What to do about Justin?

Last week’s Blackface/Brownface controversy raises the complicated question of how we navigate our way through all the competing, compelling, often contradictory private and public actions of our politicians to determine who — if anyone — deserves our vote. Voting is easy. Choosing who to vote for? Not so much… In our federal parliamentary, first-past-the-post system, […]

‘This is North Preston:’ a story that ‘needs to be heard’

“This is North Preston” is a film about the stereotype of North Preston that allows the young men who’ve been stereotyped for so long to speak for themselves. Jaren Hayman is from Toronto. He’s 32 years old, a white man. He began his professional career as a drummer, touring North America, but eventually morphed into […]

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 […]

Encounter re-encountered, with lessons for today

In 1970, a dozen outside experts came to Halifax for a week to turn the city ‘upside down.’ Last week, a local group played excerpts from ‘Encounter on Urban Environment,’ the NFB’s documentary on that cataclysmic week in Halifax, and discussed whether it’s time for another upside-downing. This column first appeared in the Halifax Examiner January 28, 2019. I […]

Hard conversations: why was ‘fantastic principal’ Lamar Eason suspended from his job?

“People don’t like to talk about race, culture, bias,” Bayview Community School principal Lamar Eason explains, adding elliptically: “Doing your job can lead to questioning the people employing you. Understandably, people get defensive. But [race relations officers] are not there just to support schools; we’re also there to support students and their families. There can […]

Race in Nova Scotia: one small step forward, another giant leap into the past

Back in the fall of 1968, Stokely Carmichael’s mere presence scared the hell out of Halifax. Are there lessons for today? The column first appeared in the HalifaxExaminer December 3, 2018. Last month, the Bank of Canada released its new $10-banknote featuring an image of Viola Desmond, the iconic Canadian civil rights pioneer who refused to give […]

A jury of whose peers?

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner on February 19, 2018. Let’s start with this. Any jury might have acquitted Gerald Stanley, the 56-year-old white Saskatchewan farmer who shot and killed Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old indigenous man, on his farm in August 2016. There are two competing narratives about what happened, and even more about the meaning […]

Masuma Khan and the issue of freedom of speech

(This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner on October 30, 2017.) Should the vice president of the Dalhousie Student Union have faced even the whiff of disciplinary action from the university’s administration for a less than genteel Facebook exchange she had with some constituents? The short answer is no. The long answer is still no. […]

Lyle Howe: a sad end to a sad case

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner on October 23, 2017. “The Hearing Committee of the NOVA SCOTIA BARRISTERS’ SOCIETY gives notice of the disbarment of Lyle Howe of Halifax, Nova Scotia pursuant to Section 45(4)(a) of the Legal Profession Act, effective October 20, 2017 until further notice.” In the end, the end was no surprise. The […]

Reparations raises the racism disconnect

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner on October 10, 2017. On Sept. 25, the United Nations Human Rights Council discussed a report on Canada by its Working Group of Experts on Peoples of African Descent. The report, which shone its white-hot light on our country’s sordid history of slavery and racism in virtually […]