Showing posts with label Nova Scotia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nova Scotia. Show all posts

Friday, November 23, 2007

Nova Scotia Imitates Alberta 2


In another example that the old neo-con ideal is not dead yet, Nova Scotia like Alberta is once again looking at P3's as a solution to long term funding of infrastructure. Despite its failure in that province previously. And like Alberta, which has a labour boom while Nova Scotia has a labour deficit, the costs will rise because of scarcity of labour. Those costs will be passed on to taxpayers if not now then over the life of the P3 agreement.

Once hailed as the new vision of the right, privatization, P3's and contracting out have proven to be a billion dollar boon-doogle and not a solution to rising costs. They are in fact simply taxpayers paying private companies to provide services that make them profit, by cutting wages and providing poorer quality, and they end up costing us more in the long run. It looked good on paper, but as with most of these ideas from the seventies they have proven their time has come and gone.

In fact in Canada it is your and my pension funds that paying for these P3's. So we get screwed twice as taxpayers.

Nova Scotia Throne Speech eyes privately funded roads, bridges

The Canadian Press

HALIFAX — Nova Scotia's Conservative government has opened the fall session of the legislature with a Throne Speech promising a return to public-private partnerships in constructing roads, schools and other facilities.

In a document entitled “Throne Speech for the New Nova Scotia,” the government says it has learned from the mistakes made when a previous Liberal government introduced the P3 concept that built 30 schools in the 1990s.

The government says with a $12.4-billion debt, it has to find ways to reduce the costs of building and maintaining public roadways and buildings.

The speech estimates the province is facing a long-term bill of $8-billion to build and maintain infrastructure.

The document also says a new department will be created that is focused solely on the environment, along with a new Ministry of Labour and Workforce Development to help deal with a shortage of skilled labour.

The government is also promising new education standards with primary attention paid to mathematics and literacy and says it will continue a freeze on university tuition with more reductions planned.

SEE

Nova Scota Imitates Alberta


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Nova Scota Imitates Alberta


Alberta has the most regressive labour laws in Canada. It long ago banned hospital workers, including nurses, right to strike. That of course did not stop those workers from going on strike. The right to strike is an essential workers right and is defended by the International Labour Organization as such. It is as essential as the right to unionize.

If governments banned the right to unionize it would be seen as the actions of an authoritarian state. The same goes for banning the right to strike.
Ironically unions were banned in the 19th Century as 'criminal conspiracies' to limit trade. It was several years after Canada became a nation that Britain changed its laws and Canada followed suit. That did not stop workers from organizing unions, as secret societies; like the Knights of Labor. It meant workers on the job organized, and went on strike because that is their right as workers. All we have to sell is our labour or our time, our presence on the job.

In Alberta hospital workers were declared an essential service that still did not prevent AUPE or the Nurses union from going out on 'illegal' strikes. And win wage and benefit gains.

In Nova Scotia the hospital employers are running TV ads, I have satellite so I get to see them when I watch the CFL or NHL on CBC Halifax, claiming it hurt patients and is in everyones 'best' interest to end the right to strike. They claim other provinces do it and it has brought labour peace. Actually they meant to say appeasement. However that being said these employers are just another arm of government. They are government appointees or hirelings. So while one arm of the government, the legislature, brings in anti-worker anti-union anti-strike laws the other arm of the government, its employer association running the public hospitals, does the PR for the law.

The fact is that if the employer, who is the government, would fund hospitals and medical services properly then workers would be assured of proper wage and benefit increases, and proper hours of work. Instead the employer, which is the government, wants to cut wages, benefits and contract out work, split shifts, end seniority etc. etc.

A group that does not face these draconian attacks is of course the Doctors who are a business monopoly. There are few doctors strikes in Canada, and if they do occur they are short lived because governments assure doctors their services are paid for. Then they turn around and cut services in hospitals and cut other workers wages and benefits and tell them to hold the line.

The reality is that mediation only works between equals. In this case the government and its hospital administration view doctors as indispensable, and other workers as dispensable. If they didn't they would fund hospitals fully so all workers got the pay, benefits and hours of work they deserve. If that was the case there would be no need to strike.

Mediation does not work. Nor does denying workers the right to strike. They will, as history has shown, strike when they get cheated and screwed whether it is against the law or not.

What is interesting is that this balanced and pro-union article is from a Business Journal.

Union Dues: Anti-strike bill 'political posturing'
BY BRIAN FLINN, TRANSCONTINENTAL MEDIA
The Nova Scotia Business Journal

Health workers, the NDP and the Liberals are lined up against the government's highest-profile bill as the Nova Scotia legislature ends a seven-month summer break. Premier Rodney MacDonald said he's pushing ahead with the doomed anti-strike legislation because Nova Scotians deserve to hear it debated and find out how their MLAs vote. But he's not putting his minority government's survival on the line.

"There won't be any confidence votes this fall," MacDonald told reporters.

The government has been working on a bill to replace health strikes with arbitration since a brief IWK walkout earlier this year. Health- and community-care workers don't want to lose collective bargaining rights, and plan to rally outside Province House today while Lt.-Gov. Mayann Francis reads the speech from the throne.

"We're pleased the opposition will defeat this bill," said Joan Jessome, president of the Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union. "But it can come back again and again. We need to make our point strong and clear enough to put this to rest."

The premier said he does plan to revive the bill later. "I'm a patient person," he said.

Both the Liberals and the NDP plan to defeat the bill at the first opportunity, when it goes to a second reading vote. MacDonald said the Liberals are "stuck in the past," while the NDP is standing up for special interests.

"They receive a lot of funding from the unions. They generally tend to be the biggest contributor to the NDP and most of their candidates," he said. "It's unfortunate; you don't put that ahead of health and safety."

NDP Leader Darrell Dexter said MacDonald is trying to distract attention from bigger problems in health care, such as emergency-room closings and the shortage of nursing-home beds. He said it's unfortunate the government is wasting some of the few days it allows the legislature to sit, on a doomed bill. "This bill is purely a product of political posturing," Dexter said.

Liberal Leader Stephen McNeil said he doesn't hear Nova Scotians pleading for anti-strike legislation. He said his party wants to co-operate with health workers, not take away their rights. "Where's the crisis?" McNeil asked. "I have yet to understand why the premier and the government are hanging their hats on this issue."

The House has to sit for only two days to avoid the label of the laziest legislature in Canada for a fourth year in a row. Prince Edward Island's House sat just 24 days this year, one more than Nova Scotia. – The Daily News


EXTRA: Strike threats useful warning system
By Brian Flinn, Transcontinental Media

Taking the right to strike away from health workers would damage an important safety mechanism and jeopardize the care of Nova Scotians, according to a new study by the Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Saint Mary's University professors Judy and Larry Haiven wrote that health workers know when the system is being pushed beyond tolerable limits and can signal it by threatening to strike. They said it's similar to the "red cord" used to stop assembly lines when something goes wrong in a factory.

"Health-care workers must have a way of indicating that the conditions under which they work do not overstress them or the quality of health-care delivery," the Haivens wrote. "Thus, in the health-care system, the red cord can be said to be the power of health-care workers to threaten to, and if necessary, withhold their labour."

Labour Minister Mark Parent has argued a modern health-care system cannot tolerate work stoppages. The report says "management by stress" now predominates in health care, and an outlet is more important than ever. "If politicians and health-care administrators insist on running a system so close to the bone, then the ability of workers to strike, to pull the red cord, as it were, is an essential system mechanism to ensure patient safety in the long run." – The Daily News


And this is from the Dominion Blog

November 23, 2007

NS Government Faces Heat Over Anti-Strike Bill

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In one of the more polite demonstrations I've attended, a union coalition lead by the Nova Scotia General Employees Union staged a sidewalk rally of about 500 in front of the province's legislature on Thursday. While members of the crowd, which included a strong contingent of nurses and healthcare workers, heckled Premier Rodney Macdonald's minority government (top pic), the military guard-laden arrival of Nova Scotia's Lt.-Gov Mayann Francis, due to read her first speech from the throne, on the other side of the building was met with no interruption (bottom pic). After Macdonald's assertion that the unions were being "disrespectful" for holding a demonstration during the ceremonial speech from the throne, the union leadership responded by urging demonstrators to remain quiet outside of the legislature while Francis made her speech.

The rally was called in response to a bill due to be introduced by the minority tories banning the right to strike for the 32,000 healthcare workers in Nova Scotia. Macdonald had promised to introduce the bill in May following a one-day strike at a children's hospital in Halifax. The bill seems to be on the verge of being junked as a result of the union campaign, as both the Liberals and NDP have pledged to vote against it, were it to be introduced by the minority government. As a result, Macdonald has admitted he is unwilling to see his government fall as a result of the proposed anti-strike legislation.

Regardless of this apparent defeat, the throne speech outlined the Tory government's plans to establish more publicly funded, private health facilities in the province.


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Thursday, August 02, 2007

Strange Sea Creatures


HAMLET

And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Scientists back from a three-week probe in the deep waters off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland discovered a surprising diversity more than 2 1/2 kilometres below the surface.

"Not so long ago, these deep waters were thought to be barren, and what we're looking at and finding is that they're quite rich," said Ellen Kenchington, one of 20 scientists who participated in the research mission aboard the coast guard ship Hudson.

This was deep-water fauna, creatures of the inky blackness and the stuff of Jules Verne: The metre-long dumbo octopus (so named for its prominent fins); the xenophyphore, a single-celled organism better known as "the Green Blob"; and the long-nosed chimera.

Amidst the weird and wonderful are three types of coral key to understanding climate change: Primoa, Paragorgia, and Keratosis, also known as seacorn, bubblegum, and bamboo coral respectively.

An octopus with ears like an elephant? Scallops that hang like bats? Yup, they're real and they live off the East Coast.

The creatures were found after Canadian marine scientists fitted the coast guard ship Hudson with Canada's most powerful deep-sea diving robot, and sent it to explore water too deep for humans.

The octopus was spotted on the second dive at 2,500 metres. When the robot got close enough, the researchers could see the metre-long octopus had fins near its eyes.

"It looks like Dumbo the elephant," Kenchington said, showing off some of the more than 3,000 digital images, hundreds of hours of videos and dozens of live samples taken during the research trip.

It was a creature that had never been seen in the Atlantic before, but Kenchington later found out one had been spotted in the Pacific Ocean.

The robot picked up images of many other creatures, including orange scallops hanging from underwater cliffs, and yellow and pink bubblegum-coloured coral.

More than half of the dives were below the 1,000-metre threshold, and they discovered "at least a dozen" species not previously found in Canadian waters. Particularly striking, she said, was the discovery of a type of bubblegum coral far from the nearest known colony of that species. The largest sea-floor invertebrate, bubblegum coral can live hundreds of years and grow at least a metre off of the bottom.

"How did it get there?" Dr. Kenchington mused. "How are they connected to the nearest neighbours, which are hundreds of miles away?"

SEE:


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Monday, June 11, 2007

Return of the Progressive Conservatives

On CTV's Question Period yesterday ousted Nova Scotia Conservative MP Bill Casey called himself an Independent "Progressive" Conservative, "emphasis on the progressive", he said.

Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams also declares himself a "Progressive" Conservative in opposition to the Harpocrites and is carrying out a Anybody But Conservative federal election campaign.

Add to that this weekends rejection of the Conservative Governments equalization bait and switch by the "Progressive" Conservative Premier of Nova Scotia and
we see the beginnings of a new movement to recognize the political reality of truly "Progressive" Conservatives.

The party that former Nova Scotia PC leader Peter Mackay opportunistically scuttled,
after agreeing in writing not to, in order to try to be leader of the political Frankenstein known as the Reform/Alliance/PC/Conservatives.

Bill Casey is breathing a sigh of relief after Premier Rodney MacDonald called on Nova Scotia members of Parliament yesterday to vote against the federal budget.

"Premier MacDonald called me today and told me," the Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley MP said in a phone interview from his Amherst home yesterday.

"I was just really surprised," he said.

Casey won support from many Nova Scotians last week after voting against the federal budget.

He was immediately tossed out of the party after the vote.

Casey now considers himself an Independent Progressive Conservative.

Also glad is Progressive Conservative Association of Nova Scotia president Scott Armstrong.

"It makes things very easy for people in northern Nova Scotia if the premier and our MP Bill Casey are singing from the same song sheet," Armstrong said.

"Bill Casey's really done Nova Scotia a favour."


With the Liberals abandoning Nova Central, MacKays riding, to Elizabeth May and the Greens, her brand of "Progressive" conservatism will likely appeal to Conservative voters disgusted with the Harpocrites and Howdy Doody MacKay.

In Nova Scotia, satisfaction with Ottawa declined from 50 per cent in February to 37 per cent in May, while dissatisfaction rose from 41 per cent to 56 per cent.


A Red tide could sweep the Maritimes next federal election, not just Liberals but Red Tories; the "Progressive" conservatives, Casey, May etc.


Nova Scotians have long memories – and the Conservative government knows it. There are people down here who are still bitter over the fact that Stanfield, the late Progressive Conservative leader, never became prime minister. To this day Stanfield is commonly referred to in these parts as "the best prime minister Canada never had."

The Tories' expulsion of Casey, who was first elected in 1988, has upset Nova Scotians.

People say they elected him to represent their interests, not play the part of a trained seal in Ottawa.

In Truro and elsewhere in the riding, Casey is being cast as the quiet-spoken constituency man who stood up to the bullies in Ottawa.

"It seems to have struck a nerve because I'm getting emails from all over Canada. ... I am truly overwhelmed because all I am doing is asking the government of Canada to honour a signed agreement," Casey told the Star yesterday.

Meanwhile, angry callers to talk radio shows want to know why fellow Nova Scotia Tory MPs Peter MacKay, who is foreign affairs minister, and Gerald Keddy (South Shore-St. Margaret's) didn't have the guts to stick up for their home province.



See:

Tory Cuts For All

You Tell 'em Danny Boy

Red Tories Are Progressives

Conservatives New Nanny State

No Room for Red Tories

Canada's New Progressive Right

Elizabeth May and Red Tories

Liberals The New PC's

PC=Liberals


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