The CBC continues to push an anti-Cuban line while downplaying the U.S. embargo On Monday, March 6, CBC Radio’s local morning newscast carried a report on Cuba by national reporter Evan Dyer, which also appeared on cbc.ca. “As holidaying Canadians return to Cuba,” it began, “Cubans themselves are fleeing in record numbers.” CBC’s Information Morning […]

For me, the most intriguing aspect of the current federal foofaraw over allegations that the Chinese government has been attempting to meddle in… well, everything everywhere is not that they are. That’s what superpowers do with their super powers. Evidence? How about the last 150 years of US mucking about in the internal affairs of […]

In an earlier, less perfect world, we wouldn’t be texting about it. Journalists wouldn’t be reporting on it. I certainly wouldn’t be writing a column about it. It probably would never have happened at all. But here we are. The reality is that we still don’t know exactly what happened in that gym in tiny […]

It was all so… Canadian. On Friday, Feb. 17, Ontario Appeal Court Judge Paul Rouleau released his Public Order Emergency Commission Report, the blandly named, legally mandated, historically consequential results of his 10-month inquiry into last winter’s controversial convoy protests and — more to the point — whether those protests justified Justin Trudeau’s decision to invoke the […]

Let’s start with this scenario. A woman with a decades-long history of having been brutalized and controlled by her common-law partner — a history that was known or should have been known to the police — is coerced into helping her partner transport ammunition for his cache of largely illegally obtained weapons. Does the RCMP […]

For me, it was the silence that spoke most loudly last week. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board “approved significant rate increases for customers of the province’s monopoly power company, in apparent defiance of the provincial government,” as Globe and Mail reporter Matthew McClearn put it. Defiance… You will remember — how […]

I have no doubt that Tim Houston genuinely wants to “fix” health care. He ran a provincial election campaign fixated on that singular if inexact goal. He has staked his political future, even his ultimate place in Nova Scotia political history on the claim that he alone can make health care healthy again. So why […]

… and accusing your opponents of “playing politics” won’t solve it So, Liberal leader, Zach Churchill wants Premier Tim Houston to recall the legislature to deal with the suddenly front-and-centre issue of why people are dying while they wait for care in our provincial emergency departments. And NDP leader Claudia Chender wants a public investigation […]

Quick now. How many Nova Scotians — earning Canada’s average industrial wage of $58,800 a year — could be hired for one full year for the reported asking price of John Risley’s one new, never-even sailed US$350-million luxury yacht? Don’t even bother with the currency conversion. If you guessed 5,992 with a little left over […]

Nova Scotia’s healthcare system is hurtling past hell in a runaway, overcrowded, broken-down gurney. Some recent dispatches from its front lines: Consider this opening from a Canadian Press story last week. Nova Scotia’s health unions say long-standing staffing shortages in emergency rooms are a key reason two hospital managers last week warned that some patients […]