Modest Accomplishments

Here is a story I wrote for the cover of the March 2012 issue of Business Voice, the Halifax Chamber of Commerce’s magazine.

Nova Scotians were overjoyed this fall by the news that Irving Shipbuilding Inc., one of the province’s largest private sector employers, was awarded a 30-year, $25 billion contract by the federal government. The announcement conjured images of a decades-long influx of jobs and even a chance for relatives out west to come home to work.

Though an exciting prospect, the contract draws attention to the labour shortage in this province, with many industries struggling to find the skilled workers they need to remain competitive.

The shortage is showing up in some industries before others, says Lynn Hartwell, executive director of the Skills and Learning Branch in the Department of Labour and Advanced Education. She points to trades such as welding and pipe-fitting and the information and communication technology sector as two areas with a significant need for new workers.

“Our expectation, though, is that because of the declining size of the working-age population, it’s going to be felt by everyone,” Hartwell says.

Brian Rose, vice president of membership for the Halifax Chamber of Commerce, says the Chamber has recently given more thought to the role business should play in education. In the past, he says, a direct connection between the needs of business and the needs of public schools wasn’t seen, but the announcement of the shipbuilding contract helped convince him of the importance of creating a strong, focused workforce through more interaction with kids still in the school system, starting at a young age.

“The people who will be working on those ships at the latter stage of this contract are babies,” he points out. “They may not have even entered the school system yet. So you really have to plan your human resources that far ahead.”

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My investigative workshop in j-school did a collaborative story on VLT gambling in Nova Scotia. It was a messy, frustrating process at times, but the end result was the coolest, most important thing I was involved with at King’s. My job was to track down people who had been affected by gambling, and go around the province interviewing them. The story won the Canadian Association of Journalists Student Award of Excellence. 

You can see the website the workshop put together here. A version of the story was also published as “Terminal Disease”  in The Coast, Halifax’s weekly paper in April 2010.

Published in the Nova Scotia Business Journal, March 2011, which you can see here. 

Protecting the environment and increasing revenue can seem like opposing goals, but one Nova Scotia paper company is achieving both at the same time. Minas Basin Pulp and Power sells carbon credits to buyers across North America, making money and helping other groups reach their carbon-reduction goals.

 In a regulated carbon market such as Europe, companies must reduce their greenhouse emissions by certain amounts. They make reductions themselves, or pay another company to reduce emissions on their behalf. Every metric ton of carbon dioxide or an equivalent amount of other greenhouse gas that isn’t released equals one carbon credit.

 Canada doesn’t have a regulated carbon market yet, so Minas Basin trades in a voluntary North American market and sells all the carbon credits it generates.

 “The voluntary market exists when individuals or companies want to reduce their own carbon footprint, just to sleep better at night, or for companies that want to offer carbon-neutral products”, says Aaron Long, manager of energy resources for Minas Basin.

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This was my first story for the Nova Scotia Business Journal in January 2011. You can see the full edition here.

Black cultural groups are gaining a competitive edge in time for the summer tourism season. The Black Business Initiative (BBI), along with provincial partners, has launched the Cultural Tourism Project, a program that will help African Nova Scotian organizations promote themselves as tourist attractions, creating jobs and expanding their reach. 

Tracey Thomas, the senior policy analyst for the Office of African Nova Scotian Affairs, says the province wants to do more to include the founding cultures of Nova Scotia, including African Nova Scotians, in its tourism strategy.  

“The African Nova Scotian community is rallying together and analyzing how it can take the organizations it has and make more of a meaningful contribution,” she says. 

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This is a profile I did during my internship at Shambhala Sun magazine in 2010. You can see the post on their SunSpace blog here.

The current issue of the Shambhala Sun offers a look at young Buddhists and the issues, styles, and passions they’re bringing to their spiritual practice.

Here, Laura MacKenzie introduces us to Adrian Fish, a young Buddhist photographer. While working on a photography project, Adrian Fish says, he is in a state of tension. If he’s satisfied with the result, the tension releases. “And that’s an uncomfortable feeling,” he says, “this state of not having tension.”

“On the one hand,” Fish says, “we think we don’t want challenge, but when we don’t have that challenge we feel very agitated and upset, and we usually create some challenge for ourselves.”

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Published in the 2010 edition of Tidings, the University of King’s College magazine. You can see the entire edition here.

 Friends, family and former colleagues remember Margaret Catherine Vickery as an outgoing, nurturing woman, and a central character at the University of King’s College.

  Vickery worked at King’s from 1979 to 1996 as a switchboard operator and secretary for the Bursar, Donald Fry. 

 Angus Johnston, who taught at King’s from 1977 to 2009, remembers Vickery’s small office as a crowded hub where faculty would gather for coffee and conversation in the mornings.

 “She was Grand Central Station,” he says. “It was like overseeing a family, more than simply doing a secretarial or administrative job.”

 Vickery died on January 16, 2010. She was 78 years old.

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This was my honours project in the last year of my journalism degree. It was published in the King’s Journalism Review in the fall of 2009.

You can read it in the KJR here. 

Truth can be hard to prove in court. A new defence could help journalists fight defamation suits if they prove they did everything they could to get it right.

In 1994, Harvey Cashore helped break one of the biggest political stories in recent Canadian history, the tale of the German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber and his controversial dealings with former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

A year later, the producer with CBC television’s the fifth estate was pulled off the story. Schreiber had launched a $35 million defamation suit, and lobbyist Frank Moores had sued for $15 million.

It would be four years before Cashore could dig into the tangled tale once more and even longer before the program would do another segment on the issue.

It wasn’t for lack of evidence.

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