Stephen McNeil, patronage and the benefit of the doubt

It is too soon to draw conclusions, but the patronage portents from Stephen McNeil’s first three months in power are not promising. First, there was the case of Glennie Langille, the defeated Liberal candidate and former party communications chief. Without benefit of a competition, McNeil handed her an $85,000-per-year plum as the province’s new chief […]

Lenore, the L- Word and the law as bully

Nic Scissons thought he was being funny. He was just being 17. “What happened to the old Lenore?” the Truro high school student tweeted to his 629 followers in late November, uncleverly linking his post to a 2008 photo of a nude scene from The L-Word featuring hometown actress-turned-MLA Lenore Zann. Zann tweeted back, demanding […]

Mandela, Rocky and the whitewashing of heroes

What a difference a few decades make. The world has spent the last week rightly celebrating the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela, a man one letter writer to The New York Times summed up as a “universal champion of freedom, humanity and equality, and as an ardent proponent of tolerance, compassion and forbearance.” Last […]

Viola Desmond Day? It’s time…

Will this be one more missed opportunity? The new Liberal government last week introduced the February Holiday Act to establish an annual mid-winter break on the third Monday of February, beginning in 2015. “The new holiday will give people time to spend with their families and friends, just as the majority of Canadians already do,” […]

Will time tell on Stephen McNeil's new government?

One of the interesting early smoke signals from the new Liberal government is the one they aren’t sending — that the sky is falling. The Liberals did not, as the previous NDP government did, order up an immediate full-blown independent report on the state of the province’s finances, a report whose conclusions changed the course […]

Welcome to Peter's global kitchen party. You paid for it…

Even though federal Justice Minister Peter MacKay concedes “no concrete initiatives related to global peace and security” have resulted from his government’s $12 million grant to a Washington-based organization to stage two-day conferences on global security every year for the past four years in Halifax, he isn’t discouraged. “We have all the ingredients in place […]

Mike Savage, Peter Kelly, Rob Ford and keeping the bar low

Perhaps it’s as simple as the fact Mike Savage is not… oh, there are too many to choose from. His predecessor, for starters. Peter Kelly, the unlamented former mayor of Halifax whose major lasting legacy was his longevity in an office for which he was so obviously unsuited. He, belatedly, had the good sense to […]

Thanks for the apology, but it’s not enough

The federal justice department’s 19-page internal review into its role in the the Fenwick MacIntosh extradition process — Aug. 15, 1997 (“Nova Scotia Public Prosecution Service contacts the International Assistance Group to discuss potential extradition request”) to July 14, 2006 (“Canada formally requests extradition”) — has no named author. The review itself — which followed […]

Welcome, Mr. Premier. And good luck…

Stephen McNeil doesn’t even have the key to the executive washroom — premier’s desk, top left-hand drawer — and his administration-in-eager-anticipation is already being sideswiped by economic events over which it has little control and less influence. Just two days after his Liberals were swept into office on an electoral toss-those-rascals-out-and-let’s-see-what-these-rascals-will-do roll of the dice, […]

What did the NDP do to deserve its electoral fate?

The question is why. Why — if you believe the polls — is Darrell Dexter’s NDP government heading for an ignominious defeat? Nova Scotia’s first-ever NDP government was hardly a disaster. It succeeded a Tory government that had careened out of fiscal control, stumbled into one of the world’s worst economic meltdowns, got sideswiped by […]