Editorial

Your bosses are being jerks. You’re feeling exploited, overworked and underpaid. You’d like to quit, but can’t afford to and besides, you actually love your job and the city where you work. Your last resort? Join your fellow workers and hit the bricks to get a fair contract. That’s what 600 IWK health care professionals […]

I’m a graffiti snitch, a narc, a stool pigeon. The Man is on a crusade to clean up the town, and I’ve happily done his bidding, ratting out urban art day after day. Being an informant doesn’t make me happy, but I have my reasons. The city’s war against graffiti is escalating to the point […]

The multi-media rampage that followed last week’s Virginia Tech massacre reminds me of some sage advice, “pity this busy monster, manunkind, not,” the poet ee cummings counselled. “Progress is a comfortable disease.” Cummings, who refused to own a radio or TV, died almost 45 years ago—decades before the technological “progress” bestowed upon manunkind by the […]

When Ahmed Assal and his family were emigrating to Halifax from Egypt, they learned a lot about their new home at the airport. “I didn’t know anything about Canadian rules,” recalled Assal during testimony at his recent human rights inquiry. Then an airline employee approached him at the gate to say “because you have small […]

Metro Transit is getting some long-overdue tender loving care. The GoTime system will be going through a major overhaul during the summer, to relaunch as an improved departure-time service this September. As part of the GoTime changes, 3,000 new signs will go up at the city’s bus stops, replacing the current ugly and confusing signage. […]

When Elizabeth May announced her plan to challenge Peter MacKay in the next federal election, she came under immediate criticism. The move was seen as a stunt at best—the Green Party leader taking on the powerful cabinet minister being a David-and-Goliath fight designed to secure media coverage. At worst, it was considered political self-sabotage, evidence […]

Ron Chisholm’s mysterious encounter with a woman in Dartmouth last month reminded me of my own recent adventure in the City of Lakes. The provincial fisheries minister says a woman tapped on his car window at Tim Hortons and asked for a drive home. “I said no at first, but she started pleading with me,” […]

On March 6, the day the round-faced French philoso-pher Jean Baudrillard stopped breathing, the US lottery Mega Millions got set to hand out the world’s biggest-ever jackpot. Baudrillard, who argued that illusion and emptiness lie at the heart of consumer society, would surely have hooted at the thought of that $390 million prize. “Americans may […]

While the Commonwealth Games bid was getting scuttled at City Hall last week, I was across the street having a meeting with two people over lunch. Although it was tempting to go over and watch the debacle unfolding, I stayed put. The Games might have been the biggest thing to hit Halifax since the explosion—and […]

On the last Tuesday in February, city council set Grand Parade free. Downtown’s main public space shall be a parking lot no longer—sometime between now and September 1 cars will be banished, with councillor parking relegated to the Truscan lot, a short stone’s throw away. The decision seems the most natural thing in the world. […]

One of the most dangerous men in America zipped across the Canadian border last week to deliver a speech in Ottawa. John Walters, chief propagandist for the disastrous US war on drugs, praised Stephen Harper’s plan to put more drug offenders in jail. He also lauded George Bush for pushing random drug testing in American […]

The controversy over terrorism and torture as depicted on the Fox show 24 calls to mind the quotation: “I wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There’s a knob called ‘brightness,’ but that doesn’t work.” 24 stars Kiefer Sutherland as a hard-boiled US anti-terrorism agent who routinely tortures bad […]