Stephen Kimber

The battle is over. It ended shortly after seven Friday morning when a marathon legislature session culminated with passage of the reassuringly entitled Essential Health and Community Services Act, forcing 2,400 Capital Health District nurses back to their stations. With its passage, the larger war for the future of labour relations in this province was […]

Could Stephen McNeil’s read-my-lips election promise to “save you $46 million per year” on your power bills become his defining, Darrell-Dexter-like, no-new-taxes/no-program-cuts, dead-on-the-doorstep electoral moment? During last year’s election campaign, the Liberals’ cross-their-heart pledge was straightforwardly specific: if you elect us, we will eliminate the efficiency tax on your electricity bill and force Nova Scotia […]

Let me see if I understand this. Capital District nurses have the legal right to strike. In February, they voted 90 per cent in favour of striking to back contract demands. But if they actually walk off their jobs, they will effectively — and almost instantly — lose that right. (See the McNeil government’s legislation […]

Why is it that all those stats-stuffed, footnote-filled, soberly sincere public policy backgrounder research reports published by inevitably “independent, non-partisan” yet somehow transparently ideological think tanks and authored by multi-award-winning senior fellows and/or professors emereti are so… well, pedantically, ploddingly predictable? Take, for example, “The Cost Disease Infects Public Education Across Canada,” the latest tome […]

Forget for the moment whether last week’s Emera executive bonuses come out of your right pocket or your left. And don’t probe too deeply into whether the supposed wall between the cash shoveled into the bank accounts of Emera executives for the work they do for our own Nova Scotia Power electricity utility and the […]

Whose services are really “essential”? And what does that mean? On Friday, the McNeil government recalled the legislature to designate most home support workers — including the 400 Northwood employees who began a legal strike Friday, the 670 VON workers who could walk off their jobs this week and even the hundreds of others still […]

It began with a January phone call from a school principal, inviting Wanda and Joe Robson to travel from their home in Cape Breton to metro to attend a Feb. 17 unveiling of a portrait honouring Wanda’s sister, Viola Desmond. Desmond — who was convicted for sitting in the whites-only section of a New Glasgow […]

Last week, the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society heard unprecedented arguments about whether to recognize graduates from a new law school at Trinity Western University, a privately-funded British Columbia Christian college. The issue isn’t whether graduates will be competent to practise law. The Federation of Law Societies of Canada gave the program its preliminary seal of […]