Growth Op: Maritime Marijuana

This story originally appeared in the July-August 2017 issue of Atlantic Business Magazine. This is the final boarding call for Flight… Not yet. Paging passenger Evan Price… Just a few more minutes. Please proceed to Gate… One more minute. Just one more… Your aircraft doors are closing… It was December 13, 2016. Evan Price had spent […]

Making our economy ‘more human’ may be utopian, but it’s also necessary

(From the May-June 2017 issue of Atlantic Business Magazine) If you do a quick Google search of the following starkly precise sentence, “Eight men now own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world”—955 results will pop up on your computer screen in .63 Google seconds. That single incendiary sentence shows […]

Laura McCarthy

Laura McCarthy tries to recall the “worst day.” It isn’t easy. “They were all extremely difficult, all very personal,” she tells me. She finally settles on the day her husband Lyle was formally charged with sexual assault in the fall of November 2011. “That,” she understates, “was a difficult day. I’d never wish any of […]

Fort McMurray: worst times, best moments

Sometimes, the worst times create the best moments. My nominee, among many, for last week’s best moment is a Calgary woman named Rita Khanchat. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with those worst times. One week ago today (Tuesday), Wildfire MWF-009 — now colloquially and correctly known as “The Beast” — flared out […]

Spanish edition of What Lies to be launched February 15 in Havana

You’re invited to the launch of the Spanish-language Cuban edition of What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five Lo que race a travis del mar: La verdadera history de los Cinco cubans Monday, February 15 at 10 a.m. Sala Nicolás Guillén, Morro Cabaña. The Cuban edition, which is published by Nuevo Milenio, features an introduction […]

Finance minister’s new approach sounds like more of the same public sector blaming

One would like to believe newly installed Finance Minister Randy Delorey meant it. Last week he told union leaders representing teachers, health care workers, paramedics and assorted clusters of government employees he wanted to meet to discuss a “new approach” to collective bargaining. There are more than 300 collective agreements slated for re-negotiation this year, […]

Why haven’t we Evolved?

Let’s begin with a worst-case-scenario hypothetical. A young woman attending last weekend’s Evolve Music Festival — Antigonish’s three-day “celebration of music, culture, and social awareness” — decides she wants to alter her mind with some mind-altering substance. She asks around, discovers a guy selling what she thinks she wants to buy. She buys. She takes. […]

Nova Scotia’s generational highway mega projects: an idea whose time has gone?

On Friday, the government issued a request for proposals for a $1.5-million study to figure out whether to twin eight sections of 100-series highways and — as importantly — how to raise the $1.5 billion that will be needed to complete what Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal Minister Geoff MacLellan calls a “once-in-a-generation set of mega-projects.” […]

Spilled secrets: the Richard Oland murder mystery

Maureen Adamson showed up for work as usual that sunny summer morning. She inserted her key in the street-level door at 52 Canterbury Street, a refurbished 19th century, three storey, red-brick office building in the heart of historic downtown Saint John, New Brunswick. The door was unlocked. Curious. It was always kept locked. The door […]

Students speak, government isn’t listening

Last week’s student march on Province House has become an annual rite of the winter season, not unlike its usual accompanying, storm-tossed February headline salad: Monday’s “Traffic Gridlock Hits Halifax,” Tuesday’s “Halifax Digging out from Biggest Snowfall” to Friday’s cheerless end-of-first-week-of-the-month news “Snowfall Amounts for February in Halifax Almost Equal to January Total.” Predictable. Depressing. […]