The more consequential resignation triggered by the expenses scandal is not that of Yarmouth Tory MLA Richard Hurlburt. It's that of Pamela Harrison, former NDP treasurer and longtime activist for whom the expenses affair was just one sour note too many.

For her, the bigger issue is that the whole tune is off. There's no sign that the NDP is different from any other government, she said, and no sign of life on the social issues -- poverty, mental health, low-income housing and others -- that the NDP is supposed to stand for.

"How foolish I feel," she said, to have imagined that decades of passing resolutions, organizing and working at elections meant anything. Ouch! And I've heard that from others.

The Bush/Cheney undead are still stalking the land, and on the global warming issue they've sunk their fangs into fresh blood.

Continuing from the Bush government's suppression of the work of its own climate scientists, propaganda and befuddlement go from strength to strength.

Driven by U.S. right-wing politics and polluting-industry money, they've unnerved scientists with their tactics to the point that some of them have apparently suppressed data -- or thought of doing so -- rather than feed it into this engine of political disinformation, in the now famous University of East Anglia emails episode.

Three points to bring the picture into focus.

A 60-megawatt forest-burning power plant at the NewPage pulp mill at Port Hawkesbury, recently given the go-ahead by Premier Darrell Dexter, has raised the ire of environmentalists, notably those within the NDP itself, and put new fuel on the fire.

But what's the view in the woods? Kingsley Brown of the Nova Scotia Landowners and Forest Fibre Producers Association -- a group that has had a contract with with NewPage and its predecessor for some 30 years, which Brown calls unique in the world and which gives woodlot owners a higher return than others in the province -- makes the argument for the plant.

It's a perilous road ahead with regard to Nova Scotia's financial and economic condition, but at least we're on it. That's progress. It's better than being lost in the bushes looking for the path, as we've been doing for the last 20 years.

Forward movement will depend on how the various elements of the society can be made to pull ahead together -- whether with a spirit of common purpose, compromise, equity and transparency, or with a political fractiousness that could put the wagon into the ditch again.