I had high hopes for Mark Carney, but then he created a Ministry of AI and appointed Evan Solomon to the position

After the Liberals won the federal election, I expressed hope that Prime Minister Mark Carney could become a transformative leader. But now he’s created a Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, and worse, appointed none other than Evan Solomon to the position.

I had thought that Carney was super-smart and clear-headed about all things economic, but he has drunk the AI poison.

AI, at least so far as generative large language models go, is an investment bubble. An investment bubble on steroids. There is simply no there there.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a liar, a confidence man, and a thief. Even though OpenAI is burning through money (at least $5 billion last year) and has no pathway to profitability — ever — Altman has conned seemingly the entire tech world and convinced many venture capitalists to fund OpenAI, supposedly for $40 billion (mostly from SoftBank, perhaps best known for the WeWork fiasco). Altman makes Sam Bankman Fried look like a boy scout.

Altman’s con works because the tech industry has been transformed. Unlike, say, your local independently owned news site or the restaurant down the street, which hope to sell real goods and services and eke out a modest profit, large tech companies are trapped in a hyper growth mode, in which investment is divorced from profitability. “Number goes up” is all that matters.

And so nearly all large tech firms are chasing the investment money, and AI is being pushed on us everywhere.

AI has destroyed Google search, which was already getting more terrible because the company cares only about ad revenue (shitty search results force us to make more searches, which means they can show us more ads).

In part under the false promise of being able to replace skilled workers with AI, Elon Musk is decimating the U.S. civil service.

Those damn chat boxes.

On and on.

But it’s unsustainable. We’re already seeing Microsoft pull back, and soon enough the bubble will have an enormous pop.

The only question is how much of the rest of the economy is it going to take down with it? No one cares if SoftBank loses tens of billions of dollars, but pension funds and therefore the retirement money of regular people are so heavily invested in tech that the AI bubble popping could bring real pain, sending the real economy into recession or worse — Grandma eating cat food worse.

Smart and savvy central bankers like Mark Carney are supposed to be above this. They’re supposed to be able to see through the hype machine, and help steward the economy around it. Instead, Carney has doubled-down on the stupid, creating a Minister of AI.

And Evan Solomon? Come on.

I have history with Solomon.

In 2015, a year after I started the Halifax Examiner, the Toronto Star published an exposé of Solomon, then a TV news host at the CBC:

The Star found Solomon has been brokering the sale of paintings and masks owned by a flamboyant Toronto-area art collector to rich and famous buyers. Solomon, in at least one case, took commissions in excess of $300,000 for several pieces of art and did not disclose to the buyer that he was being paid fees for introducing buyer and seller.

[…]

Among the people to whom Solomon has brokered the sale of paintings are Jim Balsillie, co-founder of Research In Motion (now BlackBerry) and Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada governor and current governor of the Bank of England.

Solomon, as a journalist, has dealt with both men in his high-profile host jobs at the CBC. Carney, who is also a friend, has been a guest on both of Solomon’s shows. 

Solomon met Balsillie while courting him as a journalist two years ago in unsuccessful attempts to get him on CBC to discuss sustainable development and small businesses, as well as Balsillie’s role in backing the search for the Franklin expedition ships.

[…]

In one email exchange from 2014 — after Carney made a purchase — Solomon tells his art collector partner that Carney’s international contacts will be very important as they move forward in their attempts to sell more paintings.

“Next year in terms of the Guv will be very interesting. He has access to highest power network in the world,” Solomon writes.

[…]

The CBC code of ethics states that employees “must not use their positions to further their personal interests.”

This so angered me that I wrote a profanity-laced diatribe about it, as follows:

Look, I’m just some dude in Halifax, far from the corridors of power. But I’ve spent my life trying to figure out how to be a reporter, and how to do it correctly. I’ve never made anywhere near the six figures plus that Solomon made, and have no desire to, but so what? This is what I’ve always wanted to do. Throughout my career, I’ve wrestled with issues of ethics and tried to stay true to the old school journalistic principles. It’s high in my mind.

Enough about me.

I watch reporters entering the field, earnest young people, in the best sense of the word. They’re writing freelance, making 80 bucks an article, living on ramen and dealing with asshole editors. I’ve seen the spark in their eyes, the desire to learn, to understand, to get it right. They’re self-taught, acquiring skills I never even imagined as a young reporter — html, audio, video, social media, and more. The job market is beyond tight; most move on to other careers, but the best of them get hired as reporters at 25 or 30K a year. They do this because they value journalism, and my respect for them is boundless.

I know a lot of CBC reporters, too, some full-time, some on contract work. They get paid shit, and fear they’ll lose their jobs at the next round of budget cuts, while the corporate managers get big bonuses for reducing costs. Still, they work hard and produce amazing copy, the day-in, day-out coverage that we’ve come to rely on and, beyond the call of duty, the pieces that make a real difference in the world. Yet the repeated scandals among the celebrity hosts bring disrepute onto the entire network, and onto their work.

Last month I visited the Newseum, the news museum in Washington, DC. On one floor, tastefully removed from the more dynamic exhibits, was a memorial to journalists killed on the job. I took a picture of the photo mural of some of the reporters killed in the last couple of years:

Reporters Without Borders says 71 reporters were killed in 2013. Another 826 were arrested for doing their jobs. Thousands more were threatened and beaten. Already this year, 30 reporters have been killed.

People die for this thing we do. And Solomon’s fucking around with side art deals?

Yes, we get it: you can throw ethics to the wind and parlay your reporting connections into meaningful cash. But you know what? There’s a shitload more money to be made working directly for power. You want money? Go into fucking PR. That’s where the real money is.

If every media outlet in the country were to disappear tomorrow — all the newspapers out of business, TV and radio news shows taken off the air — the governments and corporations would still get their message out just fine. They don’t need reporters for that. Nobody is paying you to brownnose power, or to rewrite press releases, or to be an uninteresting twerp. Your job is to be an asshole, to call bullshit, to explain how the powers that be are fucking us over. And, sorry, you won’t get paid shit for it. That’s part of the deal.

You’re either a journalist, or you’re part of the problem.

Somehow, Star CEO Michael Cooke read my piece, called me up, and asked me to rewrite it for the Star without the profanity. I think I got about 700 bucks for the rewrite.

I note sadly the Newseum no longer exists, having fallen victim to the financial difficulty faced by the rest of the news industry.

(I had still more to say about Solomon here).

Solomon was fired by the CBC, but he evidently has taken my advice and now works directly for power.

And here we have Solomon presiding over “AI,” working for his old side-deal pal Carney, with “access to highest power network in the world.”

It’s all so fucking tawdry.

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NOTICED

1. Sean Fraser‘s first file: Daniel Sampson

Among Carney’s other cabinet appointments are Sean Fraser, the MP for Central Nova who was previously the minister of Housing; Fraser is now the minister of Justice.

This is fortuitous.

Sitting on Fraser’s desk right now is an application for the exoneration of another Nova Scotian, Daniel Sampson. As I reported in March:

On Friday [March 7, 2025], Lance Sampson filed an Application for Ministerial Review with the federal Minister of Justice on behalf of his ancestor Daniel Perry Sampson for his conviction of murder in the death of Bramwell Heffernan. 

Brothers Edward and Bramwell Heffernan, ages 10 and 12 respectively, were tragically found dead along the railway tracks just outside Halifax near First Chain Lake on July 19, 1933. 

Daniel Perry Sampson was the last person executed in Halifax on March 7, 1935.

Friday, the day Lance Sampson filed his Application for Ministerial Review, was the 90th anniversary of Daniel Sampson’s execution. 

A ministerial review could result in the overturning of a conviction.

Lance Sampson is represented by lawyer David Steeves of Toronto.

The wrongful conviction and execution of Daniel Sampson is the subject of my “Policing Panic” series. The best entry point for those unfamiliar with the story is Part 4, which begins:

The last person executed in Halifax was Daniel Perry Sampson. On March 7, 1935 at 1:05am, Sampson was hanged to death from a scaffold erected in the yard of the county jail behind the courthouse on Spring Garden Road.

Daniel Sampson was an innocent man. 

Sampson was the victim of a moral panic ginned up by the Canadian National Railway police, the Halifax City Police, and Stipendiary Magistrate Ian Ross, a moral panic given fuel by sensational coverage and unfounded speculation in the pages of Halifax’s competing newspapers, the Chronicle and the Herald.

And in response to a political crisis over policing, the RCMP framed Sampson for a crime he did not commit. There was no crime, and so nobody committed it. But on orders from RCMP headquarters in Ottawa to find a murderer where one did not exist, RCMP officers in Halifax concocted an impossible story about Sampson’s involvement in the case, and then lied on the stand during his trial.

Sampson could be falsely charged, framed, and murdered by the state because he was powerless. He was a poor Black man in the deeply racist city of Halifax, and he had an intellectual disability that left him unable to properly defend himself.

In Part 1 of this series, I examined one of the first operations of the RCMP in Nova Scotia: the ill-conceived and inept police sting operation that left one man dead and a second man wounded during the 1932 Shubenacadie bank robbery. Even at the time it was understood as a cautionary tale about police overreach, but the lesson did not hold.

Part 2 laid out the political context of policing in Nova Scotia in the 1930s. I explored how the Liberal opposition party made an issue of what today would be called “defunding police”: decrying the scandal-ridden overreach of the RCMP, calling for the police budget to be slashed, and suggesting that cops be disarmed.

Part 3 introduced readers to the Heffernan case, involving the tragic deaths of Eddie and Bramwell Heffernan, aged 10 and 12 respectively. I detailed how the RCMP investigators in Halifax discounted repeated suggestions that the boys were victims of foul play and insisted that they had been killed by an interaction with a train — that is, they insisted that until ordered by superiors in Ottawa to find a murderer.

In this article and in subsequent articles, I will show exactly how Daniel Sampson was chosen as the supposed murderer, detail how he was framed, explain why the actions attributed to Sampson on the day of the boys’ deaths make no sense at all, delineate the multiple lies RCMP officers told at trial while under oath, and provide the context of racism that undergirded the case against Sampson.

As a result of the call for a federal election, the application for the exoneration of Sampson could not be acted upon until a new Justice minister was appointed, and here we are.

Fraser should expedite this file.

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2. Housing starts are down

Remember how the Houston government was going to supercharge construction of housing by running roughshod over traditional housing regulations?

It nullified HRM bylaws related to housing construction; it ended the municipality’s advisory committees’ and community councils’ review of developments; it created the Executive Panel on Housing which meets in secret to approve developments in nine “special planning areas” in HRM owned mostly by big name developers like Clayton Developments, and even gave Clayton $21.8 million in public money; it fast-tracked the Port Wallace and Eisner Cove developments; and it put a freeze on development fees charged by HRM and Halifax Water.

How’s that working out?

Well, after an initial upward surge in housing last year, housing starts are down significantly this year.

According to the province’s Economics and Statistics Division:

Nova Scotia housing starts have declined 16.4% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same period a year ago. Halifax housing starts have declined 19.3% in January-March 2025 compared to the same period a year ago, while housing starts in the rest of Nova Scotia declined 7.2%

This comes despite a significant decrease in interest rates.

I asked the Department of Growth & Development for comment, but nobody responded.

Update: moments after publication, I received this response from department spokesperson Chrissy Matheson:

Housing starts are just one part of the overall story when looking at housing growth in Halifax and across the province. Although housing starts are down in HRM in the first quarter of 2025, that is not unexpected or uncommon.

Over the last several years starts fluctuated throughout the year but have shown a steady upward trend. For example, year over year in January 2024 compared to January 2025, housing starts were up 38 per cent.

Additionally, this report shows that Nova Scotia is at the highest level of units under construction in years. And HRM in 2024 reached the highest number of units permitted in the last several years. We expect to see that growth reflected in the starts throughout the rest of 2025. The attached report from HRM shows this dataPermit volume | processing times | Halifax

 Please see the attached document which shows the significant progress the government has made on our five-year housing strategy. As you will see in this report, we’ve surpassed our goal in the first 18 months, and things are only speeding up, not slowing down.

Housing Plan Progress Exceeds Targets in First Year | Government of Nova Scotia News Releases

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THE LATEST FROM THE HALIFAX EXAMINER:

1. Common Roots reopening as Ecology Action Centre steps in after MetroWorks bankruptcy

Reports Suzanne Rent:

A community garden that closed after its parent organization went bankrupt is reopening with new backers and hosting a fundraiser to get work restarted.

As the Examiner reported in March, Common Roots Urban Farm was one of several social enterprises that closed when MetroWorks filed for bankruptcy. The closure of MetroWorks put 88 people out of work and left countless volunteers without access to programs. Common Roots had two farm locations: one on the grounds of the Nova Scotia Hospital in Dartmouth; and the other on a small lot on Bayers Road in Halifax next to the Bi-Hi.

On Tuesday morning, Common Roots announced the farms are reopening with the Ecology Action Centre (EAC) as its parent company. Several other community organizations will work as partners. Those organizations include Nourish Nova Scotia, JustFOOD Halifax, which falls under Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) and the Halifax Food Policy Alliance, as well as Feed Nova Scotia, United Way Halifax, and YWCA Halifax.

Click or tap here to read “Common Roots reopening as Ecology Action Centre steps in after MetroWorks bankruptcy.”

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2. Survey of Hemlock Ravine Park finds no evidence of woolly adelgid

Reports Suzanne Rent:

A survey of trees in Hemlock Ravine Park organized by Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) that included 20 volunteers found no evidence of hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA), an invasive insect that is threatening and destroying hemlocks across North America.

Click or tap here to read “Survey of Hemlock Ravine Park finds no evidence of woolly adelgid.”

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3. Bird Canada manager says pilot project data may improve Halifax bike infrastructure

Continuing her reporting marathon (it’s not at all easy to produce so many news articles in 24 hours), Suzanne Rent reports:

A general manager with a Canadian company that won the bid for a two-year e-bike and e-scooter pilot project with Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) says he’s hopeful more people will take up active transportation and that the company can help improve bike infrastructure in the municipality.

Bird Canada was the successful bidder for a two-year project that will introduce a fleet of 300 e-bikes and 300 e-scooters to HRM. The municipality announced the news in April, and the pilot project officially launches on Thursday.

The e-bikes and e-scooters will be available in communities around HRM, including Halifax, Dartmouth, Fairview, Spryfield, Westphal, and Woodside. Other phases of the pilot project will have e-bikes and e-scooters in places in Burnside, Bedford, Sackville, and other communities.

Click or tap here to read “Bird Canada manager says pilot project data may improve Halifax bike infrastructure.”

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4. Halifax council votes in favour of report to research history of Dartmouth Black community, The Avenue

Suzanne Rent has a roundup of yesterday’s Halifax council meeting (that’s article number 4 since yesterday), which includes lots of other issues as well, but as I wrote Monday, I’ve been paying particular attention to The Avenue:

Halifax regional council voted in favour of a motion on a staff report that will look into doing archaeological assessments on two properties currently in Halifax Regional Municipality’s (HRM) surplus inventory that could be the site of important Black history.

As the Examiner reported on Monday, Coun. Sam Austin had this motion requesting a staff report that would research possible archaeological assessments at 232 and 234 Crichton Ave. in Dartmouth. Those two properties are in what was a historic Black community known as The Avenue.

During council’s meeting on Tuesday, Austin said development took over the area in the 1970s and graves were dug up and relocated to Christ Church Cemetery.

…

Dartmouth historian and educator David Jones sent a message to the Examiner regarding The Avenue that he forwarded to the municipal clerk’s office prior to Tuesday’s council meeting.

In his email, Jones said he learned about Austin’s motion through longtime Crichton Avenue resident Carolyn Fowler, who heard about the motion from Foster.

“There is a clear pattern of Avenue residents and their friends/neighbours having to learn about major community developments through the grapevine and not directly from HRM,” Jones wrote in his email.

Jones also included his suggestions to HRM regarding the two properties:

232 and 234 Crichton Avenue should be immediately (without first requiring an archaeological survey) removed from the surplus property list (and changed to parkland); Carolyn Fowler has suggested a memorial park, commemorating the Avenue and the Dartmouth Lake African United Baptist Church). The 1970s picture (see below) of Rev. Fairfax and Deacon Riley standing at the foundation of the church, with Carolyn Fowler’s family home clearly in the background, is the smoking-gun for pinpointing the historic building. The properties should never have been expropriated or deemed surplus; they certainly should not have been put on a list to sell off to a developer… The Avenue has been encroached upon enough!

Archaeology in the Avenue (and especially on the site of the church) should be community-driven (as opposed to imposed by HRM) and research based (as opposed to CRM based). What’s the point of hiring a cultural resource management firm to do the background studies that have already taken place on the grassroots level? For what community-based archaeology can look like, examine what Dr. Jonathan Fowler and his SMU students are currently doing in the Beechville area with Black Nova Scotian residents (adding to the knowledge base). 

Council voted unanimously in favour of Austin’s motion.

Click or tap here to read “Halifax council votes in favour of report to research history of Dartmouth Black community, The Avenue.”

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5. Dartmouth MLA says women who escape gender-based violence face unnecessary barriers accessing provincial rental benefit

Reports Jennifer Henderson:

Dartmouth North MLA Susan Leblanc has written a letter to Premier Tim Houston urging him to find out why a program the province established to assist victims of gender-based violence is not readily accessible. 

The NDP MLA said that a government which prides itself on “cutting unnecessary red tape” for doctors and private developers should have no problem eliminating bureaucratic barriers when family violence forces someone to seek a new living arrangement. 

Last July, the province implemented a “Survivors of Gender-based Violence Benefit” that can provide victims housing support funding of up to $1,400 a month for one year. Eligibility and amounts are then reassessed in the second year based on household income and average market rents.

In March, Leblanc stood up in the Nova Scotia legislature and raised the issue of a woman for whom it took six months of advocacy to obtain the survivor’s supplement, even though the perpetrator of the violence had been charged with multiple counts of assault and the police viewed him as an ongoing threat to his ex-partner.  

In this case, eligibility was complicated because the woman was already receiving a small rent supplement, and she had remained in the same apartment after the abuser moved out. But she was unable to work as a result of diagnosed PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and was on the verge of being evicted as the bills continued to pile up.

A recent visit to Leblanc’s office from another survivor of intimate partner violence whose application for the rental benefit was also rejected has led Leblanc to question whether assistance that is supposed to help people in an emergency situation is taking too long to be effective.

Click or tap here to read “Dartmouth MLA says women who escape gender-based violence face unnecessary barriers accessing provincial rental benefit.”

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Government

City

Wednesday

No meetings

Thursday

Active Transportation Advisory Committee (Thursday, 4:30pm, online) — agenda

Youth Advisory Committee (Thursday, 5pm, Power House Youth Centre) — agenda

Province

Public Accounts (Wednesday, 9am, Province House and online) — Government Grants and Subsidies for Festivals and Community Events; with a representative from the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism & Heritage

On campus

Dalhousie

Wednesday

Why Treating Pain Well is Harder Than it Looks (Wednesday, 11:30am, Theatre A, Tupper Building and online) — seminar by David Juurlink, University of Toronto

Thursday

Reverse-engineering real-world priors (Thursday, 11;30am, Room P4260, Life Sciences Centre) — Marta Kryven will talk; from the listing:

How can we build intelligent agents that work with people as partners in the real world? To be effective, these agents need an internal model of the human mind. They must understand how people learn, interact, and make decisions—and be able to learn alongside us and from us. This talk presents computational insights into human planning and world representation, advancing the hypothesis that our remarkable real-world problem-solving efficiency arises from powerful inductive biases about the structure of the world.

Peace & Security: A Perspective on Youth Engagement & African Solutions (Thursday, 1:30pm, Room 1009, Rowe Building) — more info here

Special

Thursday

Talk and Taste: Flatbreads of the World (Thursday, 7pm, Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21) — an event marking the launch of Season 6 of the Museum’s Countless Journeys podcast; from the listing:

This event will bring five representatives from immigrant communities in Nova Scotia together to discuss and explore the shared yet distinct traditions of flatbread across cultures. The chefs will exchange insights on the cultural significance, historical roots, and evolving traditions of their flatbreads, followed by a public tasting. This event will highlight the rich diversity of culinary heritage, fostering dialogue on how food traditions unite communities while celebrating their unique flavours.

Tickets $20; includes access to exhibition “eat make share: a taste of immigration”

Literary Events

Wednesday

A Spring Launch of Art and Poetry (Wednesday, 5pm, Compass Distillers) — details here

Book launch (Wednesday, 5:30pm, Cafe Lara) — Jaime Burnet’s Milktooth

Bedford Authors Writers Group (Wednesday, 6:15pm, Bedford Public Library) — details here

An Evening of Lichen Arts & Artists (Wednesday, 6:30pm, Pavia Gallery, Herring Cove Road) — details here

Thursday

Mental Health Writers’ Group (Thursday, 4:30pm, online) — details and registration here

The Shadow in the Window: Ghost Stories of Nova Scotia (Thursday, 6:30pm, Dartmouth Book Exchange) — details and registration ($10) here

In the harbour

Halifax
05:00: MSC Bhavya V, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Liverpool, England
05:00: Atlantic Star, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Liverpool, England
05:30: One Wren, container ship (146,409 tonnes), arrives at Pier 41 from New York
10:30: Jacqueline C, cargo ship, sails from Pier 28 for sea
15:30: Atlantic Star sails for sea
15:30: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, arrives at Fairview Cove from St. John’s

Cape Breton
07:30: AlgoScotia, oil tanker, arrives at Sydney anchorage from Corner Brook
15:00: Kolga, anchor handling vessel, moves from Mulgrave to Inhabitants Bay anchorage

Footnotes

I was debating whether to put in some tomato starts today, wondering whether that was a certain guarantee for a late May frost. Turns out, however, that there are work demands that will keep me out of the garden in any event.