After the 2019 Emerald Hall decision affirmed that people with disabilities have the right to adequate care in the community, and after the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities criticized how Nova Scotia is doing on housing for the disabled (Nova Scotia still has more than 1,000 people with severe disabilities […]
Steal Away Home: Eddie Carvery’s protest and the value of Black life
This Saturday, I took a guest speaker to Africville. Black people across the world have heard of the destruction of the community, and they always want to make a pilgrimage to bear witness on the land. After visiting the sundial with the names of families who lived in Africville, we drove to the museum, where […]
Physician assistants? It shouldn’t be that hard. Really
The province has announced a pilot program to see if it's safe to let physician assistants into our health care system. They already operate legally in much of the US, Ontario, Manitoba, New Brunswick and in the Canadian military. So why just a modest pilot project? We're glad you asked.
A September announcement that the province’s health department plans to launch a new pilot project to road-test the use of physician assistants had somehow passed over — or under — my Spidey-sense news radar until it popped up again, almost incidentally, near the end of a news report Friday. The Friday story focused on new...
Waiting for Fitch: the much-delayed consultant’s report you may never get to see in full
Bob Dylan didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And Nova Scotians don't need a consultant to tell us our Emergency Health Services are a mess. Do we really even need one to tell us how to fix it?
“Last week the government issued a tender for a system-design review of Emergency Health Services. The minister said after 25 years in its current form he thought it was time for a review to ensure the system continues to follow best practices…” CBC News Aug 8, 2018 “Helping improve emergency services for over three decades....
The Climate Emergency
Part 4: Our current economy can't address the crisis; what are we going to do about it?
Previously in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. It’s not often that I root for the anti-hero in a book, but it seems that as I neared the end of Jeremy Lent’s latest book, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning — perhaps the longest book I’ve ever read at […]
Street checks: there’s not much hope for change
This month, Nova Scotia passed a law banning street checks – but what will change? Even before Retired Justice Michael MacDonald’s 108-page report concluded that street checking – the practice of stopping of citizens to collect and record their personal information — contravenes freedoms guaranteed by the Charter and at common law, street checking had […]
Windsor Halloween display opens generational wounds of racist violence
African Nova Scotian community members in Windsor, Nova Scotia say they are facing harassment after speaking out about Halloween decorations displayed by a local family. Kevin Upshaw, an African Nova Scotian man born and raised in Windsor, said he was shocked when he first saw the decorations, which appear to depict figures with black faces […]
Maritime Launch Services and its private/public servants
One government bureaucrat sent a nasty email to a CBC reporter. Others had rude things to say about the Halifax Examiner. And Stephen McNeil met with MLS and it Ukrainian "partners" even though they aren't registered as lobbyists.
It’s not the first time I’ve waded through many hundreds of pages of correspondence released by a government under a FOIPOP (Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy) request, but it is the first time that reading the correspondence made me feel slightly queasy, like a voyeur witnessing unhealthy relationships developing between uncritical and subservient […]
Whose deaths matter?
The Nova Scotia government has brought in legislation to create expert review panels to look into the deaths of those who die as a result of domestic violence as well as children who die in provincial care. The goal is to "turn tragedy into lessons learned and lives saved into the future." But Justice Minister Mark Furey refuses to extend the new law to include another vulnerable group: adults who die in provincial custody. Why not?
Why do the Liberals continue to get it so wrong even when they seem to be trying to get it right? Early last month, for example, Justice Minister Mark Furey introduced legislation to have expert review committees examine deaths resulting from domestic violence as well as unexpected deaths involving children in the care of the...
The Crown attorneys are singing a new tune now that the Neoliberal state is attacking them
First they came for the anarchists, and I prosecuted them. Then they came for the Occupy protesters, and I prosecuted them. Then they came for the union organizers, and I prosecuted them. They they came for the land defenders, and I prosecuted them. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to say anything.
On Friday, lawyers for the province’s Crown attorneys and for the government met in court as the government pursued an emergency injunction to force the prosecutors back to work. The government has declared the strike by Nova Scotia Crown prosecutors “illegal.” Outside the courtroom, Crown attorney Rick Woodburn said: “They will take away and smash and […]
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