Apology to Mike McCluskey, District 5 candidate

Hi readers,

On Tuesday, October 1 in The Coast’s City Hall Insider Newsletter, we stated that Mike McCluskey, a candidate for District 5 in the upcoming municipal election, tweeted about a phantom roundabout in Dartmouth, but we were wrong. McCluskey was not making up this information, and we apologize wholeheartedly and without reservation to him for any suggestion that he was.

The backstory here is slightly convoluted, and does not modify the fact that we were in error, but if you are interested… McCluskey recently tweeted that the city's Transportation Standing Committee is considering connecting two Dartmouth roads, which would open up a way for drivers "to join the new roundabout," and he promised "I will not allow this to happen if I am elected."

Attached to the tweet is an aerial view of the neighbourhood in question—like you'd get from screenshotting Google Maps—with what McCluskey warns in the tweet are "crudely drawn" lines showing the direction of traffic flow towards the  intersection of Lancaster Drive and Woodland Avenue. If you don't know the intersection, we can assure you the city does, because in December 2019 council passed a motion to work with the province in order to come up with a plan for improving the intersection, "including consideration of a roundabout."

McCluskey's opponent in the October 19 election, incumbent councillor Sam Austin, tweeted in response that "HRM project manager for roundabout has never heard of it… I hate to say it, but this appears to be made up." There is some room for interpretation in Austin's tweet, as he doesn't explicitly say whether he's talking about the roundabout or the connection—or maybe both. At this point, our reporting hasn’t determined if the connection is under active consideration from city planners, although McCluskey tells us he has it sourced on good authority.

Regardless of Austin's intent, for The Coast's City Hall reporter Matt Stickland, the tweet steered the conversation away from the allegation that the city might join two roads, and towards the possibility that McCluskey had invented a roundabout. Stickland, author of Tuesday's City Hall newsletter, wrote that he feels "Austin is now the out-and-out favourite in District 5, as he has yet to make anything up." The subject line of the newsletter also mentioned "a phantom roundabout in Dartmouth."

But Stickland was mistaken, and took Austin's tweet as truth without any attempt to contact McCluskey about it. This was a journalistic failure. Between the words and the image in McCluskey's tweet, it is clear McCluskey is referring to a roundabout that is really in the works and not an invention of McCluskey's. The city's been officially thinking about that roundabout for years; this December will mark five years since council passed that "consideration of a roundabout" motion, a motion moved by councillor Austin.