Editorial

I had a lot of fun in my 19 years as a CBC journalist. The pay wasn’t bad and it was great being famous. I have to admit though, there were days when life was hectic in the CBC sausage factory. Sometimes we were so busy grinding out the baloney that we forgot to ask […]

“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 […]

You could do worse than a double feature of Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck. Both are up for the best picture Oscar at Sunday’s Academy Awards, and taken together they give a crash course on everything that’s wrong with journalism today. Capote follows author Truman Capote from 1959, when he started writing a […]

There’s a scene from a classic civilization where the emperor Nero plays his fiddle, while around him a fire is destroying Rome. Although the veracity of the story is debatable—if nothing else, his instrument must have been a lyre—the image of a politician indifferent to major problems has earned a place in our vocabulary. Over […]

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 […]

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. These are what shrinks call the “stages of grief,” steps a person has to go through before fully coming to terms with a traumatic event. Consider the shock of hearing the words “prime minister Stephen Harper” for the first time. I couldn’t believe it (denial), then I expressed dismay about […]

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 […]

The looming federal election has me thinking a lot about the medically induced coma. You know, Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon was put in one after his stroke, and two Canadian soldiers received the coma treatment when they were wounded in last weekend’s suicide bomb attack in Afghanistan. Now I’m ready. Just put me out […]

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 […]

As a new year begins, let’s ask a simple question: Why are Canadian soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan? The government says we’re helping to rebuild the country, establish democracy and maintain stability. It adds that, “Canada’s overarching goal is to prevent Afghanistan from relapsing into a failed state that gives terrorists and terrorist organizations […]

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 […]