Back on the last day of June, CBC Radio's Information Morning program put Justice Minister Ross Landry on the hot seat for the Dexter Government's embrace of the Civil Forfeiture Act, a right-wing scheme to short-circuit the presumption of innocence. More accurately, the program's listers put him on the hot seat. The act lets cops seize property from suspects as long as they can convince a court the assets probably came from criminal activity. No proof needed. Just probability. As a standard of justice, it's more Queen of Hearts ("First the verdict; then the trial") than Justice Blackstone  ("Better ten guilty...

15 August, 2011

For the better part of a decade, developers have successfully quashed efforts to block new office and residential projects in the city, and then failed to build them. Contrarian reader Marian Lindsay asks: What gives? Does anyone have anything to say about all this procrastination? This seems a ridiculous waste of time and perfectly good space. Does no-one in power find this unacceptable? Can no-one get these projects rolling? And, why, I ask, if these are private developers, are they dependent on government hand-outs? Has this just become the standard way of operating in this province? Yet, it seems to me, that...

15 August, 2011

Developers often portray Halifax as a place where they face a demoralizing obstacle course of preservationists and pencil pushers whenever they try to build anything. But lately, the self-styled progressives have been winning the day, vanquishing opponents  to win approval for project after project. So where are the shovels? A friend of Contrarian took a stroll around downtown Halifax recently and sent us this photo album of projects long since approved but not yet begun.   Sisters missing, not twisted This project, approved in 2007 after a long fight with its detractors, featured two buildings with vertical twists, like licorice sticks. The “Twisted Sisters” were...

13 August, 2011

Here's a bit of contrarian sporting news that escaped my attention when it happened April 18:  The 20 fastest finishers in the men's 2011 Boston Marathon had one thing in common: All raced in wheelchairs. Our friend Warren Reed highlights this remarkable (but largely unremarked upon) fact in an article for the Journal of Medical Ethics decrying the use of outdated terms about disabilities in scholarly writing by medical researchers. It's a point Reed has gently chided Contrarian about in the past. In an informal search of half a dozen medical journals, Reed found 8,680 articles in which the word "wheelchair" was...

11 August, 2011