Some thoughts about the RCMP’s refusal to apologize for racist street checks. If you think the Halifax Board of Police Commissioners isn’t doing a good job, wait til you find out about rural Nova Scotia…
Steven Cotter, the PC candidate running in Central Nova, is a xenophobe who’s Facebook page was found to contain all kinds of vile posts about Canadians who happen to be immigrants, Muslims, or both.
Rain, the remnants of Hurricane Ida, is coming down in sheets in Halifax as I am reading the recent update by street navigator Eric Jonsson on people sleeping outside in Halifax. It makes for grim reading, especially today. A section on the harm caused by the recent evictions by force of the unhoused people living in tents and crisis shelters is particularly disconcerting.
Last week Councillor Lindell Smith, the current chair of the Board of Police Commissioners, told the Chronicle Herald that the Board can do very little about the horrible evictions of unhoused people by Halifax police on August 18. Thankfully, Smith is wrong.
The forceful eviction of homeless people in Halifax isn’t the only occurrence of violent policing in Nova Scotia at this time, but if it wasn’t for the journalism of Angel Moore of APTN we would never know it. Yesterday Moore reported how Mi’kmaw lobster harvesters were arrested and had their boat seized by fisheries officers on unceded and stolen territory of the Mi’kmaq Nation.
From now on any time an African Nova Scotian person is sentenced the judge will have to take into account the extent to which systemic racism and marginalization have shaped the person in front of the judge and how it will affect their carceral experience.
Renters looking unsuccessfully for a place to live in Nova Scotia may have more to blame than just bad luck and a lack of affordable housing. Members of Nova Scotia ACORN have found that there are at least two “bad tenants” blacklists maintained by landlords in Nova Scotia.
Three pictures of Halifax police officers taken during this afternoon’s reprehensible removal of a crisis shed at the old Halifax library. They’re nothing special, but perhaps they raise some questions.
Much like last year, Mi’kmaw fishers exercising their treaty rights are once again the victims of vigilante acts by white settlers and harassment by RCMP and DFO officers.
“There is no justice without disability justice.” Some 100 people gathered at Province House earlier today to remind the government (and voters) that the Liberal government did not meet its commitment to stop warehousing people who live with physical or developmental disabilities in institutionalized settings.