The municipality is calling in the police to kick unhoused people out of a park, stoking fears, even among councillors, of a repeat of the chaos of last August. Halifax regional council held a special virtual meeting on Tuesday with one item on the agenda: “Homelessness in Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM).” There was no motion […]
A part of our built heritage: what we get when we preserve or replace
Morning File, Wednesday, July 20, 2022
News 1. Commission to review RCMP handling of sexual assault complaints from Susie Butlin Three days after the RCMP rebuffed her fears in September 2017, Susie Butlin was murdered by the man who sexually assaulted her. On Tuesday, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission (CRCC) “initiated a complaint and public interest investigation into the RCMP’s […]
Waiting for answers as the Lionel Desmond inquiry wraps up
Can we ever really know why Lionel Desmond killed his wife, daughter, and mother, and then himself? Does that matter? Don't we know enough now about all that went wrong in the years and months leading up to the murder-suicide to begin demanding change on all fronts?
Was Cpl. Lionel Desmond a victim of a foreign war, systemic racism and siloing of medical records, or was he a perpetrator of domestic violence who murdered the women closest to him? And how do we reconcile it if he was both? — Aaron Beswick Saltwire Network April 20, 2022 I don’t envy Warren Zimmer’s […]
‘The rest is for the seagulls’
We may never know all the complex factors that led Lionel Desmond to murder his wife and family, and then kill himself. But we're learning. It's complicated.
On the evening of Jan. 3, 2017, Lionel Desmond, a 32-year-old former Canadian soldier, murdered his 31-year-old wife, Shanna, their 10-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, and his 52-year-old mother, Brenda, in their home in tiny Upper Big Tracadie, N.S. Then, he turned the rifle on himself. In the immediate aftermath of that horrific quadruple murder-suicide, we as...
300 family members and friends of mass murder victims march and demand public inquiry
About 300 family members and friends of the 22 people killed in April’s mass shooting gathered in Bible Hill on Wednesday morning to draw attention to their united demand for a public inquiry. The crowd gathered at the local Foodland parking lot armed with signs featuring the names and faces of their loved ones. All […]
“Insufficient grounds”
Susie Butlin repeatedly pleaded with the RCMP to intervene to stop her neighbour Junior Duggan from harassing her. The police took no action. A friend says an RCMP officer told Butlin her allegations against Duggan made her, not him, a "menace to society." Three days later, Duggan killed Butlin.
Since September 2017, when her best friend, 58-year-old Susan (Susie) Butlin, was shot and killed in her home at Bayhead, near Tatamagouche, Suzanne Davis has been in pain. Davis still thinks about her friend — whom she’d known since kindergarten — all the time. She says if they didn’t speak on the phone three times […]
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 […]
Christopher Garnier’s PTSD: right policy, wrong result, better outcome…
We may not like Veterans Affairs' decision to fund Christopher Garnier's PTSD treatment, but it is the right policy. And the publicity about Garnier's case may lead to better outcomes for other veterans' families.
Sometimes a right policy results in a wrong result. Most of the time — including in the case of convicted murderer/diagnosed PTSD sufferer Christopher Garnier — we are better off focusing on the right policy rather than on the occasional unexpected, unhappy wrong result of that policy. When I was a young freelance journalist, I […]
The fraught relationship between PTSD and violence: Morning File, Monday, January 9, 2017
News 1. PTSD and domestic violence “There are a lot of questions that don’t get asked about violence against women,” Lucille Harper, the executive director of the Antigonish Women’s Resource Centre, tells the CBC, which had asked Harper about the apparent murder of Shanna Desmond, Aaliyah Desmond, and Brenda Desmond by Lionel Desmond: What we saw here clearly […]