Mike Duffy… you're no Mike Duffy

To paraphrase a famous American: I knew Mike Duffy, Senator, and you’re no Mike Duffy… I couldn’t help thinking that as I read Halifax Metro’s account this week of Duffy’s inane, ill-tempered and spectacularly ill-informed rant about the King’s College Journalism School. Full disclosure: I teach at King’s. “Kids who go to King’s, or the […]

The sound of one cymbal clanging

It’s difficult to comprehend how a politician seemingly in such perfect harmony with the populist political zeitgeist eight months ago could have become so cymbal-clangingly tone deaf so quickly. Darrell Dexter got himself elected premier by channeling Coffee-at-the-Tims Everyman. He was like us, only smarter. We could—and did—trust him. We forgave him for lying to […]

A promise is not a law until it is

It happened so long ago that Alexa McDonough was still the leader of a rag-tag band of New Democrats in the provincial legislature. And I was a still-young-ish reporter. McDonough had just introduced a private member’s bill to reform the ways in which political parties got financed. Its specifics have long since escaped my memory. […]

MLA expenses a scandal but….

Yes, the MLA expenses scandal is a scandal. Some of what some MLAs filed as legitimate expenses were not. A few claims may even be criminal. Let’s make MLAs pay back what they can’t justify, and prosecute those whose actions crossed the line. Let’s fix a screwed-up system. Then let’s move on. When it comes […]

Whose best interests?

For Family Court Judge Beryl MacDonald, the question seemed simple. Does she have the authority to order the minister of community services to provide a service the department, by policy, doesn’t offer? Her answer, delivered during a family court hearing this week, was equally simple. She does not. The legal issue may be simple; the […]

Visionless NS Tories look for leader before vision

Tonight, 600 Nova Scotia Tories will gather at the Westin Hotel to pay perfunctory tribute to Rodney MacDonald, their thankfully former, now hardly ever mentioned leader. After that—if not before—conventioneers will get down to the real, if unspoken business at hand: making sure the party doesn’t blow it again like they did in 2006. That’s […]

Having our history and swallowing it too

So here is our question for today. Should the Charles Morris House—a down-at-the-heels, 240-year-old wooden structure that once served as the headquarters of Nova Scotia’s chief surveyor but today sits, forlorn, beached and abandoned in a downtown parking lot—be resurrected and spiffed up to serve as a living memorial to the man who is credited […]

Protecting privacy or covering up?

So whose privacy are they protecting? On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable shot and killed John Andrew Simon, a member of Cape Breton’s Wagmatcook First Nation. Simon, everyone agrees, was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time he was killed. According to what police reportedly told Simon’s family, he was unarmed, […]

Shipping off troubled kids not a solution

The real question, Dr. Charles Emmrys testified, is, “What works?” What doesn’t work—what research shows doesn’t work, he adds—is shipping troubled kids out of their home provinces, away from family and community, and into residential institutions where they are more likely to be warehoused than treated. Emmyrs, a Moncton-based clinical psychologist and court-recognized expert in […]

Free-range forums for the crude crazies

Mainstream media online comments sections were supposed to be one of those glorious triumphs of citizen democracy in the new Internet age. They offered a public space where ordinary readers could talk back to writers and to the people they wrote about, a free-range forum for spirited, intelligent discussion of civic issues… Instead, it has […]