Yesterday, Scott Armstrong, Nova Scotia’s minister of Justice and attorney general, issued a directive to police agencies in the province “to intensify enforcement aimed at stopping illegal cannabis operations and report back on their activities.”
My first thought: This is what Donald Trump is doing when he directs the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. Which is to say, Armstrong is compromising the independence and integrity (such as it is) of the police.
We tell a lot of fictions about police. I’m conscious that policing cannot truly be divorced from the political and economic power structures of our society, but maintaining that fiction helps us function as a society. Now, however, Armstrong is breaking that fourth wall.
I was heartened to see …
Yesterday, Scott Armstrong, Nova Scotia’s minister of Justice and attorney general, issued a directive to police agencies in the province “to intensify enforcement aimed at stopping illegal cannabis operations and report back on their activities.”
My first thought: This is what Donald Trump is doing when he directs the U.S. Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. Which is to say, Armstrong is compromising the independence and integrity (such as it is) of the police.
We tell a lot of fictions about police. I’m conscious that policing cannot truly be divorced from the political and economic power structures of our society, but maintaining that fiction helps us function as a society. Now, however, Armstrong is breaking that fourth wall.
I was heartened to see in the CBC that Wayne MacKay had drawn the same parallel with Donald Trump that I had come to:
MacKay compared the move to recent developments in the United States, where President Donald Trump has escalated the use of levers of presidential power to target his political rivals and pressure the Justice Department to pursue investigations and prosecutions of those he disdains.
“It would be completely contrary to police independence … if [the government] was targeting specific operations [to] be investigated and prosecuted,” MacKay said. “That’s the kind of thing, frankly, that we see happening south of the border with U.S. President Donald Trump.”
The Department of Justice of course rejected that comparison, but I’d say that while the comparative isn’t exact, it’s on the same spectrum, just a matter of degree.
Trump is seeking personal retribution. That’s not what Armstrong is doing; but he is directing police for political and social purposes.
And let’s not pretend there isn’t a backdrop of racism involved here. Along with the news release announcing Armstrong’s directive, he additionally sent a letter to the 13 Mi’kmaw chiefs asking for their cooperation in the crackdown. Clearly, Armstrong’s primary concern is the dispensaries located in First Nations.
We could direct police attention a lot of places. Were it up to me, I’d start with the corruption and violation of workers’ rights conducted in corporate boardrooms, but one could make all sorts of arguments about the allocation of limited police resources — cracking down on speeders, or intimate partner violence, or name your issue. Armstrong, however, is using his office to prioritize supposedly illegal cannabis sales in (primarily) Indigenous communities.
But besides the foregoing, cannabis? Really? That’s what we’re concerned about?
I don’t use weed. It’s not my intoxicant of choice. But plenty of my friends and neighbours and family members do, and they are to a person inoffensive, at least while stoned. (Some of them should probably smoke a bit more, frankly.)
Armstrong, a former high school teacher, made reference to protecting the youth, which has been the excuse for vilifying weed ever since it was criminalized because Black and Mexican people were using it. But who are we, er, kidding? Kids have been smoking weed for a century and more, and the world goes on just fine.
I don’t know enough high school students to say with certainty, but I get the sense that since legalization, they’re not smoking as much as they used to. At least I don’t see them lighting up in the stand of trees outside Dartmouth High as often as I did 10 years ago.
The true point of Armstrong’s directive is to control the province’s monopoly on cannabis sales through NSLC stores.
As I detailed in my Policing Panic series, the creation of the NSLC in 1930 was a flawed political compromise, an attempt to recognize the reality that prohibition was an utter failure while placating the temperance preachers:
The Nova Scotia Liquor Control Act overturned the Nova Scotia Temperance Act, and so Nova Scotia was no longer “dry.” But the emphasis was on the “control” part of the title — the province would have a monopoly on all booze sales through the newly created Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation (NSLC), and private sales in restaurants, hotels, or taverns would have to be the subject of another municipal plebiscite, which didn’t happen in Halifax until after the Second World War.
And “controlling” meant policing.
…
The provisions of the Liquor Control Act would be enforced through a newly created provincial police force, which would have a presence across all of Nova Scotia, including rural areas. The primary role of the force would be liquor enforcement, but it would also be charged with enforcing the entirety of the criminal code, and of the Highway Act.
Before 1930, there weren’t police at all in rural areas of the province, and even the municipal cops mostly didn’t carry guns. That changed with the creation of the Nova Scotia Police in 1930, which was absorbed into the RCMP in 1933, and here we are today.
Just as the provincial monopoly on booze sales was a mistake in 1930, so too was the provincial monopoly on cannabis sales in 2018. Both monopolies were enacted without thought of future implications.
So we cannot separate policing from the monopolized control of intoxicants. The provincial government is itself Nova Scotia’s biggest drug dealer, and cops are the enforcers. We can gushy up that reality with talk of responsible control and protecting the youth and ensuring quality and however else you want to justify it, but the plain fact is that Armstrong is siccing men with guns on Indigenous people selling a harmless weed.
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THE LATEST FROM THE HALIFAX EXAMINER:
**1. **Advocates set up new camp in Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area to protest government’s failure to protect it
Campers outside Camp NOW. Credit: Nina Newington
Madiha Mughees reports:
Environmental advocates have established a new camp in Annapolis County to defend a proposed wilderness area where the provincial government is approving logging.
Camp NOW (Need Our Wilderness) was set up on Nov. 30 on Crown land in the proposed Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area in Annapolis County. It was set up by Save Our Old Forests’ (SOOF) president Nina Newington and her allies, who have been working since 2022 to get the area permanently protected.
In a media release Thursday, SOOF said the area “more than meets all the government’s own criteria for areas to protect.”
“But citizen scientists recently discovered new flagging around the largest cutblock on the peninsula. Clearly, logging is going ahead anyway,” SOOF said.
In its release, the group also highlighted what it called the government’s failure to protect Nova Scotia’s lands and waters.
Click or tap here to read “Advocates set up new camp in Goldsmith Lake Wilderness Area to protest government’s failure to protect it.”
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2. Advocates highlight harms of salmon farming as they await verdict on additional farms in Liverpool Bay
Salmon in St Mary’s River, NS. Photo: Gilbert van Ryckevorsel
Madiha Mughees reports:
Salmon, a seemingly healthy food source readily available in supermarkets, is wreaking havoc on the environment and the health of other species, according to some experts and local advocates.
The debate about the environmental damage of open-net pen salmon farms in Nova Scotia (farms in the ocean, enclosed only by nets and accused of releasing antibiotics, waste, and feed directly into the sea) reignited in October as a result of the Nova Scotia Aquaculture Review Board (ARB) hearings concerning an application by Cooke Aquaculture’s subsidiary, Kelly Cove Salmon Ltd., to expand open-net pen salmon farms in Liverpool Bay.
…
Geoff Le Boutillier is a longtime environmental advocate and the founder of the St. Margaret’s Bay Stewardship Association. He said that just as some people think there is nothing wrong with the government’s initiatives to expand uranium extraction and exports and view them as a way to earn export dollars, the fish farm issue is also overlooked and misunderstood by the public.
He said while to some this industry is seen as a harmless way to produce and export a protein source, it is not what it seems.
“When you think of open-net pens as a barometer, as an indicator of a larger apathy that the public has towards an issue, then it starts to take on some significance,” Le Boutillier said in an interview.
Click or tap here to read “Advocates highlight harms of salmon farming as they await verdict on additional farms in Liverpool Bay.”
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Government
No meetings
On campus
Dalhousie
Accessibility into Practice (Friday, 1pm, details) — Julie Sawchuk will talk
**Phd Defence: Mathematics and Statistics **(Friday, 1:30pm, virtual) — Sarah Organ will defend “Generalizing the linear step-up procedure for false discovery rate control with applications to setwise and high dimensional variable selection”
King’s
National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women (Friday, 11am details) — vigil and memorial table
Saint Mary’s
Ribbons of Remembrance: Tied Together with Hope (Friday, 11:30am, details) — to commemorate the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence
Literary Events
Friday
Latte Lit Open Mic (Friday, 6:30pm, details)
Weekend
Book reading and signing (Saturday, 3pm, details) — Second Degree with Kayla Hounsell
Poetry Open Mic (Sunday, 2pm, Central Library)
Book signing (Sunday, 10am, details) — Shelley Thompson’s Roar and Winter Sky: Stories for the Season
Book reading (Sunday, 1pm, details) — Sarah Emsley’s The Austens
An Evergreen Christmas (Sunday, 3pm, details) — with Joyce Baxter
In the harbour
Halifax 07:30: One Eagle, container ship, sails from Pier 41 for TK 08:00: Nolhan Ava, ro-ro cargo, moves from Pier 30 to Pier 41 12:00: Algoma Acadian, oil tanker, sails from Irving Oil for sea 12:00: Algoma East Coast, oil tanker, arrives at Irving Oil from Saint John 13:30: CMA CGM Innovation, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Algeciras, Spain 18:00: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, sails from Fairview Cove for St. John’s
Cape Breton 01:00: Ardmore SeaVanguard, oil tanker, sails from EverWind for TK 12:00: Algoma Integrity, bulker, arrives at Aulds Cove quarry from Port Manatee, Florida 16:00: Rolldock Sun, cargo ship, sails from Atlantic Bulk Terminal for sea
Footnotes
The temperature dropped to at least -14° C outside my house in Dartmouth last night, providing the first real cold weather test of a heat pump system installed last spring. I’m happy to report it performed admirably.
I’ve both been recovering from my trip to the states and falling down a rabbit hole on a story I thought would be a one-day exercise in reporting, so I haven’t been able to do much else this week. Hope to have that story out early next week, then back to form, maybe.
I was in the car for a total of five long days, two southbound, three northbound, each day from seven to 10 hours. So I listened to *a lot *of podcasts. One guilty pleasure is Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, which can be up to four hours per episode. (I have it in my head that I’ve met Carlin before, but I can’t remember when, where, or why. Possibly when I lived in L.A. in the 80s? I don’t think I liked him.) The latest two episodes are about Alexander the Great, and boy was that some wild and evil shit.
Disturbed by yet another example of just how terrible humans can be to each other, I found refuge by listening to Cracker’s double album, Berkeley to Bakersfield. The bridge song in the album is “Almond Grove,” which moves us geographically from Oakland (close enough to Berkeley) to Bakersfield, and singles the transition from the Bay Area punk side of Cracker to the band’s Bakersfield sound.
