After Peter Kelly gave a milquetoast “everything’s fine and getting better” opening statement, Sheila Fougere came out swinging, saying that “back room chats and the lack of a strong leader” had left HRM taxpayers paying 2/3 of the harbour solutions cleanup costs (as opposed to the 1/3 that the city had originally hoped to pay), […]
News
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CBC Radio Information Morning
I’ll be on CBC radio tomorrow at 7:15am to discuss tonight’s mayoral debate.
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Gratuitous sex pic of the week
A press release trumpets Jenna Thibodeaux, a Halifax resident and model who won Peta’s “I’m Too Sexy for Leather” photo contest. The picture is here. Before you send the angry letters, understand that I’m big on meat that’s raised correctly (I’m an enthusiastic supporter of two local farms that raise and butcher free-range poultry, pigs […]
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The smog of electoral war…
Is a carbon tax a good idea? What the f*&^ is a cap-and-trade policy anyway? And why has the media—for the most part—abandoned its traditional role of trying to make sense of it all for us? Perhaps the simple, unhappy answer is that our journalists are so busy reading the leavings in the bottom of […]
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Going to the candidates’ debates
I happened to be in Boston last weekend for a conference, which is how I ended up watching the first U.S. presidential debate Friday evening (September 26) on a big-as-my-house widescreen TV with several hundred of my new closest friends in the atrium of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. It was fascinating, […]
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Makin’ sense of it all…
Still puzzling over how to cap carbon, or trade a tax, or emit a greenhouse gas, or… The Ecology Action Centre will host a primer entitled “CARBON JARGON: MAKING SENSE OF CAP & TRADE AND CARBON TAX” on Monday, October 6 at the Dal Law School (Room 105) from 6-7 pm. Meinhard Doelle, who teaches […]
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Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine
It starts with a violent coup by dictatorAugusto Pinochet September 11, 1973. The Chicago Boys, a gang of Chilean economists trained by free market guru Milton Friedman, are uncannily prepared with a manifesto of economic policy, “The Brick.” It lands heavy on the left-leaning populace, inducing a state of shock. The Chicago Boys have somehow […]
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Keeping score
Today’s (September 25) Globe and Mail: Number of A-Section news stories about the federal election: 5Number of stories about political strategy and who’s winning/losing: 5Number of stories about substantive issues: 0
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Zap! Will the joke be on us?
Will Stephen Harper’s “a carbon tax is crazy economics; it’s crazy environmental policy” turn out to be the 2008 election’s version of “Zap! You’re frozen”? During the 1974 federal election campaign, earnest, awkward Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield—the Stephane Dion of his day—proposed a policy of wage and price controls to put a lid on […]
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iVote: Can electronic voting save democracy?
Halifax elections are going hi-tech, but while election officials hope internet voting is the cure for voter apathy, skeptics say it is a threat to democracy itself.by Tim Bousquet | photos Aaron Fraser he three weeks from October 14 to November 4 are something of an election marathon: The Canadian federal election is October 14, […]
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On the willow tree corner
Some rogue electioneer has taken political postering into their own hands at the corner of Quinpool and Robie. Who did it? I like the ‘no-left turns’ sign below it. Harper’s taking flack on all fronts these days. Canada’s first lady of literature, Margaret Atwood, wrote a deadly comment piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail.
