Legal Aid lawyers suggest police disproportionately fined members of marginalized and racialized communities while enforcing the COVID-19 emergency acts. Where’s the evidence, asks Justice minister Mark Furey. Well, the minister is the reason that evidence has not been collected.
Canada Post recently issued a stamp of Lawren Harris’ painting ‘Miners houses, Glace Bay’. Fiona McQuarrie writes about her personal connection and the painting’s significance in terms of Cape Breton labour history.
Gary Burrill: We stand in admiration before the steadfast and herculean efforts which continue to be made at Northwood in the battle against the virus. And we call, when the clouds clear and the time is fitting, for an inquiry into long-term care and the pandemic–an inquiry not in search of culpability or accusation, but of understanding and improvement.
Food banks are often stigmatizing, difficult to access and offer little choice, no wonder only about a quarter of those who meet the objective criteria of food insecurity ever went to a food bank. Struggling Canadians need sufficient income to feed themselves now and in the post-pandemic future, write Elaine Power, Jennifer Black and Halifax’s Jennifer Brady.
Joey Delaney, the Nova Scotia citizen who suffered terribly as a consequence of being inappropriately warehoused at the NS Hospital, was awarded a mere $100,000 by NS Human Rights inquiry chair J. Walter Thompson. After all, he found Joey Delaney “so disabled that payment to him of a very large sum will not have a greater impact on his life than a moderate sum.” Such ableist reasoning makes Warren (Gus) Reed very angry.
Economic recovery cannot mean listening to the same old voices, the voices that led us to an economy with a widening income and gender gap, heightening rates of poverty and homelessness, increasing violence and inequality, poorly underfunded and inadequate public and community services, writes NS Federation of Labour president Danny Cavanagh.
Halifax Council had an opportunity to do something about the low wages paid by its contractors, and instead it chose to do nothing at all.
How to find Canada, how to believe again
it is where a freedom is rampant,
it is where it is worth what it takes
to rebuild the lives of those families
who somehow have managed to say,
“We can, and we will.”
A new poem by Truro poet Chad Norman, this one dedicated to El Jones.
“The largest and one of the deadliest outbreaks of Covid-19 in a long-term care (LTC) facility in Canada is raising serious questions about how Nova Scotia’s government has handled the crisis – and whether ignoring early warnings from frontline workers and their unions had deadly consequences,” writes John McCracken.
“This is what haunts us – the knowledge that women and children are trapped or captive in the safe at home COVID-19 directive, struggling to survive acts of violence that amounts to torture,” write Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald, co-founders of Persons Against Non-State Torture (NST). “How are we to care for all trapped in the shadow pandemic of violence against women and children that the COVID-19 pandemic has unsilenced?”