NS officials cite "privacy" as the reason for withholding useful data. There's a barnyard epithet that covers this. It has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with retaining the power access to critical information brings....
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms took a wee hit last week when a Nova Scotia Supreme Court justice told a retired Dartmouth resident that he has no right to put his surname on a vanity licence plate....
Grabher's critics are as indifferent to the free speech rights of those they disagree with as Joseph McCarthy’s apologists ever were....
Facebook friends: Stop indulging those who would have us live in fear. Fear is a notorious method of social control. Stop participating in maudlin claptrap like "marking yourself safe" when no one had any rational basis for thinking you otherwise....
[caption id="attachment_13208" align="aligncenter" width="550"] A Washington, DC, city bus[/caption] Briefly, because I can't say it better than these people did, please check out the links below for eloquent arguments about the value of Edward Snowden's lawbreaking, and the Obama administration's pernicious folly in persecuting him. On the last day of October, from his exile in Russia, Snowden wrote a letter seeking clemency. On the first day of January, a New York Times editorial endorsed his request. Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and...
Every Christmas since 1993, British Television's Channel 4 asks a noteworthy figure to record an "alternative" to starchy pieties of Her Majesty's annual Christmas message to her subjects. This year, Channel 4 tapped whistleblower Edward Snowden. From his temporary asylum in Russia, Snowden sounded a pithy, 1 minute, 43 second, warning about the dangers of government spying: A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves — an unrecorded, unanalysed thought...
No sooner did I write that two veterans would get the last word on the Remembrance Day poppies discussion, than a Facebook message arrived from my friend Walter Van Veen, whose teenage father spent the war hiding in a secret compartment in an Amsterdam flat. A Jewish family shared the compartment. Facing starvation, they gave themselves up a few weeks before the end of the war—and were killed. Walter's father held out and survived. Walter writes: You know my take on this [the media firestorm over white poppies being handed out at the National War Memorial]. This is one fairly cynical narrow view...
Growing up in the 1950s and '60s in the United States, where right-wing scoundrels turned patriotic symbols into political cudgels, left me with a lifelong aversion to flags, ribbons, lapel pins, and other obligatory trappings of national fealty. When I moved to Canada, this aversion morphed into a disinclination to wear poppies. As best I can tell, most Canadians see the poppy as a neutral symbol of respect for veterans. Social pressure to wear it is strong. Acquaintances and strangers alike view my failure to fall in step as inexplicable, disrespectful, and distasteful. I regret this. After years of attempts to...
The election took place a week ago, but Elections Nova Scotia has still not published the poll-by-poll results from each riding. This, despite a notice on the agency's website (see right) promising to post them by last Friday. In past elections, newspapers carried the poll-by-poll results two days after the vote, if not the very next day. These were understood to be unofficial results. Minor adjustments inevitably followed before the final, official results were published in a booklet. But the preliminary totals have always been public information. Elections Nova Scotia obviously has the numbers. Why is it withholding them? I suspect we will hear...
[caption id="attachment_11400" align="alignleft" width="125"] McGuire[/caption] [caption id="attachment_11401" align="alignright" width="125"] Cannon[/caption] In the moral panic that arose in response to Tom Flanagan's comments on child pornography last week, most of those who rushed to join the lynch mob were guilty of self-righteousness abetted by misrepresentation. CBC New executive Jennifer McGuire and University of Calgary President Elizabeth Cannon, however, deserve special mention for their failure to uphold the responsibility their instituions have for protecting controversial speech. Both had a duty to uphold a core principle of their organizations, and they weren't up to the task....