What Lies wins nonfiction prize

Stephen Kimber’s book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, has won the 2014 Evelyn Richardson Award for Nonfiction at Canada’s East Coast Literary Awards. The Five were members of a Cuban intelligence network sent to Florida in the 1990s to infiltrate Miami exile groups plotting terrorist attacks against Cuba. […]

Academics open letter re: CCPA audit

Here is the text of the letter: Dear Minister Findlay, Recently, we were informed through reports in a number of newspapers that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has undertaken an audit of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) on the grounds that it allegedly engages in politically partisan, biased and one-sided research activity. While we understand […]

The US State Department responds to my four-year-old FoIA Request… sort of

When I arrived back in Halifax on September 14, 2014 from giving talks in Washington about the case of the Cuban Five, there was an envelope waiting for me. It was from the “U.S. Department of State” and there was a sticker on the manila envelope that warned: “To be opened by addressee ONLY.” The […]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the new head of the US Interest Section and the implications for the case of the Cuban Five

One of the key moments in the story of the Cuban Five occurred on the morning of May 6, 1998, when Nobel-prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez arrived at the White House in Washington carrying a secret message from Cuban President Fidel Castro. That message — about an exile terrorist plot to blow up an airplane […]

Halifax Transit’s not-so-public response to its own public consultation

In 2013, Metro Transit began a series of public consultations to figure out how our public transportation system should look five years from now. The company was seeking answers to four basic questions: should the system focus on routes providing the biggest passenger bang for the buck, or offer service to as many local neighbourhoods […]

The government’s craven; we’re stupid. I’m OK with that

“Nova Scotia’s shale potential will remain in the ground,” harrumphed Financial Post columnist Terence Corcoran. Blame “growth-killing theories and activists.” “The McNeil Liberals have nailed shut one more economic doorway,”fretted Chronicle-Herald columnist Marilla Stephenson. “It’s a sorry day for Nova Scotia,” tut-tutted her editorial overlings. “Fear is trumping science,” piled on the Toronto Sun’s Brian […]

What would you do to un-Harper Canada?

Winner of the 2014 Atlantic Journalism Award for Commentary — Any Medium. For as long as I can remember, Canadian politics has been a pleasantly diverting if meaningless game of rascal tossing. We pick one set of rascals to govern us and toss the last set out. After a while, those no-longer new rascals run […]

Don’t trust Nova Scotia Power to fix what ails it

So there were these trees, see. And, it being July, these trees had leaves. Leafy leaves. And, this being Nova Scotia, there was a storm. Which meant rain that made the leaves wet. And wind that blew the wet leaves, so some of those trees fell down. around So — this still being Nova Scotia […]

No offence intended, Mr. Rudderham

One shouldn’t mess — litigiously speaking — with Parker Rudderham. The Cape Breton businessman who owns Frank Magazine — a publication with its own storied courtroom history — sometimes seems as (in)famous for his legal battles as his business successes and philanthropic donations. On October 30, 2012, to cite but one recent example, his hometown […]

Northern Pulp, the Sobeys and the lessons unlearned

Nova Scotia is a small, interconnected, even inbred political, economic and social ecosystem. So it was intriguing last month to hear former Empire CEO Paul Sobey publicly rail against the dense “haze of emissions” spewing forth daily from Pictou County’s Northern Pulp mill, stinking up the community in which he lives and in which his […]