[caption id="attachment_15410" align="alignleft" width="250"] Joliene Stockley's Ingonish great-grandparents: Thomas Doucette and his war bride, Agnes "Lucy" Devenish[/caption] Last Thursday, Friends of Green Cove met with Nova Scotia's Liberal caucus to outline something that ought to be obvious to them already: the case against giving Toronto businessman Tony Trigiani a priceless piece of the Cape Breton Highlands National Park—land Canada promised to protect in perpetuity—to a erect kitchy, highly commercialized, eight-storey statue in memory of soldiers killed overseas. It would be great to see the province officially speak out about this ill-conceived, dishonestly executed scheme, but since the park lies entirely in federal...

09 November, 2015

He was a married, 40-something opposition MLA, a large man with ambitions of becoming premier someday. She was a popular, 20-something party staffer, a small woman with plans to study law. They began what would be a four-year "personal relationship," details of which have not been disclosed, but one gathers it's the sort of friendship the MLA would prefer his wife did not discover. In the fall of 2013, the MLA's party won a landslide victory in the general election, and on October 22 of that year, he was sworn in as Minister of Energy—a giant step toward his ultimate political...

06 November, 2015

The frailty of my connection to pop culture exposed at Sobey's: Checkout Person:  Are you collecting Jamie Oliver stamps? Me:  Someone asked me the same thing yesterday. [Leaning in, sotto voce] WTF are Jamie Oliver stamps? CP:  For every $10 you get a stamp, and when you get enough stamps, you can get some...

01 November, 2015

Since 1996, Halifax resident Dan Conlin has kept close track of the vampires, witches, and ninjas who show up at his Duncan St. home on October 31. The numbers plummeted from 2005 to to 2012, but have edged up for the last three. Yesterday they topped 100 for the first time in eight years. The annual dental industry nightmare got underway at 5:45 p.m.,  peaked around 7 p.m., and vanished into the ether by 8:45 p.m. Vampires and witches continue to top the list. Skeletons are up, princesses and superheros mercifully down. The most striking feature of Conlin's meticulous list is...

01 November, 2015

Yes, there have been a few hiccups in the early stages of Halifax's Big Lift. Morning bridge openings have been delayed beyond rush hour a few times, and an awkward bump in the road surface has slowed traffic. But by any standard, the project is an engineering marvel: one that sees entire 60-foot sections of the massive structure replaced overnight, while the bridge remains open to traffic the rest of the time. This morning, Allison Currie, Community Engagement Officer with the Halifax Dartmouth Bridge Commission, circulated a time-lapse video depicting replacement of the first bridge segment, carried out between October 16...

28 October, 2015

Today would be the 101st birthday of our friend Gus Reed's late father, Robert Dunham Reed. To celebrate, Gus has created a marvelous digital exhibit of a 1930 train trip his father took from Montreal to Dawson City, Yukon, along with his cousin, Warren Goddard Reed, who kept a detailed diary of the journey. Clicking on any of the map's markers brings up the corresponding diary entry, creating a vivid record of the time and places the two young men passed through. Diarist Warren Goddard Reed had a keen eye for detail. Here he describes the pair's arrival in Dawson: From the river...

28 October, 2015

My friend David Rodenhiser put it succinctly on Facebook: Congratulations, Justin Trudeau, our first post-Baby Boomer prime minister. Please don’t shy away from your youth. Lead a new generation of government. Replace partisanship with collaboration, rhetoric with clarity, and self-interest with compassion. Champion unity, not division. Promote openness, not secrecy. Inspire hope, not fear. Embrace science and culture, and cultures. Care about people who need help – refugees, Aboriginals, and veterans, to name a few. Be effusively optimistic and courageously ambitious. Rally us and challenge us. Don’t numb us with platitudes. Renew the Canada we once were, and move us forward. Be a prime minister...

20 October, 2015

Over at The Atlantic's website, I've outlined the campaign for a mostly US audience. That a prime minister thought he might salvage his flagging reelection fortunes by promoting fear of such determined women will play on Canada’s conscience long after the votes have been counted. See the whole article here....

19 October, 2015

You're tired of Stephen Harper winning elections even though 60+ percent of the country votes for more progressive policies. And you're fed up with Harper's multifarious abuses, cataloged here, here, here, and here. So you want to vote strategically, by casting your ballot in a way that maximizes the chances of a Conservative defeat. Opportunities for voting strategically in Nova Scotia are limited. The Conservative Party of Canada has become so unpopular here, it may well be shut out of all the province's 11 ridings. In only two ridings do the Conservatives have any realistic chance of victory:  Cumberland-Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley and Central...

19 October, 2015
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