“Enterprise”: A close-up of the nameplate on the old boiler/stove, circa 1922, found in the house graciously donated for re-use as the new Lawrencetown post office. It is operated by Carleton Road Industries Association. Photo courtesy CRIA

This week I had the pleasure of learning from Mackenzie Akin how Carleton Road Industries Association (CRIA), located on highway 201 (Carleton Road) just west of the Lawrencetown lane, has been able to manage the local post office and expand the employment base for its clients. Akin is executive director at CRIA, which since the late 1970s has provided vocational training to workers with particular needs and of late has become a model for social entrepreneurship. You can read my column on the subject here, as it appears in the Sunday edition of The Chronicle Herald.

Bowater Mersey Paper Company Limited                 Image: CBC

In my Sunday business column in The Chronicle Herald this week I ask why the public is being shut out of the old Bowater Mersey paper mill, now that the industrial estate is in government hands. What other uses could be made of this iconic 1929 architectural, historical, industrial and social monument?

Old building, new business. Sales associate Caroline Perriman adjusts a wreath at Adaptations on Queen Street, Bridgetown. Photo: Copyright 2012 Rachel Brighton

Bridgetown was cosy warm this chilly weekend: school choir singing carols outside the town hall; crafters selling superb handiwork; shopping after dark; chestnuts roasting; Santa on parade; and hope abounding. I couldn’t help thinking a town like ours doesn’t need to be “saved” from economic decline (so government rhetoric); it needs to be preserved as it is, so inherent strengths (civility, tenacity, ingenuity, mutual care) displayed over the past 200 years or so will carry it through a few centuries more. Translating such personal musings for popular consumption in the paper I write for is never easy, but the fruits of my labour are here.

It’s been a while since I’ve been inspired to write on something close to home, but the dying rays of the sun bursting over the east bank of the Sissiboo River lured me down the long-way-home from Digby to Bridgetown yesterday, leading me through one of my favourite mercantile riverscapes: the bridge in Bear River. Up the hill and by a brook is the renovated “Rebekah” – an “old Elta Rebekah Lodge in the midst of a 21st century make-over into a multi-purpose community space,” as the owners’ website explains – which houses the Turkish roasting machine that is the engine of Sissiboo Coffee Roaster. Anyway, I wrote a column about roasting coffee in rural Nova Scotia for Thursday’s paper (The Chronicle Herald), which you can read online.

Northwest Cove at dawn │ Photo: © Rachel Brighton

Almost a decade ago to the day, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia ruled against residents of Northwest Cove and surrounding communities who had appealed the approval of a fish farm on their shoreline. The fish farm never went ahead, but their experience, described today in my column in The Chronicle Herald, yields insight into the current debate over the provincial government’s decision to finance Cooke Aquaculture Inc. to the tune of $25 million.

“In densely-populated municipalities like Kings County, are there other approaches to renewable energy which are better-suited, less intrusive & ‘greener’ than LSWTs (large-scale wind turbines)?” The question – which ought to be asked before rather than after a major wind farm is slated for development – is posed as one of many that concerned citizens in Kings County, Nova Scotia, have raised in the context of the move to rescind a municipal bylaw allowing as-of-right large-scale wind turbines. An ad hoc group of county residents have canvassed the issues relating to this regulatory reform in a pamphet (It’s About Respect – Wind Turbine Bylaws in Kings County) encouraging other residents to attend a public hearing on the matter on June 20.

The pampleteers continue: “Rescinding these bylaws does not mean that there will never be an opportunity for Large-Scale Wind Turbine development in Kings County. It simply means that no developments can proceed until new bylaws are debated and enacted by the Council. And unlike the original bylaws, any new LSWT-related bylaws will be developed and debated with the active participation of an awakened, informed and engaged public (italic added).” That would fit my definition of proactive, in contrast with the reactive position the county finds itself in by virtue of having passed an as-of-right bylaw before the answers to such key questions were settled.

In my Sunday column in The Chronicle Herald two weeks ago (column here; comment and clarification here and here) I raised the issue of local democracy and energy resources in a way that led some readers in Kings County to infer that I meant they were being “reactive” by wanting the bylaw struck down; my only purpose in invoking the example of Kings County was to contrast a proactive approach to regional energy development (so Cumberland County) with the consequences of a bylaw that inevitably provoked reaction when the chickens came home to roost.

Readers of this blog who care about the connection between local resources, local development and local democracy may have read my June 10 weekly column in The Chronicle Herald on the subject of generating power in the community, for the community.

I wrote in my original column:

“Public attention right now is fixed on the cost of power that is distributed through a provincial monopoly. The simplest and easiest way to avoid these costs is to generate alternative energy sources at the point they are needed.” That is, on-site, off-grid energy sources that can help us break our dependence on a monopolized, expensive, centrally operated power system.

But the key clause – “at the point they are needed” – was missing in the published version of the column.

Some readers inferred that I was promoting community-dividing, as-of-right, big-wind developments that sell power to the utility. That was not my point. My intent was to draw attention to the potential for municipalities to be proactive, through planning, regulation and investment, to set their own goals for energy self-sufficiency, tailor-made for their residents and local industry.

The “skills debate” is heating up in Nova Scotia.

Adult learning should be as much a plank of our economy and our democra­cy as educating children. But the fact that we have to pay for remedial education in the workplace points to a problem in our education system. I take up this issue in my weekly column in The Chronicle Herald and, as chronic concerns about the skills gap in Nova Scotia be­come acute, I note what literacy advocates have known all along: that our low levels of literacy across the province are a barrier to employment and a real cap on our economic growth.