needed to spend $3.4 billion in highway and bridge repairs and construction over the ensuing 10 years. Budgets increased slightly, but not enough to eat away at the shortfall. When the department took a second look at the infrastructure deficit in 2008, it found the total had grown to $4.38 billion.

Nine years have passed since that report, and we continue to spend at about half the rate required to reduce the maintenance and construction backlog. How big is the shortfall today: $5 billion? $6 billion? Who knows?

Faced with this ever-growing deficit, why would we suddenly go another $2.4 billion into hock to build new roads when we can’t adequately maintain the ones we have?

Been to Europe lately? By comparison, Nova Scotia roads are an embarrassment of ragged asphalt and crumbling curbs. Many, especially those used by heavy coal-hauling trucks, are badly rutted. Personally, I would rather drive in a snowstorm than in heavy rain on a rutted highway. In a snowy skid, I know how to regain control of a vehicle, but when a car hydroplanes, it’s strictly Jesus Take the Wheel.

My logic holds no appeal to politicians. Tell constituents you’re going to spend $1 billion to twin a nearby highway, and they’ll elect you again and again. Tell them you’re going to spend $1 billion patching potholes, and watch them yawn.

We are a large province with a small population. Our roads are lightly travelled by 21st century standards. They are much safer than they were 20 years ago. Traffic deaths have fallen sharply over that period. There are a multitude of steps we can take to make them even safer, such as rumble strips, reflective line markings, and prompt attention to the worst of the truck-induced rutting.

A $2.4 billion spending spree may or may not make us safer; it will surely make us poorer.

Ignorant, incompetent, impulsive, and dictatorial, but not crazy

Until this morning, I was inclined to agree with those, like Andrew Sullivan, who think Trump is a narcissist whose psychiatric competence to lead the western world is a legitimate matter for journalistic inquiry. A distinguished psychiatrist’s letter to the New York Times persuades me this is wrong.

Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).

Not crazy. Just evil.

Allen Frances is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke University’s medical school. He chaired the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (D.S.M.-IV). Read his full letter here.

How bureaucratic arrogance doomed a Ministerial ruling

The Sipekne’katik Band has won its appeal against the Nova Scotia Environment Minister Margaret Miller’s approval of the Alton Gas Storage Project, not on any substantive objection to the project, but due to arrogant behaviour that increasingly characterizes the provincial government’s interactions with the public and the media.

Frankly, the band’s objections to the project are flimsy, but the government deserved what it got.

The initial concerns of the band and local residents were understandable. The Shubenacadie River has been a central feature of the band’s history and culture for millennia. It’s an important resource for all area residents. But the scientific evidence is clear the gas storage project poses no discernible threat to the river or its environment.

Alton’s plan is to buy natural gas at times of year when it’s cheap, and store it in underground salt caverns for use when prices rise.  The caverns would be hollowed out by a process known as solution mining, with the dissolved salt discharged into the Shubenacadie.

Sounds scary until you learn the maximum daily discharge of salt would be less than 1/1200th of the salt that enters the river on the daily influx of the tides. Moreover, discharge would only be permitted when it would not take the river’s salt content outside its natural range.

The protests persisted mainly because they got tangled up in band politics, with rival factions vying to outdo one another in the fervour of their objections. News coverage in local online media mainly took the form: Natives good; government and industry bad. There was little or no reporting of the scientific evidence or the band politics.

So if the minister’s decision to approve the project was correct, why was it overturned?

As she was considering her decision, the minister received a staff report recommending the project’s approval. That report was informed, in part, by a memo from the Office of Aboriginal Affairs. Band lawyers repeatedly asked to for a chance to review and comment on both documents. The department refused.

Madam Justice Suzanne M. Hood ruled Friday that by refusing to let the band respond to information she considered in reaching her decision, Minster Miller denied it “procedural fairness.”

In addition to being arrogant, this was just dumb. What possible reason was there—apart from knee-jerk secretiveness—to deny an appellant access to all the information the minister considered when making her quasi-judicial decision?

I’ve encountered more and more of this knee-jerk secretiveness from provincial officials lately. Recently I’ve asked communications officers in two departments about an investigation carried out almost a decade ago into an intriguing problem with potential public safety implications. I don’t suspect anything nefarious. I’m just genuinely curious, and I think readers would be too. The responses to my inquiries have been curt to the point of rudeness, and non-responsive to a degree I have not encountered since the Gerald Regan administration.

More on this in the weeks to come.