The dystopian future we are building: giant vehicles are taking over our cities

1. Provincial election set for Nov. 26

“Nova Scotians will head to the polls on November 26 to elect 55 members of the legislature and a premier,” reports Jennifer Henderson:

The call was not a surprise given the blizzard of good news announcements by the Houston government this week that included a one percentage point cut to the HST and the announcement of three new elementary schools for the Halifax area – none of which had  been included in the most recent capital budget.  

Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotian election called for Nov. 26.”

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2. The party leaders

“Tim Houston has called a provincial election eight months before he had to. He broke a promise and a law that established July 2025 as the election date,” reports Jennifer Henderson:

Why? 

Here is the explanation Houston provided supporters who gathered at The Village Taphouse in Bedford Sunday afternoon:

“We are ready to make significant new investments in areas such as housing and affordability. But before we enact that plan, I feel Nova Scotians should have their say.”

Stay tuned for a description of those new investments when the PC platform is released.

Second, said Houston:

It is clear to me that facing a political crisis and a potential defeat, Prime Minister Trudeau has made a decision to try and save seats in Ontario and Quebec at the expense of places like Nova Scotia. And we see this with the federal government trying to send us 6,000 more asylum seekers… and we said ‘No’… We also see this with issues like the Chignecto Isthmus… they are trying to rip us off on fixing that…I think we all know if the Isthmus was in Québec, Mr. Trudeau would have stepped up and made that investment.

Halifax Examiner reality check: it is worth noting that Nova Scotia received a larger amount of money from Ottawa this past year for health care. 

The Trudeau government has also agreed to bail out $500 million worth of Nova Scotia Power’s fuel costs to keep electricity rates from increasing beyond inflation. 

And the federal government is an active partner when it comes to electrifying buses and a future fast ferry service in HRM.

Henderson scuttled about town yesterday, racing from Bedford to downtown Halifax to downtown Dartmouth, to catch each of the party leaders at their election kick-offs.

Click or tap here to read “Why are we having an election, anyway? Party leaders rally the troops.”

I don’t have the intestinal fortitude to cover the day-to-day of election campaigns that Henderson demonstrates — I offered to cover one of the leader events, but then Henderson told me she could make it and stood me down, heh.

It’s not that I don’t think elections are important — they are. Obviously, the actual election is an inflection point, a check back with voters about how and where things are going, but the parties, and for that matter the media, should be better defining the issues over the course of any government, long before people head to the polls.

And I find Houston’s current election call particularly cynical. I don’t have any inside information, but despite Houston’s assertion to the contrary, it feels like part of a coordinated national Conservative strategy leading up to the next federal election, calling elections so they can campaign against Trudeau.

The saddest thing, or perhaps most worrying thing, about this national strategy is the Conservative attack on the carbon tax. I remind readers that the carbon tax was the conservative answer to climate change. It was a way to use market mechanisms to price in the externalities of climate change — that is, to bring capitalism to environmental policy, as opposed to what conservatives saw as heavy-handed prescriptive government regulations. But here we are and the conservative approach to the problem has been adopted in Canada, and the Conservatives are attacking it. All I can say is: What else do you have? How do you propose to address the climate calamity we are facing right now?

In passing, Henderson notes that there are three PC “Tim” candidates — Tim Houston, Tim Halman, and Tim Outhit. (I’ve gone most of my life being the only Tim in the room, and suddenly Tims are everywhere, including in the U.S. vice presidential race. It’s a little disconcerting).

I’m a bit surprised by Tim Outhit running for the PCs. Back when I was covering municipal politics, Outhit used to tell me about his NDP mom and Liberal dad, and I remember that his entry point into politics was basically running against what I jokingly called the Bedford PC mafia — Len Goucher and Peter and Matt Christie. Outhit was a moderating presence both in Bedford and on council generally.

Whatever I thought about any particular stance Outhit took at council, I appreciated that he always had time for random calls from me to discuss things on background and to explain his positions. I fear that openness may be a thing of the past.

3. The election and the Coastal Protection Act

This item is written by Yvette d’Entremont.

A group of advocates that pushed for the adoption of the Coastal Protection Act are calling on Nova Scotians to make it an issue during this provincial election. 

“Despite its own legislation to fix Nova Scotia’s election date, the government is now thrusting Nova Scotians into an early election on November 26th, 2024,” the Coastal Coalition said in a media release Monday morning.

“This broken promise likely won’t surprise Nova Scotians who are still reeling from the government’s failure to proclaim the Coastal Protection Act (CPA).”

Nova Scotia’s long-awaited Coastal Protection Act was passed in 2019 with full support from all parties. On Feb. 26, the province announced it wouldn’t proclaim it. Instead, the government said it had opted for a new plan.

It said that plan was focused on “empowering coastal property owners to make informed decisions, supporting municipal leadership and aligning resources with coastal protection.” 

As reported here, in May hundreds of people rallied in front of Province House to demand the government change course and implement the Coastal Protection Act

The Coastal Coalition is asking Nova Scotians to “engage their candidates and hold the government accountable for its broken promise to proclaim the Coastal Protection Act in the upcoming election.”

“With its broken Coastal Protection Act promise, the government has joined a 50-year legacy of failed cohesive coastal management in Nova Scotia,” Coastal Coalition member Peter Barss said in the release. “That is simply unconscionable, especially in a climate crisis.” 

The Coastal Coalition pointed to results of a recent telephone survey conducted by Narrative Research on behalf of the Ecology Action Centre. The group said they echo the findings of three rounds of public consultations by the government. 

“The survey clearly shows that the majority of voters want the government to protect Nova Scotia’s 13,000+ km of coastline by proclaiming the Coastal Protection Act,” the Coastal Coalition wrote. 

Of voters polled, 86% view coastal protection as important and 68% think the government should implement the CPA. The release said “even among participants identifying as Conservative voters,” 48% wanted the act proclaimed. 

“The Houston government’s unilateral decision to forgo an evidence-based, enforceable, province-wide law that would protect our coasts in favour of a rough patchwork of by-laws that vary from municipality to municipality is a clear failure of leadership,” Coastal Coalition member Karen Robb said. 

“Despite all the money the government has spent on advertising its watered-down plan, Nova Scotians know that this approach will be ineffective, costly, and cause delays that we can’t afford. And funding one expert with a sample by-law doesn’t change that reality.”

The Coastal Coalition first emerged as a coastal advocacy coalition in Nova Scotia in the early 2000s. The present-day coalition is a group of citizens, organizations, and business owners that formed to advance the proclamation of the Coastal Protection Act.

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4. No consequences for abuse and neglect in long-term care

“Carol Macomber is still angry,” reports Jennifer Henderson:

It has been 13 months since she visited the Cedarstone nursing home in Truro and heard her 99-year-old mother, Margaret, yelling in pain. The door to her room had been closed to muffle the screams.  

“It’s the horrific nature of her unnecessary suffering that I’m protesting. She didn’t get relief until I found her and insisted on a 911 call,” Macomber said. “She was taken to a hospital where she died a few days later.” 

Carol Macomber is going public with her mother’s story because she has discovered the lack of meaningful consequences when there is abuse and neglect in nursing homes:

The Protection for Persons In Care Act does include fines which may be levied against individuals (up to $2,000) and corporations (up to $30,000). 

But no individual or nursing home has ever been fined, according to Kristen Rector, a communications advisor with the Department of Health and Wellness…

Approximately 8,000 Nova Scotians live in 92 licensed nursing homes. Published datashow that over the last six years (up until March 2024), that Protection for Persons In Care receives approximately 500 calls each year alleging abuse, and there have been approximately 200 confirmed cases of abuse or neglect in nursing homes over that period. 

Of those confirmed cases of abuse, 45 involved negligence or failure to provide adequate care; 56 involved  physical abuse; and 52 were cases of non-consensual sexual contact. Those were the top three categories.

Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia isn’t doing enough to address abuse and neglect in nursing homes, say advocates.”

As I told Henderson, this article, like Joan Baxter’s series below, is why I started the Halifax Examiner. These deep dive investigative pieces are important and are what we do best. I’m especially proud to be publishing such work.

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5. Oversized pickups and SUVs

We’ve published the third and final instalment of Joan Baxter’s series about oversized pickups and SUVs.

In the third part, Baxter looks at what governments in Canada could, at least in theory, do to tackle the bloat, as recommended by the Canadian Coalition to Reduce Auto Size Hazards (C.R.A.S.H.):

Among other things, C.R.A.S.H. recommends that the federal government:

• within six months, do a full review of “greater danger of pickups and large SUVs,” publish it, and act on it to ensure these vehicles “are no more dangerous than conventional cars”

• within 18 months update the Canada Motor Vehicle Standards to include an assessment of the risks to pedestrians and cyclists in crashes with motor vehicles in the test criteria

• require advertisers to include warnings about the greater dangers of pickups and large SUVs to other road users

C.R.A.S.H. wants municipal governments to increase parking fees for pickups and large SUVs to reflect the actual space they require, to update Vision Zero and related municipal safety plans so they highlight the dangers of pickups and large SUVs, and to restrict their use in heavy pedestrian and cycling traffic.

C.R.A.S.H. also has recommendations for provincial governments. Among them:

• create a new class of driver’s licence for pickups and large SUVs

• reintroduce vehicle registration taxes and other fees based on size, weight, and horsepower

• update highway traffic laws, imposing a ban on right turns at red lights, and imposing increased fines for traffic offences committed by drivers of such vehicles

Click or tap here to read “Oversized pickups and SUVs: the new kings of our roads are dangerous, threatening lives and our living environments (Part 3).”

Parts 1 and 2 of the series are available here and here.

For myself, I can only see the proliferation and increasing size of these vehicles as part of the coarsening of our society, a sort of interpersonal, anti-social violence on hyper-drive.

People say they “need” the big vehicles for this reason or that, but none of the reasons stand up to scrutiny — the beds are smaller than in more conventionally sized pickups; the “safety” aspect ignores the safety of anyone outside the vehicle; and most such vehicles rarely, if ever, are used anywhere other than on city streets. Instead, the big size and menacing (and often pointless from a functionality standpoint) big grills meant only to intimidate, seem to appeal to some social dysfunction, a ‘me against the world’ attitude.

What of self-driving vehicles? I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, I think we’ll never have actual self-driving vehicles, at least in the next century. I’m not really joking when I say it’s not a self-driving car until I can drunkenly put my toddler in the back seat, alone, and the vehicle takes the kid to the ex’s trailer two hollers over via a gravel road in the snow. Everything else is either glorified driver assist or a closed track system.

Moreover, as with Elon Musk’s ridiculous tunnels, the promise of supposed imminent arrival of self-driving cars seems mostly a rhetorical argument against better funding of mass transit.

And besides, seems to me, self-driving vehicles go against the entire ethos of giant pickup trucks and SUVs — isn’t the whole point to be at the wheel and lord it over your lesser fellow citizens?

Still, I’ve been wrong before, and maybe I’ll be wrong about this. Maybe next July or whatever, suddenly driverless vehicles become a reality, and the toddler can be taken safely to the ex’s trailer.

What then? Well, like all new technologies, it will first be used for… sex. And why not? The vehicle will take you where you want to go, and you’ve got your 45-minute commute with no need to pay attention to the road, so you can get a little nooky without a care. So suddenly the driverless vehicles all have beds. Then they’ll expand even more to include theatres and kitchens. And once you have all that, you need a toilet.

Basically, as I see it, if driverless vehicles ever actually become a reality, barring some government intervention, every vehicle on the road will become an RV.

This is the dystopian future we are building.

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Government

No meetings

On campus

Dalhousie

Today

No events

Tomorrow

Biosourced Lubricating Hydrogels for Treatment of Early-Stage Osteoarthritis (Tuesday, 9:30am, Theatre A, Tupper Building) — Vahid Adibnia will talk

Intracellular Amino Acid-Signaling Causing Epilepsy: Ancient Genetic Pathways Reveal Future Therapeutic Avenues (Tuesday, 4pm, online) — Paul Dutchak from Faculté de Médecine, Université Laval will talk

NSCAD

Opening receptions (Monday, 5:30pm, Anna Leonowens Gallery) — exhibitions by Alice Shirtliffe, Sarah Hutten, and group exhibition “An Od(i)e to Garfield”

Opening reception (Monday, 5:30pm, Treaty Space Gallery) — Xandú: Honouring Our Ancestors, a collaborative project exhibition

Literary Events

Register now — Conscience and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person: Zadie Smith will deliver the 11th Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture, Nov. 6, 6:30pm, Alumni Hall, King’s; more info here

Readings (Monday, 7pm, Halifax Central Library) — “Reading in the Dark: A Celebration of Horror,” a conversation led by Kydra Mayhew of Pints and Pages

In the harbour

Halifax
06:00: Tropic Hope, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Philipsburg, St. Croix
09:00: Harbour Fountain, oil tanker, sails from Irving Oil for sea
09:30: Azamara Journey, cruise ship with up to 781 passengers, arrives at Pier 20 from Sydney, on a 15-day cruise from Montréal to Miami (itinerary)
11:30: One Falcon, container ship, sails from Pier 41 for Singapore
15:00: MOL Experience, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from  Caucedo, Dominican Republic
16:00: MSC Sena, container ship, arrives at Pier 41 from Montréal
17:45: Azamara Journey sails for Saint John
22:00: Tropic Hope sails for West Palm Beach, Florida

Cape Breton
06:00: AlgoScotia, oil tanker, arrives at Sydney anchorage from Sept-Iles, Québec

Footnotes

I’m off to get my COVID and flu vaccines.

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