Getting coffee while black

What does a recent human rights case — and HRM’s lack of response to it — say about the state of race in Halifax in 2021? On the morning of Jan. 24, 2017, Gyasi Symonds, a provincial department of community services caseworker, did what many of us routinely did in pre-pandemic times. He went for […]

Brace for a(nother) summer of discontent in Nova Scotia’s fishing industry

How do Ottawa and First Nations mutually agree on the best way to organize Atlantic Canada’s most lucrative fishery to serve the economic interests of Indigenous communities and those of traditional non-Indigenous commercial fishers without undermining the industry’s commercial viability or environmental sustainability? It won’t happen so long as Ottawa insists it alone knows best. […]

Dancing on the head of a constitutional pin

Is the Veterans Affairs department’s internal review of its handling of the Lionel Desmond murder-suicide relevant to the current Nova Scotia inquiry? Yes. Are there lessons to be learned? Almost certainly. Time for Ottawa to stop playing jurisdictional games and make it public. Some days you read something, and you just have to shake your […]

It’s (past) time to defund the Halifax International Lobby Forum

The real questions for Harjit Sajjan should be these. Has the world become a better, safer place after more than a decade of Canadian-funded Halifax International Security Forum schmooze fests? And are there better ways to invest tax dollars to achieve that end? No. And yes. When I first read the news that Harjit Sajjan, […]

Premier Rankin talks a good game. Where have we heard that before?

During a Chamber of Commerce state-of-the-province event last week, our new premier postured back at the chamber’s posturing about his government’s budget. But should we have faith he means what he says? Gavin MacDonald’s introduction was full of the expected whinging and woe-is-us, and — of course, as always — it arrived with its own […]

Local journalism is dead. Long live local journalism!

Last week’s announcement the Examiner will be one of 10 independent digital journalism businesses across North America receiving support and funding from the Google News Initiative’s Startups Labs is good news for the Examiner — and its readers. It was, in fact, a good news week for local journalism. Sometime in early 2014, I began […]

Well, that didn’t take long

From the smiling selfie of our future-facing face of generational change and environmental salvation to the big reveal only a mini-month later that the shiny new was just one more in a long line of old-style pols in the welcoming embrace of all the usual corporate interests. And it will only get worse. Well, that […]

What if there were real penalties for legal ‘delay of game’?

It’s been eleven months since the Nova Scotia mass shooting and the Crown and the Mounties are still doing their best to make sure we can’t find out what happened in the investigation. Perhaps it’s time there were consequences. Before the 2019-20 season, the National Hockey League changed its rules around what are known as […]

Time for a serious rethink of the Serious Incident Response Team?

A mentally disturbed man holding a pellet gun mistaken for a handgun was shot and killed by a police officer after the man responded to another officer firing a rubber bullet his way, so he raised his pellet gun in response… There must be a better way. On July 9, 2020, the RCMP responded to […]

Can we finally hope to hope?

We have a new provincial government that at least seems to be making the right progressive noises. COVID-19 vaccines are headed our way. And spring is in the air… The first hint that the change of Nova Scotia government might be more than a simple shuffling of shop-worn deck chairs did not come from the […]