Profile of Michael Johansen

Biography

MIchael Johansen is a resident of North West River, Labrador. His column "North of Here" appears every Monday.

All articles of Michael Johansen

• Labrador school called ‘toxic’ workplace
  Work life at the Queen of Peace School in Happy Valley-Goose Bay is rife with fear, secrecy, disrespect, conflict, tension, animosity, bullying, ...
• Weird visions of the land, post-byelection
  Warning: the following is a foray into the semi-literate and semi-rational world of online commentary. Offensively lunatic remarks will be ...
• Wake me up if something happens
  If the Labrador byelection is supposed to provide a template for the next general election of members to Parliament, it looks like a lot of ...
• The price of making racist remarks
  The matter is closed. At least, the lid’s shut and they’re all sitting on top of it, but there’s so much stuff underneath, it keeps forcing ...
• Riadh Ben Aissa paper trail leads to Mount Pearl
  At first it looked like the Tunisian-Canadian wheeler and dealer Riadh Ben Aissa was going to have a long and fruitful career as a businessman in ...
• A few questions for the candidates
  Finally, the Labrador byelection is officially underway, so now is not the time for any more partisan bickering. Well, OK, yeah, it is — but ...
• On the trustworthy company Nalcor keeps
  How fortunate for the people of Newfoundland and Labrador that they can trust the big mega-corporations that get so much of their tax money. How ...
• Greens should run in Labrador
  The Labrador byelection hasn’t even started, but it already looks like ex-MP Peter Penashue could head back to Ottawa to again bolster his ...
• One byelection won't be enough
  In the flurry of news about our MP resigning from Parliament because of all the money he shouldn’t have gotten and spent during the campaign that ...
• A project and a landslide
  So, if Nalcor doesn’t build a whole new dam at Muskrat Falls (at whatever astronomical cost) it looks like the so-called North Spur (a long bank ...
• Shutting Nalcor down solves the deficit
  “Nalcor is the prime target. This is an experiment that has gone horribly wrong.” — Danny DumaresqueNote to Newfoundland’s currently governing ...
• Peter Penashue, hamstrung minister
  Poor Peter Penashue. Now there’s a man stuck on the horns of a dilemma. Lucky for him, caribou horns aren’t as sharp as others. He might just get ...
• Historic coastal boat seeks new owner
  The old MV Taverner is up for sale and now's the time to act: the price has been slashed by nearly half to a mere one-and-a-quarter million ...
• Y'all don't come back now, y'hear?
  Come and listen to a story about a man named Ed,A wily financier with too much power in his head,He was done building dams, but he’s not a man to ...
• Poking an Innu bear with a caribou stick
  “It’s time for us to help the caribou.” That’s how a meeting began between Innu Nation monitors and almost a dozen hunters from Sheshatshiu last ...
• A choice between salt and pepper
  Medical science teaches that a little bit of sodium chloride is good for the health, but too much is dangerous. It causes high blood ...
• A slim chance for Ungava caribou
  Back when the Trans-Labrador Highway was all potholes in dirt, wary drivers slowed down — but not just because the relentless bumps threatened to ...
• Cold shock of a pre-dawn protest
  Somewhere out in the province in some murky courtroom or another, there’s probably a team of Nalcor lawyers trying to convince some judge to have ...
• A Labrador manifesto
  Call this, more fully, A Manifesto for the Territorial Independence of Labrador. Demands for the political separation of Labrador from ...
• The right side of history
  The rally was small, as rallies go — at least it seemed so at the time.Friends of the Grand River/Mistashipu, one of many groups opposed to ...
• One wish for the new year
  First an O and then a B. The first S is already on the board and there’s plenty of room for an E and two more S’s. Double letter score on one ...
• Top 10 sanction countdown
  The Lower Churchill hydroelectric project (the first part of it, at least) has now received official sanction from the Government of Newfoundland ...
• Top 10 sanction countdown
  The Lower Churchill hydroelectric project (the first part of it, at least) has now received official sanction from the Government of Newfoundland ...
• Taking it to the streets
  Three men just got arrested for protesting a planned hydro dam in Labrador. The men stand in good company.The protests that overthrew East ...
• Enemies at the gates
  An MP stopped me at the gates of 5 Wing Goose Bay a few days ago and for the first time ever I was not allowed to pass. This MP was not the MP I ...
• Making a federal case out of it
  A small van waits as a man and woman, activists both, stock it for a three-day drive. They’re underway soon after sunrise, off to pick up a third ...
• Two regions, one thumb
  Labrador and New Brunswick share two things in common at the moment: brand new highways and an almost complete lack of public transportation.In ...
• Dogs are my favourite people
  Forty-seven homeless dogs on the Goose Bay tarmac waiting for a plane; then the same 47 on another tarmac in Halifax — all to have homes within ...
• A clear vote for a referendum
  One vote: that’s all it should take. If the provincial government is truly interested in knowing how many citizens support building more dams in ...
• Ten reasons why Citizen Williams is wrong
  “The facts,” one ex-politician said recently to a board of merchants, “should be enough.”Quite right. But enough for what? And which facts? One ...