We awoke this morning to a CBC report that Halifax Regional Police have laid in a additional stock of military-issue, semi-automatic weapons, and they found two opportunities in the last 10 days to draw these weapons on the streets of Halifax. I am no gun expert, but piecing together police statements, photographs of the two incidents, and a little internet sleuthing, the guns in question appear to be Colt Canada C8-IUR carbines like the one pictured above, outfitted with 10- or 11.6-inch, cold hammer forged barrels for use in what Colt's promotional material calls “close-quarter battle.” Close-quarter battle. HRM Police stocked up on the weapons back...

31 October, 2014

Writing in the Metro News, reporter Ruth Davenport seeks to explain why so many women choose not to report episodes of sexual violence and abuse. Like so much of this discussion, it's a strongly worded piece, and it puts the lie to the notion women who "fail" to go to police "couldn’t possibly have been assaulted." Think about being groped, molested and raped, and then think about whether you’d want to give the detailed play-by-play to a whole stable of complete and mostly male strangers...

30 October, 2014

In the aftermath of Wednesday's shooting in Ottawa, here are four brief readings: two from readers, and two from columnists running counter to the national press hysteria. Longtime Contrarian reader Tim Segulin writes: Finally the Harper government has the undeniable pretext it has sought for years to spy on the phone and internet communications of innocent citizens without need of judicial oversight. After shrill charges that those who didn't agree 'stood with child pornographers' and an attempt to install it by exploiting the Rehteah Parsons and Amanda Todd tragedies was foiled by the Supreme Court, now the Harper government can claim that we...

28 October, 2014

    Director Ashley McKenzie and actress Carmen Townsend on the set of "4 Quarters Makes A...

27 October, 2014

Many online critics of the CBC's decision to fire Jian Ghomeshi have cited an earlier contretemps between the corporation and DNTO host Sook-yin Lee as having established the precedent that private sexual behavior is irrelevant to on-air employment at the public broadcaster. Here is how one twitter-poster put it: Sook-yin Lee did porn flicks. She still works for them. The comparison is inapt, and the details dead wrong. Notwithstanding the expertly crafted, pre-emptive defense in Ghomeshi's Facebook post, it seems all but certain that the issue in his firing is not private, non-mainstream sexual tastes, but the level of consent in specific sexual...

27 October, 2014

Now that the fog of fear and bombast is lifting, here is what we are left with: a single, mentally ill Canadian man approached a ceremonial guard at the National War Memorial Wednesday and shot him dead. The killer then drove and ran the very short distance to Parliament Hill, where rushed past security and was shot dead in a brief gunfight. The death of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, a 24-year old army reservist from Hamilton, ON, is particularly sad, as he was a single father. Moreover, any violent disruption of Parliament constitutes an affront to democracy to be resisted with firm resolve. But then, the 500+ victims of homicides that occur every year in...

26 October, 2014

The week's events got one Contrarian reader thinking about policing: We have way too many police, and we pay way too much for them. Regardless of what people think, our crime rate is dropping. As I sometimes tell people when I am particularly argumentative, "If your child is not aboriginal or a new immigrant, then she is the safest person who has ever lived." So when I get a ticket for failing to stop at a stop sign given by a nice older man in the RCMP, any cost benefit analysis would say: way too much cost for too little benefit. --  Salary...

26 October, 2014

I received a polite phone call this morning from Chief Electoral Officer Richard Temporale, acknowledging that the Nova Scotia Elections Act would not support a conviction against me on the alleged offence of photographing and tweeting my ballot. In other words, what I did is not against the law. They are dropping the case. We already suspected as much, because the one-year time limit for laying a charge under the act expired October 5. I am grateful to Jason Cooke, an outstanding young civil litigator at Burchells, who sent Elections Nova Scotia a brief last January, pointing out that the Act did not outlaw my actions. The support I...

21 October, 2014

You can be forgiven, dear Contrarian reader, for not knowing that a hearing last week in the Ontario Divisional Court sought to determine how far wrongdoers can go to suppress the freedom of those they have wronged to speak about the wrongdoings. And for not knowing that the wrongdoer in the case is Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, or that the person wronged was once its most celebrated columnist, Jan Wong. You can be forgiven because, in an revelatory display of unanimity, the Canadian news industry has suppressed coverage of the court battle. The sole exception* is a bilious piece of character assassination by National Post columnist Chris Selley, the sort of journalist...

20 October, 2014

Barry Morrison went out to look at the surf along the Lighthouse Point Trail, Louisbourg. ...

20 October, 2014
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