Editorial

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 […]

With 250 years of democracy under our kilts, does history hold the provincial Tories back?

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I happened to be in Boston last weekend for a conference,which is how I ended up watching the first US presidential debate Friday evening 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 and not just […]

The joke’s 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 […]