Stephen Kimber is the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax. He is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster.
His writing has appeared in almost all major Canadian publications including Canadian Geographic, Financial Post Magazine, Maclean's, En Route, Chatelaine, Financial Times, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post. He has written one novel — Reparations — and six non-fiction books. Website: http://www.stephenkimber.com.
by Stephen Kimber
Few will be surprised to know I’m a financial as well as philosophical supporter of the New Democratic Party. I’ve been making modest, tax-write-off-able, publicly recorded donations since the early 1980s when the provincial party had no MPs and a single MLA. Giving then seemed more act of charity than political statement.
by Stephen Kimber
Do you remember back in the dying days of the Rodney MacDonald Progressive Conservative regime when then-NDP finance critic Graham Steele threatened the then-deputy finance minister with contempt of a legislative committee for refusing to be forthcoming about the province’s finances? Remember when the deputy finance minister shot back Steele’s criticism was all “political foolishness?”
Do you remember how quickly all was forgiven and forgotten just three months later when the NDP formed the government, Steele became finance minister, the deputy minister remained deputy minister and the new government casually assumed the former government’s penchant for secrecy?
by Stephen Kimber
Solidarity Halifax’s quixotic campaign to rename the Commons skating oval isn’t likely to find many takers among cash-starved city councilors, but it should give the rest of us pause.
How is it that Emera, the parent company of Nova Scotia Power, the private utility that keeps applying to jack up our electricity rates, not only has enough spare cash to reward its million-dollar-a-year executives with top-up performance bonuses — in no small measure for convincing regulators to jack up our electricity rates to keep shareholder returns high — but also still has sufficient leftover scraps to contribute “generously” to public recreation complexes in exchange for rights to name those mostly-publicly-financed facilities after itself?
by Stephen Kimber
The proposed $66.6 million payout to McInnes Cooper for its successful legal work in the veterans’ benefits case is — in the words of Defence Minister Peter MacKay — “excessive and unreasonable.”
by Stephen Kimber
The old Young Mike Duffy would have been all over it.
A Senator playing fast and loose with parliamentary rules of residence, claiming as his full-time home a modest bungalow of a summer cottage that hasn’t seen a snowplow in a year’s worth of winters.
by Stephen Kimber
Another February. Another African Heritage Month. Another plaintive plea — from me and a few lonely others — for an official day to honour Viola Desmond’s contribution to the human rights movement in Canada.
by Stephen Kimber
“You obviously have something against Nicole Ryan,” declared a reader of my column last week. In it, I’d questioned the Supreme Court’s decision not retry Ryan on charges she’d hired a hit man to kill her husband. “I'm not sure what it is,” the reader continued, “but it was extremely distressing to deal with the fact that you’re now on the side of the abusers.”
That reader certainly wasn’t alone in extrapolating wildly from what I wrote. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
by Stephen Kimber
In the third last paragraph of his 2010 decision finding Nicole Ryan not guilty of hiring a hit man to kill her abusive husband, Justice David Farrar notes he was “struck” by the fact the husband “did not take the stand to give evidence with respect to any of the assertions that were made against him.”
During the trial, Michael Ryan had been accused of putting a gun to his wife’s head, threatening to torch their home with his wife and daughter inside and keeping his wife isolated from family and friends.
Why didn’t he testify?
by Stephen Kimber
Two-million to unsuccessfully contest the audit, $2 million for conduct unbecoming and $4.5 million more to cover disallowed fuel costs. That’s $8.5 million.
by Stephen Kimber
On January 1, 1992, Andrea Lynn King, an 18-year-old woman from British Columbia flew to Halifax to begin a travel-work adventure. She phoned her sister from the airport to say she’d landed and would be staying the night at a downtown hostel. She would call the next day, she said, with her new address so her family could mail a purse she’d forgotten.
She never called.
