Schooling Shawn Cleary on journalism education

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner July 2, 2o18. My Examiner column last week seemed to set off a modest Twitter tempest, mostly because its subject, Coun. Shawn Cleary, chose to respond to what I wrote and didn’t write (even when he didn’t seem to realize I’d written it); and then to respond in scattershot […]

Unpacking the contradictory Mr. Cleary

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner June 25, 2018. “We don’t build buildings because of public opinion. We build them for good planning… And so I think this is a good thing for us… In terms of the design, I think we’ve mitigated most of the concerns…” —Councillor Shawn Cleary June 19, 2018-06-22 […]

Cannabis will soon be legal. Just don’t smoke it, or grow it, or enjoy it

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner June 18, 2018. Talk about buzz kill. At its meeting Tuesday, Halifax city councilors will consider a staff report recommending ever more stringent controls around the cultivation and consumption of cannabis to make sure no one gets the notion there is anything remotely recreational or fun — certainly, definitively not fun— […]

The Yates case: self-regulation or self-protection

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner June 11, 2018. Start with this: a July 11, 2017, CBC news story entitled “Lack of Psychologists Delays Youth Sentencing More than 6 Months.” The story quoted Brandon Rolle, the managing lawyer at the youth office for Nova Scotia Legal Aid who pointed out that the IWK Health Centre was […]

Ask no questions, get no answers… Mission accomplished

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner June 4, 2018. HOUSTON: The motion is that the Public Accounts Committee meet on June 13th, June 20th, and June 27thto address these three topics of the Auditor General’s report in a timely fashion. CHAIRMAN: Would all those in favour of the motion please say Aye… Contrary minded, Nay… The […]

Council to Armco: ‘Jump? How high, sir, how high…?’ ‘Good dog…’

This column was first published in the Halifax Examiner May 28, 2018. Last week, Halifax City Council again/still/always decided to re-re-re-write its planning bylaws on the fly for the greater good and increased profit of a private developer whose books it didn’t bother examining, let alone asking to glimpse once, maybe upside down on […]

Hijacking ‘reasoned debate’ for right-wing noise at MSVU

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner May 22, 2018. Mount Saint Vincent University grappled this month with a complex web of issues that will feel uncomfortably familiar to academics at plenty of other Canadian universities: how to (belatedly but quickly) increase the numbers of professors from traditionally under-represented Indigenous and other marginalized communities; how […]

From Stephen McNeil’s ‘who me?’ to McInnes Cooper’s #metoo

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner May 14, 2018. Why am I not surprised? Last Monday, Halifax police dropped all charges against the 19-year-old they’d arrested less than a month before for “unauthorized use of a computer with fraudulent intent.” The fact is this case has been a cock-up from the beginning. Even before the beginning. Perhaps […]

Politicians’ snake oil hopes and dreams meet economic, environmental reality

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner May 7, 2018. You can draw a neat, straight line. Start with the October 5, 1971, front page of the Halifax Chronicle Herald, with its photo of a beaming Premier Gerald Regan holding a tiny vial of oil supposedly sucked to the surface during offshore drilling off Nova Scotia. […]

The Liberals’ Fang-less Five, the data breach and the public interest

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner April 30, 2018. Really? Of course, really. Last Wednesday, five Liberal MLAs —Gordon Wilson, Suzanne Lohnes-Croft, Ben Jessome, Brendan Maguire and Hugh MacKay — voted, not with their minds, or their hearts, or their common sense, or even in the interests of the taxpayers who put […]