Bruce Wark

One sunny morning in September 1999, a wall of industrial fog suddenly rolled across a section of expressway near Windsor, Ontario, known as “carnage alley.” Within seconds, 87 cars and trucks began plowing into each other, creating a fiery pile-up of twisted steel. Crash survivors heard the screams of people trapped in burning cars. Seven […]

Surveillance cameras won’t reduce violent crime in Halifax because they do nothing to solve the deeper problems of poverty, racism and youth alienation. But we shouldn’t be surprised that Halifax police are testing them anyway. We live in a society addicted to quick techno-fixes, even if there’s little evidence that they work. The human rights […]

“With words we rule,” declared England’s Benjamin Disraeli. The Tory PM’s 150-year-old notion is popular these days as Steve Harper and his pal George Bush spout misleading slogans to hide their antiquated, anti-people actions. Want to allow big polluters to let their emissions rip? Want to scuttle the Kyoto Accord on cutting greenhouse gases? Well, […]

Military recruiting ads have come a long way from those First World War posters showing a stern Uncle Sam pointing a bony finger and yelling, “I WANT YOU for the US ARMY.” Nowadays, the US military has created an action-packed video game called America’s Army to entice young adults to sign up for the bloody, […]

Tears stream down an old man’s face as he remembers Africville. “It was a heaven, a home, a real home,” he says of the tiny black community on the Bedford Basin that was bulldozed by the city in the 1960s. “I’ve been around this world twice. I never met a place like Africville. Never.” That […]

The death of a bricklayer at a construction site in Lower Sackville this week followed a familiar and disturbing pattern. The worker fell four metres from a scaffold, hit his head and died. The provincial labour department then ordered his employer, Darim Masonry of Bedford, to ensure that the scaffolding and guardrails were installed properly. […]

Who says you can’t fight city hall? Jerry Reddick, aka the Dawgfather, has been battling Halifax Regional Municipality for six years over the right to sell cheap eats outside Dal’s Student Union Building. On Tuesday, the self-styled black pugilist won another round when Regional Council overruled city staff and voted to “grandfather the Dawgfather.” That […]

As you thumb through our “Back to School” guide, here’s food for thought from Marshall McLuhan: “School is the advertising agency,” McLuhan wrote, “which makes you believe you need the society as it is.” Yes, prison-like high schools equipped with surveillance cams and ruled by fascist vice-principals make perfect sense as ad agencies for our […]

“I came here as a foster child and my mumma’s buried down there,” Wendy Campbell told me last Saturday in the graveyard at Tracadie United Baptist Church near Lincolnville, a tiny black settlement in Guysborough County. “This lady took me and raised me as her own and Lincolnville is my community.” Now Campbell fears that […]

“We continue to view poverty as the fault of the individual and ignore the social and economic systems and mechanisms that are so often responsible for it.” Those are the words of Fred MacKinnon, a passionate advocate for social justice who worked as a senior civil servant for more than half a century. MacKinnon, who […]

So, the Halifax-Dartmouth Bridge Commission wants to phase out tokens in its campaign to get more people to sign up for MacPass, the electronic payment system that lets drivers breeze through the toll booths without a care in the world. “MacPass is by far, from the bridge commission perspective and for the majority of our […]

All hell broke loose 16 years ago when I produced a report on the pro-Israeli bias of Peter Gzowski’s Morningside, CBC Radio’s leading current affairs show. I was producer of Media File, a CBC program that reported on the newsmedia. After the report aired, the shit hit the fan inside CBC. I spent days penning […]