Stephen Kimber

Fage I, Foley Melvin and now… Fage II The bigger mess, as is so often the case in Rodney MacDonald’s all-message-track-all-the-time government, has less to do with the initial stupidity and more — much more — to do with the premier’s inept mishandling of everything that happens afterward. That’s not to suggest the specifics of […]

A feast of Stephens I know it’s personal, perhaps even petty of me to get caught up in what was clearly a minor moment from a major occasion — Stephen Harper’s first annual round of year-end media interviews as our prime minister. I mean, Harper was nothing if not newsworthy, generating plenty of pre-Christmas headlines […]

Firing board just the first step It is difficult to fault Education Minister Karen Casey for her decision last week to fire — or should I say “relieve of their responsibilities and authorities” — all 13 elected members of the Halifax Regional School Board. It is easier to quibble over where the minister, and her […]

The Holocaust and the West’s double standard Forget for a moment the knee-jerk need to be shocked and appalled that Shiraz Dossa, a St. Francis Xavier University political science professor, presented a paper at a “bizarre international conference.” (CTV) Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is, of course, “a lunatic and dangerous man” (Yvon Grenier, St. […]

Will the province learn Judge Nunn’s lessons? To his credit, Justice Minister Murray Scott got it right. "I can’t go back," he conceded in his first response to the release last week of Merlin Nunn’s report into the death of Theresa McAvoy. "I can only go ahead." But, he added with apparent sincerity, “we want […]

Reading the ‘State of Rodney’ If you want to know the true State of the Province of Rodney MacDonald, you could do worse than to read the premier’s "State of the Province" speech last week. Forget for the moment MacDonald’s unchanging confection of over-baked, under-done puffball platitudes: "The notion of leaving our province a little […]

Liberals dance around trust funds Quick now. Who said the following? “Since the beginning of the Regan administration… the Liberal Party… has been living… from the proceeds of crime.” If you guessed those fightin’ words were uttered — and later retracted —by a politically potty-mouthed NDP MLA during last week’s filibuster on a Tory-Liberal campaign-finance […]

November 23, 2006 Rodney Mac-Donald fights to stay on message A year of leadership in action. by Stephen Kimber Rodney MacDonald looks more like the guy who’s just realized he’s landed smack in the can’t-get-out-of-the-way path of a runaway freight train than the dignified, in-control premier of Nova Scotia. His latest "important good news" press […]

Those of us who live in glass houses “Does Justice David Gruchy feel like he has blood on his hands?” My colleague David Rodenhiser asked that question in a scathing column two days after the Nov. 5 stabbing death of an American sailor in downtown Halifax. Rodenhiser’s argument: the person who has since been charged […]

Uh… don’t pick up that phone Here’s the problem with justice. It must not only be done, but also be seen to be done. Whenever a judicial process is not open, transparent and accountable, citizens – in the words of the 1989 Nova Scotia royal commission into the wrongful conviction of Donald Marshall, Jr. – […]