The Halifax Chronicle Herald and its newsroom union are hurtling toward a head-on collision, with management threatening a lockout in 10 days unless it gets painful concessions. To back up the threat, the paper is reportedly seeking replacement workers that will let it keep publishing through the work stoppage. Newsroom staff are angry, hurt, and lashing out with vehemence that betrays the weak hand they are playing. It's hard to imagine the paper that emerges from the pending confrontation will much resemble the Herald we know. In fact, today's Herald doesn't much resemble the paper of 10 or 15 years ago. The once plump classified ad section has vanished—taking with...

14 January, 2016

Speaking of Tim Bousquet, his Halifax 'Examiner has done a great job covering the fire serves debacle unfolding at HRM Council. Read his detailed account of how craven councillors (with a few exceptions) caved in to know-nothing sentiment and rejected Chief Doug Trussler's sensible proposals for rationalizing and improving fire coverage in Dartmouth and peninsular Halifax. A sample: Trussler is a professional fire manager with decades of experience who successfully revamped the North Vancouver fire department before moving on to Halifax. The Halifax fire department managers before Trussler were incompetent and worse, and Trussler was sincerely trying to improve the delivery of fire services....

13 January, 2016

Last Saturday, El Jones, the poet-activist who writes and edits the Saturday edition of Tim Bousquet's online publication, The Halifax Examiner, added this footnote to her weekly contribution: I want to use this space to say something about Tim Bousquet and the Examiner. I started writing here in May after writing a guest Morning File while Tim was away. I contacted Tim about the possibility of writing for him further, and he immediately agreed. Tim has given me a space where he allows me to write whatever I want. He doesn’t demand I write certain things for page views, or censor...

12 January, 2016

Last week, I cheered on a sardonic Contrarian reader who mocked the suggestion that some teachers with children of refugees in their classrooms are suffering from "vicarious trauma," for which they may need counselling. Sort of like second-hand smoke, I guess. Dan Bedell, Atlantic Region Communications Director for the Canadian Red Cross, thinks the sardonic reader and I are making light of a well-established mental health problem. I read the recent Trauma Days post just after reading this story about Red Cross personnel helping Syrian refugees cope with the stress and trauma they've endured, both in Syria and since seeking refuge elsewhere. To me, your...

10 January, 2016

Cape Breton Post columnist Mary Campbell has written a crowd-pleasing column that purports to recite the history of efforts to develop a container pier in Sydney Harbour. Her thrust is that public money has been squandered on unscrupulous local business people while failing to ensure public ownership of the port. Today's Post carries a letter to the editor from me in response. Mary Campbell’s article on port development ('Whose port is it, anyway?', Cape Breton Post, Jan. 2) has been getting a lot of traction on social media. It combines a smart-alecky tone with the assumption that all the business people she mentions are crooks with...

08 January, 2016

Yesterday I published Adam Marton's moving account of his brief, long-ago encounter with a young Baltimore man who would become one of that city’s 344 homicide victims in 2015.  I said the war on drugs has caused far more harm than the drugs it targets. A Contrarian reader in the US responds: My grandson died of a heroin overdose at age twenty-four in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Yes, he was an addict. But the proximate cause of his death was the quality of the heroin. It was extremely pure. In my view, this is like drinking bath-tub gin during the depression. What a waste! We have long accepted that Prohibition failed because banning liquor...

07 January, 2016

I've been re-watching Season 5 of The Wire, perhaps the best television series ever produced. Season 5 focuses on the Baltimore Sun, and features delicious score-settling by David Simon, the former Sun police reporter who created the series with Ed Burns, a former homicide detective in the city. The Wire shows how thoroughly the harm caused by the war on drugs eclipses the harm caused by drugs themselves. Thank heaven Canada now has a federal government committed to legalizing—not namby-pamby "de-criminalizing," whatever that is, but legalizing—marijuana. May legalization of heroin, cocaine, and the rest follow promptly. So my ears perked up, a moment ago, when a dispatch about...

06 January, 2016

Well, here's a story that plays into my prejudices on many levels. "Spotlight," a highlight of the Christmas movie season and likely Oscar nominee, details the painstaking investigation by the Boston Globe's Spotlight team that exposed the coverup and condonation of sexual abuse by more than 70 pedophile priests in the Boston Archdiocese of the Catholic Church. The Globe's work led to the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Law. It's a gripping account of the nuts, bolts, and shoe leather that go into investigative journalism, free from the sentimental claptrap that infects so many movies about newspapers. A journalist friend wrote that she, "especially liked the portrayal of the...

05 January, 2016

A sardonic observer of the passing scene in our fair province writes: I heard an interview with and about teachers who have the children of refugees in their classrooms. The conversation drifted from the problems the kids have had in their war-torn countries and in refugee camps to problems the teachers suffer. Some of the teachers, after listening to these horrific stories, actually suffer from "vicarious trauma." Bring on the grief councillors...

02 January, 2016

The wonderful Halifax writer Jane Kansas left Stanfield Airport Tuesday morning at -21º (wind chill*), landing in Tampa, Florida, a few hours later at +35º (humidex*). She spent a few hours trying to get comfortable before falling into bed, sweaty and exhausted. She slept 'til 6 a.m. then set off on a 10-hour walk through random parts of Tampa, including an Ikea store: In IKEA I had an ice cream cone and wandered around. Near the end of my tour, which was at least two hours long (air conditioning), the wail of a child began. The cries bounced off the concrete floors and walls, and echoed...

31 December, 2015
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