“Professor Kimble’s comments seem to reinforce the recent CBC Marketplace show on fake credentials,” Gerry Anderson wrote on LinkedIn. He was among the unhappier readers responding to my recent column about the federal government’s modest tax reform proposals. “His comments show that he has not done any research nor has any real-world experience.” Similarly, Robert...
Reparations raises the racism disconnect
"I wasn’t around when slavery existed and I’m not responsible for it, so why should I have to pay reparations? The past is past, things are better now, so let’s just move on…" It’s a comforting argument, but it pre-supposes we, as whites, haven’t benefited from centuries of slavery and racism, or that our black fellow citizens aren’t still suffering its after-effects. It also assumes the economic, educational, judicial, and social scales are now in perfect colour-blind balance. Neither notion is correct.
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 every sphere of life — from education to justice to the environment...
Beware businesses bearing bleats
There is no doubt the Liberal tax reform proposals are only a baby step in the right direction — and there are lots of other ripe targets for reform — but we need to begin somewhere.
What should you think when you suddenly find yourself squarely in the firing-squad crosshairs of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the Canadian Medical Association, Doctors Nova Scotia, the Canadian Bar Association, the business-boosting press, retailers, restaurateurs, tax planners, even ad hockeries like the newly minted Nova Scotia Coalition for...
Stephen McNeil could learn a thing or two from Fidel Castro
How is it that Cuba, which is such a poor country, can afford such a comprehensive health care system and so many Nova Scotians don't have a family doctor? We're glad you asked.
My wife and I recently spent a week in Washington, D.C., advocating for an end to the failed, 56-years-and-counting U.S. blockade of Cuba. We were with a group that included American, Canadian, and European activists, a renowned Cuban pediatric oncologist, a North American representative of Cuba’s main people-to-people friendship organization, the head of a Cuban...
The politics of economics
What price is too much to pay for the Yarmouth ferry, asks Tim? How much is the cost of a vote, responds Stephen...
In last Wednesday’s “Morning File,” Tim Bousquet walked us through the most recent disappointing passenger counts from the still ongoing, seemingly never-ending bottomless money pit we call the Yarmouth-to-Portland ferry service. (It’s worth noting that Tim got his numbers from that’s-public-information-you’re-entitled-to-know-so-here-you-go Portland, Maine officials and not from our own who-are-you-and-what-right-do-you-have-to-ask-how-your-tax-dollars-are-being-spent buttoned-up Nova Scotia government bureaucrats....
The Herald strike ends; how long will the bitterness linger?
It was Day 2 back on the job after an incredibly long, deeply bitter and divisive strike, and many among the Halifax Chronicle Herald’s two dozen returning reporters and editors feared management wanted to provoke them by forcing them to work alongside ex-scab reporters and editors. Inside what unfolded that day...
The question was straightforward. Would the replacement workers who’d taken their jobs for the previous 19 months continue to work in the newsroom, the Chronicle Herald reporter wanted to know? There was a long silence. “Yes,” Mark Lever responded finally. Later, another reporter pressed the newspaper’s CEO. “All of them?” “All of them.” It was only...
The first day of the real new year… Now what?
Are we — the collective Nova Scotian “we” — better off today than we were a year ago? Five years ago? Twenty years ago? Are we more — or less — optimistic about our own futures, and the futures of our kids and grandkids? If we aren’t better off and we’re less optimistic, what is the reason for that? And what are we going to do to change that?
As someone who has spent most of his life living to the rhythms of academia of one sort or another, I always think of the day after Labour Day as the real New Year’s Day, an annual day of stock-taking, resolution-making and future-fantasizing. Which inevitably brings me to this question. Are we — the collective...
Bar Society says Lyle Howe should be disbarred, ordered to pay $500,000
The bar society argues Howe should now suffer the ultimate legal punishment — not being allowed to practise the profession for which he trained — and also be shackled with a debt he may never be able to repay, in Catch-22 part because he is not allowed to practise his profession.
The Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society wants Lyle Howe not only disbarred from practising law for at least five years, but it says he should also have to pay between $450-600,000 of the costs of the disciplinary hearing against him. The society estimates its total cost in the case at $1.1 million — a figure that...
Name? Un-name? How about no name?
Naming controversies raise the question, not so much about why blacks or Indigenous peoples might object to our in-their-faces celebration of their oppressors, but why those of us who are neither black nor aboriginal use up so much oxygen and energy on these debates...
Last Wednesday in Morning File, Tim Bousquet went on a rant. “Stop it,” he wrote. “Stop naming shit after people who are still alive.” The specific object of Tim’s ire that morning was not immediately apparent among the story’s cascading collection of photos of local edifices named after the alive and hopefully well (not to...
Mark Lever and sins against journalism
If Mark Lever really wants to restore public confidence in his post-strike Halifax Chronicle Herald, he could begin by acknowledging — and publicly apologizing for — some of the newspaper’s most egregious sins against journalism during the past 18 months. The problem is that Lever — the failed-businessman-turned-newspaper-magnate — would need to have the first clue about the ethos of journalism and why facts and integrity matter. He doesn’t.
If Mark Lever really wants to restore public confidence in his post-strike Halifax Chronicle Herald, he could begin by acknowledging — and publicly apologizing for — some of the newspaper’s most egregious sins against journalism during the past 18 months. The problem with that, of course, is that Lever — the failed-businessman-turned-newspaper-magnate — would need...
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