The dream is dead. Long live the dream. For more than 30 years, Nova Scotia New Democrats have enjoyed the ultimately unsatisfying luxury of pointing to smug, don’t-blame-me-I-voted-NDP stickers tattooed on their foreheads while the province lurched from one profligate Tory farce to the next corrupt Liberal tragedy and then back again. And again. And […]
Stephen Kimber
Posted inNews + Opinion
Who is premier Darrell Dexter?
Darrell Dexter has a complex family background, a complex educational and career history and—if, as expected, the NDP wins Tuesday’s provincial election—a perhaps impossibly complex governing task ahead. photos by Scott Munn
Posted inNews + Opinion
Premier Rodney MacDonald’s demise
Is it too soon to say, “So long, Rodney?” The final outcome is still far from a done deal, of course. Forget those public opinion polls predicting an NDP victory in next month’s elections. Those numbers reflect mostly province-wide aggregates of voting intentions; real-life elections in Nova Scotia are usually won and lost in the […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Election campaign moves along right on script
Every election needs its defining moment—its too-big-foot-in-too-small-mouth moment, its searing, snapshot flash-of-insight moment, its accidental, incidental larger-than-life moment that suddenly careens the campaign off in an unpredictable direction toward some unknowable destination. So far, we have not, needless to say, had any such moment in this blandest of beige provincial election campaigns. There certainly have […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Not your grandma’s NDP
This ain’t your grandma’s NDP. If there were any last lingering doubts on that score, Darrell Dexter erased them Monday with one simple response to a question about whether an NDP government would repeal 1979 legislation that has made it virtually impossible for unions to organize workers at any of Michelin Tire’s three Nova Scotia […]
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Victims of the Herald
If not for the lousy weather, Jennifer Stewart would have been in a downtown courtroom this afternoon, covering the opening arguments in a high-profile murder trial. But thanks to the slushy, slippery conditions outside, the judge sent the jury home at noon. So Stewart had returned to the Chronicle Herald newsroom to write a nothing-much-happened […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Government by sweater
Thank God for Danny Williams. And for the people of Quebec. And for Bill Casey. And, of course, for Stephen Harper, whose stubborn, sweater’s-off-now arrogance helped save us all from a fate worse than George Bush—which is to say a Stephen Harper Conservative majority government. It is easy to imagine what might have happened Tuesday […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Dream team
Perhaps it’s a sign of what a centre-left coalition might be able accomplish in Ottawa. Or perhaps I’m just desperate to find some hope somewhere… The Montreal Rocket, a Quebec Major Junior Hockey League team, have two players—Pierre-Antoine Dion and Nick Layton—who not only share the last names of two of Canada’s federal party leaders […]
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Truth in advertising
It is fair to say that this election has come down to a choice of which party leader—and which party—you think is best suited to cope with what will almost certainly be future ongoing economic turmoil. The problem is that there is a disconnect between their record and their rhetoric. Consider the Liberals and Tories, […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
$300 milion for…
Thank God for Danny Williams. And for the people of Quebec. And for Bill Casey. And, of course, for Stephen Harper, whose stubborn, sweater’s-off-now arrogance helped save us all from a fate worse than George Bush—which is to say a Stephen Harper Conservative majority government. It is easy to imagine what might have happened Tuesday […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Robots never rest
The first disembodied call came early Thanksgiving Monday morning from a computer announcing itself as a representative of EKOS Research, whose auto-dialers were working their electronic fingers down to their hard drives on this holiday conducting one last poll of Canadian voting intentions in advance of today’s federal election. Did I have five minutes to […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Who would you want to be PM?
The question is no longer who wants to be prime minister, but why anyone would want the job. Consider: The global banking system is in massive meltdown, the stock market in frantic freefall; our short-term fiscal future seems unpredictable, perhaps unfathomable, even to those who make their living fathoming and predicting it. And don’t get […]