My first reaction to this ‘action plan’ is that it is sparse.  At 592 words (much of it political babble), I’ve made more detailed action plans for my younger son just in the course of mapping out one afternoon to his satisfaction.  If I were to devise a whole action plan for autism in the entire province of Nova Scotia, I might need more words than that.  Its lack of real substance aside, it throws a decent bone or two to the preschoolers in need of early intervention.  But it mostly ignores the significantly larger portion of the population that actually live with autism – adults and older children.

The action plan calls for increasing autism funding by $5.5 million over the next two years.  The bulk of this – $4 million – will go toward creating new spaces in the EIBI (Early Intensive Behaviourial Intervention) program.  EIBI is widely, though not universally, believed, in the government’s own words: “to improve functional skills including communications, social skills and behaviour, so children with autism can better communicate and interact with their families, classmates and community.”   Perhaps.  There is significant room for discussion about the long term advantages of this approach, but many experts endorse it, and for now let us acknowledge that we are at least lucky enough to have a government in this province that gives due heed to experts.  If the $4 million investment does what the government optimistically says it will, which is that “soon, every pre-school child with autism will have access to the program”, a significant improvement will have been made.  Currently, participation in the program is determined by lottery, like in the Shirley Jackson story.  Half the eligible kids currently get EIBI, the other half are not so lucky.

But – and this is a big but – that is just of the eligible kids.  There are lots of autistic children who are not eligible for EIBI for a variety of reasons.  The action plan does almost nothing for those kids, and they continue to fall more or less between the cracks.

On the subject of doing almost nothing, after the $4 million is subtracted, the remaining $1.5 million gets spread around in “supports for school-aged children, supports for adults, training to raise skills and awareness, and partnerships to support programming and services.”  That’s a tall order for such a meager investment.  But wait, let us see some detail on how these things will be achieved.

First, by “maintaining the provision of autism specialists at the Department of Education and in school boards so children have the support they need in the classroom.”   So, one of their “investments” is actually a promise not to spend less.  That’s like the time my boss gave me a raise by not cutting my pay.  Swell guy, he was.  The real slap in the face, of course, is that simply maintaining of the level of support kids currently get in the classroom just won’t cut it.  These kids – my kids! – need more support than they get now.  And maybe as a society we can’t afford that support or maybe we have even decided it is not society’s job to provide it, but let’s be honest about that and not pretend the kids already get adequate support in the public school factory.

Additionally, the action plan promises to “review and implement revised income guidelines for the Direct Family Support for Children program so more families have more access to things like medication, transportation and respite when a break is needed.”  So some chunk of the $1.5 million is going to go into a review of respite funding, that much is explicitly promised.  Changing the income guidelines, thereby increasing access to this funding is also explicitly promised.  Conspicuously absent from the plan, though, is the promise to expand the funding of the respite program itself in order to accommodate the new demand.  I’m not a big city economist, but I bet the tiny piece of that spare $1.5 million that’s left by this time is not going to do it.  More likely, current funding will be maintained (we’ve already seen this government’s propensity to call that an investment), but will be required to serve a larger number of families.  Thus the families who currently receive support may have that reduced in the future as their slices of the pie shrink.

Despite the already quoted promise of  “supports for adults, training to raise skills and awareness, and partnerships to support programming and services,” no detail on how this might be accomplished is provided.  Which is really just as well because one ought to seriously question the ability to accomplish all that’s promised on such a slim allowance increase.

The most intriguing part of the action plan for me was the announcement of funding for a tracking system for people with autism (and other disorders).  As the father of two highly flight risk children, I welcome the the idea of a wrist worn transmitter.  But this, though its announcement accompanied the provincial announcement, is actually a federally funded initiative and does not come from Darrel Dexter’s largesse.

The whole action plan falls short in its terseness, in its optimistic assertion that it can accomplish so much with so little, and in its failure to adequately address the needs of adults and older children with autism in its almost exclusive devotion to preschoolers.  The preschoolers need attention, and early intervention is important, I don’t want to diminish from that.  But I was talking with a coworker today who attended an autism charity event recently.  She found herself surprised to be in a room with a large number of autistic adults because she somehow saw it as a childhood disorder.  Intellectually, she knew autism was forever, and so she could have derived the existence of autistic adults, yet she still perceived it as a childhood thing.  This is a view that I think is unfortunately quite widespread, and it helps account for the political focus on children with autism rather than on people with autism. Roughly 1 in 123 Nova Scotians have autism, the vast majority of them over six years old.

In short, while I applaud the NDP for making autism services an explicit part of its agenda, because that’s an important step in the right direction, I think this particular “action plan” more political than practical.  And that’s not unlike four people who will take to the stage in a nationally televised debate tonight.  Back to my regularly scheduled programming.

My friends are moderately split on the subject. Some of them think this is a tempest in a teapot that diverts our attention from the more important issues of housing, education, health, and the Olympics. These friends make a solid point.  One that  is being endlessly reiterated by Finance Minister Graham Steele, now touring the province on a push-poll “consultation” with Nova Scotians designed to justify an HST increase.  Mr. Steele tells us the MLA money we are talking about amounts to a “drop in the bucket”.  A few tens of thousands of dollars, and our focus on it is terribly distracting from the bigger picture. A few of my friends, and Mr. Steele, are right about that.  This is just chump change.

My other friends think that it was their chump change, and that makes them chumps, and it was their MLAs who made them that way.  They also have a good point.   Most of my friends are fairly politically savvy.  They may not be the compulsive wonks that dwell in my house but they stay in touch and they make informed opinions. They recognize that it isn’t all MLAs who turned them into chumps. They believe that most MLAs are hard working and honest people who want nothing but the best for their constituents. They also believe that Ghandi himself would have gone wild with an unchecked expense account. The opinion of our representatives from the Nova Scotian electorate at large seems considerably less forgiving.

A well known finance minister – then revelling in the glorious and unaccountable outrage that is Opposition – once came and spoke to a political science class I was taking. In politics, he told us, it doesn’t matter what is true, it matters what people think is true. Graham Steele, who is constantly telling us to forget about this, should talk to that guy.   Because the Nova Scotian electorate thinks he, and hs 51 counterparts, are criminals or just shy of it.  Graham Steele knows that’s not true, just like I do.  Unfortunately, the electorate is just not as forgiving as I am and anyway – it doesn’t matter what is true.

MLA expenses are more symbolically than materially important. They represent a selfish mismanagement of public resources by the people who promised to do exactly not that if only we’d vote for them. Naively, we voted for them and expected more. But fewer and fewer of us are falling victim to that patrticular naivte, and so fewer and fewer of us are voting. I have heard and read comments on this story from voters calling for a boycott on voting. Clearly, boycotting voting is the avoidance of, rather than the solution to, the problem, but this does not change that sense of further disefranchisement in voters. Such a boycott may not present a problem for the entrenched MLAs who could benefit from fewer outraged voters venturing to the ballot box, but it is potentially disastrous for our democracy.

The government can take steps to deter this disaster, if Darrell Dexter ever returns to Nova Scotia. These steps should include, but not be limited to: determining a just and open process of MLA compensation, opening the books completely on MLA expenses, changing the rules to make MLAs more accountable, and telling Graham Steele to think twice every time he wants to tell us to stop talking about this.

But where the criticism rang genuine, the apology does not.  Keddy’s original comments were in defense of the hiring of migrant workers, which Mr. Keddy himself doesn’t do for his own Christmas tree operation, but which is nonetheless both a common and – to Keddy – defensible practice in the Nova Scotia agriculture industry.  My objective here is neither to celebrate nor denigrate the practice, but to take issue with Gerald Keddy’s sweeping and – to me – heartfelt dismissal of the unemployment and homeless issues in Nova Scotia.   That is, in the HRM part of Nova Scotia.  Never a party to miss a slot into which they can drive a wedge, Keddy pointedly talked about the no good bastards on the sidewalks of Halifax.  The unemployed of Bridgewater and of Lunenburg, and of rural constituencies in general, get a pass.  It’s the urban bums that make us bring in Mexicans.

As told in the Chronicle-Herald:

“Nova Scotians won’t do it — all those no-good bastards sitting on the sidewalk in Halifax that can’t get work,” Mr. Keddy said Monday.

He said if you want to “shut down the Annapolis Valley, and every market garden operation and all the apple industry, then don’t bring in immigrant labour. We’ve got 20 Christmas tree growers using immigrant labour this year.”

Enter Nova Scotian outrage.

Enter Gerald Keddy tersely apologizing for having ever opened his mouth:

“These comments were insensitive, and for that I am truly sorry…In no way did I mean to offend those who have lost their job due to the global recession, nor did I mean to suggest that anyone who is unemployed is not actively looking for employment.”

What is it then that Mr. Keddy meant to suggest when he cited the need to bring in Mexicans (“It’s not slave labour here“) to do jobs the unemployed no-good bastards from Halifax wouldn’t do?

Some years ago another Conservative MP took a swipe at the people of Nova Scotia, cited our “culture of defeat” as if our collective indolence were responsible for the socio-economic realities of the region.  That, of course, was Stephen Harper – Gerald Keddy’s master in Ottawa.  Harper said such things because he understood well the benefits of wedge issues in politics and understood further that the basis of all meaningful wedge issues in  Canadian politics are geographic.  We may have different takes on abortion and capital punishment and gay marriage, but culturally we all more or less accept that these issues are resolved and that it behooves us to accept things as they are and perhaps never mention them again.

Not so with geography.  During Harper’s federal rise, he played to his regional base.  And if that meant taking shots at Nova Scotians as welfare bums, he wasn’t above it.  Gerald Keddy did the same thing with his crack at the poor of Nova Scotia’s largest city – the regional wedge issue in Nova Scotia is, as always, urban vs. rural.  If you want to destroy the Annapolis Valley, Keddy asserted, force them to rely on the no good bastards from the city.  That would be good wedge politics if the people of Nova Scotia – rural and urban alike – hadn’t collectively raised their eyebrows and said “WTF?”

Keddy was compelled to trot out the standard issue apology.  It was insensitive, I didn’t mean to offend, etcetera, etcetera.  Left unrecorded, of course, if Mr. Keddy is sincere in his apology, are the reasons why he should have spoken so derisively of the urban poor in the first place.

Here’s to hoping Mr. Keddy joins the ranks of Nova Scotia’s unemployed the next time we go to the ballot box.

I titled this blog – optimistically – a few days ago, and I left it at that.  That was when Erin Flaim, the Manager of service delivery at Metro Transit, called.  She wanted to talk with Charlene and I – to open a “dialogue”, in her word – about the recent incident with our son.   And she wanted to do so, understandably, away from the cameras and microphones and somewhat misrepresentative editorial practices of the mainstream press.  Charlene and I were accordingly invited to her office, and it was an invitation we readily accepted.  That meeting with Ms. Flaim (and Public Affairs Coordinator Lisette Cormier) was today, and I came away from it feeling optimistic not just about the seriousness with which Metro Transit took this issue, but about its willingness to cooperatively and constructively work on means to avoid such distresses in the future.  I kept the hopeful title.

Ms. Flaim and Ms. Cormier had different versions of the actual incident than we did.  They had a film of the incident, after all, which privacy policy unfortunately prevented us from actually seeing.  They assert, for example, that the driver did not actually say that Izaak had to get off the bus.  The bus was stopped and the driver said he couldn’t continue to drive safely if Izaak continued to scream.  The camp director then made the decision, voluntarily, to remove Izaak from the bus.  Personally, and I said so at the meeting, I thought this was a semantic point because the driver had created a situation where there was little choice – due to authoritative and social pressure – but to remove Izaak from the bus.  So the driver hadn’t explicitly used the words “off the bus” – there are a thousand and one ways to say a thing without actually having to say it.  The video says he didn’t say it, and Metro Transit has us at an advantage on that one, because we didn’t actually have a video camera on the bus and we can’t watch the tape they made.  But like I said, it’s a semantic point, anyway.  Explicitly or implicitly,  it was a driver’s words that caused Izaak to be removed from the bus.  We tended to agree to disagree with the transit representatives on this point, but we moved on.

I asked Metro Transit to issue a public clarification on one other point, because it sparked some heated comments on some of the stories.   There was a lot of hate from a lot of commenters.  That kind of stuff can get to you when they’re talking about your son.  Lisette Cormier made the helpful suggestion to ignore it, and Charlene has largely been able to – but I’ve perhaps been less successful.  Readers of my original blog will recall that the rest of the Autism Summer Camp staff and campers got off the bus one or two stops later because they couldn’t get back into the camp home base without the director, who had the keys and who had got off with Izaak.  When the group disembarked the bus and asked the driver for a transfer, they were refused one.  Comments to the media by transit spokeswoman Lori Patterson conveyed the impression that the transfers were refused because the group was riding the bus for free.  This was simply not true – a fact readily acknowledged by Ms. Flaim and Ms. Cormier – and Lori Patterson’s apparent assertion of it was actually a result of editing for TV news in order to make the story more adversarial.  It was a reasonable enough explanation that I let the matter drop. Besides, we all got misrepresented to one degree or another in the stories and the comments.

I offered to issue a public clarification of my own, too, because I accidentally misrepresented our case in a couple of interviews.  Because of a misunderstanding when the story was first relayed to me, I thought the camp counselors had asked the driver for a five stop grace in which to settle Izaak down and were refused it.  In fact, no such thing happened.  That was a result of my own misunderstanding, and I accordingly apologize for it.  The rest I stand by.

But since Metro Transit has no intention of publicly commenting on this story again in any way whatsoever, let this set the official record straight.  The Autism Summer Camp was not riding the bus for free and all the hate-filled commenters on the various stories who jumped on this notion to justify and spew their hate can just….well, you know what they can just go do.

Although it was a sometimes emotional meeting – Charlene cried once or twice and my voice raised as I had a renewed (but brief) fury at the notion that Izaak had been on the bus for just 3.5-5 minutes total before the driver could take no more – it was also a highly productive meeting.  Despite the points of disagreement, Ms. Flaim will send a letter of apology to Izaak and one to the Camp Director,  a remarkable man who acted in Izaak’s interests and called due attention to a perceived injustice.  My gratitude is with him 100%.

Once the meeting today moved past the actual specifics of the incident and focused on the future, there was significantly more common ground to be found.

Metro Transit doesn’t want to be accused of intolerance and discrimination any more than they actually want to be practicing them.  And they sincerely seem to be open to ways of avoiding these situations in the future.  They already have a relationship with the Mental Health Association and will be working with Autism Society Nova Scotia and with Artists for Autism going into the future to help generate awareness not just within Metro Transit itself, but in the public at large.  They are developing a diversity training program for its operators that incorporates cultural and neuro diversity and are open to suggestions that would enhance that programming.  Ms. Cormier eagerly welcomed my suggestion that we place Autism Awareness advertisements on the buses, and are interested in a “tip sheet” for parents of kids with autism and transit drivers alike that Charlene and I offered to develop.

Furthermore, it turns out that the boys are eligible for Access-a-Bus service.  It had been a couple of years since we inquired about it, so the rules have either changed or were misrepresented to us at that time.   I suggested that Metro Transit make well known to the various autism advocacy groups in the city that their members and constituents may qualify for this service.  Left unaddressed was the problem of lack of institutional access to Access-a-Bus.  If special needs groups could use this service, the whole incident might have been avoided in the first place.

I suppose all sorts of things were left unaddressed – you can’t fix everything in an hour and a half.  But you can take your first baby steps, and this is what we did today.  I am enormously grateful to the media (even the few who did some questionable editing) for bringing this story into the public and making people talk about autism for a couple of days.  I am even more enormously grateful to Erin Flaim and Lisette Cormier, who recognized the significance of the issue and who wanted to give it more sincere and detailed attention than a soundbite ever could.

The child has autism, it was explained to the driver, lest the sea of bright red shirts with the clear white lettering reading AUTISM SUMMER CAMP in CAPS on both the front and back was insufficient, let us have a moment to calm him down.

Get him off my bus, it was explained to the camp counsellors.  I wasn’t there, so I am avoiding direct quotes and relaying the gist as it was relayed to me.  The upshot was that Izaak was removed from the bus – his amazing and dedicated counsellor and the (if possible) even more amazing camp director at his sides.  Almost as soon as the bus began moving – the rest of the kids and their (what must have been bewidered) counsellors still on it – one of the counsellors realized that with the director off the bus, keys with him, when they actually got back to the camp location nobody would be able to get in.  They had to get off the bus, too, and – even after explaining this to the driver, he refused to give them the necessary transfers so that the thirty or so of them could catch the next bus for free.

This is neurodiversity and tolerance – Metro Transit style.  Kids with autism aren’t ‘disabled’ enough to use the access-a-bus, but they are too ‘disabled’ to be tolerated by drivers of the standard buses.  The blind can ride the bus for free, but some kids with autism not at all?   For the record, I have no problem with blind people riding the bus for free (I think everybody should be able to do so), but I can’t accept a special rule, driver-imposed,  targeting my son directly and others like him.

In the end, the next bus driver let the whole camp on and didn’t demand the transfers.  He knew the camp, the kids, the counsellors.  He liked them, besides.  the issue was rightly brought to Metro Transit’s attention by the camp director, a file number assigned and an investigation pending.

New details to come, but I have just discovered that CBC  is on its way over for interviews so I have to clean up.  I’ll keep you posted.

Christine McCulloch was obviously of a different impression, as she came away from the meeting – according to ENS spokesman Dana Philip Doiron – believing the Greens “didn’t demonstrate that they had taken all of the steps to become an organized party yet.”  And so the party’s status remains in limbo, “a recognized party under review”, a new deadline for individual candidate expense forms to be submitted.   These must be delivered to ENS by the 18th of this month.  That’s just 13 days from now – tick tock tick tock.

Will the party get the job done?  The Province’s Chief Electoral Officer “didn’t get that sense of confidence.”

The Green Party of Nova Scotia has dealt itself one successive blow after another – from a botched election to a botched executive.  From its failure to comply with its own constitution to its failure to comply with the province’s laws – if there has been a way to screw it up, the Green Party of Nova Scotia has found a way to do it at every conceivable turn.

And yet, here I sit.  A paid up member who believes in it still.  I am even a brand new member of the executive (interim, pending the result of a postponed constitutional debate) because I believe in the ability of  the party to break out of its chronic pattern of self abuse and public humiliation.

And then GPNS can grow to its full potential, where it is the voice for sustainability and self-sufficiency in Nova Scotia.  Where it is the advocate for major political reform in Nova Scotia.  Where the disenfranchised (and the newly disenfranchised – the coming large demographic of alienated Dippers) turn to GPNS to express and have expressed their own political voices.

GPNS can make an enormous impact in the future, but only by first gaining the confidence of both the Chief Electoral Officer, and the taxpayers of the province of Nova Scotia.

Bullshit.  If you’ll excuse the bluntness.  What we witnessed was the peaceful transition of power – a beautiful thing, to be sure, but hardly a revolution.  It ain’t nothin’ but democracy.

Scene change: Iran.  When I got home last night and logged onto Twitter as I always do, there was this chilling message from one of the Iranian sources I follow: “Saturday has begun.”  The announcement of the dawn of a new day is not normally described as “chilling”, I grant, but this Saturday is not like every Saturday in Iran.  This Saturday has the potential for making history, but what kind of history remains to be seen.  There is a rally scheduled in Tehran, to begin roughly an hour from when I write these words, that is being held in direct defiance of the Supreme Leader of the Iranian theocracy.  What kind of history is being made?  It could be the equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down, the beginning of a democratic revolution that will see the people of Iran freed from their theocratic masters.  Or, it could be the equivalent of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a violent and bloody crackdown on dissidents and protesters foolish or brave enough to stare down the barrels of police and military weapons.

The world is watching, as best it can with no media there to report.  We are relying on Facebook and blogs and Twitter, yes.  The tweets heard round the world.  We are waiting, and those like me are doing so with an uncomfortable gnawing in their bellies, tears at the verge.  “Today, we are all Iranians”, and other such bumper sticker shows of support don’t come anywhere close to the depths of the feeling.  But what else is there?  We could take to the streets in our own countries, in our own cities, in a show of solidarity with our Iranian bretheren – but what can that honestly accomplish?  My gut feeling, when I can isolate it from that overall gnawing,  is that massive street protests in the west merely feed the political-religious zealots in Iran who seek to blame their domestic unrest on western interference.  This is about Iran, not The Great Satan, and we could do the people of Persia a great disservice by providing an external bogeyman on whom the Ayatollah and his puppet president can pin the blame.

Some tens of thousands of people are expected in the streets of Tehran.  Protesters are being advised to carry a copy of The Koran, because it is apparently a mortal sin to kill someone who is holding a copy of that wholly holy book of Islam.  It is difficult to imagine how this can end, if not in great bloodshed.  The Ayatollah has spoken, warning against future protests, holding dissident politicians responsible for the violence such protests might unleash.  Even though he is the one man who could stop the violence, as he is the one man who can give the order to begin the crackdown.  We are watching.  We are waiting.

Saturday has begun, and today, we are all Iranians.

Also, you need more time than I had, both in terms of advance notice that you will even be running a campaign and in terms of having enough ‘free’ time during it.  I had neither of these.  The writ had been dropped nearly a week before I was approached about being a candidate.  Another day passed while I thought about the time commitment and whether I could balance that with my stay-at-home-dadness.  Clearly, since I ran, I decided I could.  But that was before I understood what sort of a time commitment an actual campaign would entail.  I simply didn’t have the time to do it properly.  A month or two notice, and a plan could (and would) have been pretty firmly in place, with a small slate of volunteers to cover everything from canvassing to babysitting.  Ah, but for the curse of time.

I believe I could have obtained the 500 votes I sought – which was roughly 5% of the popular vote – if I had concentrated all of my efforts and all of my free time in my riding, and I am responsible for not having done so.  I could have engaged more directly with the other candidates, could have visited more community events, could (and should) have knocked on more doors.  I could have done all of these things, but the party under whose banner I ran must share some culpability.

Province wide, The Green Party held steady in terms of popular vote.  In 2006, the party participated in its first province wide election and took 2.33% of the vote.   In 2009, in its second provincial election, the Greens took 2.33% of the vote.  Deja vu all over again.  So why the three year steady climb to end in the same place?

For one, there was no steady climb for the Green Party.  In the three years between elections, I can think of no meaningful attempts by the Green Party to insert itself into the political dialogue of Nova Scotia nor into the political consciousnesses of Nova Scotian citizens.  In the months leading up to the drop of the election writ, which only the most politically disinterested or uniformed could have failed to see coming, there appears to have been no concerted effort from the party to line up viable, interested, and interesting candidates.  And then, once the candidates were lined up, there was no candidate training, little advice or support from the central party leadership, and no central plan for a cohesive campaign.  We had 52 mini-campaigns instead, one for each riding, run with widely varying degrees of devotion.  Every party had some parachute or paper candidates, meaning people who were little more than names on the ballot so that the parties might be represented in all of the ridings, but the Green Party had more than the others.  In this dubious field, at least, the Greens were number one.

It was no way to run an election, and without a lot of growing up, the party would have no way to run the province.  Which was, after all, the job we were technically applying for.  I think I’d like to help the party grow up.  It needs specific (and costed) policies, and riding associations.  It needs clearer communication from the leadership and executive through the party ranks.  It needs to form a shadow government, to follow the workings of our new legislature.  It needs to applaud our new NDP government for the things it does right and offer constructive advice and insight on how that government might do things better.  It needs to get out in the community, and make its presence felt.

So many people I talked to over the course of this past campaign thought the Green party was the Marijuana Party.  And many more others believed it was a single issue, environmental party.  That’s a branding problem, and the perception of the Green brand in Nova Scotia will be one of the greatest hurdles for the party to overcome.  Especially if it doesn’t even try to.

Lest I should convey the wrong impression, I do believe in the Green Party, and I do believe it can have an important role to play in the future of the Nova Scotian political discourse.  We lost a lot of votes to the NDP this time around, simply because it was a great orange wave – or Orange Crush, as the Herald headline put it on June 10 – and Nova Scotians en masse seemed determined to put Mr. Dexter in the Premier’s office with a huge majority behind him.  A pre-election Angus-Reid poll showed that the Greens lost as much as 50% of their support to the NDP in the 2009 election.  Given that, it may be remarkable that the party even held steady at 2.33% of the vote.  We must have picked up a good number of votes from PC supporters to have done so.

Personally, I enjoyed seeing and working an election from the candidate side of things for a change.  It gave me a deep appreciation for the difficulties of the task.  And while I had enormous criticism to heap on the central party campaigns, comprised as they were of attack ads, meaningless soundbites, and politics-as-usual promises made, the candidates running in my own riding were all intelligent, decent and respectable people.  Colin Hebb, the young man running under the Liberal banner in my riding, particularly impressed me – and I would like have voted for him had I not had such an excellent Green candidate to support.  George Jordan, the candidate for the PCs, gave me the impression that he honestly cared about the riding and the province, and I respect him for that and for his involvement.  Plus he has an awesome voice.  Marilyn More, the NDP incumbent who again won handily this time, will continue to do a good job of representing her constituents, but this time with a view of Province House from the government side of things.  And good for her.  I wish her all the best, because she is my representative in government now, so her best is my best.

I am not done with politics in Nova Scotia, nor am I done with policy.  When the Legislative Assembly reconvenes, I and some of my fellow Greens will be there.  We will not sit in the House itself, because Nova Scotians have not given us that right.  But we will be in the visitor’s galley, watching the business of the house, taking notes and making plans.  We will criticize where criticism is called for and praise where it is warranted.  We will bring our ideas to the government in power, with the reminder that good ideas are good ideas and in matters of good governance and smart public policy, the origin of those ideas is irrelevant.  Good ideas can, and should, be stolen.  I encourage Mr. Dexter to hear the advice that all other parties have to offer.  I encourage him to hear the good ideas all Nova Scotians have to offer.

I believe Darrell Dexter has the potential to be a powerful proponent for positive social change in our province, and that all Nova Scotians should do what they can to encouragingly nudge him in that direction.  In the meantime, the Green Party has some remodelling and some cleaning to do in its own house.  Not until it has gone some considerable distance in that direction can it reasonably ask Nova Scotians to support it at the polls.