Keeping the ship afloat in Nova Scotia politics: Advice for a new premier-designate

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Dear Mr. Premier-designate,

I see that you're 48 years old. Just a young guy. I voted before you were born. I've been watching governments come and go ever since. Here's what I learned. There may be something you can use to keep the ship afloat in this storm-tossed province.

You're eager to act, to make your mark. Here's my first counsel: Don't be too eager.

Just as curiosity killed the cat, impatience, even for the most virtuous of reasons, sank many a premier. Look at Darrell Dexter. He was genuinely concerned about jobs and our aging population. But he went at it too hard, too fast, got stuck in some bad ruts and it was game over.

Contemplate this: Your most important decisions, whatever the issue, will be whether to act sooner or later, whether to shoot now or rag the puck.

In your case, I have some firm advice: Rag the puck.

When, during the election campaign, you declined to make any promises you couldn't keep, I thought, "That's a smart young fellow." But then you went on to make some -- not so much that you can't keep, but that you shouldn't have made in such sharp terms: Trashing the health boards, and giving Nova Scotia Power a few whacks.

Any too-fast moves on these before you have your ducks in a row could spin backwards so hard that, two years from now, people could be calling the Dexter government the good old days.

And take with a grain of salt calls by spin-doctors, the media and others who say you have to move quickly and decisively to establish your "brand." I have a saying to cover that. If the choice is between doing nothing and doing the wrong thing, do nothing. You can always do something tomorrow. If you do the wrong thing, you'll never shake it.

Here's more. Waste no time dumping blame on the previous government. Even if blame is due, blaming is old stuff. But in fact the story here is different. Dexter was actually righting the ship before your big wave took him down.

The fruits of Dexter's agonized labours are actually there for you to pick. There's a Yarmouth ferry coming after all, the finances (despite your campaign trail claims) are under better control than they've been for a long time, the Irving contract and the Halifax convention centre (despite both sucking too much public money) will produce jobs during your tenure, there's a promising inquiry on the rural economy at work, and one on that troubling business of open-pen salmon farming, which you would do well to speed up.

So, if you want to keep things level, you'll acknowledge that the NDP moved forward on many fronts -- including, crucially, on health care -- and carry on from there. Any instinct to chuck it all and start all over will be a move backward for both the province and yourself.

Or consider one that's in the news already: Efficiency Nova Scotia. Like many, I was skeptical about this outfit. Now it's getting kudos as a unique -- that is, independent -- organization, and is taking off. It's in high demand by the public and getting results. It's doing what I've been waiting 20 years for someone to do -- rolling out solar hot water and heating throughout the province. Taking its funding off the power bill and putting it under NSP sounds like crippling it. I'll be very cranky if that happens.

Here's something else you must do. Unlike the back-of-the-envelope nature of most of your electoral platform, this one is more firm. It's the question of poverty and associated issues. In 2009, you yourself called for a poverty-reduction strategy. The NDP made some moves, but not enough. See to it that you follow through.

And among the other inescapable ones -- education, environment -- it would be to your credit to pay attention to this one: arts and culture, which has a reach, as much economic as cultural, that can be surprising. The financial troubles of NSCAD will figure into that. Look it over.

You have good instincts, Mr. Premier-designate. But here's a kink. I don't trust your party, and maybe you shouldn't either. It took it 30 years to get rid of that dirty trust fund that did so much to destabilize Nova Scotia politics. Some say it could still crawl out to bite you. Meanwhile, your party has always had more career creepers than others. If they're around you now, be doubly wary.

A niggling question is how much the Liberal party has changed since the 1990s when Premier John Savage was almost overthrown by the internal forces of old corruption. If it has changed, you can thank the NDP for making corruption unfashionable.

Keep all that in mind. Now, go. Good luck.

This article was first published in the Chroncile Herald.

Photo: Nsliberal/Wikimedia Commons

Exploding some of the myths about gentrification

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| October 20, 2013



Title: Exploding some of the myths about gentrification Album: Redeye: Vancouver Cooperative RadioLength: 15:46 minutes (14.44 MB)

David Madden argues that gentrification is not synonymous with urban renewal. Madden is an assistant professor in the Sociology Department and the Cities Program at the London School of Economics. He’s the author of a recent article in the Guardian, Gentrification doesn’t trickle down to help everyone. David Madden speaks with Redeye host Jane Williams.

To find out more about Redeye, check out our website.

'Disappearing Palestine' ads uncontroversial in exposing Israel's nature despite desperate efforts of Israel lobby

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In October, 2013, 10 ads went up in Vancouver transit stations showing loss of “Jewish land” in the Middle East since 1000 BCE. It turns out that in the past three thousand years, “Jewish land” has shrunk by a factor of five or so. The images are truly pathetic: from covering the whole area, blue-washed “Jewish land” is now reduced to the State of Israel -- and not even all of that.

These ads seem to be an answer to ads put up in transit stations and on sides of buses, in September, 2013, by the Palestine Awareness Coalition, called “Disappearing Palestine.”  PAC -- of which Independent Jewish Voices-Vancouver is a proud member -- had the more modest aim of showing Palestinian loss of land only since 1946. In three stages, the bright green territory of Palestine has been carved away until by 2012 it’s only a small patch called Gaza and freckles of discontinuous territory in the West Bank.

You just can’t disagree more than that.

The response ads were put up by a group called StandWithUs, which says it is “supporting Israel around the world.” SWU has countered pro-Palestinian advertising in several U.S. cities, including Denver, Houston and Helena and Missoula, Montana. Talking about “Disappearing Palestine,” SWU’s CEO Roz Rothstein said, “A combination of anti-Israel groups pretend to be pro-Palestinian [but] the bottom line is they don’t want an Israel. They want Israel to be gone.”

The original Vancouver ads were designed and paid for by IJV and six actual pro-Palestinian groups: Boycott Israeli Apartheid Campaign, Building Bridges, Canada Palestine Association, Canada Palestine Support Network, Seriously Free Speech and Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, later joined by Canadian Friends of Sabeel / Near East Cultural & Educational Foundation.

We are members of IJV-Vancouver, and we and our friends believe our maps are as accurate as they can be, given the streamlining of advertising graphics. A professor of political science at the University of British Columbia said our ads simply showed “statements of fact,” but his Arabic name, Hani Faris, disqualified him as an unprejudiced expert by a writer in the Jewish Independent. (Could we make the same criticism of Alan Dershowitz -- or Roz Rothstein? ). Our design is simply a graphic illustration of statements like this:

In over 60 years, around 700 Jewish communities have been established in Israel's pre-1967 borders -- but just seven for Arab citizens (and those were built in the Negev for “concentrating” the Bedouin population). The average Palestinian community inside Israel has lost up to 75% of its land since 1948, while a quarter of all Palestinian citizens are internally displaced, their property confiscated for use by the state and Jewish towns” (Ben White, The New Statesman, February, 2005).

Much of the lands in question were actually not taken over in the name of the state, since this could be construed as illegal confiscation, but they were handed over in trust to the Jewish National Fund, for state and individual Jewish use.  We thought the fact of Disappearing Palestine might be a new and alarming piece of information for many in our intended Canadian audience, and we never thought our maps were controversial. Similar graphics exist by the hundreds on the internet and have been the basis of billboard and transit advertising at many US sites, and this same graphic is used by Wikipedia to illustrate its article on Palestine.

But we were wrong. As with other aspects of Israeli policy, our presentation of sober fact touched a nerve, and the “Loss of Jewish Land” response ads were quite unhinged. The first panel shows a sprawling mass of territory identified as an “Ancient Jewish Kingdom” of 1000 BCE, while the second shows a territory easily three times as large as the present state, identified as the “Jewish Homeland” of 1920, i.e., all of British-controlled Mandate Palestine (regardless of the actual minuscule Jewish population). The third panel shows the present State of Israel with Gaza and the West Bank identified as “disputed territories” -- a breathtaking act of geopolitical chutzpah.

We in IJV naively thought we were educating the Canadian public: the land had disappeared, and we didn’t even blame any entity for its disappearance. But the SWU response told us we had done something terrible. The backlash was vicious -- as it so often is -- and quite out of proportion. It came not from a Jewish community, but from a vengeful, bullying fringe that can be relied on to respond fiercely to any criticism of Israeli policy.

In a curious way, the ferocity of the pro-Israel response guaranteed the success of our campaign better than anything we could have done ourselves. Without it, our campaign would have attracted little notice: The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) even warned, “Countering these ads in the public domain (on buses, for example) would only raise the profile and lend credibility to these marginal groups.”

They called our coalition “marginal.” We couldn’t be called self-hating Jews, since only one of the groups was Jewish, but we were nonetheless called anti-Semites who want to destroy the state of Israel. Besides, we were accused of timing our ads so they would appear over the Jewish High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. (In fact we had no control over the timing. But the interval between the two holy days is traditionally a time for reflection and repentance.)

Mitchell Gropper, chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, called the ads a provocative attack on Jewish people that would incite hatred. “This is of grave concern to our community at large, because the ads make the use of the buses unwelcome and unsafe,” Gropper continued, linking it with terrorist attacks in Israel that often target buses. The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto agreed that TransLink was running ads “that are provocative and incite hatred and contempt.” Stephen Schachter, the co-chair for CIJA, told us that there were "members of the Jewish community who say they are not going to use transit and are very concerned about safety issues as a result of this kind of advertising."

We found some amusement in our antagonists’ metaphorical frothing at the mouth:

They accused us of wanting to wipe out the state of Israel when we were claiming that that was almost precisely what Israel had already done to Palestinian territory -- a trenchant instance of the old Hebrew adage, “The accuser accuses himself..”

B’nai Brith Canada hinted at indecent exposure in the title of their article:  “Exposé: Whose Behind Anti-Israel Ads in Vancouver.”

Liana Shlien of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies told us that Palestinian land could not be disappearing because, “In truth, an official state of Palestine had never existed, while Jewish contiguous presence on the land is a record of fact.”

Others lathered on the same stock distortions and misstatements that are regularly used to silence criticism of Israel. To all of these we responded that Palestine is universally understood as the name of a geographical region in southwest Asia, on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, inhabited for centuries and without interruption by a people known as Palestinians, who are of different faiths: Muslim, Christian and Jewish; and who assumed a predominantly Palestinian Arab culture in the seventh century. All of these elements, Palestinian land ownership, the indigenous people of the land and the indigenous culture, are disappearing, as our four maps show. To say or imply that these things cannot be disappearing because the boundaries of a Palestinian state have not yet been set by an occupying power and a subject population is the sheerest casuistry.

IJV and our coalition partners raised more money, allowing us to keep the wall mural up for an extra month. Our opponents changed tactics and became vandals, tearing down the ads three times after we had them put up again. At least we assume it was our opponents (or some small subset of them); we couldn’t imagine ordinary thugs taking such offense at our images.

While the SWU ads are up, we’re thinking about what to do next. Unlike the borders of Palestine or Israel, one thing is sure: our efforts will continue.

Marty and Martha Roth

IJV-Vancouver

rothx002[at]umn.edu