I still don’t know nearly enough about what actually happened inside the Mumford Road Walmart shortly after 3:30 pm last Wednesday afternoon, but I already know too much to have faith we will get full and complete answers from either a we-take-allegations-like-this-seriously Halifax Regional Police or a buck-passing Walmart. Let’s start with what we do […]
George Elliott Clarke, the murderer, and the murdered woman
At one level, “‘Truth and Reconciliation’ versus ‘the Murdered and Missing’" was intended to be a serious academic lecture by one of Canada's most esteemed poets and social justice truth speakers. Somehow it all went wrong.
I don’t know George Elliott Clarke well, but I have known him for a long time. Back in the mid-1980s, before he became what the Globe and Mail recently called “a celebrated Canadian poet,” he was a young wannabe writer earning his actual living as a field worker for the Black United Front, a black...
On Rana Zaman: Some somebodies have some explaining to do
Let's start with the provincial NDP and its leader, Gary Burrill. And move on to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, and to the Atlantic Jewish Council.
For Rana Zaman, it had been another long and not untypical day of good-doing. But as she wrote proudly on her Facebook page on Dec. 20 at 4:12 pm: “I’m happy to say, turkey dinner with all the fixings was bought and dropped off for 7 families to enjoy. Still pending is delivery of toys...
Northern Pulp: planning the future five years too late
I don’t want to criticize Stephen McNeil’s announcement Friday. It was hard to watch without feeling just how emotionally wrenching and personally difficult it had been for him. He was genuinely caught between the rock of an important and necessary promise he had made to the Pictou Landing First Nation and the hard place of knowing keeping his promise would mean the end of vital jobs for workers at Northern Pulp and beyond in the province’s forest industry. But the thing is… Should it really have come to this?
When it comes to identifying all its political, social and economic consequences and parsing the larger meaning of Friday’s history-making, future-shaking decision by Premier Stephen McNeil to order Northern Pulp to finally “stop pumping effluent in Boat Harbour,” I am grateful to defer to my smarters. Joan Baxter, Linda Pannozzo, Jennifer Henderson and Tim Bousquet […]
‘Tis the season to say something positive
I had been hoping to say something positive about Stephen McNeil’s government — it is, after all, the season — but as soon as I could consider it, his government inevitably did one more something that was so bone-headed, so egregious, so cringe-worthy, I couldn’t help but revert to my natural nattering-nabob-of-negativism self. And yet...
I had been hoping to say something positive about Stephen McNeil’s government — it is, after all, the season of speaking positively — but as soon as I began to put electronic keyboard to computer-screen praise, his government inevitably did one more something that was so bone-headed, so egregious, so cringe-worthy, I couldn’t help but...
Calvin Lawrence: Black Panther Party’s “unlikely cub”
His hiring as a Halifax police officer in 1969 happened only because the city feared what might happen if it didn't at least pay lip service to inclusion. But over the course of his 36-year policing career, Calvin Lawrence proved a more than worthy fighter against racism.
Calvin Lawrence remembers the life-altering moment well. It was an early summer day in 1968 and Calvin, then 19 and still a student, was hanging out at Creighton and Gerrish Streets, “one of my favourite corners,” with his good friend Ricky Smith. A big Lincoln car filled with three senior members of the black community,...
Coming to terms with the complicated legacy of Gerald Regan
How do you reconcile the contradictory facts of our 19th premier's life? You probably can’t. No matter what you write, you’re either rinsing Regan’s black heart in the cleansing stream of his passing or dancing gleefully on his grave. Most news reports I saw got it about as right as those complicated realities — and our changing times — allowed. Premier Stephen McNeil didn't.
“I think you know every Canadian knows you’re guilty. And you can take that to your grave!” Court spectator Mark Iich Shouted at Gerald Regan following his acquittal December 1998 As the author of “that book about”… I spent much of last week being interviewed by journalists, all of whom — like me — were...
NOT GUILTY: The missing Gerald Regan Chapters, Part 2
Gerald Regan, who died Monday at 91, was a prominent 20th-century Canadian politician, a federal Liberal cabinet minister and two-term premier of Nova Scotia. He was also a serial sexual abuser of young women who spent much of the 1990s fighting off criminal allegations involving more than three dozen women whose complaints stretched over four decades. Halifax journalist Stephen Kimber wrote the 1999 book, NOT GUILTY: The Trial of Gerald Regan. Because Regan had been found not guilty, however, his publisher decided to excise two chapters from the original manuscript. Here is the second of those two chapters.
It remains one of the most intriguing and enduring mysteries of the Gerald Regan era. Who stole the tape recording of the interview with the page girl — and why? That story began in the late winter of 1977 following a night sitting of the Nova Scotia legislature. Jennifer Oulton,[1] an 18-year-old legislative page who’d […]
NOT GUILTY: The missing Gerald Regan Chapters, Part 1
Gerald Regan, who died Monday at 91, was a prominent 20th-century Canadian politician, a federal Liberal cabinet minister and two-term premier of Nova Scotia. He was also a serial sexual abuser of young women who spent much of the 1990s fighting off criminal allegations involving more than three dozen women whose complaints stretched over four decades. Halifax journalist Stephen Kimber wrote the 1999 book, NOT GUILTY: The Trial of Gerald Regan. Because Regan had been found not guilty, however, his publisher decided to excise two chapters from the original manuscript. Here is the first of those two chapters.
Before there was Jian Ghomeshi, or Bill Cosby, or Donald Trump, there was Gerald Regan. On March 15, 1995, the RCMP charged Nova Scotia’s 19th premier with what would eventually become more than 30 counts of sexual misconduct, including rape, involving nearly three dozen women over a 40-year period, dating from his days as a […]
Doctors’ deal within government’s public sector wage guidelines? Not really
When the government announces its new contract with the province's physicians, expect it to claim the deal fits within the guidelines it intends to impose on less powerful, more vulnerable public sector workers. It isn't. Not even close. But that's the McNeil smoke and mirrors.
We won’t know for certain until Wednesday (Nov. 27) whether Nova Scotia’s 3,100 doctors have agreed to a new four-year contract with the provincial government. But we can guess. And that guess would be yes. Doctors Nova Scotia has been officially lips-zipped silent about the terms of the deal during the past month while its...
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