Hello, So… I’m one of 12 Nova Scotia writer-volunteers taking part in — wait for it — a “writing relay event.” On Feb. 19, each of us will take a turn creating 200 words of a collective short story before handing off to the next relay writer. And so on. And so on. It’s a little […]
The Mulroney questions that won’t go away So Brian Mulroney believes Pierre Trudeau’s youthful opposition to fighting the Nazis in World War II “doesn’t qualify him for any position of moral leadership in our society.” Then how does Mulroney imagine his ongoing, continuing never-ending refusal to answer simple, reasonable questions about the envelopes stuffed with […]
The prophet in Clayton Park Bill Deagle MD, ABFP, CCFP, AAPM, CIME, AAAAM, ACOEM, AAEM claims to know things they don’t want you to know about 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing and Columbine school shootings, to name but a few world-shaking events. So what’s he doing in Halifax? by Stephen Kimber On the morning of […]
The endemic epidemic of secrecy During an opening-day address to law students at the University of Ottawa Tuesday, Maher Arar posed an interesting question to a standing-room-only hall full of future lawyers: “Who will you include and who will you exclude?” At one level, Arar — whose deportation, detention and torture in the soiled name […]
When plausible denial becomes impossible Back in my long-lost Dalhousie University days, there was this big galoomphy guy named David MacKinnon who used to hang around the student newspaper office. MacKinnon wore unlaced army work boots, sported a perpetual blond bedhead and peppered his inevitably coarse conversation with references to “revolution” and “the pigs.” During […]
Province doesn’t get rural health care crisis In my other life on these pages, I write a weekly Sunday column called Kimber’s Nova Scotia, which is my slightly skewed take on all the news that’s fit to comment on from around the province. As part of my research, I spend a lot of time reading […]
The Peter principle at work By Stephen Kimbe r Was Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to pluck Peter MacKay from the rock of Foreign Affairs and plop him into the hard place of Defence good for Peter MacKay’s career? Is it good for the country? It’s far easier to answer the latter than the former. […]
Blacked-out bits raise questions “’Satiable curiosity,” as Kipling called it, is one of the peculiar traits of the journalist. I have spent more hours than I can count — or should admit to — trying to decipher the usually meaningless upside-down writing on the desks of people I am interviewing. Or listening in on banal […]
Police learn nothing from standoff The Halifax Regional Police learned nothing from 2004’s costly three-day Shirley Street standoff — because there was nothing for them to learn. They did everything right. That, at least, is the pre-determined conclusion of the department’s self-serving, butt-covering, two-years-in-the-making, 16-page internal review of “Incident Number 04-21470.” That is the blandly […]
Another legacy of Africville I had called Tom McInnis, Nova Scotia’s deputy premier during the last days of the Buchanan era, to ask him a question. In December 1991, McInnis had announced — to great fanfare and applause — that the province would rebuild Seaview United Baptist Church on the site of the former Africville. […]
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax and co-founder of its MFA in Creative Nonfiction Program, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of two novels and eight non-fiction books. Buy his books
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