Hugh MacKay and our I-know-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing premier

Why is it so hard for Stephen McNeil to acknowledge mistakes were made, let alone admit he or anyone in his orbit ever does anything wrong? The latest Hugh MacKay drunk-driving allegations offer a premier case study in Trumpian counterattack, obfuscation and butt-covering. Stephen McNeil insists he knew nothing, his chief of staff did nothing […]

Is ‘Idle Some More’ back for another season?

It’s the end of February, so it must be time for Bay Ferries to announce the start of this year’s summer sailing season between Yarmouth and Bar Harbor. And for the rest of us to ask if it will really happen this year. Shall we begin a new round of our favourite game show, “Idle […]

Hold on to your ballots

Tax cuts for businesses, increases for minimum-wage earners, cute photos with kids… There must be an election coming. Let us count up just a few of the reasons Premier Stephen McNeil will call a provincial election before the end of 2020. Start in the counting house itself. Last week, during his annual State of the […]

Why are we still talking about Africentric schools?

Why aren’t we doing something to try to change decades of data — “comparative drop-out rates, school suspension rates, graduation rates, academic averages achieved” — that show African Nova Scotian students aren’t reaching their potential in our school system? Whatever the reasons, it’s time to stop allowing the failures of the past to keep repeating […]

Complicated legacies

Was Lionel Desmond a victim of his war demons? Or was he a villain, a perpetrator of domestic violence who murdered his own family? Or both? We may never know. “Speak not ill of the dead man.” Spartacus “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Shakespeare Legacies have always been […]

New street checks almost the same as the old

The province banned street checks. The police chief apologized. But nothing’s really changed. Earlier this month, former police officer Maurice Carvery says police turned his routine traffic stop into an example of racial profiling. “They haven’t stopped; they’ve only changed.” Red lights flashing in your rearview; a high-pitched siren’s we-we-we-waaaahhh from somewhere behind your head, […]

Can we expect truth about the Walmart incident from police or the store? Nope

When a young black woman accused the Halifax police of racially profiling and abusing her in connection with an alleged shoplifting incident at Walmart last week, officials did what officials do. They obfuscated, they passed the buck, they pretended to take it seriously. I still don’t know nearly enough about what actually happened inside the […]

George Elliott Clarke, the murderer, and the murdered woman

“‘Truth and Reconciliation’ versus ‘the Murdered and Missing’” was intended to be a serious academic lecture by one of Canada’s most esteemed poets and social justice truth speakers. Somehow it all went wrong. I don’t know George Elliott Clarke well, but I have known him for a long time. Back in the mid-1980s, before he […]

On Rana Zaman: Some somebodies have some explaining to do

Let’s start with the provincial NDP and its leader, Gary Burrill. And move on to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, and to the Atlantic Jewish Council. For Rana Zaman, it had been another long and not untypical day of good-doing. But as she wrote proudly on her Facebook page on Dec. 20 at 4:12 […]

Northern Pulp: planning the future five years too late

I don’t want to criticize Stephen McNeil’s announcement Friday. It was hard to watch without feeling just how emotionally wrenching and personally difficult it had been for him. He was genuinely caught between the rock of an important and necessary promise he had made to the Pictou Landing First Nation and the hard place of […]