Rocky Jones, thank you and rest in peace.

The last time I talked face to face with Rocky Jones was in November 2011, a few nights before he was scheduled to deliver a public lecture on “The Struggle for Human Rights in African Nova Scotian Communities, 1961-2011.” It could have been the too-wordy title for his autobiography. (Metro File Photo) We met at […]

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 […]

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 […]

Rehtaeh Parsons, the media and social media: it's complicated

It’s complicated. The Canadian Psychiatric Society, among others, publishes guidelines for reporting on youth suicide. Don’t put the word “suicide” in the headline, it says. Don’t give such stories undue prominence. Don’t describe the method. Don’t glorify the victim. The guidelines are designed to reduce the very real risk of copycats. We know many media […]

Russell MacKinnon should have gone to jail

What was he thinking? That he could baffle, buffalo, bamboozle past way too many inconvenient contradictions from too many witnesses with too little to gain to lie about what he’d done? That the law wouldn’t apply to him because he’d been an MLA and Liberal cabinet minister? On Friday—after four days of a scheduled five-day […]

What would the Former Mike Duffy say to Now Senator Mike?

The old Young Mike Duffy would have been all over it. A Senator playing fast and loose with parliamentary rules of residence, claiming as his full-time home a modest bungalow of a summer cottage that hasn’t seen a snowplow in a year’s worth of winters. A Senator pocketing more than $30,000 for the inconvenience of […]

Still no Desmond Day… or any day to honour African Nova Scotians

Another February. Another African Heritage Month. Another plaintive plea—from me and a few lonely others—for an official day to honour Viola Desmond’s contribution to the human rights movement in Canada. On Nov. 8, 1946, Desmond, a pioneering black businesswoman from Halifax, found herself stuck in New Glasgow overnight. She decided to see a movie. The […]

The Ryan case again: it's justice but is it just?

“You obviously have something against Nicole Ryan,” declared a reader of my column last week. In it, I’d questioned the Supreme Court’s decision not retry Ryan on charges she’d hired a hit man to kill her husband. “I’m not sure what it is,” the reader continued, “but it was extremely distressing to deal with the […]

And the victim would be… fairness

In the third last paragraph of his 2010 decision finding Nicole Ryan not guilty of hiring a hit man to kill her abusive husband, Justice David Farrar notes he was “struck” by the fact the husband “did not take the stand to give evidence with respect to any of the assertions that were made against […]

Justice delayed is justice as usual

Let’s review. On February 3, 2010, Auditor General Jacques Lapointe reported some Nova Scotia MLAs played fast and loose with their expense accounts. One year after that—on February 14, 2011—RCMP charged three former and one sitting MLA with the criminal equivalent of fast and loose. Today—17 months after those charges, 30 months after that report—only […]