Reading at the Port Medway Reader's Festival

Stephen Kimber will be the featured speaker Saturday, July 31, at the 2010 Port Medway Reader’s Festival in Port Medway on Nova Scotia’s south shore. Founded in 2002 by writers Cynthia Wine and Philip Slayton, the Festival is “an opportunity for readers to listen to and meet writers in an informal and friendly village setting. […]

Our new governor general and the greasy Airbus affair

David Lloyd Johnston, our soon-to-be governor general of all we survey, is, I’m sure, a fine fellow. Even if he does fit—right up to his blue button-down—every stereotype known to boring, old white guy governors general of the pre-Adrienne Clarkson, pre-Michaelle Jean era. But hey, I’m a boring old white guy too, and it’s nice […]

We want answers; they offer hype

I don’t necessarily oppose the new convention centre proposed for that gaping hole in the heart of downtown Halifax. And I don’t completely subscribe to the too-tall, edge-of-the-wedge principal objections raised by the Save the View Coalition. The preservationist group argues the convention centre’s twin 18 and 14-storey towers will obliterate much of the iconic […]

Drink the convention centre Kool Aid

Last Friday, a group calling itself the Coalition to the Save the View held a press conference to release its analysis of four reports on the financial viability of a new convention centre for downtown Halifax. Promoters want the province to ante up one third of its $300-million cost. You may recall that when those […]

New agencies won't resolve old case; we need an inquiry now

The Harper government’s proposal to replace the current, gums-only Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP with a new, baby-toothed civilian watchdog agency is better than nothing. But not by much. The new agency will have power to force witnesses to appear and testify, but will need to get the justice minister’s OK to initiate […]

The question that matters goes unanswered

So what was the money for? That is the question for which we still have no conclusive answer, despite countless millions of dollars spent on RCMP investigations, legal proceedings, an out-of-court libel settlement and, most recently, Justice Jeffrey Oliphant’s tightly circumscribed (No Airbus please, we’re Canadian) but nonetheless reputation-damning-to-hell $16-million public inquiry. Thanks to that […]

NDP Year 1: What went wrong?

On June 9, 2009—one year ago next week—Nova Scotia voters took a flying leap of faith and fate, sweeping out a tired Tory government, sidelining the faint comeback hopes of a still-recovering Liberal party and handing the keys to office for the first time ever to the New Democrats. It is probably fair to suggest […]

The teacher, the hit man and the questions that remain

At first blush, it seemed like one of those tawdry, too-strange-to-be-true tabloid tales. In April 2008, a 38-year-old Digby County school teacher named Nicole Ryan was charged—along with her 70-year-old father—with trying to hire a hit man to murder her husband. Because I follow most court cases from the comfortable periphery of my morning newspaper, […]

Expenses scandal meets lynch mob

The morning after the big semi-reveal—the auditor general had turned over to the RCMP expense-claims files on one current and four former MLAs, but he wouldn’t say which ones to avoid compromising the criminal investigation—CBC Radio Information Morning’s political panel weighed in. The panelists—veteran freelance journalist Ralph Surrette and former newspaper editor and Tory cabinet […]

Much truth in "The Truth…"

Our All The President’s Men Part page-turning thriller, part indictment of contemporary pack journalism, part thoughtful meditation on the human cost of the passion for truth, Journalist Harvey Cashore’s The Truth Shows Up: A Reporter’s Fifteen-Year Odyssey Tracking Down the Truth About Mulroney, Schreiber and the Airbus Scandal is essential (and entertaining) reading for anyone […]