Stephen Kimber

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. – […]

It was, if nothing else, compelling political theatre. Even on Channel 95 in cable’s nosebleed section. And even allowing for our legislative television channel’s blandly annoying alternating medium-close-up head shots of questioner followed by witness followed by questioner. Although the static camera never strays, never zooms tight on the eyes of the witness so we […]

The dogs of bore There must be something positive we can say about the current, ongoing, never-ending, will-it-ever-please-god-soon-end saga of Belinda and Peter, Paul and Belinda, Peter and his dog, Belinda and Tie, Tie and his wronged wife, Belinda and her feigned innocence, Condi and Peter, Peter and his dog… again. And now, of course, […]

I’ve been writing about media coverage of Brian Mulroney and the Airbus scandal for years (most recently in the Sunday Daily News of Jan. 28, 2007). Here are some of the earlier columns as well as a link to a magazine profile of Mulroney I wrote for the Financial Post magazine in 1978 between his […]

Politeness will not end poverty My colleagues over in the editorial department at the Daily News got our collective knickers in a righteous knot this past week over exactly what is the oh-so-polite and proper way to express one’s… well… one’s discontent with the seeming failure of our political betters to manage to accomplish anything […]

When is a war crime not a war crime? Forget for the moment Stephen Harper’s gratuitously partisan smear of "virtually all of the candidates" in the federal Liberal leadership race as somehow "anti-Israel" for not agreeing with him that Israel must be right even if it is wrong. Forget too the predictably wounded, angry — […]

‘Bold’ leadership or caving to reality I couldn’t help but wonder whether my usually button-downed, clear-headed colleague David Rodenhiser had been smoking something illegal (perhaps in preparation for a screening of Trailer Park Boys: The Movie ) when he sat down at his computer to write his Thursday column on Nova Scotia’s new Sunday shopping […]

Reluctant Genius The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell. By Charlotte Gray. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 448 pages, hardcover. Did Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone and change our world forever? Or does that honour more properly belong to Elisha Gray, an electrician, inventor and founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company who […]