Tonight, 600 Nova Scotia Tories will gather at the Westin Hotel to pay perfunctory tribute to Rodney MacDonald, their thankfully former, now hardly ever mentioned leader. After that—if not before—conventioneers will get down to the real, if unspoken business at hand: making sure the party doesn’t blow it again like they did in 2006. That’s […]
- 02/05/2010
- StephenKimber
- No Comments
So here is our question for today. Should the Charles Morris House—a down-at-the-heels, 240-year-old wooden structure that once served as the headquarters of Nova Scotia’s chief surveyor but today sits, forlorn, beached and abandoned in a downtown parking lot—be resurrected and spiffed up to serve as a living memorial to the man who is credited […]
- 01/29/2010
- StephenKimber
- 3 Comments
So whose privacy are they protecting? On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable shot and killed John Andrew Simon, a member of Cape Breton’s Wagmatcook First Nation. Simon, everyone agrees, was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time he was killed. According to what police reportedly told Simon’s family, he was unarmed, […]
- 01/22/2010
- StephenKimber
- 1 Comment
The real question, Dr. Charles Emmrys testified, is, “What works?” What doesn’t work—what research shows doesn’t work, he adds—is shipping troubled kids out of their home provinces, away from family and community, and into residential institutions where they are more likely to be warehoused than treated. Emmyrs, a Moncton-based clinical psychologist and court-recognized expert in […]
- 01/15/2010
- StephenKimber
- 5 Comments
Mainstream media online comments sections were supposed to be one of those glorious triumphs of citizen democracy in the new Internet age. They offered a public space where ordinary readers could talk back to writers and to the people they wrote about, a free-range forum for spirited, intelligent discussion of civic issues… Instead, it has […]
- 01/08/2010
- StephenKimber
- 2 Comments
“You’re wearing my sneakers.” The voice—hard, flat, insistent—is coming from behind us in the line at the A&W in the food court at Scotia Square. I turn to see who it is. She’s a big girl, probably in her late teens, blonde hair pulled back tight against her skull, a belligerent, don’t-fuck-with-me look permanent-markered onto […]
Russell Walker, Chair of Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners, isn’t happy with me. It has to do with my comments two weeks back about his lack of comment on the city’s startling number of unsolved murders. I’ll save the specifics of Walker’s complaints for another column. Today I want to talk about something Walker said, […]
- 12/18/2009
- StephenKimber
- No Comments
Nova Scotia’s new New Democratic Party government isn’t so new anymore. A week from tomorrow, it will have been in office six months. How well has it performed? At one level, the answer would have to be very well. Darrell Dexter’s government has demonstrated a level of calming, policy-wonkish competence sadly lacking during the chaotic, […]
- 12/11/2009
- StephenKimber
- 1 Comment
Tom Martin had it wrong, Halifax Police Chief Frank Beazley told CBC Radio’s Information Morning on December 1. In my story for The Coast (November 19, 2009) on the city’s striking number of unsolved homicides, I’d quoted Martin, a respected retired homicide detective as saying: “To my knowledge, the cold case unit has not laid […]
- 12/09/2009
- StephenKimber
- 2 Comments
Sunday, Dec 6, 12:00-2:00pm Author Stephen Kimber will be signing copies of his books, including his latest, IWK: A Century of Caring for Families. Coles, Halifax Shopping Centre. Sunday, Dec 6, 3:00-5:00pm Author Stephen Kimber will be signing copies of his books, including his latest, IWK: A Century of Caring for Families. Chapters, Bayer’s Lake, […]
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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