Are you listening, Minister MacFarlane?

No one — not the overworked, understaffed social workers trying to cope with messes they didn’t make in a bureaucracy they can’t control, not the family court lawyers and judges tasked with enforcing the unreasonable, not the family and children’s advocates trying to change the unchanging, and certainly not the parents and children trapped inside […]

When being poor equals poor parenting…

“There is a difference between parents who are poor, and poor parents. Ms. C and Mr. S are parents who are poor. The minister argues that they are poor parents and that their 20-month-old daughter, D, should be in the minister’s permanent care and custody. The minister says there is substantial risk of D’s […]

$2 million for consultants, more cuts for welfare recipients

Community Services Minister Joanne Bernard says she knows the province’s welfare system is “broken… None of the systems and none of the policies and the way we serve people has changed in many decades.” That’s why her government announced last week it is forking out up to $2 million to consultants to “vision,” “design,” “transform” […]

The boy who took the photo, the girl who was bullied to death and the sentence that can never satisfy

It is easy to understand the anger, the frustration. The boy, who is now a man, who took the picture of the girl who will now never become a woman (but who still can’t be named — and that is part of the frustration), will not go to jail. Instead, Judge Gregory Lenehan Thursday sentenced […]

The Liberals, the NDP and the Home for Colored Children settlement

Credit where credit is due. When he was still the opposition leader, Stephen McNeil met with former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children. He listened to their claims that, as mostly black and often orphaned children, they’d been subject to physical, sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of their mostly black […]

06/09/2014
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The girl whose name we know but now can’t say…

I can’t tell you her name. You know it already. She’s the teenaged girl who committed suicide after an alleged sexual assault at a house party was photographed and posted online, triggering months of cyber-bullying but no criminal charges against those allegedly responsible. She is the girl whose bereaved parents went public with her story […]

Thanks for the apology, but it’s not enough

The federal justice department’s 19-page internal review into its role in the the Fenwick MacIntosh extradition process — Aug. 15, 1997 (“Nova Scotia Public Prosecution Service contacts the International Assistance Group to discuss potential extradition request”) to July 14, 2006 (“Canada formally requests extradition”) — has no named author. The review itself — which followed […]

The hit man, the sexual assaulter, the courts and justice

It’s been an unsatisfying week for the be-seen aspect of that justice-being-done-and-being-seen-to-be-done shibboleth. The more we learned the more clear it is we still don’t know all we need to know about two high-profile court cases to satisfy ourselves justice has been served. Let’s start with the report of the Commission for Public Complaints Against […]

Trevor Zinck: A fatal mix of alcohol, gambling, politics and delusion

The careening train wreck Trevor Zinck’s political career and personal life had become has finally flown off the tracks, plunged over the cliff and disappeared into an abyss. Zinck, who’d promised a vigorous defence of the criminal charges in the MLA expense scandal, turtled instead. On the the fifth day of his trial — after […]

06/24/2013
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The curious case of the incurious justice minister

So federal justice minister Rob Nicholson isn’t the tiniest bit curious/concerned/appalled about what went wrong, and why, and what needs to be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Last week, the Supreme Court of Canada threw out Fenwick MacIntosh’s 2011 conviction on 18 charges of sexual assault and gross indecency, not because he […]