Councillors cancelled the tank contract. Good. Now what?

We are in a moment. It has forced us to rethink what we mean by policing, and by public safety, and to begin to reimagine a world in which public safety does not necessarily mean a cop with a gun killing someone with whom he is supposedly conducting a “wellness check,” or six cops with […]

Councillor Lindell Smith: Not is proud of… Will be proud of…

As he begins the second half of his first term as a city councilor, Lindell Smith reflects on what’s been accomplished. And what’s still to do before he moves on. He is not, he says again/still, a career politician. This column first appeared in the Halifax Examiner February 25, 2019. What are you most proud […]

Schooling Shawn Cleary on journalism education

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner July 2, 2o18. My Examiner column last week seemed to set off a modest Twitter tempest, mostly because its subject, Coun. Shawn Cleary, chose to respond to what I wrote and didn’t write (even when he didn’t seem to realize I’d written it); and then to respond in scattershot […]

Unpacking the contradictory Mr. Cleary

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner June 25, 2018. “We don’t build buildings because of public opinion. We build them for good planning… And so I think this is a good thing for us… In terms of the design, I think we’ve mitigated most of the concerns…” —Councillor Shawn Cleary June 19, 2018-06-22 […]

Cannabis will soon be legal. Just don’t smoke it, or grow it, or enjoy it

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner June 18, 2018. Talk about buzz kill. At its meeting Tuesday, Halifax city councilors will consider a staff report recommending ever more stringent controls around the cultivation and consumption of cannabis to make sure no one gets the notion there is anything remotely recreational or fun — certainly, definitively not fun— […]

Council to Armco: ‘Jump? How high, sir, how high…?’ ‘Good dog…’

This column was first published in the Halifax Examiner May 28, 2018. Last week, Halifax City Council again/still/always decided to re-re-re-write its planning bylaws on the fly for the greater good and increased profit of a private developer whose books it didn’t bother examining, let alone asking to glimpse once, maybe upside down on […]

Does Cornwallis matter? More than I thought

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner February 5, 2018. Count me among the countless Nova Scotians happy to see the back of Eddie Cornwallis’s scraggy, statue-head as it was ignominiously carted off last week to some dank, secret storage depot somewhere, out of sight and — hopefully — out of mind for at least […]

Lindell Smith: more than a symbol

First, of course, there is the symbolism. Lindell Smith is Halifax’s first black city councillor since 2000. But not just… Early in his race for District 8, a campaign worker warned the corn-roed, goateed Smith he’d have to “deal with people looking at you like you’re Snoop Dogg trying to be a politician.” Rather than […]

Job one for the new council: end developer donations

Now what? With this year’s municipal elections history, the question becomes what should our new-old council do first? Answering that question is complicated by the reality our mayor and councilors are elected individually and independently. We don’t have political parties at the local level, either traditional or uniquely municipal parties. While that can be positive […]

Robertson’s independent facilitator’s report: independent? facilitator?

If you failed to submit written objections to Judge Heather Robertson’s “Facilitator’s Report” on proposed Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Regional Park boundaries by 3 p.m., Monday, July 4, forget it. If your written objections ran to over three pages and you failed to submit 35 copies, no one will read them. No matter. It was too […]