Each day at least 10 people die of suicide in Canada, leaving behind seven to 10 so-called “suicide survivors.” And yet, the shame and stigma surrounding the taking of one’s own life has led to a troubling (and decidedly counterproductive) underreporting and lack of honest discussion about the problem. It’s a safe bet that many […]
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...
City councillors approve increased police budget despite ongoing racial profiling
You don’t have to be Negrodamus to have predicted that the Halifax City Council would approve the police budget increase of about a million dollars, but even for the cynical the budget committee meeting on Wednesday demonstrated some surprising depths of unaccountability. Calls to freeze the police budget in response to the Halifax Regional Police’s […]
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...
Northern Pulp, past and future: It ain’t over till it’s over
On December 20, 2019 Premier Stephen McNeil announced that the province would be respecting the Boat Harbour Act, and that Northern Pulp would have to stop pumping its effluent into the Boat Harbour treatment facility on January 31, 2020. Without the use of Boat Harbour, the Northern Pulp mill in Pictou County would have no […]
Georgie Fagan used to organize with white supremacists. Now he condemns them.
The friendship I can’t remember exactly when I met Georgie Fagan, but for some time we organized together for prisoners. Georgie had been in and out of prison for most of his life, and has years of experience in the prison system. At Prisoner Justice Day a few years ago, he spoke movingly about his […]
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...
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