Stephen Kimber

One person’s root cause is another’s yesterday They say the first casualty of war is truth. Context is usually a close second. In the bomb-blasted echo chamber that is the modern 24-hour news cycle, certain phrases bounce from politicians, to anchors, to pundits, to us, and then back round again, quickly assuming a truth of […]

A dream deferred Will former Africville residents finally get their church rebuilt? An apology would be nice too. Stephen Kimber reports. by Stephen Kimber Irvine Carvery has reason to be cautious. And he is. But he could be cynical too. And he isn’t. Since 1976, when the birth of his first son taught him the […]

Arab Holy War meets Israeli Apocalypse On the evening of June 3, 1967, shortly before the beginning of that Arab-Israeli war, United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk sent an “eyes-only” cable to his Arab-based ambassadors describing a situation “as complex and as dangerous as any we have faced,” and asking them “to put your […]

Health department’s proposed bylaws make bad situation worse It is hard to imagine at first blush, but the department of health’s belated, half-hearted attempt to head off future embarrassments like the still-ongoing Gabrielle Horne affair may only end up making the situation worse. Horne, of course, is the cardiac research specialist whose promising career was […]

Do we need a little more MAD? Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD. The idea is simple. If you have a nuclear bomb and I have a nuclear bomb, you’d better not try to use yours on me or I’ll fire mine at you, and we’ll both be dead. World ends. Game over. For a good chunk […]

MacDonald makes bad law worse To tell the truth, and I sometimes do, I could care less whether I am allowed to shop ’til I drop on Sundays. I have no vested, or even unvested, interest in the outcome of this tiresome debate. I don’t, thank God, work in the retail business. If there is […]

Our school board’s sorry for … everything Geoff Cainen, the coordinator of education quality and accountability (whatever that may be) at the Halifax Regional School Board, clearly believes in inclusion. As he groveled to reporters last week: “If this question in any way has offended anyone with a Muslim background, or Canadian Forces, or anyone […]

Baillie, Batherson blather while Rodney burns If you want to know why the Conservatives managed to lose this election while slightly increasing their share of the popular vote and winning the most seats, you need only rewind and replay the what-me-worry, see-me-smile, that’s-me-still-smiling election-night blather of two of its key backroom operatives — Jamie Baillie, […]

HarperCollins Canada’s cocktail party HarperCollins authors Stephen Kimber and Charlotte Gray are joined by Gray’s son, Alex Anderson at the HarperCollins cocktail party kicking off Book Expo Canada 2006 in Toronto June 10, 2006. Photo credit: Rannie Turingan

Ignoring the elephant in the election campaign Brian Crowley and I do not agree on much. Crowley is the head of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a right-wing think tank funded largely by big business… and I am not. He believes, if I may simplify just a smidge, that what is best for business […]