Stephen Kimber

Proud Rodney, Frank Francis and Diligent Darrell If no clear winner emerged from the primordial swamp of Thursday night’s party leaders’ debate, the luminescent loser, at least from my somewhat jaundiced point of view, was our vacuous wind-up doll of a premier. Rodney I-am-proud MacDonald seemed so mired in I-am-very-proud message-track mode that he couldn’t […]

Of anniversaries, speeches and civic responsibility This month’s second anniversary of the Shirley Street standoff passed with barely a whimper, a sad testament — but one that would no doubt comfort our current prime minister — to the power of governments to outlast their critics by simply ignoring whatever legitimate questions they raise. Shortly after […]

Harper crosses a line One can almost understand, even forgive Stephen Harper’s inability to stop running for office. Almost. After all, there will be another federal election, probably within the next two years, perhaps sooner if the stars and moon align in a favourable way for the prime minister, and Harper would be remiss if […]

Health authority should learn from Willow There’s a lesson for the Capital District Health Authority in this week’s Human Rights Commission ruling in the Lindsay Willow case. But is it a lesson the authority is yet ready to learn? Willow is the Halifax West High School teacher who has spent the last five-and-a-half years trying […]

We don’t meet with doctors…" How a personality conflict mutated into a medical disaster I’ve spent the past few weeks rummaging through news clippings, press releases, court documents, official reports, "full and final" agreements and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of a seemingly senseless medical dispute, trying to make sense out of what went so […]

An arrogant, hypocritical blinkered, paranoid bully… with power The problem with deciding to throw out a governing party that truly deserves to be defeated, as we did with Paul Martin’s Liberals earlier this year, is that we must inevitably, if only by default, choose another group of power-hungry wannabes to take their place. The bigger […]

Not asking the $300,000 question Google, the Internet search engine, was almost puppy-eager to be helpful after it had returned from its first global source scouring with not a single, solitary news story in response to my query. So it offered suggestions. “Make sure all words are spelled correctly.” Check. “Try different keywords.” No luck. […]

Is it just me or can you, too, hear the distant melodic strains of John Buchanan singing “Out on the Mira,” or catch the faint whirr and whiff of an untendered, unwanted electric toilet seat off in the distance? It is perhaps too early to consign our new premier to the dustbins of provincial political […]