News 1. Steve Craig Steve Craig won the byelection for MLA in Sackville-Cobequid. (Preliminary results are above.) The district has long been solidly NDP, so a PC victory is notable, but I wouldn’t read too much into it. The NDP candidate, Lara Fawthrop, didn’t have Craig’s name recognition, and Craig is more on the “progressive” […]
Archives for June 2019
The Halifax Examiner turns five years old today
Morning File, Tuesday, June 18, 2019
News 1. Five years The Halifax Examiner turns five years old today. On June 18, 2014, I made this site live and posted this video: Look how young I was! [cries] I had a pretty good idea where I wanted to take the Examiner, and I think it holds up: Much of the content on […]
The Halifax police department has a crisis of legitimacy
Morning File, Monday, June 17, 2019
News 1. The Halifax police department has a crisis of legitimacy Is there an unusually large number of Halifax cops who are crooks? I suspect there is an institutional culture that looks the other way and avoids confronting official misconduct, and that institutional culture therefore actually encourages even more misconduct. But of course it’s a […]
Nova Scotia health care by the numbers
A rally organized by a citizen who started a Facebook group called “Nova Scotia Health Care Crisis” attracted about 75 people in front of the former library on Spring Garden Road Saturday afternoon. They included three frustrated emergency room doctors from Valley Regional Hospital who began a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for new long-term […]
What if we just gave Americans cash to come to Nova Scotia?
Crazy? Is it any crazier than pouring more millions of dollars into an American ferry, American docking facilities, American customs officers...?
Say, here’s an idea. My idea isn’t quite the Chase-the-Ace, get-us-on-national-TV, fun-and-games scheme Tim suggested a few months back. “Simply toss 20 dollar bills from a helicopter above downtown Yarmouth,” he proposed as his own common sense alternative to pouring still more millions of our tax dollars into that bottomless ocean that is our from-nowhere-to-no-way-not-now...
We’ll all be rich if we give Ben Cowan-Dewar an $18 million airport
Morning File, Friday, June 14, 2019
News 1. SIRT is not equipped to investigate rape by cops The Serious Incident Response Team (SIRT) is tasked with investigating police, but it has no written policies for preserving rape kit evidence and its investigators have no specialized training in dealing with victims of sexual assault. Reporter Maggie Rahr brings us the case of […]
The Archaeology of Loss
How industrial logging in the Mi’kmaq heartland is destroying a lot more than trees
“We were in wonderful moose country now.” At least this is how Albert Bigelow Paine described the Nova Scotia landscape he and three others journeyed through in his 1908 book The Tent Dwellers. The book tells the true story of a June trout fishing trip led by two guides, Charlie Charlton and Del Thomas, who...
Raped twice by the same cop
The Serious Incident Response Team is tasked with investigating police, but it has no written policies for preserving rape kit evidence and its investigators have no specialized training in dealing with victims of sexual assault.
Elizabeth had no expectations when she opened her email on a Monday morning in early February. But the words she read in the message received at 9:05am struck fear through her. As she stared at the screen, disbelief escalated into panic. “To date I have not heard back from you. After discussions with our Director, […]
Former Richmond CAO Kent MacIntyre’s fascinating career, and its collapse
Morning File, Thursday, June 13, 2019
1. Former Richmond CAO Kent MacIntyre’s fascinating career, and its collapse The Richmond County council fired Chief Administrative Officer Kent MacIntyre during a closed session meeting on April 1, 2019. The vote was three to two, with councillors Brian Marchand, Gilbert Boucher, and Alvin Martell voting in favour of firing, and councillors Jason MacLean and […]
The problem with meritocracy: it destroys our humanity
Morning File, Wednesday, June 12, 2019
News 1. Studenting While Black “On June 2, Black graduate student Shelby McPhee was accused by two white women of stealing a laptop while he was attending the Black Canadian Studies Association session at the 88th annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held at the University of British Columbia,” writes El Jones: The white […]