“I think you know every Canadian knows you’re guilty. And you can take that to your grave!” Court spectator Mark Iich Shouted at Gerald Regan following his acquittal December 1998 As the author of “that book about”… I spent much of last week being interviewed by journalists, all of whom — like me — were...
Shelburne School for Boys: Good intentions gone wrong? Or…?
Was the government's compensation program crafted out of a well-intentioned desire to allow victims to tell their story “without a public spectacle” that would re-victimize them? Or in a desperate attempt to keep the public from ever learning the real story behind the abuse of children in care?
While pursuing something else entirely yesterday, I was reading through back copies of The 4th Estate, the lefty Halifax newspaper of the 1970s, and stumbled upon repeated references to the Shelburne School for Boys. —Tim Bousquet “Morning File” June 27, 2019 I was a reporter then. And there. But I’d forgotten — forgotten that...
Verdict without end
More than 20 years after former Nova Scotia premier Gerald Regan was acquitted of sexually assaulting multiple women, other women are still coming forward with still more stories of what he did to them, still needing finally "to be heard." Including "Catherine."
I shouldn’t be surprised. Not after Me-too. But I am. Still. It happens more often than you might suppose. I’ll be attending a public event, and someone will come up to me. “Aren’t you the guy who wrote that book, the one about…?” Yes, I am, but it was published 20 years ago. “My sister…...
Gerald Regan and the legacy of our #MeToo moment
It isn't the jury's verdict from 1998 we should be remembering today, but the fact the RCMP and prosecutors finally chose to believe women over one of the country's most powerful political men. And, more important, that women — lots of them — stood up for other women, and said #MeToo.
“Members of the jury, have you agreed upon your verdicts?” The court clerk asked her rote question with a wavering, tell-me-don’t-tell-me tone that seemed to capture perfectly the nervous, nerve-wracked mood among the more than three dozen men and women sitting in the Halifax Law Court’s Courtroom 3-1 on the blustery afternoon of December 18,...
We’re pretty sure it will soon be legal to smoke dope with that murderous imperialist Boer War dude outside Province House
Morning File, Monday, October 1, 2018
News 1. The 1% “Did you know Canadian taxpayers earning more than $250,000 annually — them’s the “one per cent” to me and thee — paid $6.8-billion less in federal taxes in 2016 than they did in 2015?” asks Stephen Kimber: But… uh… wait a minute. Didn’t Canada’s shiny new Liberal government create a whole […]
Peter Stoffer: former MP, former hugger, accused groper
We are at the very beginning of a seismic culture shift, and men like Peter Stoffer — who may have assumed they were playing by rules that now suddenly no longer apply — will inevitably pay a price while the ground shifts and the rules change. That is necessary, and not necessarily unfair.
There is much to ponder in the latest dispatch from the world of #metoo — if indeed what I think of as the latest in the cascade of distressingly similar stories of inappropriate conduct by men in positions of authority hasn’t already been superseded by even more recent, ever more egregious, latest revelations of same....
How Many Times More Likely?
Me Too and Black Canadian Women
This week, Time Magazine chose the #MeToo movement as Person of the Year. But founder Tarana Burke was left off the cover. For years, Tarana was in the trenches working directly with young survivors of sexual harassment. She listened to the story of a young woman burdened with the memory of her assault and dedicated […]