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...
New street checks almost the same as the old
The province banned street checks. The police chief apologized. But nothing's really changed. Earlier this month, former police officer Maurice Carvery says police turned his routine traffic stop into an example of racial profiling. “They haven’t stopped; they’ve only changed.”
Red lights flashing in your rearview; a high-pitched siren’s we-we-we-waaaahhh from somewhere behind your head, slowly penetrating your music-listening, daydreaming, distracted driving consciousness; the faint hope this siren does not scream for you; the eventual realization it’s you the officer wants to pull over; the long wait by the side of the road while traffic...
Can we expect truth about the Walmart incident from police or the store? Nope
When a young black woman accused the Halifax police of racially profiling and abusing her in connection with an alleged shoplifting incident at Walmart last week, officials did what officials do. They obfuscated, they passed the buck, they pretended to take it seriously.
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,...
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