The Halifax Examiner is providing all COVID-19 coverage for free. On Friday, five unions representing workers on the coughing, spewing, life-threatened front lines of our province’s particular finger in the dike of the global coronavirus outbreak, called on the Nova Scotia government to agree to the same protections Alberta is now providing its frontline healthcare […]
Healthcare lessons from Manitoba’s First Nations… and Cuba
Manitoba's First Nations reached out to Cuba even before COVID-19 because they need healthcare help. So do we.
The Halifax Examiner is providing all COVID-19 coverage for free. In February — before the coronavirus changed everything about everything for everybody — Jerry Daniels, the Grand Chief of the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, which represents 34 First Nations in Manitoba, led a delegation to Havana to meet with Cuban healthcare officials and tour its local […]
COVID-19: who should live and who could die?
We need to have that discussion, even if none of us want to. But we also need to have a larger conversation about the societal changes we need to make to make a better, more liveable world for the future.
The Halifax Examiner is providing all COVID-19 coverage for free. Last week, a friend emailed me with what he suggested was an idea for an Examiner column. I’d been meaning to contact him. We usually get together a few times a year for lunch and the opportunity to share our inevitably smarter-than-those-in-charge solutions to the […]
Whatever happened to spring legislature sessions that lasted until spring?
In 1972, the legislature's spring session last 54 sitting days. In 2020, it lasted 13. It seems we have nothing to discuss.
The last time I covered the Nova Scotia legislature on a regular basis, Gerald Regan was the premier. It was a simpler time: before even now-museum vintage fax machines and VCRs but also before personal computers, the Internet, online newspapers, 24-hour cable news, streaming services, social media and… well, life as we now know it....
What’s the difference between opioid and gambling addictions?
The difference is that, in the case of opioids, the harm creators are the drug’s makers and distributors. In the case of VLT gambling, they're governments themselves. And that creates a world of difference when it comes to which harm-maker governments decide should be punished and which should be protected.
Give Stephen McNeil’s Liberals an A+ for Audacity. On Tuesday last week (March 3), the government introduced legislation to give it, present and previous cabinet ministers, the Nova Scotia Gaming Corporation, the Atlantic Lottery Corporation, and provincial casino operators blanket immunity from class-action lawsuits, as well as a free pass on liability for any punitive...
Hugh MacKay and our I-know-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing premier
Why is it so hard for Stephen McNeil to acknowledge mistakes were made, let alone admit he or anyone in his orbit ever does anything wrong? The latest Hugh MacKay drunk-driving allegations offer a premier case study in Trumpian counterattack, obfuscation, and butt-covering.
Stephen McNeil insists he knew nothing, his chief of staff did nothing wrong, and it’s all the fault of the author of an email or/and the leader of the opposition for failing to go to the police with information Chester-St. Margaret’s MLA Hugh MacKay might have been driving drunk almost a year before he was...
Is ‘Idle Some More’ back for another season?
It's the end of February, so it must be time for Bay Ferries to announce the start of this year's summer sailing season between Yarmouth and Bar Harbor. And for the rest of us to ask if it will really happen this year.
Shall we begin a new round of our favourite game show, “Idle Some More: 2020 Edition.” On Friday, Bay Ferries pinned the tail on June 26 as the official start-up date for this year’s summer ferry service between Yarmouth, NS, and Bar Harbor, ME. Well… not definitively pinned. That’s just its “planned” start-up date. If...
Hold on to your ballots
Tax cuts for businesses, increases for minimum-wage earners, cute photos with kids... There must be an election coming.
Let us count up just a few of the reasons Premier Stephen McNeil will call a provincial election before the end of 2020. Start in the counting house itself. Last week, during his annual State of the Province address at — where else? — the Halifax Chamber of Commerce, McNeil announced tax cuts for corporations...
Why are we still talking about Africentric schools?
Why aren't we doing something to try to change decades of data — “comparative drop-out rates, school suspension rates, graduation rates, academic averages achieved” — that show African Nova Scotian students aren't reaching their potential in our school system? Whatever the reasons, it's time to stop allowing the failures of the past to keep repeating themselves.
“And all the news just repeats itself Like some forgotten dream that we’ve both seen” —John Prine It’s April 2006. The African Nova Scotian Advisory Committee has just released a new report criticizing the Halifax Regional School Board for “failing to adequately address the challenges faced by African Nova Scotian learners, citing as evidence...
Complicated legacies
Was Lionel Desmond a victim of his war demons? Or was he a villain, a perpetrator of domestic violence who murdered his own family? Or both? We may never know.
“Speak not ill of the dead man.” Spartacus “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Shakespeare Legacies have always been complicated and fraught, of course, but never more so than today. Consider Kobe Bryant. In the first hours after news broke last month that Bryant, “one of the greatest...
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