Ontario results warning

Ontario vote a caution for Harper The last time I bothered to clue in to the state of Ontario politics, which is to say sometime around the beginning of the current provincial election campaign, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government was in deep doo doo. The government had broken too many of its previous promises, the pundits […]

Michael Goodyear's ordeal continues (Oct 4, 2007)

Five years of ‘stress, isolation and poverty’ Dr. Michael Goodyear marked an anniversary this week. He didn’t celebrate. Five years ago on Tuesday — Oct. 2, 2002 — Goodyear, a respected medical oncologist and ethics researcher, received a letter from his bosses at the Capital District Health Authority. As the result of ongoing personality clashes […]

Iran's president not problem (Sept 27, 2007)

Denouncing Iran’s president rings hollow The problem with lobbing rocks inside glass houses is that the shards often end up all over you. Consider the case of Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, whose 15-minute, scattershot denunciation-introduction of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the university earlier this week was so gratuitous, insulting and self-serving […]

Health care right to strike (Sept 20, 2007)

Health care strikes not the issue It is intriguing to watch politically tin-eared, ideologically wrong-headed Rodney — the premier who couldn’t make up his many minds on Sunday shopping until it was too late for him to claim anything but blame — now relentlessly clutching between his teeth the chewed, spit-up bone of legislation to […]

Column for June 4, 2006

Proud Rodney, Frank Francis and Diligent Darrell If no clear winner emerged from the primordial swamp of Thursday night’s party leaders’ debate, the luminescent loser, at least from my somewhat jaundiced point of view, was our vacuous wind-up doll of a premier. Rodney I-am-proud MacDonald seemed so mired in I-am-very-proud message-track mode that he couldn’t […]

Column for May 28, 2006

Of anniversaries, speeches and civic responsibility This month’s second anniversary of the Shirley Street standoff passed with barely a whimper, a sad testament — but one that would no doubt comfort our current prime minister — to the power of governments to outlast their critics by simply ignoring whatever legitimate questions they raise. Shortly after […]

Column for May 21, 2006

Harper crosses a line One can almost understand, even forgive Stephen Harper’s inability to stop running for office. Almost. After all, there will be another federal election, probably within the next two years, perhaps sooner if the stars and moon align in a favourable way for the prime minister, and Harper would be remiss if […]

Column for May 14, 2006

Health authority should learn from Willow There’s a lesson for the Capital District Health Authority in this week’s Human Rights Commission ruling in the Lindsay Willow case. But is it a lesson the authority is yet ready to learn? Willow is the Halifax West High School teacher who has spent the last five-and-a-half years trying […]

Column for May 7, 2006

We don’t meet with doctors…" How a personality conflict mutated into a medical disaster I’ve spent the past few weeks rummaging through news clippings, press releases, court documents, official reports, "full and final" agreements and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of a seemingly senseless medical dispute, trying to make sense out of what went so […]

Column for April 30, 2006

An arrogant, hypocritical blinkered, paranoid bully… with power The problem with deciding to throw out a governing party that truly deserves to be defeated, as we did with Paul Martin’s Liberals earlier this year, is that we must inevitably, if only by default, choose another group of power-hungry wannabes to take their place. The bigger […]