Special Olympics Wine Tasting and Fundraiser

Sixth Annual Special Olympic Tasting :

 

Several years ago over a few glasses of wine, a couple of brilliant minds came up with an idea to help raise money to go towards purchasing uniforms for Dartmouth Special Olympics teams, of which my daughter is an athlete in three sports.

Many of the participants are local professional sommeliers and "wine people", but it's a very casual atmosphere and a lot of fun.  Some of the special bottles are, indeed, very special simply because they are great wines.  Some bottles are special because they mean, or meant, a lot to the person who brought the wine.  

The first year we raised $350 ......the last few years we have raised close to $3000 on this one evening.

 

The location is Saege Bistro's Purple Sage Room,  Wednesday Nov 14th , 6.pm for reception & to get your bottles to Larry & I.  Sit down 7p.m.  The fee is $25 ( cash or cheque made out to Dartmouth Special Olympics )   plus you bring a "special" bottle of wine .  Upon arrival this bottle will be taken by Larry and put in a carafe and numbered. The guests will be seated at 2 different tables. Your wine will be at your table. We pour about 2/3 of the wine at your table, saving the rest for others at the other table to try later. We do the usual geeky thing of trying to guess our wine. When it is revealed you may stand and say why this wine is special. In the past some stories have been ....the bottle you were drinking when you proposed.....the last bottle you shared with a departed family member.....the bottle that made you fall in love with Pinot Noir....etc. 

 

As well , we ask you to bring along any silent auction items that you or any of your suppliers may put on the silent auction table....this is where the big bucks come in so feel free to blow the dust off that '93 riesling you've been holding on to. And don't forget your chequebook !!!

 

Cheeses & pates will be supplied to munch on afterwards. Don't delay , reply to Jeff Pinhey at brewnoser@gmail.com  to reserve a spot .

 

Cheers,

Kempton Hyson, Sommelier and Dad

Episode 2: Buying Local...or not. Exploring the Culture of NO

In her famous book "Cities and the Wealth of Nations", adopted Canadian economic heroine Jane Jacobs identified a very effective economic development approach.  She coined the phrase "Import Replacement", to differentiate it from the term Import Substitution, a policy followed somewhat blindly by many Latin American countries and India in the 60's.

Essentially, and simply, the concept revolves around the logic that your local economy would benefit  most by developing an ability to manufacture a thing, or deliver a service, that it was currently sending the fruit of its own efforts to another economy to acquire.

Jacobs was also a proponent of the idea of the power of distributed energy in the form of organically evolving small enterprises.  Those that were viable, necessary, and still efficient at a scale that matched their community.  If she were alive in Halifax today, I'm pretty sure she would not go near a Walmart, and would be a fixture at the farmers markets.  And it's also fair to say she'd not be a proponent of government meddling in the economy through grants, forgivable loans, and subsidies. She'd want a business to grow deep roots without artificial props, so that it could survive hard times.  Trees and parachutes look a lot alike until the parachute hits the ground.

Jane Jacobs' idea for urban design generally followed the same model - a preference for smaller, tightly woven neighbourhoods that were almost self sufficient, comprising larger communities, that were stronger, and ultimately binding together to form the larger city state that drove its own economy.

It is fair to say, I think, that many of our more liberal, and certainly many of our socialist leaning political types have accepted much of what Jacobs stood for as a path worth pursuing in developing new policies for community and economic development.  Certainly, the buy local theme has been more and more prevalent in almost all we do of late.

To my engineer's mind, the logic behind import replacement is straightforward, one only need to take an example like beer, something else I know a bit about.  When one of my local microbreweries makes a beer, it imports grain (though local options exist and are growing), hops (same as with the grain), and a small amount of yeast.  (Indeed, there are a few beers made here every now and then that use ingredients that all come from the Maritimes - this move is growing.)  One bottle of beer made on Gottingen Street takes a lot more labour to make than a same size bottle from the Molsons Brewery in Moncton.

The people who work at the Micro, all of them, live here, work here, and play here. Molson's has some employees in Moncton, but they are a tiny speck on a global map of operations.  Yes, there are jobs in Moncton at that brewery, but there will be a lot more jobs per bottle at my local micro, and Molson's HQ is not in Moncton.  The beers cost about the same, and if I were to develop a $/taste scale, the micro would win easily.

But the profit?  Well, 100% of the micro's profit stays right in my Province, in my neighbourhood.  The Molson profit?  Well, that depends on how many people here own shares in it.  Mostly, it's gone out of our economy.  So when you buy a Propeller, a Tanner Brewing Co., a Saltbox, or a Shipwright, you really are practicing import replacement of a sort.  And when you buy an apple from the Valley, instead of California Washington or Oregon, you are really practicing it.

The benefits of keeping our money in our economy seem to be obvious.  There is more money to go around because more stays here.  Our quality of life can increase.

But this is about goods.  What about services?  I argue that services, such as the engineering I've been providing to people, companies and government for 30 years, are an incredibly important part of our economy.  In fact the services industry, once the glue that held things together, is becoming more the concrete walls that support it.  It's a true renewable resource - ideas and designs are renewable, reusable, and yes, recyclable.  One thing we have proven we can make here in Nova Scotia is people. People with good brains. Of course our problem is that many of them have gone away and grown the economies of Ontario and Alberta instead of ours.

Two announcements made by our ostensibly socialist leaning NDP government a few years ago demonstrated why government should refrain from meddling in the affairs of a competitive market, and that it really needs to learn what it's priorities should be when it does do anything.  In these cases they got two different things completely back-assward.

In one news item, we heard that our hard earned tax dollars are going to subsidize the staffing costs of a big Alberta Engineering company to enlarge its office in Halifax. Its been here for a while, competing with locally owned business, and other branch offices, for oil field related work, local work, and actually doing work for the mothership back home.  They then started recruiting, now that they had my tax money to afford to be able to hire away my employees.  As someone who has helped build a small business and created jobs with no help, here in Nova Scotia, that was somewhat irritating.

If they can't justify being here without the subsidies, they should not be here.  And if they can, why are we giving them money?

This runs the risk of making the companies that were already here unviable. It takes profit out of our economy and sends it west.  Whose idea was this? Are we now going to offer the same subsidies to every other firm in the Province in order to maintain a level playing field?  What is government doing in this industry, screwing up the nature of its competitiveness?

It might be justifiable for a government to practice a buy local policy for its own service needs, but the reality is that in NS now, about 90% of all engineering services purchased by the government are provided by companies that are not owned by Nova Scotians and not headquartered in Nova Scotia.  And that is partly because government purchasing policies are directed almost exclusively to cater to larger firms.  The large firms are, with one exception, all "foreign" owned.  Our first job for the NS Government cost us more in insurance costs to qualify than the fee for doing the work. This is the type of barrier to small, locally owned companies that the Provincial bureaucrats who created purchasing policy apparently cannot comprehend.  I call it their "Buy Loco" policy.

The second news item was about the potential contracting out of IT services by the Provincial Government.  Perhaps someone made a business case for this work being done in India or wherever people work for 10 cents an hour, I don't know, and perhaps it might save money.  When things are working.  But what happens when they don't (something will go wrong, that's for certain)?  Our sensitive government records, stuff we really should be protecting and holding close to our collective chest are going to be under the control of a foreign owned multinational corporation?  Now I REALLY trust all of those guys, don't you?

So how much are we saving for this loss of control?  Is it really worth it?  And how much of what we now spend on the care and control of this data stays in NS after the changeover?

There are some things that should never be privatized.  I can't remember who told me this, but there is the "Library Test".  You cannot privatize a library.  If you do, it becomes a bookstore.  Every time you consider privatizing something now provided by government, you need to think - is this like a library? Now we are going to privatize our governmental information management systems?  My question is, who's buying?

Please note - I am not saying that nothing currently done by civil servants can't ever be done by private sector contract.  I am asking whether there are certain things best left alone, and suggesting that perhaps this is one of them.  I am also questioning where the money to do it ends up.

These cases both have one thing in common.  Instead of conforming to Jane Jacobs' ideas about strengthening our economy through Import Replacement, they actually do the exact opposite.  And perhaps it's not for certain, but they most definitely risk doing the opposite to our economy as well.

Back then, the NDP went 0 for 2 today, in a big way.  They were like 16 year old high schoolers desperately trying to look old enough to get into a bar when they've already had too much to drink.  With the next election, we told them to take their fake ID's and go back to school.  They didn't really know what they were doing. Maybe next time, if there is one, they will have learned, here in our Culture of NO.

Episode 1: Why Not? - Exploring the Culture of NO

In introduction, I got enough support for the previous RANT that I have decided to initiate a regular series of episodes, each documenting one of my experiences with government activity, in both the good or bad ending, as they related to our negative approach to governance.  I'll talk about the ones where they try to do something right, but end up being so incompetent, that they actually achieve the opposite of the intended result, and I'll discuss others where they eventually serve the public interest.  Like this one.

Of course there is an underlying level of lack of care or incompetence that infects most of the examples, and that is the lack of will on the part of those in charge, often our elected representatives, to correct the wrong, or wrongs, caused by staff bumbling, incompetence, or disdain for the public they are supposed to be serving.  Often, the entire issue is generated by something being approached from the philosophical position of NO from the start, with no initiative or intent to serve the public good by using their intelligence or authority.

Here is a story about access to our public highways, and how the reflex of the culture of NO was misapplied for a long time before some common sense arrived, the application of which has resulted in significant works of public good.

Highways, like the 101, 103 and 118, are obviously not desirable to have driveways and turnoffs or intersections connecting to them.  Traffic is moving fast, reaction times are less, and drivers tend to behave with a sense of complacency, making them more vulnerable to sudden moves by others.  Traditional highway and traffic engineering principles, most unchanged for generations, are all based on a very set hierarchy of the travelled way.  The closer you get to your house, the smaller and slower the road.  They tend to assume perfect conditions and prairie-like geography in their geometric simplicity.

Nova Scotia has adopted a practice of building the big "100 series" highways along the same transportation corridor as one of the former single digit "Trunk Roads", such as Trunk 3, with its corresponding Highway 103, and so on.  Connector Road are built to connect the Trunk roads, which have many smaller roads, local roads and driveways that provide access to the system of transportation, to the 100 series highways.  In the rigour typical of a system that seeks to rule by restriction, relying on a culture of NO to maintain the integrity of their "design", these connector roads are almost always deemed to be "Limited Access" and normally have an "Access Management Plan" prepared when they are being built that shows where you are allowed to connect.  Anywhere else: NO.

The access management plan becomes enshrined in the policy of the Provincial Department responsible for our roads and highways, currently called the Nova Scotia Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, a name clearly conceived by people with far too much time on their hand who did well in elementary school spelling bees.

This plan has often been prepared by an engineer, a road design person, using offset distances from other road elements as their main guide.  It will show, for example, a place where the road is permitted to be accessed using an approved intersection at a set distance (often 400 m) from the end of the taper of an off ramp from the 100 series highway.  It then will not show another such access point at a set distance, but only then if there is one more such distance available between the next access point and the Trunk Road being connected to.

A situation similar to this existed for some time on the Hammonds Plains Road (Route 333) from Exit 5 on the 103 down the hill (at times steep) to Trunk 3.  The access management plan showed approved access points at the location where the connector road left the original alignment of the 333 and became a newly minted Hubley Mill Lake Road.  It also allowed access to he connector at a similar location, again where the original 333 alignment intersected the newly built connector, newly termed French Village Station Road.

The engineer who did the plan in the first place also indicated that access would be permitted at a four way intersection in these locations, although they were originally only 3-way, "T" intersections.  One of those access points was gladly taken advantage of by the landowner it now provided access for, and a new residential subdivision was created from a new road called Fox Hollow Drive (though they should have called it Estabrooks Drive, but that's another story).  The Province took advantage of this location and built two new schools.  Private tax generating development has followed up with a private school, another subdivision, and a gas station and car wash.

Unfortunately the other location that had been approved did not really mesh well with land ownership on the opposite side of the three way.  A private driveway was developed by two lot owners that they share for personal access.  Meanwhile, up at the top of the hill, on that side, was a large piece of government owned land on one full quadrant of a major interchange that was seeing rapid development on two of the remaining quadrants.

For years, government and private sector approached the Department, trying to work out access to these land up on the hill, but every time they asked, they were told NO. That there was an access point approved, and that the land could be access by building there, and making a new parallel road back up the hill to the lands that were now increasing in value, and still owned by the Crown.  This direction was given despite the fact that the access point was a private driveway, the lands it immediately abutted were not owned by the Crown, and the actual feasibility of building a road back up the steep hill was doubtful.  But no matter, every time anyone asked, the answer was an abrupt NO.

It turned out that the peson who was responsible for saying NO, on a regular basis for almost 10 years, happened to be the same engineer who, as a junior engineer not long out of school, had created the "access" management plan.  Perhaps he can be excused for thinking himself infallible.

Eventually, this person retired and was replaced by a new Area Manager, and the Department had established the position of Access Manager.  A new Regional High School had been announced for this part of HRM, and the Province was out looking for the best place to put it.  The committee assigned to find a site agreed that that flat piece of land, up near the exit, close to the rink, the library, and yes, the McDonalds, made sense for the new high school, and the bonus was, it was already owned by the Province!  Except that the access point that same government would allow was almost a kilometer away, far down at the base of the hill.

The engineer working to review the site for the school visited the place, and walked along the limited access road, watching traffic move along in front of the desired location, and then accelerate down the hill towards where the approved access point was.  He stood at the access point and watched cars come down the hill, and concluded that it could never be safe for a slow moving school bus to have to lumber out into the road to head up that hill to the 103.  So they called the new Access Management Engineer and asked them to measure the safety of this "approved" spot, and then, while they were there, measure a place that would serve the preferred school site very well.

The result was what is now called Scholar's Road, home to the new Sir John A. MacDonald High School, a new controllable signalized intersection, and the new fire hall for the area.  In addition, it provides a future access, by simple pre-designed extension, to the remainder of these lands for future use as public open space, complete with a stunning view of St. Margarets Bay.

Someone had finally not said NO out of reflex.  Someone had listened to the facts, done some real engineering, and instead of taking the lazy way out, they figured out a way to not just say YES, but create an improvement for the people of the Province, those people they serve, by looking at how to get to a beneficial outcome, instead of how to protect their plan.  And in this case, they actually had the wherewithal and the authority to change the plan, to override policy for the common good.

The land remains in public ownership, and is not the private domain of a developer's clients.  It is public land in public use, in a fair, safe and effective manner.  And the policy of controlling access for safety and traffic flow remains.

Because instead of asking "Why?", someone said "Why not?"

RANT - Our Culture of NO

We in Nova Scotia have a problem that is not always shared in other places in Canada. It's been termed many things; "self defeatism", "infighting", "backstabbing", "a group inferiority complex", and the list goes on. This has become a bit of a self identity thing for some people, as more and more simply accept that it's how we roll. One of us works hard to rise above the rest, and they are dragged back down by petty, mean spirited, small minded mass degradation and devaluation of their achievement. Even Sidney Crosby has lots of haters here. And he's barely old enough to have earned the scorn of the asshats who will never, ever, accomplish anything meaningful in their meagre, listless, and ultimately wasted lives. If that sounds like you, it's best to stop here.

Yes, a good proportion of our population is accomplishing just that. Sitting at below the average level of productivity, initiative, risk taking, and, dare I even use the word, entrepreneurship. These couch potatoes are like the Lilliputians with their string lines tying down our potential Gullivers. Many are to be found online in comment forums of The Herald, CBC and the Coast. Losers.

And then we have the opposite. As in most things, we have an over-compensating reverse reaction from a group of people. These are more hopeful, positive, though perhaps somewhat glassy eyed from the Kool-Aid. Here I speak of the "rah rah" types supporting things like a stadium/football team, a new Convention Centre no matter where or how much it costs, or a politician who wins simply because they were in office before. It seems that they tend to gravitate towards anything that needs a massive PR effort in order to succeed. It does not need to make sense if their tribe is proposing it.  These people tend to just like what they are told to like and believe what they are told to believe.

So we have these two groups. Those who won't get on any banner, and those who won't get off, no matter how distorted the idea. And none of them thinking about anything but what's in it for them. The first group figuring to get even by bringing others down to their level, the second looking to get more by being on the right team; but both claiming they are doing it for the greater good. In the midst of this convoluted culture is our government. Or should I say governments. Here we have three often dissonant groups each thrashing away like kids at a candy toss for our tax dollar and the chance to decide where to (over)spend it.

Anything we might want to do, there is sure to be a permit required to do it. Pretty well anything you want to do that makes sense, socially, economically, or just for sheer fun, is probably not supported by existing by-laws, regulations, laws, or policies of one of the three levels of government. In fact, many things we know to be good policy, tested elsewhere, are either illegal, or discouraged here. But the real Nova Scotia element to this suppression is that the discouragement often takes the form of rules being interpreted with a goal of disallowing, or rendering an idea useless, or debilitating a business idea to the point where it can't make money. It's not illegal, but it might as well be for all the trouble it takes just to get your permit. Not for any real reason, perhaps just to make sure that no good idea someone else had ever gets realized. Let's look at some examples.

Fire codes. We use this sacred cow to smother calves. No one has the courage to stand up to these people. They ask for the ridiculous, often apparently out of some desire for power over others, I guess. I am sure there was dancing and rejoicing when they put Tribeca out of business, along with the 40 or so lost jobs. Consider this: we paid for one of our own government agencies to relentlessly hassle a business that was in reasonably good health until it could not afford to stay in business. This was a long standing business that we extinguished by not being able to adapt to our codes changing over time. Other restaurants and bars are held to similarly Draconian officialdom - some are limited only by this group of apparent haters. One other nearby bar does not even have a kitchen, but is held to the same fire escape path lengths and widths as if it had fat fryers and pots on stoves. We regularly pay about $6000 per new building to install fire hydrants that our fire department will not touch. The codes make us install the hydrants, and make us go out there and paint them yellow. A yellow hydrant is a "private hydrant". The fire department knows this, and they also know that only the red hydrants are maintained by Halifax Water. So they NEVER touch a yellow hydrant, because when they need water, they need it to work immediately. But we still make developers (including the government) put in the yellow ones. I sometimes wonder how many yellow hydrants there are in total in Halifax, and how the annual cost of installing new ones and repairing breaks around them compares to the cost of running the food bank.

We do this to ourselves.

Liquor licenses. This is a source of historic corruption, abuse, and nonsensical application of an ancestral protestant hatred of fun. OK, we have decided that to sell an organic substance that anyone can make, you have to have a license from the state. As if that was not enough, the state has devised a myriad of illogical, ill applied, redundant, and sometimes harmful rules, regulations and policies, such that this entire industry, one of our top job creators, is constantly hassled by overpaid, redundant inspectors and bureaucrats who really should be just out cleaning the streets or some other useful task. You cannot have a real pub in Halifax, a British Navy town. You can have lots of real/fake Irish pubs,but no true neighbourhood pubs. The senior citizens in charge assume that liquor is evil, therefore any bar must also be evil. These hypocrites probably love pubs when they visit England, and might go so far as as to wish we had them here, they are wonderful neighbourhood enhancements. Well, we would if we were allowed to. Zoning, parking requirements - yes you must drive to drink, and our complaints-based political system make establishing a proper neighbourhood pub impossible. Just try. Then go back to watching Coronation Street, you dreamer.

Obaldee, which is the type of place that you WANT kids to go to with their parents so that they can learn about responsible drinking and the respectful enjoyment of fine drink, is multiply hindered by the idiotic laws governing their operation. They cannot sell Scotch or other spirits. No real reason why, they just can't, some ancient rule is being misapplied on them. They can't have anyone under 19 in there at any time they are open. But the Pogue Fado can. Despite the full hearty meals that Obladee's delicious cheese and charcuterie boards make for many of their customers, the Liquor License fools interpret their rules according to the culture of no - they say it's not a full meal - I guess you have to have junk food and fries to call something a full meal in the culture of no. And apparently you have to serve full meals to serve scotch, but wine and beer are OK on their own. Imagine that! Why is this? I say it's because it was easier for some bureaucrat to "just say no" rather than address the real life situation in a responsible and intelligent manner, and advise their Minister that a variance to their outdated brain-dead regulations be created. But no, we can't be seen to be supporting business that might actually create a few stable jobs in this wobbly economy.

Seniors Care Here is my "favourite" one right now. In Nova Scotia, if you want to take your garage and fix it up so your parents can age with your family but not be in the house all the time, good luck. We have a Department of Environment that managed to decide to regulate this activity, with the goal of making it possible, but couldn't manage to not screw it up, and instead of facilitating, they actually made it impossible to do in almost every case. And what happens then? People get sent to our overflowing senior's care facilities, funded by another part of government that is working to encourage more home care. Families who want to have the benefit and joy of having their parents around as long as possible are forced into sending them into a home, because what is essentially a typographic error is being enforced by a government department in a manner and outcome that is the exact opposite of the intent of the policy. They have known about this for years now and done nothing to stop it. In a culture of no, it's just easier to say no than fix something.

There are countless more examples. Environmental regulations that actually make things worse for the environment. Giving money to out-of-province companies who will only take it and run as soon as they can. The insane self prosecuting nature of our government departments who spend far more time policing other government groups than the actual industry. The running of our government purchasing system such that it actually biases against, or even excludes, buying local. A small company in, say Shelburne, that can do a job with almost no expenses for the Nova Scotia Government in their own town, must compete with two other firms from away, but purchasing policy dictates that the winner is the one with the median price, not the low price, so we actually spend more NOT to buy local.

We do this to ourselves.

Anyone who wants to say this happens everywhere need only go somewhere where government seems to actually want business to flourish and to create growth and jobs. In Moncton, for example, there is a palpable culture of YES. A business can start up, build its warehouse or office and go into business in less than a year, while the business opportunity needed to spark a new company still exists. In Halifax, by the time the Moncton shop is open, we are having a fourth public meeting with the only attendants being people who want nothing to ever change. We cede naysayers an inordinate amount of control over the permission to do anything here. There is a place for public interaction, but it cannot adhere to the culture of no.

We have to learn to start saying yes, and allowing an economic culture to establish that not only encourages our best and brightest to stay here, but allows them to succeed as well as, or even better than anywhere else. We have to start celebrating our neighbours' success, not mocking it. We have to establish true buy-local practices that encourage import substitution of goods and services. We have to protect and grow our local food sources. We have to make sure our youth stay in school and can afford to achieve their full potential, and that they have a place to exercise that in their home land. Finally, we have to create a culture where it is an honour to run for public office, and one that allows a full participation of capable people, instead of the dull, dysfunctional, professional politicians we have now. A 2 term max, please? Eight is enough when it comes to years, and don't try to tell me there are not another 16 people here in HRM as smart as our current new council.

How can we start? A long discussion with a recently retired HRM bureaucrat offered some insight. It really does start at the top. If people in an organization are encouraged to point out and try to fix the inane things their department is doing, and not punished for it, they will. A Mayor or CAO who is out there setting an example, and recognizing the efforts of people who do really try to make things better can create change.

Our average intelligence is the same as anywhere. Our application of that is well below average. We need to smarten up and stop doing this to ourselves. Instead of having to have a litany of reasons why we should be allowed to do something, we need to focus on making sure our reasons for saying no are valid, and plentiful. Not every development or proposal is good, but they're not all bad either.