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 […]

Shocked and appalled stocking stuffer

With the pre-holiday spate of comment-worthy local news and the upcoming holiday absence of venue to vent my inevitable shocked-and-appalled-at-it-all spleen, today’s column will be an assorted stocking stuffer. No charges in Home for Coloured Children investigation: I’m less shocked than I’d like. But winning convictions when allegations date back decades, involve children and include […]

Why can’t we have Viola Desmond day and…?

As Canada Post prepares issue a new stamp next month to celebrate the life of Viola Desmond, our own government seems about to quietly take a pass on the opportunity to honour the Halifax woman whose personal courage remains a symbolic inspiration in the fight for human rights in Canada. In 1946—nine years before Rosa […]

Not "Africville all over again"… not yet

Rev. Rhonda Britten may have been guilty of hyperbole when she compared last week’s city council decision to sell the former St. Patrick’s-Alexandra School to a local developer to “the rape… of a community… Africville all over again!” But she is not entirely canary-in-the-coal-mine wrong. In 2009, Halifax Regional School Board—over the ongoing objections of […]

Rocky Jones: The past and future of the Nova Scotia human rights' struggle

I wanted to ask Rocky Jones about his Wednesday lecture: “The Struggle for Human Rights in African Nova Scotian Communities, 1961-2011.” No problem. When? Not today. He’s on a panel at a national conference on public policy. Saturday, he’s in Truro, keynote speaker at an International Year for People of African Descent symposium. Then Ottawa […]

Africville: The lesson still unlearned

No one asked them. Again. The real lesson of the original Africville relocation—which should be seared into our collective consciousness after 50 years of hard-learned lesson-living—is that outsiders, even well intentioned ones, cannot make decisions for a community without at least asking the people of that community what they really want. Back in the 1960s, […]

Entitled to their entitlements, aboriginal edition

The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation is right. There, I’ve said it. And it only hurt a little. While I can—and do, and will—dispute the larger goals of this never-met-a-public-expenditure-it-can-stomach crowd, the CTF did discover real slime under its latest freedom-of-information rock. Though there are only a million aboriginals in Canada, 82 reserve politicians “earned” more than […]

TYP: It all began in a duck blind

What became the “most important (educational) program ever” for Nova Scotia’s black and aboriginal communities began inauspiciously enough in a duck blind in the middle of the Nova Scotia nowhere. Dalhousie University’s Transition Year Program—a unique-for-its-time scheme to bring marginalized black and native students into the academic mainstream through a year-long process to “transition” them […]

Keep hate laws for real haters

It’s difficult to summon a scintilla of sympathy for the Rehberg brothers. Twenty-year-old Justin was convicted Friday of criminal harassment and inciting hatred against blacks by setting a two-metre cross ablaze last February in front of the Hants County home of a mixed-race couple. His brother Nathan faces similar charges this week. But since this […]

Best interests of the child (care system)

Remember that Cole Harbour kid who had so many complex emotional issues and acronym-saturated syndromes the province’s community services department decided the only possible solution was to put him in a residential care facility where he could be helped 24 hours a day on a long-term, continuing basis? And remember there wasn’t such an institution […]