CrowsNest
In the days of sail, mariners would ‘take watch’ in a basket-shaped crow’s nest, mounted just below the top of the mast.
We’ve been keeping watch from the CrowsNest for more than a decade.
Now, we’re starting to share what we see. Sometimes our posts will be quirky, sometimes sad, sometimes insightful, and sometimes wrong. We’ll do our best to be relevant. Now and again, we might even steer you safely into port.
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Looking for East Coast shelter from global tsunami(s)
Well, Atlantic Canadians certainly live in interesting times. President Donald Trump is turning global geopolitics into a much-watched Game Show. Global stock markets boil and roil in his wake. The major Western defence alliance (NATO) appears to be crumbling. The US has become an enemy of foreign aid. Its Secretary of Health, Robert Kennedy, is…
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It’s the New Abnormal – Get Used to It
If you like to scroll through the news for comfort food, chow down on the coverage of the March 9 convention confirming Mark Carney as the new leader of the Liberal party of Canada – and prime minister in waiting. Former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, still spry and sharp at 91, delivered a convention speech…
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Canada puts pizzazz into politics – now, let’s have some good government
If Mark Carney can launch his federal Liberal leadership candidacy on a US late-night talk show, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston might as well announce new provincial legislation at an Ontario election campaign event. Both Carney and Houston reckoned they would get more media coverage by staging events in unconventional venues, and they were right.…
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Dealing with Canada’s grumpiest (and largest) customer
If President Donald Trump is a bully, as many Canadian politicians and pundits claim, so what? The accusation will not ease the economic impact of any tariffs the US imposes on Canadian exports. In that context, Monday’s stay of execution on Trump tariffs, now delayed for at least a month, comes as an immense relief…
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In the wake of Justin Trudeau’s resignation, a nation awaits renewal
Justin Trudeau did the right thing for Canada by announcing he would step down as prime minister. While the country, and his own caucus, grew increasingly critical of Prime Minister Trudeau, he and his senior ministers were hard-pressed to deal with any issue except that of his faltering leadership. Here’s hoping Canada’s next duly elected…
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Posthaste or postscript at the Post Office?
It’s tough to see national institutions stumble on their way to the future or lose their place in history. Canadian railways were once seen as a proud symbol of nationhood, ribbons of steel connecting people from coast-to-coast. Today, Canadian railways are often depicted as tools of 19th century colonial exploitation. Say what you will about…
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‘Climate change? Never heard of it’
If you’re looking for odd connections in a chaotic world, consider the Nova Scotia election campaign which ended Nov. 26, and the COP29 climate change meeting which wrapped up a few days earlier in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Delegates to the multinational summit at Baku, like candidates in the Nova Scotia election, showed little…
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Trump, trade, and tirades
Say what you will about Donald Trump, the president-elect of the United States. Just don’t call him predictable. What is more predictable is the outcome of his policies, if implemented as promised. Let’s start with trade, the bilateral US-Canadian issue that’s most important to Atlantic Canada. Trump says he will impose a blanket 10 to…
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So you’re a Canadian, right?
Freddie Freeman, who grew up in southern California and plays first base for the Los Angeles Dodgers, is getting more Canadian every day. Canadians started to seriously claim him as one of their own when he hit the first walk-off Grand Slam in World Series history on Oct. 25, in the opening game of the…
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Election season is coming at us – let’s get serious about it
To many voters, election campaigns seem like a toxic brew – one part popularity contest, two parts mud-slinging match. But we dismiss elections at our peril in Atlantic Canada, where voters in three of the region’s four provinces will go to the polls within a year. (PEI gets a pass, for now.) A federal campaign…
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𝙏𝙞𝙥 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙚𝙧𝙫𝙞𝙘𝙚, 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙩𝙖𝙭
Everyone talks about ‘tipping fatigue” but no one’s done anything about it – until now. The Quebec government has tabled legislation which would – among other things – force restaurants to calculate tips based on the pre-tax cost of a meal. This idea makes sense, even if the legislation does not. There is something downright…
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DFO finds its voice, but its leader is still lost
After weeks of deafening silence over allegations that it is doing too little to enforce illegal and out-of-season lobster fishing in the Maritimes, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) has finally found its voice. In an unsigned letter to The Chronicle Herald, DFO said it is deploying a “suite of assets” to monitor indigenous…
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‘A smallish summer debate … the best kind’
Between late summer hurricane alerts, our CrowsNest team marvels at small mysteries. Like, how did two athletes (Ethan Katzberg and Camryn Rogers) from hockey-mad Canada win gold medals in the Olympic hammer throw? Isn’t the sport properly dominated by suspiciously muscled giants from former Soviet bloc nations? And why are baseball’s Blue Jays emulating the…
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The last of KC’s boys dies, but not without leaving a legacy
James Kenneth (JK) Irving and his brothers Arthur and Jack were raised the same way and cut from the same cloth. Like their father, the legendary New Brunswick business giant K.C. Irving, they got up early, shied away from public attention, and often showed up unannounced to inspect the family operations in energy, forestry, shipbuilding,…
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Oh no! Is the ‘old normal’ rearing its hoary head?’
Atlantic Canada didn’t become a cool place to live after COVID-19 lockdowns started to take effect in 2020. What enticed thousands of Canadians to move here was safety, not hipster vibes. They were attracted by relatively low COVID-incidence rates in Canada’s four easternmost provinces. Atlantic Canada’s attractiveness to newcomers was then part of a ‘new…
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Halifax – how to build a great city
Today, Haligonians seem less worried about the city of the future than they are about the crisis of the moment – homelessness fueled by a housing shortage and a population which is growing by four per cent per year. This narrow focus is troublesome, because we now risk creating a city we might not want…
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Remembering Arthur Irving, an old school corporate leader
Arthur Irving, the New Brunswick industrialist who died this month at the age of 93, used to have his name listed in the Saint John phone book, back when phone books were still a thing. That way, when an Irving Oil customer had a complaint, they could call him directly. That says a lot about…
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Creating chaos – Canada’s new style of government
Say what you will about Canada’s premiers, but don’t accuse them of being reliably boring defenders of the status quo. Often, they sound less like governing political leaders than they do like critics of the institutions they represent. This is most obvious in Western Canada, but the trend is spreading eastward. Unfortunately, this is not…
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Sinking funds and sinking feelings
Celebrate the sinking fund! OK, that command might ask too much of Chrystia Freeland, the federal Minister Responsible for Almost Everything. After all, sinking funds – accounts in which governments store money to pay off future debts – won’t send happy voters to the polls. Instead, the funds help governments manage their finances soundly. …
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Yikes, ‘Sitting is the new smoking’
You’d better stand up to take in this news, because sitting is bad for you. Putting your posterior in a chair is now added to the growing list of indulgences – drinking a droplet of malt scotch, eating a potato chip, driving a car instead of walking – that can kill you or worse. Indeed,…
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Putting our communities back in the newspapers
In 1874, 18-year-old William Dennis ponied up $50 to buy one share of the fledging Morning Herald, which published its first edition on January 14 of that year. Dennis, a British immigrant who also toiled as a junior reporter, was one of 88 investors in the new venture. Newspaper ownership, then as now, was a…
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Brian Mulroney, Atlantic Canada’s Prime Minister
Brian Mulroney made Canada better, much better. I personally bore witness to his passion for transforming Canada into a stronger nation during the six years I spent working in the Mulroney PMO, as a young recruit fresh out of his alma mater at St. FX. The Prime Minister’s passion for nation-building was contagious and inspiring.…
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OK, Boomer, your time is up
Life’s been good to Baby Boomers, the generation of post-war kids born between 1946 and 1965. There were so darned many of them, born in the economic sweet spot following World War II, that they once comprised 40 per cent of the Canadian population. Given their demographic might, and voting power, it’s no surprise government…
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A Citizens’ Storm Response does Nova Scotia proud
The first (and hopefully last) February blizzard of 2024 buried roadways across much of Nova Scotia, and given that the province boasts 28,340 kilometres of public roads, no one could have reasonably expected to be dug out in hurry. After all, the three-day storm that wouldn’t go away dumped as much as 150 centimetres of…
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The Freedom Convoy and the perils of government overreach
Kudos to Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley, who ruled that the federal government erred by invoking the Emergencies Act (EA) in February 2022 to control the ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest near Parliament Hill. Yes, if you lived or worked near Parliament Hill in the early winter months of 2022, you had to endure bouncy castles, diesel…
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Atlantic Canada holds a winning hand in 2024 – Can we play it?
With wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, we could use a little good news in our small corner of the planet in the New Year. And Canada’s Public Policy Forum (PPF) has provided some. The PPF, a think tank dedicated to the notion that good public policy can improve the lives of Canadians,…
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New lobster crisis, just like the old lobster crises
It’s hardly news, the current decline in lobster catches in southwestern Nova Scotia. In 1873, W.F. Witcher, the Canadian Commissioner of Fisheries, said American lobster harvesters had overfished the species, a trend also evident in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. “Excessive fishing has exhausted the lobster fishery along the north coast of the United States,…
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At Province House – it’s time to stop wringing hands and ringing bells
Everybody talks about reform of the legislative process at Province House in Nova Scotia, but only NDP Leader Claudia Chender proposes to do something real about it. Good for her. Ms. Chender’s call for commonsense reform at Province House, with fixed hours during scheduled fall and spring sessions of the legislature, was renewed following the…
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‘Billy Jean King laces up her skates’
Billy Jean King, the tennis legend and so much more, was in Toronto this month to help launch the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL). If King’s starring role in the PWHL event seems strange to you, you’ve missed half a century of sports history. On Sept. 18, 1973, King handily beat Bobby Riggs – a…
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Atlantic Canada’s once-in-a-generation opportunity … let’s seize it
We, the watchers of the CrowsNest, were happy to see Donald Savoie back in the public eye this month. In a commentary published in The Chronicle Herald, the eminence grise of Atlantic Canada’s thinking classes argues (as do we) that the federal carbon tax has a disproportionate and unfair impact on this region, with its…
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These guys should talk – more!
Chances are pretty good you’ve never heard of the Council of Atlantic Premiers (CAP), though it’s been around since 2000. CAP, with its mandate to “promote Atlantic Canadian interests in national issues”, more or less slept through its first two decades of existence. Fortunately, that’s starting to change. In May, the premiers launched the Atlantic…
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Yes, there is a fairer way than a carbon tax to go green
In Atlantic Canada, tens of thousands of rural residents – many of them older and living on limited incomes in an inflationary era – depend on oil to heat their homes. In theory, they can spend $30,000 they don’t have – to qualify for $10,000 or so in government subsidies they might get someday –…
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In the culture wars, let’s have more Merle and less Jason
Merle Haggard wrote better songs than Okie from Muskogee – up here in the CrowsNest, we always hum along to Sing Me Back Home. But Okie is still Haggard’s signature song. Released in the late 1960s, it staked out middle America’s position on the Vietnam war. “We don’t smoke marijuana in MuskogeeWe don’t take our…
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Finding a decent, affordable place to live (in Vienna)
Vienna, home to almost two million people, is depicted as a Shangri La by international media, and its brand is about more than coffee shops and its famous opera house. The Austrian capital, the world’s most livable city according to The Economist, is also a place in which ordinary people can find an affordable place…
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Newspapers that forgot to stay new
Two pictures can say 10,000 words. The one on the left shows New York’s Park Avenue at Easter 1900. The one on the right was taken on the same thoroughfare at Easter 1913. The juxtaposed photos tell us a lot about the advent of the automobile more than a Century ago, when horse-drawn conveyances rapidly…
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Competition and the high cost of everything
According to a recent article in The Economist, Canada and Australia have much in common – starting with resource-intensive economies, sparsely-populated territories, and dominant global infrastructure companies. That’s the good news, in a way. Resource sectors help make both economies hum; and expertise in managing and financing infrastructure renewal is a key asset as floods,…
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David Johnson’s lineage
For those of us in the CrowNest, keeping watch from the seas off the East Coast, David Johnston is one of those privileged guys who buys into and benefits from the Laurentian Thesis. Johnston, as you’ll recall, is the special rapporteur appointed by Justin Trudeau to probe foreign interference in Canadian elections. The Laurentian thesis,…
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COVID-19 – it’s time to understand the full story
On March 22, 2020, Nova Scotia declared a state of emergency under which the government was empowered to order people to “stay the blazes home” (unless they needed essential items like groceries). Gatherings of more than five people were forbidden. Provincial parks and beaches were closed. (Yes, police officers patrolled public parks and gave out…
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A fifth horseman comes riding in, again
If you’re following breaking news about Artificial Intelligence (AI), you might think technology has just joined conquest, war, famine, and death as the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. Truth is people have feared apocalyptic technological change since the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press around 1436. Suddenly, books and pamphlets could be…
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Women Talking, Women Working
Women Talking, the 2022 film based on a novel by Canadian writer Mariam Toews, depicts the sexual abuse of girls and women by male elders in a remote Mennonite colony. It is a tough but beautiful film, tough because the colony’s women suffer horrendous abuse, and beautiful because they talk and argue and talk some…
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Counting Sheep, not Docs
Counting sheep helps some people sleep. Counting docs keeps people awake across Canada because there aren’t enough of them to go around. In Nova Scotia, it seems, the government wants people to rest a little easier – to stop fretting about doctor-shortages and start counting on the broader health care system. On April 14, Health…
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24 Sussex – that’s our home, not theirs
Canada can’t provide housing for thousands of its citizens or its prime minister. The former issue is a tragedy. The prolonged agony over 24 Sussex Drive, the PM’s official residence, is starting to feel like a farce. The old Norman-style mansion has been derelict for years and is now a rodent-infested, asbestos-laden health hazard. Actually,…
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Trader Joe and Trojan horses
President Joe Biden put in a bravura performance last month, telling Canadian Parliamentarians it was time for Canada and the US to forge closer economic ties. Biden, at his ‘ah-shucks’ best, said ‘secure’ North American supply chains would put the two nations at the forefront of the economy of tomorrow. (Think high tech, electric vehicles,…
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The Finance Minister – another endangered species
We don’t know when Canada’s finance ministers stopped sounding like accountants, but it was a bad moment. It might have been back in 2017, when then Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau spoke in his budget speech about “the joys of building a campfire with” the kids. Finance Ministers should neither wax poetic nor sound joyful.…
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The China conundrum and Atlantic Canada
China is arguably the rogue state ‘du jour’ in Canada, though Russia is giving it some firm competition. How is the Canadian government dealing with each nation? In Russia’s case, the response to the invasion of its neighbour is clear – provide weapons to Ukraine, impose economic sanctions against the Russian state, and freeze or…
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Churchill Falls – Guess Who Came to Dinner?
At last, Newfoundland and Labrador has a fighting chance to wrest its fair share of revenue from the Churchill Falls hydroelectric project. In 1969, Premier Joey Smallwood’s government signed the infamous Churchill Falls agreement, under which Hydro Quebec buys very cheap power from the massive hydro project in Labrador until 2041. Quebec pays Newfoundland…