It will come as a surprise to no one — least of all to Lil herself — when I predict Lil MacPherson will not be mayor of Halifax after all the votes are counted this Saturday. But that was never the point, especially for MacPherson. And that is a point the rest of us should […]
- 10/11/2016
- StephenKimber
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North Preston’s Miranda Cain tells Metro’s Zane Woodford the key issue in her District 2 is “lack of recreation.” Rod Brunt’s main concern, reports Haley Ryan, is cycling safety on Halifax’s “shark-infested” streets. “Our issues,” Musquodoboit Harbour’s Kim Young tells reporter Yvette d’Entremont, “are just basically the oppression of rural development.” And so it has […]
- 10/04/2016
- StephenKimber
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It goes with saying the Tilt-a-Whirl that is Halifax city council has too long tilted toward men, who traditionally also happen to be white, middle-aged and middle class, usually involved in business of some sort and been recycled through at least a couple of election wash-dry cycles. There are plenty of people — count me […]
- 09/27/2016
- StephenKimber
- 1 Comment
Why do we pay so little attention to the simplest — yet most important — opportunity to influence what happens in our everyday lives: voting in municipal elections? In 2012, only 36.9 per cent of us — barely one-third of those eligible — cast ballots to choose our current mayor and councilors. The irony is […]
- 09/20/2016
- StephenKimber
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Too often, our criminal justice system is ill-equipped to deal with the sad brutishness of real life. Consider the recent case of the 43-year-old Dartmouth man convicted of an incestuous relationship with his then-17-year-old daughter. The facts are relatively straightforward. In September 2012, the young woman — who’d been living on the streets in Ontario, […]
- 09/13/2016
- StephenKimber
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At 2:30 p.m. on July 4, 2016, Nova Scotia Minister of Labour Kelly Regan issued a news release. Athletes playing on Nova Scotia-based teams are exempt from parts of the Labour Standards Code… It was the Monday after the Canada Day long weekend, the beginning of our traditional summers-long political disengagement. This out-of-nowhere decision hadn’t […]
- 09/11/2016
- StephenKimber
- 1 Comment
We could begin today’s globe-girdling adventure almost anywhere and at almost any time. In eastern Siberia, perhaps. Circa 1756. That’s when a Russian explorer and naturalist first identified the delectably healthful properties of a blue-ish, tart-tasting, strange-looking, oblong fruit from the lonicera caerulea plant. Or perhaps on Hokkaido, Japan’s most northern island, during the 1940s when […]
- 09/11/2016
- StephenKimber
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Could the answer to the pressing-to-pundits question — why hasn’t Stephen McNeil called the much-anticipated-by-pundits fall provincial general election? — be… “Halifax Needham.” Last week, the NDP’s Lisa Roberts, a former journalist and community activist, convincingly won that north-end Halifax riding with 51 per cent of votes in a by-election. McNeil’s chosen standard-bearer, Rod Wilson, […]
- 09/06/2016
- StephenKimber
- 2 Comments
Carolyn Abraham, Stephen Kimber and Emily Urquhart will judge the 2016 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, Canada’s richest literary award for a work of nonfiction. The finalists for this year’s $60,000 prize will be announced on Sept. 28, 2016. Carolyn Abraham, a journalist and author, has twice been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award […]
- 09/02/2016
- StephenKimber
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If you’d like an object lesson in how not to conduct corporate public relations, consider how Sobeys, the iconic, Nova Scotia-rooted company that operates the second largest supermarket chain in the country, bungled a racial profiling case. The story began back in May 2009 when an assistant manager at the Sobeys Hammonds Plains outlet confronted […]
- 08/30/2016
- StephenKimber
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STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax and co-founder of its MFA in Creative Nonfiction Program, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of two novels and eight non-fiction books. Buy his books
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