City of Dartmouth Auditor’s Report, 1996

“In our opinion these financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Corporation of the City of Dartmouth as at March 31, 1996 and the results of its operations and the changes in its capital position for the year then ended in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles adopted for Nova Scotia Municipalities.”

The final financial statement of the City of Dartmouth is a great starting point with which to understand Nova Scotia’s “amalgamation” in the parlance of our crown adjacent ruling class. It also presents a great refresher for those who might have forgotten where we were before.

Dartmouth School Board, Dartmouth Housing Board, Dartmouth Library, Dartmouth Common and Dartmouth Ferry. Dartmouth’s quarter billion dollars in infrastructure, stolen without even a non-binding plebiscite and then absorbed into the borg. We had some iota of local control of what were municipal – Healthcare, Education, Policing, Transport, Social Housing; all with long constitutional predicate, since lost to this ever more centralized twice municipalized “government”. “Social services”, especially, exposed to decades of disinvestment seemingly by design without any corresponding increase in a healthcare market with options.

The fruits of these deinstitutionalizing labors have come in the form of a perpetual crisis in education and healthcare. Our (supposedly) “public” (but certainly a monopoly) government social services in ruins now heaped upon the vassals, who are blamed for the rot that’s taken over all of these institutions — when any control they could hope to have had over them ended in 1996 with “amalgamation”.