28 minute read
Learning from post-crisis response
This excerpt from Barry Cahill’s Rebuilding Halifax shows how a terrible disaster provided an opportunity to modernize a city and create sweeping policy to help its residents well beyond their hour of greatest needs. On the flipside, the relief commission that was formed ignored the old charitable adage of aiming to put itself out of business by achieving its mission and eliminating society’s need for its services.
In doing so, Cahill argues, the agency—“a free agent with easy access to political leverage on the federal scene”—robbed provincial and municipal governments (and therefore citizens) of the opportunity to determine their own fates. Therein lie lessons of what to do and what not to do in the face of disaster, when trying to build back better.
Historically, the most significant aspect of the Halifax Relief Commission, apart from its achievement, is its sheer uniqueness. Is there another instance of the federal government setting up a special operating agency in response to a catastrophic disaster, which the provincial government then incorporated with paramount powers rivalling, if not exceeding, those of the municipality where the disaster occurred? The commission’s evolution over nearly six decades had less and less to do with emergency management and more and more to do with its desire and capability to perpetuate itself. It did not want for resources, material or moral. The commission’s greatest achievement was recovery in all its problematic diversity—rehabilitation, reconstruction, victim compensation, rehousing, town planning, urban renewal.
The commission recreated the “urban morphology” (Janice Miller’s term) of Halifax’s North End section that constituted the Devastated Area.1 The commission’s most obvious and best-known legacy is the so-called “Hydrostone District,” a visionary exercise in urban planning that helped modernize the city of Halifax. In other respects, too, the commission was ahead of its time. It developed and implemented a town-planning scheme long before the City of Halifax did; and, through its hiring of qualified professionals at the very outset, helped introduce scientific social work to Nova Scotia. Through its cooperation with, support of and, latterly, direct involvement in the work of the Halifax branch of the Massachusetts-Halifax Relief Committee (afterwards the Massachusetts-Halifax Health Commission), the commission also contributed significantly to the improvement of public health in Halifax.
All these contributions however, were tied to the early and most productive years. On the other side of the ledger, the commission’s longevity is a black mark. After 1921, when recovery had effectively concluded, the commission magnified its residual tasks—property management and services to pensioners and other survivors—assuming an air of indispensability with a view
to indefinite self-perpetuation. For its part, the federal government lost interest and largely forgot about the commission— except as a useful patronage plum for local Liberals—because, after 1919, it was no longer giving it money.
The commission, left to its own devices, endeavoured to respond “creatively” to the ambiguous situation in which it found itself. By way of filling the vacuum, the commission not only adapted to its shrinking responsibilities but also skillfully deployed its finite financial resources, exploiting its statutory tax-free status as well as opportunities accruing from its being a large landholder and landlord. Investment income and astute divestment of real estate (much of it expropriated) sustained its revenue stream, enabled it to meet its obligations to survivors and occasionally to act as a community benefactor. For example, on the occasion of the disaster’s 46th anniversary—6 December 1963—Chairman Butler announced that the commission would contribute $100,000 towards the cost of building the Halifax North Memorial Library, to stand on a site near the former Devastated Area. Opened in October 1966, the library honours the memory of disaster victims.
Though it made much of its relationship with the federal minister of finance to whom it informally reported, the commission was for all practical purposes a free agent with easy access to political leverage on the federal scene. Its David-and-Goliath contest with the City of Halifax, which poisoned civic politics for decades, was a very unequal one, from which the city did not emerge victorious. From the later 1940s onwards, when postwar retrenchment and accommodation made the commission’s continuing existence harder to justify, the City of Halifax became much more aggressive in its dealings with the commission. Despite attracting sensational press publicity, which it did not want and did not know how to effectively counter, the commission resisted all efforts to disband until it was ready to be disbanded; it even influenced how its sole remaining function— pension administration—would be carried on after its demise.
The commission appreciated that its fate depended on how well it cultivated the powers in Ottawa; consequently, much of its energy was directed towards that goal. Its strategy of hiding behind the coattails of the minister of finance worked amazingly well. By the end of the Second World War, no one much cared about the commission except its pensioners and the cash-starved City of Halifax, which potentially stood to gain a great deal of money—depending on the final disposition of the commission’s residual assets. However, the city’s naive assumption that it would as a matter of course directly benefit from the commission’s “surplus” after its demise proved fatal to its case. That the commission was so successful for so long in resisting pressure from the city was due, at least in part, to its mastery of brinkmanship, knowledge born of long experience dealing with Ottawa.
It can be inferred that Ottawa never took Halifax’s pretensions seriously, though it sometimes wanted to appear to be
REBUILDING HALIFAX
Barry Cahill Formac Publishing
doing so for the sake of politics. At the root of Ottawa’s disinterestedness was that successive ministers of finance did not wish to be seen to be involving the federal government in what amounted to a social war between the commission and the city—two big fish in a very small pond. Both parties were invited from time to time to state their case to Ottawa and both did so—with more seriousness than they were received. For the city of Halifax, however, the sense of injustice was real and present. In the end, no benefit would ever accrue to Halifax as a result of the commission’s dissolution, which it had been agitating for over the previous thirty years.
A virtual second government where the Devastated Area was concerned, the commission in its early days constituted a powerful administrative tribunal at a time when the regulatory state had not yet emerged. The Second World War changed all that, and the commission benefitted from the new paradigm. A novelty when it was established, the commission survived, even flourished, long after the regulatory state had become mainstream.
The worst disaster in Canadian history was met by a unique intervention by the federal government in municipal affairs. Were there—should there have been—constitutional implications? Though no lawyer served on the commission after 1940, one suspects the commission’s modus operandi was the legacy of its first and most influential chair—T.S. Rogers (1918–1928)—an exceedingly clever and resourceful corporate lawyer who endeavoured successfully to maximize the commission’s powers and freedom to act. If post-disaster Halifax was, as the title of one unidentified contemporaneous article proclaimed, “the town that was blown into progress,” then the commission was the mighty wind that blew it thither. It had the perspicacity to see that the Halifax Disaster, despite its unremitting horrors, was opportunity writ large—the means of bringing the former Devastated Area, and indeed the whole city, forward into the zeitgeist of the twentieth century. ■ BARRY CAHILL is an independent historian whose work focuses on Atlantic Canada. He is a former editor of the Nova Scotia Historical Review.
100 years later, frustrations are similar although the initial results look better
Below is an edited excerpt from the conclusion of Ruth Holmes Whitehead’s Nova Scotia and the Great Influenza Pandemic, 1918-1920, which details the severe impacts of the “Spanish” flu pandemic of the early 20th century, on individuals and communities. Here, the author looks specifically at strategies for containing the disease, the dangers of lifting quarantine (“re-opening” in today’s parlance) too early, and the difficulties of properly documenting and quantifying what was happening—challenges that are remarkably pertinent 100 years later in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This section concludes with perfect advice for political leaders at times like these. In short, be very open, be very honest and be very proscriptive.
Initial Disease Vectors in Nova Scotia, 1918–20 News of the spread of the epidemic in the United States was waking Nova Scotians to the fact that something unusual, massively contagious, lightning-fast, and lethal was happening in the outside world. In September, things in Massachusetts got so bad that they begged other states for help. They even sent word to Halifax, asking for assistance in the form of doctors and nurses. Lieutenant-Governor McCallum Grant wrote Governor McCall a letter saying that Nova Scotia remembered the help Boston sent them in the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion in 1917, that aid in the form of nurses had already been sent to Boston, and that other nurses and doctors would follow, “as you may require them.” A copy of this letter appeared in Halifax newspapers on September 30 and October 1. It included portions of a telegram by Massachusetts State Health Commissioner E.R. Kelley to Surgeon-General Blue of the US Public Health Service, underlining the state of emergency:
Reports from 55 cities and towns outside Boston total 5,500 new cases of influenza [in 24 hours]. There are at least 75,000 cases of influenza in Massachusetts to-day, excluding the number in Cantonment [army camps].
Halifax Evening News, 1 October 1918, 7. Doctors McDougall, Thomas and Lessel told the mayor of Halifax, “We advise that with the first appearance of the disease, the utmost limit of preventive measures should be used—such measures as would be used in dealing with any of the dangerous epidemic diseases—and used at once.”
The Necessity of Accurate Statistics in Fighting Epidemics In 1918, Dr. J.T. MacAulay, city and district medical officer from Cape Breton County, spoke at the October 26 meeting of the Board of Health against lifting the quarantine in Sydney. He was particularly insistent that schools remain closed. The board, he said, lacked the data to be effective, and until they got it, strategies could not be created to contain it. He knew that without data, one cannot plan a campaign against an enemy—in this case, influenza.
I include Dr. MacAulay’s statement of frustration, because our book still has the same problem, namely, lack of data on this most virulent epidemic. Even today, we still have no idea how to
Annapolis County had at least 56 confirmed deaths from the Great Influenza. At first, physicians were saying that this was a milder version of what was raging elsewhere. Then the first fatalities started appearing in the newspapers. By far, most were farmers or housewives. Other professions included carpenters, labourers, a manufacturer, a clerk, a foreman printer, a bridge builder, and a larrigan maker! There was only one fisherman—quite a change from deaths in counties on the Atlantic side of the province.
arrive at a figure for cases of influenza in Nova Scotia during the disease’s 1918–20 run, because no continuous coverage of patients exists, and no totally accurate counts from that time are available. We can only guess that the number of those infected with the virus at any one time or place was overwhelmingly greater than the number of deaths, a huge percentage greater. And while this is better than a disease that kills everybody, it does mean that for weeks and months, Nova Scotia society must have had to do without the skills, labour, and contribution of those who were ill. Small towns, villages, and rural areas must have at times been so stricken, that business and social life were at a standstill. It’s almost a surprise that any data at all was being sent in. So you will find less on that than I could wish. This project still needs your help!
Dr. Marble’s lists have given this text a head start of at least twenty years of research.
The thing that I noticed all the way through this collection of oral histories, the thing that impressed me the most, was how people consistently helped family, neighbours, and total strangers. It is this quality of Nova Scotians, to rise to the occasion with compassion, I think, that contributed most to our low death levels here, as compared with many other places.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for example, had 759 deaths in one day (October 10, Source: HVS, Cape Breton County Death Register, 1918, Book 30, Page 47, Number 273.1918), whereas the city of Halifax, in the entire three years of the Great Influenza had only 336. Halifax County, including the city deaths—the county with the highest total— had only 497 deaths in three years. Comparisons are odious, and there are too many factors to draw conclusions from this, I know, but compared to many cities, countries, even continents, Nova Scotia got off lightly.
In Halifax, there were some strong individuals in local governance: the Provincial Health Officer, Dr. W. H. Hattie; the Mayor, Dr. Arthur C. Hawkins; the Chairman of the Board of Health and Quarantine Officer for the Port of Halifax, Dr. Norman E. McKay. These three doctors in key positions knew exactly what to do and had the power
Pier 21 A History Steven Schwinghamer, Jan Raska 9780776631363 - 27,95$
Between 1928 and 1971, nearly one million immigrants landed in Canada at million immigrants landed in Canada at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. During those years, it was one of the main ocean immigration facilities in Canada, including when it welcomed home nearly 400,000 Canadians aer service nearly 400,000 Canadians aer service overseas during the Second World War. overseas during the Second World War. In the immediate postwar period, Pier 21 became the busiest ocean port of entry in the country. Today, people across Canada still enjoy connections to Pier 21 through still enjoy connections to Pier 21 through family history and stories of arrival at family history and stories of arrival at the site.
Since 1998, researchers at the Pier 21 Interpretive Centre and now the CanaInterpretive Centre and now the Cana dian Museum of Immigration have been dian Museum of Immigration have been conducting interviews, reviewing archival materials, gathering written stories, and acquiring photographs, documents, and other objects reecting the history of Pier other objects reecting the history of Pier 21. is book builds upon the resulting 21. is book builds upon the resulting collection. It presents a history of this important Canadian ocean immigration facility during its years of operation and later emergence as a site of public commemoration.
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A JAMBALYA THAT AMPLIFIES BLACK BEAUTY AND OFFERS AUDIBLE RESISTANCE
Halifax’s Poet Laureate, Afua Cooper, and photographer Wilfried Raussert collaborate in this book of poems and photographs focused on everyday Black experiences.
“Sometime we’ll understand.” William Mills’s stone, Fort Massey Cemetery, Halifax. William and his brother, natives of Shulie, both died of Influenza in 1918. The quote is from a popular hymn of the period. Photo: Doug Pezzack
to enforce it. Since Halifax had the largest population, and the largest port traffic, this counted for a lot. The city fielded a cast of medical personnel, both civilian and military who worked themselves ragged, and who sometimes gave their lives taking care of the sick. Sydney had a good medical health officer in Dr. J. F. MacAulay, but he struggled with city aldermen who were better at arguing than at taking action. Rural communities, on the other hand, often made do with only one, or even no medical personnel at all. In a number of places, when influenza took out the local doctors, the people were petitioning for others to be sent—for help of any sort. Sometimes this was possible, sometimes they were left to cope alone.
The Great Influenza was a nightmare beyond our wildest imaginings, but Nova Scotia somehow survived. It survived because people helped each other—with common sense, with kindness, sometimes even by sheer bull-headed doggedness.
What the Future [Presently] Holds The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, states that it is not a question whether this sort of influenza epidemic will occur again, but when. “Influenza viruses are unpredictable—we can never be certain of when or from where the next pandemic will arise. However, another influenza pandemic is inevitable. Mar 11, 2019.”
John Barry’s opinion, as well as my own, is that the most important thing any government at any level can do in a situation like the Great Influenza epidemic is to tell people the absolute truth about what’s going on, what the dangers are, and what measures they will have to take. [Submitted to publisher January 2020] ■ RUTH HOLMES WHITEHEAD is a renowned historian and ethnologist. She has worked with the Nova Scotia Museum for more than 40 years. She is the author of several books including Six Mi’kmaq Stories and The Old Man Told Us.
How to defend public education
This autumn, there are two books assessing our education system through two very different lenses and making two distinct arguments. One is written by teacher and union activist Grant Frost. You’ll find an excerpt from his book below.
The other is by education consultant Paul Bennett. Check out our website for an edited excerpt from Bennett’s book, in which he argues for a complete rethinking of education systems in Canada centred on teachers as experts on education.
Readers wanting to look beyond their own bubble (and isn’t everyone desperate to see outside their bubble right now?) can do so by reading both.
An excerpt from Grant Frost’s The Attack on Nova Scotia Schools
In this excerpt, the author considers means of protecting public schools from political austerity and corporate-minded, neoliberal think tanks—meaning ones that prefer privatization, decreasingly democratic school systems and the reduction of public services in general.
Frost makes the case that public schools should be championed—by parents, teachers, unions and especially governments— for their many successes, the way a private company champions sneakers or SUVs. Frost believes that making the merits of a public system clearer paves the way for a steady, collectivist approach to education, rather than constant reform. In this way, he argues, we can build a public-school system that endows children with the critical thinking skills necessary to build more resilient, sustainable and just societies.
Authors Maude Barlow and Heather-Jane Robertson reported that even in 1991 teachers were among the least likely groups to be quoted in stories about the education system, and little has changed since that time. Some of the responsibility for this missing voice must be laid at the feet of the union, which has often discouraged teachers from speaking directly to the media.
The absence of teachers willing to speak on the subject of education should not, however, give a free pass to the press to arbitrarily assign expertise to consultants who work outside the system. Given the current state of the news media, journalists have a greater responsibility than ever to examine the source of their information. Although finding a spokesperson from AIMS [the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies] to weigh in on the subject of public education may prove expedient, doing so without exploring the motivation behind the views, or perhaps examining the accuracy of their claims, is irresponsible. There remains a certain authority in stories that come from mainstream media outlets in Canada. As a result, the capacity they have to do lasting damage by repeating poorly researched, and sometimes completely inaccurate, claims of school failure is considerable.
Finally, when it comes to the preservation of public education, the organization with the greatest capacity for impact is, by far, our government. Governments do not spend much time or money promoting the system they themselves have built.
It would be easy to blame this silence on the fact that our current government is decidedly neoliberal. But successive governments in Nova Scotia have fallen victim to the same line of
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Law courts, judges, prosecutors, witnesses, defense teams, red evidence bags, all drawn from artist’s perspective– the ‘good’ guys, the ‘bad’ guys – 15 stories – half of them reported widely in the Canadian media: Alan Légère, Premier Hatfield, the Dennis Oland trials, Columbian smuggling cartel, Bourque RCMP murders, child molestation, and more. Covers the last three decades, in one tidy package, with fascinating images and well-constructed verse from gifted writers explaining each trial. Carol’s courtroom sketches from over 30 plus years, are both factual and entertaining. thinking. Even when the ruling party was not dominated by neoliberal discourse, there was little effort to promote or celebrate public education.
If this were a private entity, they would be trumpeting this system to the skies. They would be celebrating their own innovations, positioning themselves as a mover and a shaker, singing the praises of their hard-working and innovative workforce. All this would be done with an eye to drawing consumers to the product. This could allow jurisdictions like ours to become veritable education destinations. Yet, from governments across the country, we hear crickets.
Instead of looking at ways of promoting the system, politicians have, time and again, used education as a political tool, painting their all-too-familiar reforms as a way of repairing the perceived failures of previous governments. When the status quo is called into question, it is much easier to offer alternatives than to defend the current model. Unfortunately for public education, often the only alternative models readily available are those that are firmly rooted in neoliberal soil.
Furthermore, addressing the underlying issues of a system such as education is not only more difficult, but more time consuming and expensive than offering an alternative to the status quo. If standardized tests results are not up to snuff, it is far easier for governments to, say, increase accountability measures for teachers than it is to address underlying issues such as child poverty or racial inequality.
Although Nova Scotia is a relatively small province, when it comes to education, we punch well above our weight. It is here that our most valuable resource lies. Not in our oceans. Not in our forests. Not in our blueberry fields or in our apple orchards. It lies within our classrooms. We have the educational expertise and the infrastructure. It is high time we stopped being a model of educational reformism gone awry and time we started to recognize and promote ourselves as what we long have been: a model of educational excellence.
I can’t help but wonder how much further ahead we would be as a province if twenty-five years ago we had committed
THE ATTACK ON NOVA SCOTIA SCHOOLS
Grant Frost Formac Publishing
to a collectivist vision of public education as opposed to pursuing the neoliberal one. If all the money and time spent on such endeavours as Horizons, the Action Plan and the Glaze report had gone into promoting and enhancing what we were doing well, as opposed to what the neoliberals wanted us to believe we were doing poorly, would we still be languishing as one of Canada’s “have-not” provinces?
There is nothing but a lack of political will stopping us from becoming another Finland: a region with an education system that others, indeed entire countries, aspire to. But for that to happen, all of us, union, government, media and the public, both individually and collectively, must accept one single, solitary truth.
Our schools are not underperforming. They are under attack.
And unless we stop placidly accepting the messaging of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt being advanced by the neoliberals, control of one of the last, most fundamental public entities in our possession will slip, quietly and forever, away from our collective grasp. ■ GRANT FROST is a teacher, speaker and union activist who has written several articles on public education in Nova Scotia and beyond. He was the host of a local cable television show Education East until 2018. He is a contributing writer for The Chronicle Herald and blogs at frostededucation.com.
When Brian met Chris
In this excerpt from Unicorn in the Woods, acclaimed business journalist Gordon Pitts shares the story of how a billion dollars of value (USD) was created after a chance encounter between an entrepreneur and a tech innovator. Pitts’ book shows that economies outside major urban centres can develop and grow in a new economy, without relying exclusively on old-world, and increasingly unsustainable, resource extraction.
Chris Newton didn’t really expect much from the meeting. He would have been content to spend the day coding software in his tiny office along a dark corridor of the University of New Brunswick’s computer science building in Fredericton. But officials of the university—who, after all, were his employers—had insisted he go along to a gathering of alumni and potential investors in the hope of turning his little software idea into something commercial, something that might actually be sold.
He didn’t think he had a “product,” just a way of dealing with the denial-of-service attacks from mischief-makers that were wreaking havoc on the university’s ill-prepared computer networks in these early days of the internet and the wired university. Massive quantities of data would slam into the UNB network and shut it down, inciting a chorus of complaints. It created urgent calls for a cybersecurity tool that could give a real-time snapshot of the health and frailties of the system.
And that was what Newton was working on—this program he called Symon (short for System Monitor)—mostly at home at night as he wrote computer code well into the wee small hours.
But on that warm fall day in 2000, wearing shorts, sandals and a T-shirt, the 28-year-old part-time student and full-time UNB employee lugged his laptop up the hillside from his tiny office, through the cluster of UNB’s signature red brick buildings, toward the modernist Wu Conference Centre at the top of the hill. Below him lay the sleepy provincial capital with its 19th-century legislature, its sprawling frame mansions and the broad Saint John River as it curled downriver from its source in northern Maine.
A crowd of interested types—some local, some from as far away as Halifax—had gathered in a meeting room, creating the impression of a pilot for the future hit TV show Dragons’ Den. At his appointed time Newton flipped open his laptop screen and a chart appeared—a colour guide to the maze of computer networks that coursed through the university, where the emails went, where the downloads landed, where the trouble points were flaring up. There was a silence, and then a large dark-haired man moved closer to the front and fixed his attention on the screen, then started peppering Newton with a torrent of questions. What was this? Could it be sold? Who owned it? Can we talk?
Chris Newton was polite—he was the compactly built, babyfaced son of a police chief in the Miramichi, the rugged northeast New Brunswick region of salmon, forests and old mill sites. The only presenter under the age of 40, and the only non-academic, he projected boyish innocence and showed proper respect to people. He found the whole thing both unsettling and intriguing.
Chris Newton poses for a Globe and Mail photo shoot in 2011.
Newton finally managed to tear himself away and scrambled back down the hill to his office in the comfortable corridors of the UNB Computing Centre. But the big intensely energetic man would show up later, talking on about forming a company, creating a product and becoming an entrepreneur. Chris Newton didn’t know what an entrepreneur was—or a start-up or a business model or venture capital (VC). He just liked fixing stuff, figuring things out, solving problems for the people who employed him.
But his relentless pursuer was obsessed with all those entrepreneurial things. With the rangy build of an athlete, Brian Flood towered over Chris Newton. He was more than a decade older and 100 times more experienced in the ways of the world. Flood was like a man possessed, having spent the past four years preparing for this moment, when he could seize the chance for funding a technology breakthrough in his beleaguered home province.
He didn’t seem like a natural tech founder. He had been running a sports bar/restaurant down the road in Moncton, and later added another one in his hometown of Saint John—both cities about an hour or two’s drive from Fredericton. Then he got
UNICORN IN THE WOODS
Gordon Pitts Goose Lane Editions
hooked on reading about this hot new thing called the internet. He embarked on a personal crash course to learn about this new pot of technology gold that had entranced everyone from tech titans Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to callow kids such as Mark Zuckerberg, still a student at a New England private school but about to burst on the world as a social-networking Harvard undergrad.
Flood was just back from one of his fact-finding expeditions to California’s
Silicon Valley when he was invited to this showcase event by the sponsors at UNB. He had first met Newton in the “rubber room,” a session where the presenters were prepped for the show. Chris Newton seemed like the answer to his dreams—a whiff of game-changing innovation in the middle of his home province. As he chased Newton around the hillside university, he acted like a suddenly smitten suitor pursuing the reluctant target of his affections. He was not going to let this slip away. In the words of one friend, Brian Flood is the “weirdest, wackiest, hardest working, most tenacious son of a bitch.”
At one point in the courtship, Flood asked, almost as a throwaway line, what would IBM pay for this? Chris Newton pondered the thought: maybe the computer behemoth might cough up $25 a month for using the software or even as much as $500. Neither of them imagined that, a decade later, IBM would pay $600 million US for Chris’s little product and the company that grew out of it. And that by that time, Newton would have already gone on to cofound another company that he and his colleagues would have sold for about $330 million US. The bashful kid from the Miramichi would be New Brunswick’s billion-dollar man in value creation, putting him in the same rarified air as the Irvings, McCains, Olands, Sobeys and the other established business families whose names were synonymous with wealth, power and achievement on Canada’s East Coast. ■ Excerpted from Unicorn in the Woods: How East Coast Geeks and Dreamers Are Changing the Game copyright ©2020 by Gordon Pitts. Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions.
GORDON PITTS is a former senior writer for the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business. He is the author of several books, including The Codfathers: Lessons from the Atlantic Business Elite and Stampede: The Rise of the West and Canada’s New Power Elite, winner of a National Business Book Award.
