No success like failure… Rob Bennett and NSP

One of the enduring myths among those who bow down to the gods of the marketplace is that someone who screws up in the private sector—unlike the cosseted public sphere—will suffer inevitable, inevitably dire consequences for failure. While there may be truth to that at the lower rungs of the corporate ladder, those at the […]

Andrea King’s murder, the murder suspect and the missing evidence

On January 1, 1992, Andrea Lynn King, an 18-year-old woman from British Columbia flew to Halifax to begin a travel-work adventure… She phoned her sister from the airport to say she’d landed and would be staying the night at a downtown hostel. She would call the next day, she said, with her new address so […]

Is it 2013? Let the campaign begin…

Forget this year’s faux feints and fevered fantasies. Two thousand and thirteen will be the year we get to pass electoral judgment on the government of Darrell Dexter. Will we decide, on balance and measured against his less-than-stellar competition, that Dexter has earned a second majority term? Or will we, seeing more potential than performance […]

Shocked and appalled stocking stuffer

With the pre-holiday spate of comment-worthy local news and the upcoming holiday absence of venue to vent my inevitable shocked-and-appalled-at-it-all spleen, today’s column will be an assorted stocking stuffer. No charges in Home for Coloured Children investigation: I’m less shocked than I’d like. But winning convictions when allegations date back decades, involve children and include […]

Whatever happened to Darrell?

How and why did avuncular, reasonable-man-trying-to-do-the-right-thing Opposition leader Darrell Dexter morph into prickly, why-should-I-answer-your-reasonable-question Premier Darrell Dexter? Last week, as the House of Assembly wrapped up its fall sitting, Dexter announced—not in the legislature where you might have expected it, but in a puffed up State-of-the-Province speech to an audience of 400 Chamber-of-Commerce types—that his […]

Pat Connolly, R.I.P.

I didn’t go to journalism school. In a day when informal apprenticeship was the norm, I was lucky to learn my trade from its best practitioners: Nick Fillmore, the crusading editor of the feisty local alternative weekly, the 4th Estate; Harry Bruce, one of Canada’s finest magazine writers and essayists; and Pat Connolly, the legendary […]

The auditor general, the convention centre and the premier

One can understand Premier Darrell Dexter’s aggressive/defensive, head-in-the-convention-centre response to last week’s auditor general’s report. That report—which damned the shoddiness of the business case Trade Centre Ltd. concocted to justify a new convention centre—called on the government to launch an independent review of TCL’s numbers. Dexter was having none of it. TCL based its conclusions, […]

Halifax International Security Forum: Making the World Safe for Peter MacKay

The idea for this past weekend’s fourth annual Halifax International Security Forum, Peter MacKay told the Globe and Mail, was born because our defence minister “got a little tired” of traveling to other global security conferences in places like Munich where the discussions were all “Europe-America, Europe-America.” Voila the Halifax Forum. MacKay’s “brainchild”—as another media […]

Jamie Baillie offside… as usual

Forget the Byzantine balls-up the attempt to unionize Canada’s junior hockey players became—league-hired private investigators snooping on union staff, falsely (maybe) intimating one was a felon; union (dis)organizers scheduling, then canceling votes—and ask ourselves two simple questions: First, do run-of-the-litter junior hockey players, the ones least likely to lose millions in the next NHL lockout, […]

Did you hear the one about the snap election?

When I was a fresh-faced young radio reporter in the days before journalists discovered ethics, we would occasionally—on slow days when news was in short supply—create our own.“Did you hear the rumour?” one reporter might say to another. “The premier is thinking of calling a snap election.” “Really?” the second reporter would reply. “We should […]