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Former Liberal cabinet minister Geoff MacLellan has been named chair of the provinces HRM Housing Panel. Photo: Communications Nova Scotia

Yesterday, Premier Tim Houston announced that former Liberal cabinet minister Geoff MacLellan will chair the newly created HRM Housing Panel, often referred to as the housing task force. Other members of the panel are:

Kelly Denty, Executive Director of Planning and Development, HRM Peter Duncan, Director of Infrastructure Planning, HRM Stephen MacIsaac, CEO, Nova Scotia Lands Paul LaFleche, Deputy Minister, Department of Municipal Affairs and Housing

I attended the announcement yesterday, and so had some questions for Houston about the powers and (even more important) oversight of the panel. My questions with his responses, lightly edited for clarity:

Bousquet: Throughout this process and in the release, theres mention of roadblocks. Can you identify even one roadblock? Ive been covering municipal politics for a dozen years, and it appears to me that most every development proposal gets approved. So what are we talking about?

Houston: I wouldnt agree with your assessment. I mean, we have some developments that have been kind of on the books in discussion for about 10 years. And heres what I would say about the task force. Obviously, there was a reaction to the task force. We heard some members of HRM council speaking out against what the province was planning here. We had others pointing the finger at the province, saying the province is the problem on housing. But when we announced the task force, we started to see some projects approved. We actually started to see some movement. But I think everything weve seen since the announcement of the task force just confirms the importance of the task force. And, you know, right now, if you look at the discussions around the city and in the last week or so you have a situation where everyone is working to keep things affordable affordable housing, rent cap extension. And then you have HRM talking about a 6% property tax increase, and all that will flow down to tenants, will flow down to everyone. So I think it just shows the need for a task force that can really look at these things objectively and put people before everything. But are there roadblocks dealing with HRM? It may be the assessment of some that theres not, but certainly everything I read in the media and from talking to people, not-for-profits included, they would tell you there are lots of roadblocks.

Bousquet:Can you identify one?

Houston: Sure. Theres a situation right now where the province is wanting to move people from a hospital to another building more long-term care. And the inspectors are identifying little issues that I think dont raise to the standard of keeping people in hospital. So theres all kinds of little anecdotal things like that. Theres all kinds of real things like that. But heres what I would say. The focus is we need more housing stock in this province, and we want to be absolutely respectful of the consultation process and all of the concerns of communities. 100 percent will follow that process. But theres also a time for action, and we believe the crisis in housing necessitates more action. And thats what were focused on.

Bousquet: Will the task force be able to change HRMs zoning?

Houston: The task force will be able to. But these arent our intentions. But this is serious stuff. We are sending the message very clearly with this task force that we have one focus thats people; its not politics, its people. And we respect the process, but we need housing for people in this province. And thats what our focus is.

Bousquet: As I understand it now, the growth patterns for HRM, approved building areas can accommodate three times the expected population growth. It sounds to me that there may be a move by this task force to increase those geographic areas and wont that have effect on things like urban planning and transit and greenhouse gas goals and etc.? It sounds like youre setting all that aside.

Houston:No, I dont think so. I apologize if Im having trouble articulating exactly what the intent of the task force is, but I would also remind that theres a transportation task force to that we need to get to as well because transportation is a significant part of housing. So if youre going to open up areas for housing stock, people need to be able to get to the places of employment and stuff. So lets not forget about that. But right now, the immediate need in this province and certainly in HRM is for housing. And if we have general agreement on that, then we would have general agreement on the use of the task force, which is to look at those situations where housing stocks should be built and where theres no good reason why its not, other than some delays. They can be addressed or can be focused in on and say, Well, how do we really get past this? Whats the solution? Heres a problem, how do we really get past this? And this would be the task force if there are files where things are taking a long time and somebody says, Look, Ive been dealing with this for years, I want to build some housing, heres what theyre telling me, then the task force would have the ability to get everyone in the room. We already have everyone in the room with HRM and with the province and say, What is the hurdle and is there a solution here or not? And we can just kind of cut through the noise. Thats all were trying to do is cut through the noise and get housing built. Thats all.

Bousquet: In the housing announcement from a few days ago, there was some money that went to non-profits, but primarily it was subsidies for large development companies and the affordable aspect translated into a household income of above $40,000 a year. Theres a huge segment of the population that makes less than that. Their needs are not being addressed. And theres a criticism that this government is focusing on large development companies perhaps through the task force as well to approve these things when what really needs to be done is there needs to be more money spent on social housing and co-operative housing to create new units for that lower income. How do you respond to that?

Houston: Well, listen, I fundamentally believe that a solution to a housing crisis is more housing. You dont build more housing, youre not going to fix the housing crisis. The very reason for this task force is to make sure that those housing developments and that housing that should be built is built. When we build more housing, we create more opportunities for people that have a place to live. That has a shift on the market. For anyone to suggest that were not focused on affordable housing, I dont accept that. I just think its wrong. Obviously, we want more housing stock across the spectrum and every time you build a housing unit that somebody can move into and vacate, you know, move upwardly mobile. Whatever the case may be, youre talking more people with more income. That opens up a housing stock for somebody else. So were focused on more housing and more housing will have benefits across the spectrum. But particularly those that need affordable housing.

Bousquet: Theres an enormous amount of money were talking hundreds of millions, probably billions of dollars worth of potential development. What safeguards are going to be in place to prevent corruption; is there an ethical review? Is there any oversight of this process?

Houston: Youre talking about government investment in housing?

Bousquet: Im talking about the task force operations. When the city doesnt allow a development, the task force says, screw the city, were going to approve this. Theres a lot of money at stake there. Maybe the task force is doing the right thing, but the opportunity for bad actors is huge in that process. Will there be any safeguards to prevent that?

Houston: I think theres law, legal situations. Look, were focused on building housing stock. Well take every safeguard we can, but when you look at the integrity of the individuals on the task force, I believe in people and Geoff is a person of incredible integrity. The task force members are people of incredible integrity and I still believe in the good of humans.

I just wanted that last question on the record, because Ive seen too often how these things go. On the one hand, there are developers with tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, and on the other hand there are underpaid, under-appreciated, and unnoticed civil servants, and politicians looking for a leg up. Its a recipe for corruption.

The thing about this is, the potential corruption that is at least possible through the usual development approval process is simply being institutionalized, making it completely legal. Theres a loophole being built into the system, and it will be exploited; developers will push the envelope as far as it can be pushed.

I would feel a little bit better about the process if there were regular reviews by an independent reviewer, something along the lines of an inspector general or auditor.

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Suete Chan

This item is written by Jennifer Henderson.

Suete Chan would have turned 28 today. But shortly after 8am on Wednesday morning, Suete was killed after being struck by a motorist as she was crossing Pleasant Street in a marked crosswalk.

The 41-year-old female driver was issued a ticket for a failing to yield to a pedestrian. HRM police say they are continuing to investigate yet another fatality as a result of a pedestrian-vehicle collision: there have been 12 deaths involving pedestrians in HRM since 2018, and hundreds of collisions that resulted in injuries to pedestrians.

Those who knew and worked with Suete (prounced Soo-tee) are mourning the loss of a talented colleague who immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong in June. Suete worked as the marketing manager for Fairechild Clothing Co located on Mount Hope Avenue in Dartmouth, not far from where she was killed.

Tabitha Osler is the founder and owner of the small company that designs and manufactures childrens outerwear made from recycled plastic. Osler is deeply saddened by Suetes death.

She showed great passion for the business and was so keen to immigrate, I felt I wanted to support her with all the political changes happening in Hong Kong, said Osler. Suete was really proficient at everything she did. Its very sad she was an adventurous spirit who had travelled the world and was just starting to make some real friends here.

Osler has set up a GoFundMe page to help Suetes parents with their travel expenses to come to Canada to collect their daughter.

Meanwhile, HRM police continue to look into the circumstances around her death the speed limit is 50 km/hr in that 300 block of Pleasant Street where she was killed and Wednesday was a dark, rainy morning. Sadder still, as reported yesterday in the Examiner, Pleasant Street is no stranger to pedestrian fatalities. By our count there have been four in recent years.

In February 2019, 57-year-old Gary Harvey was killed crossing near Tim Hortons by a hit-and-run driver on his way to the community college. The 24-year-old driver, Matthew Gerald Kennedy, was charged with negligence and sentenced to 6 months in jail.

Senseless Deaths

An examination of pedestrian fatalities in HRM over the past two years show charges have not been laid against drivers even though their victims were killed while crossing the street in a designated crosswalk. In three out of the four cases, the fatalities occurred between 8am and 9am as people rush to get to work. Here is a short synopsis of three other pedestrian deaths since 2020.

75-year-old Dr. David Gass, a respected and recently-retired family doctor, was killed by the driver of a pickup truck while walking in a marked crosswalk at the corner of Young Street and Kempt Road on March 16 of this year. The driver was ticketed.

On March 31, 2020, Kathy Warren, a Dartmouth grandmother of three was killed while out on her morning walk as she crossed in a crosswalk at the intersection of Portland Street and Eisner Boulevard. The driver was ticketed.

On February 18, 2020 a 74-year-old woman was struck and killed as she was crossing in a marked crosswalk at the intersection of Dunbrack Street and Clayton Park Road by a pickup truck. The 83-year-old driver was ticketed.

Perhaps its time to pressure those tasked with improving Traffic Safety to step up patrols or reduce speed limits in areas where the most frequent accidents occur. That data is all contained in HRMs Open Data portal although it is not user friendly navigate and could and should be used to inform decisions to prevent more pedestrian deaths.

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Gabrielle Horne. Photo: gabriellehorne.com

Journalists saved my life. When I was one person facing the awesome power of a public institution gone bad, journalists told my story over and over, refusing to go away, refusing to move on, refusing to buy into PR lies, refusing to allow the hospital to get away with it, for 18 years. And they got me through it, and the light they shone made justice possible.

Today and every day, I send all my love to journalists everywhere, whether they are in war zones, or telling hard stories in national newspapers, or covering the local news because all news begins as local.

There is a special place in my heart for my local news enterprise, the Halifax Examiner, reporting home to my heroes Stephen Kimber, Jennifer Henderson, and Tim Bousquet. Take a look. You might find your heroes there, too.

Chris Miller in the Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes Wilderness area. Photo @NSwilderness

I have been a subscriber to the Halifax Examiner since Day 1. I am a subscriber because journalism is essential for our society, to shine light in dark corners and to hold people in power accountable.

I also subscribe to the Halifax Examiner because of its particular focus on key environmental issues in Nova Scotia, including clearcutting, species-at risk, open-pit gold mining, Northern Pulp, and the protection of Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes. These issues matter. And without the reporting by the Halifax Examiner, many would simply go unreported and the public would be non-the-wiser. That situation would be unacceptable. I hope you will subscribe, too.

Halifax Transit Route 401.

This Saturday morning at 7:41am will mark the first time the city has offered weekend transit service to the Black community of East Preston, reports Matthew Byard. That service is offered through Halifax Transit route #401.

Despite this and many other changes that took effect this week to the Halifax Transit system, one East Preston man says the changes are definitely not an overall improvement to the bus service in his community.

Even when they get it half right, they get it wrong, East Preston resident Marshall Williams said.

Click here to read East Preston resident says his community is underserved by Halifax Transit: Even when they get it half right, they get it wrong.'

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Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

A man in his 70s who lived in Nova Scotia Healths Central Zone has died from COVID-19. He is the 108th Nova Scotian to die from the disease. Additionally, the province announced 22 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday.

This morning, the province opened up vaccination appointments for children aged 5-11. Parents and guardians can gohereto make an appointment.

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One of the first lies we tell children is that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words shall never hurt me.

In fact, words can and do hurt, and we all have scars from hurtful things said to us. More, people use their words to organize like-minded people, recruit new people to the ugly cause, and these movements can become not just ugly but despicably violent and even culture-changing.

But how to respond? Ive been thinking a lot about how we react to bad words through the pandemic, as Ive watched people of ill-intent exploit our reasonably open and democratic processes to advance their goals. As I noted Monday, there truly are such bad actors, and more of them than we often acknowledge and Ive just ignored them for fear of amplifying their false rhetoric, which is their aim.

Those bad actors are mostly people who just want to cause harm for its own sake, but some of them are people who are exploiting peoples fears for a straight money motive.

Ann Coulter is perhaps the uber troll, having learned how to make a lot of money by saying outrageous things, and then profiting even further by getting a reaction to her hateful speech. I wrote about this in 2018:

It goes like this: Some marginal student group invites an outrageous speaker and gets student union money to pay them. Students object to the outrageous speaker and to the use of their money to pay them. There are protests, people call for the speaker to be banned from campus. Then, the marginal student group and its marginal political cohorts in the wider world point to the protests as proof! that it is the students, not the outrageous speaker, who hate free speech and everything good. Not-very-intelligent free speech advocates jump on the cause, and the outrageous speaker gets a higher profile, is invited to appear on national TV, sells more books. Rinse, repeat, over and over again for 30 years and counting. Ann Coulter has made an entire career out of this. Now that Peterson dickhead is making millions of dollars with his YouTube vids, and evidently Mehta wants on the gravy train.

A word of advice to students: Youre being played. I dont know what to do about that, but you should be aware of it.

A word of advice for free speech advocates: Hey, maybe look beyond the ivy on your campus walls, eh? Where were you when teachers were being told not to voice opinions about the Glaze Report? Your silence about the moves against BDS activists is deafening. What about free speech for prisoners and political detainees? When you advocate for the free speech rights of only a certain kind of right-wing asshole and ignore the free speech rights of people with progressive causes, youre seen for what you are: a shill.

A word of advice to everyone else: Twenty-something college students dont run the world, and what happens on college campuses is ultimately not very important. Worry not! Most of the students will soon enough graduate into jobs where they will fall in line with the banker and capitalist mafias that actually do run the world, and your desire to use the n-word or hate on transpeople or whatever will be forever protected by law in any case.

A couple of weeks ago, I changed my pinned Tweet (the first one people see when coming to my Twitter account), to this:

A reminder that you dont have to amplify an obvious troll with a small number of followers by responding to their misinformation and bullshit: thats exactly what they want you to do.

Still, while I caution against amplification, I honestly dont know what to about this. I only play an all-knowing wise guy on TV; Im not one in reality.

So when earlier this year Philip Moscovitch pitched a story about a library book that demeaned transpeople, and that some transpeople wanted removed from the library, I was a bit trepidatious: were we going to amplify a stupid book such that wed draw unneeded attention to it? But, as a not all-knowing wise guy, I respected Phils instincts, and he came back with a straight-forward piece of reporting, interviewing people with competing opinions, and exploring the meaning and purpose of libraries from those varied perspectives.

But then, as I feared, the article was picked up by TERFs and other people who hate transpeople and used as proof! that it is transpeople, and not the books author, who hate free speech and everything good. I havent checked the analytics recently, but as I recall the article is one of the top five ever published by the Examiner in terms of number of readers, at least so far as the headline went. And I feel kinda weird about that, as we have no doubt amplified the book, which people tell me is full of hateful and harmful shit (I havent read the book, but I have no reason to disbelieve them).

Evelyn White. Photo: Facebook

I was again a bit trepidatious when this week Evelyn White brought an opinion piece to the Examiner about the library acting as a conduit for bringing legal help to transpeople.

A word about Evelyn. She is hands-down the most stylistically excellent writer I know, and no offence to all the other excellent writers I work with. Just observing Evelyn has hopefully improved my own writing a tiny bit, but Im the first to admit I am still by no means even a capable writer in the stylistic sense.

And Evelyn has a life story, which shes written about in the Examiner and elsewhere. She was trained as a cub reporter by working alongside Randy Shilts, who changed the way we report on gay people and AIDS. Evelyn went on to write a biography of Alice Walker. When she and her partner moved to Halifax, she contacted me to have coffee, I think to school me, which was necessary.

All of which to say, I have immense respect for her professionalism, and I consider her a friend.

As with Philip before her, I was trepidatious with Evelyn once again getting us into this territory, for a couple of reasons: I dont want to needlessly offend people and I dont want to again amplify that damn book. But again as with Philip, I simply deferred to her as a writer and trusted her judgment.

I will say this: the role of libraries is complex, especially for those of us who came of age before the internet. As a child, the library was the one place where I, a nerdy kid with zero social skills, could find refuge from the teasing and ridicule that constituted everyday life for me. I both lost myself in books I discovered at the library, and found myself in books I discovered at the library.

I had no idea I still have no idea how library collections are, er, collected, and how theyre maintained. I know there were lots of truly dangerous books at my local library (were talking about a library in a deeply racist southern community). Probably, if my parents knew what I was potentially exposed to, they might have been a bit worried, but I think in the end part of the finding myself aspect of going to the library was learning how to navigate through the barrage of competing views represented in the collection and coming out the other end as a somewhat rational and ethical person.

But WTFDIK? Maybe its all just damned dumb luck. I once noted that:

It occurs to me now that at least in terms of teenage boys, Ursula Le Guin is the anti-Ayn Rand. Give a teenage boy a copy ofAtlas Shrugged and theres a good chance hell grow up to be one of those horrible people who thinks hes a superman void of any sense of social responsibility and that hes benefitted not at all from a world constructed precisely to enrich men like him at the expense of everyone else. But give a teenage boy a copy of The Dispossessed and theres a good chance hell, well, he wont grow up to be that other guy.

Anyway, in her opinion piece, Evelyn defends the librarys interactions with transpeople, including by highlighting the legal work. She wants to set aside the book issue:

Reflecting on the librarys indisputable support of transgender people, I was perplexed by those who, earlier this year, initiated a boycott against its scheduled Pride events. Their gripe? The refusal of library staff to remove from the collection a single title that some decried as transphobic. Reasonable people can disagree.

As for the contested transgender book, Im riding with a renown mantra that has held wide sway in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community: Take what you need and leave the rest.

These lines are generating a great deal of negative response from transpeople and others, and now my Twitter feed is full of people calling it, and me, out.

I dont have strong opinions one way or the other about removing the book from the library. I dont think its any great affront to free speech to limit whats in the library by having an ethical filter that excludes this one particular book hell, anyone can find ways to obtain the book on the internet, and probably read the whole thing for free. And while Im not trans, so I cant truly know, I cant see how one piece of ugly shit on a shelf somewhere is going to irreparably harm someone, especially when there are other resources in the same building that can help them.

I worry more about amplifying the shit book, which will cause ugly people to organize and feed off each other to make the world that much more ugly. And once again, I feel like the Examiner has inadvertently served as the vehicle to amplify the book, as people opposed to it are not considering the ramifications of making it a cause clbre for the reprehensibles.

So, at the risk of further amplification of the shit book, Ill accept pitches from transpeople who want to write about this, select the best, and well pay our usual rate.

I have no doubt, none at all, that this is not a satisfactory response to those now attacking me. So it goes.

This all deeply saddens me.

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The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.

Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven;

And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

And Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord.

And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.

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The latest pedestrian to be killed in a marked crosswalk was a 27-year-old immigrant starting a new life in Dartmouth - Halifax Examiner