In 2021, a special committee of the Senate of Canada issued its report on the country’s charitable sector. I am not going to pretend to a deep knowledge of this committee’s work, given I just discovered its existence on Monday, but I will say that the question the committee setRead More

Part 1: Tigray The evil of modern states is their power to decide who eats. Russel Lawrence Barsh, ‘The Nature and Power of North American Political Systems,’ American Indian Quarterly (1986)   In mid-February, heads of state and government of the African Union (AU) convened at the organization’s headquarters inRead More

Last Friday’s “emergency” CBRM council meeting has been well covered in the local media, leaving me with one angle—secrecy—that I still feel has not been adequately explored. But first, let’s recap recent affordable housing history: 2020 October 27: The federal government launches the Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI) delivered by theRead More

It was very disappointing to hear CBRM placing blame rather than taking accountability for their flawed actions, only to reverse course due to public pressure—Acting Municipal Affairs Minister Colton LeBlanc   While I don’t support Tory politics, Minister LeBlanc’s comments summarize my view on the five-million-dollar CBRM affordable housing debacle.Read More

Transparency 101 Amid the blowback from CBRM council’s rejection of a staff recommendation it fund a New Dawn/Ally Centre project with the $5 million it received under the federal government’s Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI), District 2 Councilor Earlene MacMullin took to Facebook to explain why she’d voted against the project,Read More

“The world really is impossible to manage as long as we have nuclear weapons. It really is a terrible way to have to live in this world.” President John F. Kennedy to British Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, 21 October 1962   Over 200 blood-soaked days into Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,Read More

Editor’s Note: I received my copy of this open letter, released by the Health for All Network on 12 October 2022, from Dr. Monika Dutt, a public health physician in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland & Labrador whom I’ve interviewed in these pages previously and who stated, in an accompanying pressRead More

Author’s Note This month’s ‘War & Peace’ column is dedicated to the memory of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022), the last leader of the Soviet Union, who grasped—as he told the United Nations in 1988—that in the nuclear age, “disarmament” is “the most important thing of all, without which no other issueRead More

One hears the word and wants to know more, but one also wants to forget it. One has heard both too much and not enough about Hiroshima. For the city evokes our entire nuclear nightmare…  Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967) Return to Hiroshima on AugustRead More

  1 Witch. When shall we three met again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? 2 Witch. When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won. Shakespeare, Macbeth   Shakespeare’s Macbeth opens in the “fog and filthy air” of an “open place,” a no-man’s-land where three witches – theRead More