Idea of merging Maritime provinces revived despite lack of political support
By The Canadian Press - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - 0 Comments
HALIFAX – The age-old idea of merging the three Maritime provinces has been resurrected…
HALIFAX – The age-old idea of merging the three Maritime provinces has been resurrected despite an overwhelming lack of political will from an array of government levels.
A trio of Conservative senators — John Wallace of New Brunswick, Mike Duffy of Prince Edward Island and Stephen Greene of Nova Scotia — are making a plea to consolidate the Maritime provinces, an idea that has intermittently reappeared over the past century.
But several political figures — including Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter and Robert Ghiz of P.E.I. — have denounced the idea in recent days, saying the provinces are already working co-operatively.
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Atlantic Canada’s lobster glut
By Noah Richler - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 10:01 AM - 0 Comments
Too much of a good thing?
Robert F. Bukaty/AP
In Nova Scotia, locals will tell you, lobsters used to be poor-man’s food, and prisoners were once fed so much of it that they rioted. In his celebrated essay “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace states that “even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.”
In the restaurants of Canadian cities, the experience is the opposite—lobster is purveyed as a luxury food. A bit of claw, or a couple of slices of tail arrive, balanced on a carefully sculpted tower of julienne vegetables and a cappuccino froth, with an altogether heftier bill that comes later. Poached lobster at Vancouver’s C Restaurant will set you back $38. A couple of “lobster spoons,” the morsels braised in butter with vermouth, will cost a diner at Mark McEwan’s restaurant One, in Toronto, $26 before tax and tip, and a lobster carbonara $38.
Compare these dishes with others on the same menus and you will see that plates featuring Atlantic lobster at One sell for more than others featuring lamb or steak tartare, and at C for more than twice the price of “Pacific fish & chips.” And yet lobster is wholesaling in the Atlantic provinces at record low prices. Matthew Theriault, whose lobster-fishing rig Beth and Lyne sails out of Digby, N.S., into St. Marys Bay and the Bay of Fundy, has kept meticulous records that show the price he gets now is down a third since its 2007 peak of roughly $6 per pound. Today lobster is easily available for retail at $5 a pound in Digby and for less than $10 a pound in big city superstores—about the same price as haddock and less than cod, and half or even a third the price of lamb and beef.
