DEXTER best Modernist govt NS ever had --- just too bad we live in postmodernist times...

If postmodernist times believe in de-centralization, the local, small is beautiful, DIY/PUNK and Off-the-Grid , modernity * just as surely worships megaprojects and the idea that ever bigger is ever better.

Darrell Dexter's NDP government here in Nova Scotia isn't bad  (ie isn't corrupt) and is giving us the kind of competent "modern" government we can only wish we had had in the 1970s and 1980s.

The problem is that we are living in the 21st century and in postmodernist times.

Mr Dexter's worship of the sort of large scale industrial projects his father worked at when Darrell was a child is almost admirable, in  an act-of-filial-piety-sort-of-way , but it is not good for the long term overall economy of Nova Scotia - an economy that includes our friends the birds, bugs and bees as well as us.

Old fashioned open cage fish farms are a disaster - he knows that - but their proponent is promising a big factory building with 400 unionized jobs of the sort we haven't seen since Dexter's childhood in the Fifties and Sixties.

So he takes the bait ----- and the hook.

An older hook was cast by our PM, Stephen Harper : billions to build ships in Halifax.

Dexter staked his party's fate on getting that contract. Now it is being held up and any pip from Dexter on anything that might point fingers at Harper could delay and delay those shipbuilding megaproject jobs.

So when Harper cut the Confederation-promised rail link between Nova Scotia and "Canada" , don't expect Dexter to lead the charge to the Supreme Court to restore the rail link.

I call this a postmodernist era, because that is the academic consensus : but I personally see it more as a transitional period, post-hegemonic, where moderns (skygods) war it out with postmodernist commensalists ( earthlings).

Darrell Dexter's fiercest critics are within his own party, within the postmodernist section of it.

The battle between skygods vs earthlings could ultimately tear the NS NDP apart into two separate parties.

I doubt whether Dexter will be NS's last NDP premier but my bet is he could be the last Modernist NDP premier of this "small is beautiful" oriented province.

Remember Elizabeth May birthed the SMALL PARTY here 30 years ago ....

* modernity is pre-1945 style thinking ; postmodernity is post-1945 type thinking .....

Nova Scotia oceans: meet the new (SOCIALIST) boss, same as the old (CAPITALIST) boss

     Growth-oriented governments of the left as well as the right are both equally deadly to Mother Nature.
     Both rape and pillage and deplete the Earth and then deny they are doing so.
     Just take the socialist government of Nova Scotia ----- please take it  !

     Elected for the first time ever, a few years back, it promised rural fishing communities that things would be different on its watch, over such matters as the process of consultation before any more projects of open pen aquaculture were approved.
    In fact the wannabe socialist premier (Darrell Dexter) was filmed, along with local MLA Vicki Conrad, telling a fishing community exactly that - a fishing community in the hometown (Queens County) where he grew up.
   A man won't lie in his own backyard now would he - anymore than a bear would poop in his own backyard now would it ?

    Well I have just been to see the world premiere of a new film on open cage salmon fishing (SALMON WARS) and a whole lot of unhappy voters in the film seem convinced that not only would Dexter lie in his own backyard but that he did just that.
    What happened ????
     I suspect : "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs".
     Oh no, not real jobs, jobs, jobs ---- but promises of jobs, jobs, jobs - hundreds of jobs in one photo-op-friendly location.
     There are lots of sustainable, earth-friendly,  aquaculture alternatives to open cage fish farming of carnivore fish --- alternatives that will provide as many or more jobs .
   But these jobs will be spread out and diffused - not in one great bloody big building labelled " 400 jobs right here folks - vote for me".
   Large mega-projects have always appealed to the ( ahem) less subtle political mind because the benefits are frankly so photo-op-able.
    Easier to sell "SHIPS START HERE" ---- not so easy for a timid premier to condemn open cage salmon fishing by explaining that under the harbour surface, under the beautiful open cage fish farm, "THE SHIT STOPS HERE" and will eventually kill the golden goose (wild lobster fishing in that same harbour) that has fed your family for 400 years.

   This premiere took place in the large auditorium at Halifax's Citadel High and I don't recall such a large Nova Scotian audience for an environmental movie -probably more people there than at some of last week's NDP provincial convention's plenary sessions. (V. Bad News that .)
   But this movie was 21st century digital (written and narrated very effectively by SILVER DONALD CAMERON along with a devastating cast of 100% rural accented folks) and so could be webcast around the world at the same time as it was shown, old style, in the province's capital city.
   In particular, it was simulcast, over the web, at four halls close to where the documentary was filmed - villages where proposed fish farm projects loom before local fisherfolk.
   The film is free and freely available and many people plan to show it over and over in living rooms and fire halls all across the province until every last rural NDP (socialist) voter throws their hands up in disgust and vows to stay home in the next election.
    This digital film will undo all the hitherto successful lobbying efforts of the industrial special interest groups in the big city capital in Halifax -undo it silently but effectively - in one rural kitchen and living room at a time.
    The mills of the rural voter grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine.
   Growth oriented capitalists and growth-oriented socialists should both be afraid - very afraid.....