Bruce Wark

“The central issue in the cartoon controversy is about power,” Paul Bowlby told more than 200 students and professors last week in a crowded auditorium at Saint Mary’s. Bowlby, the university’s chair of religious studies, was referring to the uproar over the Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed as a terrorist. “Canadians enjoy the freedom […]

Peter March seemed to be enjoying himself last week as students loudly called him a fool. “By many people’s accounts I am a fool, but even fools have the right to teach,” the Saint Mary’s philosophy prof said during a protest in which 100 people marched from the Dal campus to Saint Mary’s. “It’s a […]

“Journalism is a state of mind. It’s a way of looking at the world.” The speaker? None other than Eddie Greenspon, editor-in-chief of Toronto’s national newspaper, known in the trade as the Mop & Pail. The Chief Mopster was addressing King’s journalism students last week just days after the Halifax Daily News laid off eight […]

I’m down on my knees thanking god for another minority government, even if it will be led by the unholy, right-wing trinity that briefly called itself CRAP, the Conservative Reform Alliance Party. CRAP summed it up nicely, don’t you think? But they dropped that moniker like a hot turd when they woke up and smelled […]

Pa used to recite an old Puritanical rhyme: “I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty/But woke to find that life was Duty.” No wonder he loathed Irving Layton, the Canadian poet who died last week at 93. “Whatever else poetry is freedom,” Layton wrote, adding years later: “A poem is an Alka-Seltzer tablet: orthodoxies […]

The best thing about 2005 was there was no nuclear war. But there were lots of worse things, including the earthquake in Pakistan that killed 80,000. That quake was a natural disaster. But the record number of hurricanes that brought death and destruction to Central America, the Caribbean and the US in 2005 were, at […]

Mayor Kelly’s latest ‘Christmas gift’ to HRM has stirred up heated debate between two keen political observers—Monica and Mike Bobbsey. The 26-year-old twins have sharply opposing views on the SuperCity’s successful Canadian bid for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. “Imagine blowing a million bucks just to compete for the friggin’ Games,” says Monica, referring to the […]

Welcome to Election 2006! Ah yes, developers are putting up monster homes in the suburbs. Construction is going full speed ahead on a Super Mall in Dartmouth. Rush-hour roads are jammed with fuel-gulping SUVs, minivans and trucks. And, the Canadian TV networks have again decided to bar the Green Party from the TV leaders’ debates. […]

Maclean’s magazine once called him “Canada’s sexiest cerebral man,” because of “his made-for-TV-looks and effortless eloquence.” But when Michael Ignatieff flew in from Harvard last week for his Liberal nomination meeting in Toronto, he faced a chorus of boos. According to CBC Radio, Myroslava Oleksiuk, the secretary of the local riding association, angrily denounced the […]

Now that we’re into a federal election campaign, everything is looking political—even the death and funeral last week of Charlie Keating, the one-time cable TV czar. In my former life as a CBC hack, I vividly remember clomping door-to-door with Charlie in his futile 1988 campaign to eject John Savage from the mayor’s chair in […]

With a federal election looming, voters who care about environmental issues should heed the roars of battle coming from within the Green Party of Canada. The internal fighting erupted publicly last week in Halifax when my good friend Michael Oddy, leader of the Nova Scotia Greens, confronted federal leader Jim Harris. Their clash came during […]