Bruce Wark

Stephen Harper’s mad scramble to save his skin reminds us that political news is its own kind of soap opera. The afternoon soaps, aimed at women, are mainly about emotional relationships within families and among friends. The nightly news soap is about power relationships among men dressed in business suits with the odd woman thrown […]

I call it city council’s royal fuck-up. The Queen’s High School is being traded to the Queen’s Hospital for a new central library on—where else—Queen Street. And we’re all worse off. The deal means another chunk of the Halifax Common is about to disappear. It’s all part of a land swap between city and province […]

It was nice to hear Dal economist Lars Osberg on CBC Radio last week calmly talking sense about the federal equalization program. No, the sky is not falling, Osberg said, just because Ontario is officially joining the ranks of the so-called “have-not” provinces. Next year, Ontario will receive about $347 million from equalization, a program […]

After Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th US president on Jan. 20, he may soon start wishing he’d never been born. What a mess. Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933 has a new president faced such a shambles. George Bush has left his successor two disastrous wars, a tanking economy, […]

Muriel Duckworth, the veteran Halifax activist, turns 100 this week, still full of hope that the cause of peace will eventually triumph in a world wracked by war (see also “Muriel’s century,” page 8). Ten years ago, during a peace vigil in Halifax, Duckworth told filmmaker Pat Kipping, “I don’t know how you reach people […]

Remember Lucy Chapman? She’s the disabled seven-year-old who is supposedly banned for life from entering Canada. A quick recap: After the Chapman family tried to enter Nova Scotia for a vacation last July, the Canada Border Services Agency ruled they would have to return to Britain. Their story touched off a controversy about the rights […]

Just after 10pm on October 4, 1967, 12-year-old Chris Styles spotted something weird through his bedroom window overlooking the Dartmouth side of Halifax Harbour. “It was a round object, glowing orange, the colour of iron heated in a forge,” Styles writes. He ran down to the harbour to get a closer look. From a distance […]

The president of Maple Leaf Foods sat in front of a TV camera a couple of weeks ago to deliver a sombre apology. “To Canadians who are ill and to the families who have lost loved ones, I offer my deepest sympathies,” he said. “Words cannot begin to express our sadness for your pain.” Michael […]

Here we go again: Multinational giant outbids Canadian outfit and workers take a hefty pay cut. Except that’s a deep, dark secret you’re not supposed to know. In this case, the workers are the 10 to 12 parking enforcement officers who patrol Halifax streets. For the past 40 years, they’ve been wearing the uniform of […]

Paul and Barbara-Anne Chapman say even a dog has more rights than their daughter. When the British couple arrived at Halifax airport July 12, their Labrador retriever sailed through customs. But an official with the Canada Border Services Agency demanded to know why they were bringing their seven-year-old daughter Lucy into the country. “Why shouldn’t […]