“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” That’s the opening line of “One Art,” the Elizabeth Bishop villanelle widely considered among the best of the exacting poetic form. The piece turns on a cascade of sorrows that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author suffered during her life. Chief among them stands the loss of her mother, […]
Double Exposure
The pandemic has pushed back the curtain on how decades of austerity have left Canadians and the health care system more vulnerable.
The Halifax Examiner is providing all COVID-19 coverage for free. By April 13, Nova Scotia’s State of Emergency had been in effect for 23 days, schools were closed, most businesses shuttered, and people were feeling the effects of the “lock down.” At the daily COVID-19 briefing, Premier Stephen McNeil and Dr. Robert Strang, the province’s […]
Random thoughts from a random week in the middle of a random time…
On Westray and Portapique, naming names, suing Trump, making media great... someday, pressing legislature business, comparing Cuba's COVID-19 numbers to Nova Scotia's, and, oh yes, Franco is still dead...
Random thoughts from a random week in the middle of a random time… Just before dawn on the morning of May 9, 1992, a methane gas explosion rocketed through the underground tunnels of the Westray mine in Plymouth, NS, killing all 26 miners working underground. That’s just four more than were killed last month in...
The mass murder isn’t “senseless” in a culture that excuses the violence of white men
Why can't we understand how the impunity with which white men are allowed to threaten, to follow around, to fixate and to harm connects to how GW was able to move in silence until it was too late? Our culture continues to give white men a pass and then act shocked in the aftermath.
After she wrote an article naming “white male terrorism” in the Nova Scotia mass shooting and other mass killings in Canada, Robyn Bourgeois, a woman of Cree heritage, predictably woke up to death threats from white men. Of the many things we were told it was “not the time” for in the wake of the […]
Canada needs one — not many — clinical triage protocols for the COVID-19 pandemic
Imagine learning that a parent or sibling was denied access to a ventilator on the basis of age or disability, when they would have had access if they lived in a different province, or were at a different healthcare institution in the same province. Access to life-saving treatment should not be determined by geography.
COVID-19 causes severe illness and, in some cases, death. In Canada, there are more than 52,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and the number of lives lost is over 3,000. A disproportionate number of these deaths (nearly 80%) are associated with long-term care facilities. Twenty-eight of the total number of deaths in Canada (approximately 1%) have […]
Portapique tragedy: We need a full public inquiry
It isn't about assigning blame. But there are questions we need to answer, and it isn’t good enough for the RCMP to conduct an internal investigation into what happened and why, and then tell us what they decide we’re allowed to know.
Late on the afternoon of Sunday, April 19, I sat in front of my television waiting for an RCMP briefing I fully expected would help me make sense of the confusing cascade of disjointed, disconcerting, increasingly frightening news bytes and bulletins that had tumbled out and over one another all that day. I’d woken to […]
Let’s play Pandemic: Then and Now
Remember the time — two months ago! — when businesses were railing on about too high taxes, too much government, too much waste... Well, that was then. Whose hands are out now?
The Halifax Examiner is providing all COVID-19 coverage for free. Let’s play a game of This was Then. Let’s start with when then was February 2020, which — as the crow flies and the pandemic super-spread itself into every nook and crevice of our working, waking, walking, living lives — seems like at least a […]
Letter from Black community to Premier and Chief Medical Officer has been vandalized with racist comments
The Halifax Examiner is providing all COVID-19 coverage for free. Organizers of an open letter from the Black community to Premier McNeil and Chief Medical Officer Robert Strang say that the letter has been vandalized with racist comments. The letter, which collected over 250 signatures in two days, calls for an apology for the […]
Easter in the pandemic
Live-streaming the church service, I'm reminded that all our mothers, back and back, have always been about resurrection, about holding on, about coming back.
Queen Elizabeth has nothing on my Grandmother. Grandmummy loved hats, and Easter is the time that Black church ladies show out. Easter service, new hat. Plus white dresses for the girls, conjured out of God knows what money. Growing up in poverty, in a colonized country, like all the women of her age she sewed, […]
Stop the presses
Our more-than-a-century-old newspaper publishing model — print-on-paper journalism paid for primarily by advertisers seeking eyeballs for their messages — simply doesn’t work anymore. It hasn’t for more than an internet hour. What can — what should — we do about that?
The Halifax Examiner is providing all COVID-19 coverage for free. When I first saw Tim Bousquet’s 9:33 pm Facebook post on Wednesday, March 18, 2020 — deep in the bottomless trough of that still surreal week when everything changed about everything for all of us in a COVID-19 minute — I was stunned. “Tomorrow is […]
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