Halifax Politics dot ca

November 22, 2007

Dear Mr Windsor,

I am writing to you today regarding your request for opinion regarding the HRSB’s upcoming application to the Utility and Review Board Regarding Number and Boundary of Electoral Districts.

Speaking only for myself today, while reflecting on my recent fourteen months experience advocating for my community and quality education in the Halifax Region, I would like to outline several thoughts regarding the opportunities and pitfalls this review creates. Specifically, I would like to address four areas: the selection of the Board, the composition of districts, the size of the districts, the naming of the Board.

Selecting the Board: I agree with the parent who presented to you yesterday night, electing the Board does not work. We have had about two decades of experiment with elected Boards, and the results are poor. As Canadians we don’t elect sheriffs, judges, or the water commissioners, nor should we elect a school board. Education is a service. The Minister of Education is responsible for the service, and he or she is elected. The Board has little of the power normally associated with an elected body, as it cannot sign contracts with its workers, or set tax rates. Why elect this group?

Other jurisdictions, such as Ontario, are toying with returning to appointed Boards, or turning education over to the municipalities. HRM running HRSB would go against the very foundation of the Haywood Report and the entire provincial direction of social services provided from the provincial tax pool and property taxes paying for property services, and I cannot support such a model.

I suggest that a model based on the metro university governance, the Nova Scotia Community College, or even the Water Commission would be far better. There are plenty of precedents and models that are already in use in the province. 4-5 Provincial appointees, 4-5 people recruited by the elected Board, 2 HRM councillors, 2 elected staff reps, 2 elected student reps, and 2 elected SAC reps would be a good place to start. Appoint them for 4-5 years, stagger the terms, recruit the very best people you can guilt into serving (as you yourself were not doubt asked to come out of retirement and serve for the greater good). This would actually be larger than the current model, but I am sure with the right mandate from the minister and the right leadership that we could see our community served better than it has been since 1996.

An appointed board aided and enhanced by more regularized “Super-SAC” meetings would better serve the public good.

Composition of Districts: In the event that the Board continues to be elected, districts will remain an issue. The current status quo is that each district of HRSB includes two districts of HRM council. This means the district size and shape is not reflective of actual educational service delivery areas. There has been a proposal that each family of schools should be a district. Proponents of this suggestion had also suggested that each school district Super-SAC elect a representative to serve on the Board. While the later may not be something that is available under the act, the former may. This would give HRSB a council of 14. Regional factionalism and NIMBY syndrome may occur (it was occurring anyway), but this model may allow for the reconnection of the Board members to organized and active constituencies, keeping the elected Board grounded in this educational reality. Perhaps a recall provision could be considered, as well, to allow the electorate to enforce good behavior.

Size of Districts: I don’t think having a smaller Board will address interpersonal issues the last elected Board faced. Far too many of the Board members have been elected unopposed, and while we all hope that this might change in the next election, there is nothing to say that we might end up with 4 or 8 people who win by acclimation and still lack the personal and professional ability to be successful Board members.

The elected Board members, paid only $7000.00 a year, are essentially volunteers. Having to do the job of a Board member in their spare time while holding down a day job is very difficult. When the Board grew from the size of Halifax, or Dartmouth, to be HRM wide, the elected members were no longer able to rely on their innate sense of “what needed to be done” in their community. A Board rep in the old city of Dartmouth “just knew,” or at least had an idea! The Districts are already far to big for that. Fewer districts, representing even more schools, will not create a more tenable situation.

Naming of the Board: This may be beyond the scope of the URB, or the HRSB, but I strongly recommend that the elected or oversight apparatus of the Board be renamed, or the rest of the Board renamed, to clearly outline the difference between the decision making body and the staff and admin. Halifax Regional School Trustees? Halifax Regional School Administration? The Cabinet is not the Province, or Council is not HRM, so the Board should not be the Board.

Why is this important, you ask? For one, it causes a lot of confusion amongst the public, and needless concern and worry for teachers and principals. “Is he criticizing my employer again?” Criticizing or critiquing the elected board is okay in everyday discourse, this is fair comment, but treating the overall staff and Board admin in the same fashion would rarely be acceptable! The fundamentally political and representative role of the Board, elected or not, requires rigorous public discussion, debate, and sometimes more! Clearly separating oversight from admin would help greatly to reduce confusion and increase the quality of this debate.

I thank you for your time, and commend you for all your hard work,

Yours,

Waye Mason
Parent of Emma, 8, and Rhett, 13

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please feel free to circulate and distribute under this license.

It has not been a good year for those that sacrifice themselves to lead the energetic arts and culture sector in Halifax. There is a growing feeling, hovering somewhere between ennui and abject despair, and it is expressing itself throughout the province’s creative continuum.

Halifax has never been an easy town to love if you are a creative person, or as the bureaucrats call them, “cultural worker.” The city and the province it is capital of have never had particularly good support for the arts, and if anything, the gap between expectations and support has never been wider.

In fact, many worry that the limited success we have had in the absence of adequate funding and resources has in fact made it even harder to convince government that more funding is desperately required.

Arguably, Halifax’s reputation as an international centre for art has its roots in the incredible experiment that was NSCAD in the 1970s. For a time, our humble art college was THE world leading institution in art and design.

Garry Neill Kennedy lead the college to unimaginable heights, but the support to continue this momentum, for growth and international leadership, was simply not forthcoming from the Provincial or Federal funders. Don’t get me wrong, NSCAD is still a good institution, and probably better than we deserve, but like most things in Nova Scotia the raw potential of the organization is not being realized due to insufficient leadership and lack of funding.

The situation with NSCAD can be used as a template or referent for the challenges faced by virtually every other arts agency, institution, or business in the province. From craft to film to music, from higher education to art galleries, the potential for greatness is there, but not realized.

Provincially, funding is stagnant. The current government promised to double funding during the election, and then increase the $7 million dollar budget by just $450,000. Vital organizations from the Tattoo to the Writers Federation have not seen significant increases in funding since the 1980s.

Costs continue to rise, funding does not, and the end result is decreasing programming and slashed services. Depending on who you speak too, Nova Scotia’s funding is either the lowest or the middle of the national pack, per capita. How can we lead the nation with anything less than top notch funding?

On the municipal level, the much vaunted “culture plan” has yet to result in concrete action or funding. The HRM has, I am told, over 2200 pieces of art in storage. The city has an entire museum, the Dartmouth Heritage Museum, in storage. The city has finally, after 23 months, reposted the cultural officer job that has been empty since Keith McPhail fled the position is despair in 2005.

There may be meetings underway, there may be “multi-stakeholder committees” meeting and discussing plans, but at the end of the day, the council has yet to commit serious and even adequate money to funding culture.

The most depressing example was told to me at a recent brainstorming session for Symphony Nova Scotia, where we were told that Halifax funds our symphony the least of all municipalities in Canada, with $15,000 a year. The next lowest, you ask? Edmonton at $100,000, and the support rises rapidly in other cities from there. Halifax wants world class art and music? Show us the money!

The creative energy in Halifax has never been stronger. The raw potential is there to have a cultural powerhouse, to be a centre, if not the centre, of independent arts and culture production in English Canada.

The people who sacrifice to stay in a city they love, to create and live their lives, do so in large part because they perceive that things will change for the better. They think that society wants art, wants creativity, and is willing to fund opportunities, and also, to fund not just good or adequate institutions, but amazing and world class institutions and agencies.

Halifax has the potential to be better than average. Halifax can and should be great, but the question remains, will leadership, vision, action and money come in time? Will it come before the current batch of cultural leaders end up packing up and abandoning the city in frustration, and exhaustion? Time is running out.

—
Waye Mason is music and festival promoter, business consultant and activist in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please feel free to circulate and distribute under this license.

Here comes the new boss… same as the old boss.

From: Waye Mason [mailto:waye@halifaxpopexplosion.com]
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 1:26 PM
To: Stephanie Domet; Phlis McGregor; Stewart Young; Carmine Klassen; Steven Cooke; Dean Lisk; Stephen Claire; Tara Thorn; alexa@hfx.eastlink.ca; Dawn Marie Sloane; Peter Kelly; Leonard Preyra; Maureen MacDonald; mikesavage@ns.aliantzinc.ca; sgee@hfxnews.ca; asmith@herald.ca; Steve Maher
Cc: mackay.p@parl.gc.ca
Subject: Summer Student Program
Importance: High

Hi there folks.

Please forward this email to whomever should be aware of our small part in this ridiculous summer employment issue.

The Halifax Pop ExplosionAssociation applied for 2 student summer grants this year. One was our Showcase Coordinator, a college student position that we have had for the last two years. One was for a Summer Activities Coordinator, aimed at a high school student.

Showcase was going to be the same gig as Ben Pearlman filled the last two years. He is now in Toronto having graduated King’s and works FULL TIME in the music industry at Against the Grain Concerts.

Summer Activities was targeted at an African Nova Scotian high school student, in order to have that student be mentored by our ANS Advisory Committee, and for that student to help organize and run the North End Community Fair stage here on Gottingen.

Did I mention that our office is in the heart of the ‘hood? That we are a part of the North End community?

With this in mind, Service Canada says the program exists for the following reasons:

1emphasis on creating skills that get them full time employment
2 emphasis on low income areas
3 emphasis on minorities

We meet all three criteria. We scored 22 out of 70. We did not get the grants.

I am more than happy to talk about this on the record.

I have attached the job descriptions we submitted for your records.

Last night I gave what I am mentally referring to as the “talk” and Inglis Street Elementary. Nice building, nice people. Only three parents made it out to the Home and School meeting this night. And the VP, the P and a teacher. Slightly awkward, when you are reading your prepared text. Ah well. The talk was well received, I think, but…

Inglis is one of THOSE buildings. It has asbestos right in the walls. No thumb tacks. No holes of any kind or the guys in moon suits have to come and vacuum your room. Hard to retrofit. Hard to do ethernet drops. Asbestos also reflects radiowaves, I found out last night, making it VERY difficult to make wireless connections happen!

At LMST and many other older schools I have been too in the last while (Westmount, Saint Mary’s) it seems like mounting video projectors, running more power, cat 6 ethernet and new floors and lights are all that is needed. Wipe boards instead of chaulk. New lights with clean unyellowed defusers around the fluorescent lights. Inglis presents better than LMST does, superficially, BUT it may actually be way harder to renovate.

On there other hand, they DID renovate the old Beaufort building, and it is totally modern inside now. Short of state of the art renovations to turn the building into a college campus, a la Beaufort, and the status quo, a la Inglis, there may be some middle ground.

God, send me an engineer or architect to the CDSA meeting. Please!

Citadel District School Association meets Thursday at the Forum Atlantic Room. 7-9pm. This will be the founding feeling out meeting. I am nervous about how it will go, not because I expect bad things, but because I have invested a lot of intellectual and emotional energy and I want to see it go well.

Today I spent an amazing hour talking with Brendan from SpinART Records, about how hard it is for the kind of music we both like to break out in the United States these days. Media and college radio are into really quirky arty stuff and a straight forward rocker like Joel Plaskett does not seem to be able to get a lot of traction with key media support.

Note to cooler than me readers. Joel is, increasingly, in Halifax, considered to be a pretty mainstream act. That is a view that amuses me no end. Joel is pretty out there when the mainstream is still defined for the masses as somewhere between Faith Hill and Hillary Duff. Canada has had an odd run of 15 years of country rock, rock, rock rock, and rawk band dominating the Canadian (content) charts. Big Sugar through to Tragically Hip. This is a Canadian phenomena that has no equivalent in the USA. Tragically Hip harken from the early Hootie and Black Crows era, and that type of rock dead and rotted in the USA.

I would argue that Joel is not in fact particularly commercial, by the simple argument that if he was, a major would have signed him and he would have records out all over the USA. But no, he continues to tough it out as an indie, and has not gotten serious US support.

Anyway, Brendan has been marketing for SpinART for years and years. We talked about Joel because we both love his music but really, Joel was the case study, in how hard it is right now to break the US. He feels that indie pop rock is not marketable right now, and that unless some key media in the US decide that Joel is their guy, that its a sisyphean task to try and break him on an indie budget. The key is touring, touring touring. Regional touring, well, he says it does not work. If you have to focus on one market, he says, Boston to Philly means nothing, because the only media that matters is in New York. San Fransisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, are all important. But to build a fan base, through touring, means 200 clubs, on rotation, for 150 bucks a night, for two years.

And of course, right now, getting a Visa means regular trips to the USA are difficult for cash strapped indie bands. It is simply too damn expensive and dicy to wait for Homeland Security to let you come in to play that $150.00 show.

I have a lot to think about…