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Growing up in Québec in the era of cheap tuition, I never had any real doubts that I would go to university.
I came from a middle class family that valued education — probably, in part, because my parents grew up unable to afford much education. My dad dropped out of high school, after helping lead a failed student strike against a hike in public school fees that meant he could no longer stay in school. After the Second World War, he finished his high school diploma at night school. My mother came to Canada on a program for domestic workers.
By the time I was in high school, I had decided I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t go straight into English. Instead, I got into the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University in Montreal. It’s a great books program similar to the Foundation Year Program at King’s. At their best, these programs provide a broad education in the classics, encouraging discussion, debate, and critical thinking. At worst, they give you the chance to just skim enough material to make yourself sound smart at cocktail parties (as one of my L.A.C. peers said), using a very narrow view of what constitutes great books. I understand that these programs have changed to try and broaden that narrow view. No more art history survey textbooks that do not include a single woman.
(One of the Liberal Arts College highlights had nothing to do with the curriculum: Allen Ginsberg dropped into one of our classes; we had been told he was coming and were sworn to secrecy, to prevent it turning into a zoo, but I did tell one poet friend.)
I flunked out of my first year, mostly because of a failure to turn in assignments. After taking a year off, I signed up for a creative writing degree. I took a few religion courses on the side. After a couple of years, I’d fulfilled all the requirements for my major, and realized I could load up on the religion courses for my final year, and have a minor in religion. So I did that, and then I applied to do a master’s in the history and philosophy of religion.
This is the supposedly useless degree I refer to in the headline.
Did I have a career path in mind? A sense of what this degree was going to do for me? I did not. I was fascinated by what I had learned so far in my religion classes, and I wanted to learn more. At the time, that seemed like enough.
Religion is one of those subjects that is regularly on the chopping block when universities review their programs and decide to cut costs. This was true when I was doing my degree (and many talented scholars were leaving the field because of poor career prospects in academia) and it’s even more true now.
I studied Tamil devotional poetry and rules around ownership of property by Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka hundreds of years ago. I spent hours in the library researching temple inscriptions in South India, and learned about U.S. “civil religion” and the origins of fundamentalism. I took courses in Buddhist philosophy, and spent many hours in a Hindu temple, where I was welcomed by people who very generously allowed me to spend time with them, and who answered my many questions about how they celebrated Maha Sivaratri. I looked at lots of data from the British census of India. I studied feminism and Christianity.
My experience as a grad student in the religion program is reflected nicely in something Tim Bousquet wrote last week about the dangers of turning university education into nothing more than a stop on a career path:
> Of course we want students who go to university to end up with good jobs. But outside of the job conversation, we need places that aren’t defined by financial terms alone. It’s important and useful for young people to have a place to continually lose themselves and find themselves, to make mistakes and have unstructured encounters with people not like them and viewpoints they’d otherwise never know about.
A couple of weeks after I finished the coursework and exams for my master’s, I was hired as the National Film Board’s marketing manager for documentaries produced in Québec and Atlantic Canada. I stayed a couple of years, and then we moved to Nova Scotia, where the writing thing has worked out (so far).
I had considered staying in religion and doing a PhD, but in a rare burst of self-awareness, realized that building on my master’s would require learning at least two languages, one of them Sanskrit, and that I would get so caught up and anxious about it all that I would probably spend seven years working on my degree and never finish my dissertation. Plus, we now had two kids who I needed to contribute to feeding. So, off to the NFB it was. (Admittedly, a pretty good workplace at the time.)
You could argue that my master’s in religion is useless. It didn’t help me get the only full-time job I’ve ever had. And I haven’t had much call in my work life for understanding how the British Census of India exacerbated religious and other divisions, or for the complexities of Buddhist logic.
But I would argue that taking such a narrow view is wrong-headed.
I could make the case that my studies taught me better critical thinking skills, expanded my horizons and so on, and that’s all true. But there is a broader point also.
Whether or not you are a believer or a practitioner of religion, there is no denying how much religious beliefs and practices continue to affect us, and even underpin fundamental assumptions we make in our daily lives.
Can you really understand current U.S. politics without an understanding of the founding of the country and the origins of fundamentalism — a novel and radical form of Christianity that is not old at all and has little connection with literal readings of the Bible, despite what its proponents say?
Many right-wing policies are explicitly based on a narrow and novel view of Christianity that their proponents have pretty successfully convinced people represents traditional Christian views.
In politics, we hear a lot about how people don’t care about issues beyond putting food on the table and paying their mortgages, even when this is demonstrably not true. Oppressing trans people will not help you deal with the cost of living crisis, and yet politicians on the right continue to demonize people who are gender non-conforming, in part claiming a religious basis for these views.
Similarly, degrees in fields that are considered useless (gender studies often comes up here) are mocked, even while discourse on gender becomes more prominent, often with hateful voices predominating.
Religious studies programs are gutted while religious fanatics take over governments.
In his May 2024 column for the Revealer, editor Brett Krutzsch writes about why the elimination of so many religious studies programs in the United States is so harmful:
> As institutions eliminated or decreased their religious studies courses over the past several years, a massive Christian nationalist movement was underway to overturn _Roe v. Wade_ , to put evangelical and conservative Catholic judges in life-long judicial positions, to siphon tax money to private Christian schools, to demonize transgender people, and to refashion the United States into an avowedly Christian country. And as that has been happening, fewer students have been exposed to the analytical tools of religious studies, to identifying how religion functions in society, to understanding the myriad ways religion influences people, and to seeing how politics shape religious communities…
>
> Removing religious studies courses means less students have been learning about Hindu nationalism in India, the spread of Pentecostalism in Latin America and its effect on global politics, debates on the place of Islam in Muslim-majority countries, and much more…
>
> A healthy democracy does not benefit from fewer people learning about religion’s many roles in society. And one could reasonably argue that things like Christian nationalism gain strength when less people have spent dedicated time studying and analyzing how religion influences the diverse cultures within a country, and how religion shapes people’s politics.
I agree with all this, even as I think that any instrumentalist view is problematic. Things are worth studying for their own sake: religion, art, philosophy. They are part of what makes us human, and that’s enough justification on its own.
But that’s not a message that politicians who see universities as an investment in their narrow view of the future are likely to embrace.
And as the cost of an education becomes increasingly inaccessible, I can understand students not wanting to gamble on something like religion, with an uncertain future, rather than a job in tech, where a recent survey shows the median salary in Halifax as $132,000.
These decisions make individual sense, because that’s how the system is set up. But we are the poorer for them.
The religion department where I studied was in danger for a while. It has survived, but in a different form. It is now called the department of religions and cultures.
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## 1. Are you blaming ‘excited delirium’ if you only think about it?
Credit: Tim Bousquet
Last Friday, the Serious Incident Reponse Team (SIRT) issued its investigation report into the death of a man at the hands of police on Feb. 28, 2025 in Bedford. It found no grounds to lay charges against the officer under investigation.
According to the report, the man was near a school, behaving erratically, wearing shorts in -10 degree weather, and appeared to be high. The original responding officer (the subject of the SIRT investigation) said the man had had to be sedated in the past, after confrontations with police.
From the report (AP is the person who died, and SO is the officer subject to investigation):
> The AP was yelling into his phone and behaving erratically. He proceeded to clench his fists and start walking towards one of the officers, who feared for their safety, the safety of the AP and others on the scene. This officer deployed their Conducted Energy Device (CEW/Taser). It did not make full contact with the AP and was therefore not effective. The AP then started moving much more aggressively towards the officer who had just deployed the CEW. Another officer pulled her out of the way. At this time the SO approached the AP from behind and attempted to place him in a neck hold. Both the SO and AP slipped on ice and fell to the ground, with the AP landing on top of the SO.
>
> Six officers then attempted to restrain the AP, who was resisting and exhibiting extreme strength. A seventh officer arrived and assisted in handcuffing him, and another officer placed flex cuffs around his ankles. The AP continued to struggle, but eventually his breathing slowed down and when officers checked his pulse there was none.
I suspect the words “eventually his breathing slowed down” are, as they say, doing a lot of work here. The man was hit with a Taser, fell on the ice, and was subdued by seven officers.
The parts that most interest me in the report though, are the descriptions of the man, and his superhuman strength. (WO refers to witness officer — someone on the scene, but not under SIRT investigation.)
Some examples, from the report:
* “Six officers then attempted to restrain the AP, who was resisting and exhibiting extreme strength.”
* “The SO described the strength of the AP as being able to lift five officers. He stated that the AP’s behaviour was at the highest level and he felt he could have seriously hurt WO1.”
* “WO1 stated he was the strongest person she has ever dealt with.”
* “WO5 stated his strength was incredible…”
I am not doubting the officers’ testimony that the man was strong, and that sounds like a difficult situation all around. But it is a long-standing and well-known trope that police will attribute super-human strength to those who die after being subdued. Until very recently in Nova Scotia and in other jurisdictions, this strength was often said in reports to come from a made-up condition called excited delirium.
I wrote about excited delirium for the Examiner two years ago
> Excited delirium is said to cause people to have super-human strength and even make them immune to pain, meaning police need overpowering force to restrain them. If the person dies after suffering, say, repeated electrical shocks, being punched repeatedly in the head, or injected with ketamine (or some combination thereof), well, you can’t blame the officers.
Reading through the descriptions of the victim’s outrageous strength (“being able to lift five officers”), I wondered if excited delirium would rear its ugly head. And it does, sort of:
> WO3 stated that the AP had numerous cuts on his body, which could have been from going into the woods before they interacted with him. WO3 noted that the AP was sweating and hot to the touch, and the outdated term “excited delirium” was going through his head.
The problem with excited delirium is not that it is an outdated term, akin to saying…well, I don’t really want to give an example because most of them would involve using words once common that are now considered slurs.
The problem is that it is a condition that does not exist, and has racist roots to boot.
Read my story if you want all the details, but the short version is that a Florida forensic pathologist came up with a theory that, when high on cocaine, Black men died of excited delirium when restrained, and Black women died during sex. He surmised that the combination of cocaine and blood types more common in Black people might be lethal. However, several of the women whose deaths he blamed on the condition turned out to have, in fact, been murdered. No matter, the concept of excited delirium took hold in police circles.
The company that makes Tasers went on a blitz in the early 2000s, “educating” police chiefs and medical examiners on excited delirium syndrome — presumably as a way of helping ensure that the deaths of those who had been shocked with their weapons were attributed to the made-up condition, rather than to the massive amounts of electricity to which they had been subjected.
So, if the officer was thinking about excited delirium, it does not really matter what term he was thinking of. What matters is that his training had taught him to see a condition that does not exist. Presumably that would have an impact on his actions.
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### 2. Free holiday meals
Dinner is served. Credit: Ana Maltez/Unsplash
As part of his Christmas wrap-up blog post, Kendall Worth includes a comprehensive list of free meals available in Halifax over the holidays. It appears in the post as an image, so I can’t extensively quote it directly without a lot of retyping. But you can see the full list on Worth’s post.
It includes meals at Hope Cottage, Saint Agnes Church Hall, Jameson’s Irish Pub (registration required), Souls Harbour in Halifax and Lower Sackville, and Staggers Pub and Grub, with live music (registration required by today).
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## 3. Last call for the Lunenburg Barnacle
The logo of the Lunenburg Barnacle
As I’ve noted in this space many times, I have a fondness for community papers and hyper-local news sources. One of these is the Lunenburg Barnacle, which I wrote about here.
Well, I’m sad to report that the Barnacle’s run is coming to a close — although I may perhaps feel sadder about it than the people actually running the paper.
In an editorial published Dec. 11 called “Announcing the end,” Sal Falk writes:
> From the beginning, the Barnacle set out to be a project for a gaggle of new-to-Lunenburg-County folks to have a reason to gather once a week in the dark evenings of winter. We wanted to highlight all the incredible things we had come to learn and know about this special place we call home.
>
> Immediately, people took notice. It was simple – everyone around us agreed that there are so many hardworking people, organizations and small businesses that deserve recognition and warrant a shout-out or boost.
>
> Quickly, the Barnacle grew in purpose.
>
> We became about pointing to the things we wanted others to pay attention to. This was a radical and simple way to engage in this age of short attention spans and short-form digital content.
Falk adds that the Barnacle was a volunteer effort, essentially run by two people, with the help of many volunteers. And now it’s time to move on:
> The Barnacle has always been volunteer-run. It was never a sustainable model. It was just a way to reinvigorate local journalism, no matter how brief a tenure. The time to transition has come.
The final issue will be published in January 2026.
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### 4. Clark Griswold and class struggle
Chevy Chase, the face of the bourgeoisie, in a still from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989).
In his Bad Faith Times newsletter, Denny Carter argues that National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is a tool of Marxist indoctrination (and this is a good thing).
Denny starts with the Marxist archetypes in the film. Clark Griswold represents the petite bourgeoisie, cousin Eddie is a stand-in for the proletariat, and Frank Shirley is the bourgeoisie:
> Shirley is an incompetent, a total fool who belongs to the privileged minority that rules over the vast majority – Marx’s central grievance and the lynchpin of capitalistic domination in western society. The movie offers a host of reasons to believe Shirley is bad at his job, focused only on maximizing profit for himself and his marauding corporation exploiting the labor of Clark and his fellow petty bourgeois…The bossman is, in short a dumbass. This aligns with Marxist literature’s depiction of the ruling class as inept, blundering, yet dominant owners of the means of production.
Denny describes Griswold, played by Chevy Chase, as wearing a happy face while “class-based resentment simmers just beneath the surface.”
Finally, by espousing a violent and revolutionary act, the film:
> offers a Marxist lesson in how the bourgeoisie can be conquered, a key precursor to the glorious dictatorship of the proletariat that dismantles the genocidal capitalist system — or in this case, to get some extra spending cash at Christmastime.
Perhaps a rewatch is in order.
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### 5. Scathing book reviews
The New York Times Book Review. Credit: Ekrulila/Unsplash
Book reviewing is an art. One of my first gigs was writing the literary column for the Montreal alt-weekly Hour (RIP) — a task I shared with two colleagues. (We rotated it among us.)
If you want to have people in an insular literary community dislike you, write honest reviews of their books.
My column didn’t always feature reviews, and when it did, I really did try to review fairly. But I was also enamoured, in an immature way, with the book review as a way to express your own cleverness through biting commentary and a seemingly well-deserved takedown.
I no longer find this kind of writing particularly appealing. What I’m looking for in a review (in a world in which it is increasingly hard to find a decent review, and no, most of the stuff on Goodreads does not count) is someone who is smart but not flashy, who can offer insights and context on the book.
However, I will confess to deriving a certain amount of pleasure from Literary Hub’s compilation of the most scathing literary reviews of 2025. If you’re going to dunk on a new author doing their best, I’m mostly not on board. But many of these punch up, and do it delightfully. You want to bash Louis C.K. and Woody Allen? (Did you know he released his debut novel last year?) I’m here for it.
From Laura Miller’s review of Louis C.K’s novel _Ingram_ , published in Slate:
> Ingram seems most of all like the kind of first novel that ends up in a drawer and stays there until its author dies, whereupon, if the writer’s fully realized works have won over enough readers, it might get dragged out and published by the artist’s heirs. But C.K. is famous and still has many fans despite his scandals, and what ought to have been cashiered as mere juvenilia winds up printed between hardcovers, with a slipcover photo of its author sitting at a manual typewriter, and listed for $27.95.
From Ron Charles’ review of Mitch Albom’s _Twice_ , published in the Washington Post:
> Mitch Albom’s new novel, _Twice_ , is about a man with the miraculous ability to travel back to any point in his life and make a different choice. A few hours after starting _Twice_ , I knew exactly which choice I would make differently.
From Johanna Thomas-Corr’s review of Woody Allen’s _What’s With Baum?_ , published in the Times of London:
> The question should be: is the writing any good? Well, no. All the best sentences have been crammed into the first page and all the drama happens in the last 20. In between, there’s a nice use of ‘zombie’ as a verb and an interesting paragraph involving Goebbels. But most of it is kvetching and ogling.
Rather appropriately, I guess, some of the commenters get in on the action, with one referring to a comment as “inane,” to which the commenter replies:
> It’s only inane because you’re a dunce who doesn’t understand the point. My goodness, you are miserable.
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## RECENTLY IN THE HALIFAX EXAMINER:
### N.S. partnering with Dalhousie University to kickstart drilling for onshore natural gas
Kim Doane (left), executive director of energy resource development, Nova Scotia Department of Energy, and Graham Gagnon, acting vice-president research and innovation, Dalhousie University, during the Dec. 22, 2025 announcement. Credit: Jennifer Henderson
Jennifer Henderson reports:
> The province of Nova Scotia is partnering with Dalhousie University to kickstart drilling for onshore natural gas as early as next year.
>
> Premier Tim Houston’s government has earmarked $30 million for the Subsurface Energy Research and Development Investment Program to be administered by the university. Most of that $30 million (over and above this year’s provincial budget) will be used to pay up to 100% of eligible operating costs for exploration companies that respond to a call for proposals during the first quarter of 2026.
“Drilling for onshore natural gas” is what the province is calling fracking now. Something’s got bad PR? Change the name. See also: oil sands/tar sands; power failure/outage, and more.
Henderson’s story continues:
> The university appears to be doing a lot of the work the province would normally do, including issuing a call for proposals and managing the consultation with the public once a company has identified a location it wants to explore.
>
> Asked by the Examiner to explain what public consultation would look like, [Graham] Gagnon [Dalhousie’s acting vice president of research and innovation] told reporters those “project details” will be worked through with the province during the early part of 2026.
Click or tap here to read “N.S. partnering with Dalhousie University to kickstart drilling for onshore natural gas.”
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## IN OTHER NEWS
### 1. Homeopathic remedy importer/exporter challenges Quebec civil forfeiture law
A new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says provinces have surpluses they could spend on social programs for Canadians. Credit: Dreamstime Stock Photo
Jacob Serebrin reports for the Montreal Gazette that a man is challenging Québec’s civil forfeiture law as unconstitutional after police seized more than $2 million in cash from his home but did not charge him with a crime.
Civil forfeiture laws allow police to seize property they believe to be the proceeds of crime, whether or not they actually wind up charging people. As you can imagine, this power has the potential for abuse, especially in jurisdictions where police departments get to keep some or all of that money, or have it returned to them in the form of program funding.
In the last two fiscal years, Halifax Regional Police and the Truro Police Service have both received grants from Nova Scotia’s Civil Forfeiture Grant Program.
Back to the Gazette story. Police in Longueuil, a suburb of Montreal, searched the home of 75-year-old André Levy last year, and found more than $2 million dollars hidden behind a fake wall. Under Québec’s civil forfeiture law, police can seize any amount over $2,000, “the disposition of which is incompatible with the practices of financial institutions,” if it is presumed to derive from illegal activity.
Serebrin writes:
> Lawyers for André Levy argue a provision of the law, which presumes cash sums of $2,000 or more are the proceeds of illegal activity except in certain circumstances, violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and are seeking the return of the money.
>
> “The legislative provision being contested, while it pursues a laudable goal, constitutes a draconian, disproportionate and irrational response,” Alexandre Bergevin and Edith Darbouze wrote in a court filing. “Depriving a person of a substantial sum of money, representing a lifetime of work and saving, simply because a presumption exists, or because they cannot rebut a presumption established by law, opens the door to the worst abuses of power.”…
>
> Levy’s lawyers say that element of the law violates the sections of the Charter that guarantee basic fairness in judicial proceedings and protect against unreasonable search and seizure.
Now, you may argue that a guy who has two million bucks behind a fake wall, whose business is supposedly importing and exporting homeopathic remedies, and who had a money counting machine in his home, is probably guilty as hell. And maybe you’re right. Who knows? But I’m glad to see him challenging this law, because a world in which cops can walk in and take your property without ever charging you is dangerous for all of us.
I don’t regularly walk around with thousands of dollars on me, but I can easily imagine any number of scenarios in which that could be perfectly legitimate. But it would probably not be that hard to gin up some story about how the money must have come from criminal activity.
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### 2. Electric City funding
An electric vehicle charging station in Weymouth, NS. Credit: Suzanne Rent
Stéphanie Blanchet at Radio-Canada reports that the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) is giving $181,100 to The Electric City/La Nouvelle France Society for a new “visitor experience.”
The Weymouth area has a fascinating history when it comes to electricity, and I am glad to see that it will be more broadly recognized. Blanchet writes:
> In the late 180ss, while most Nova Scotian villages were lit by oil lamps, a few electric streetlights shone near Weymouth. Thirty kilometres inland, a forest settlement known as La Nouvelle-France already had electricity.
>
> “Many parts of the province didn’t have electricity until at least 20 years later,” says Hal Theriault, who heads the Electric City/La Nouvelle-France society, and who has been working for years to preserve the memory of the village.
>
> Founded in the 1890s by the Stehelin family, originally from Gisors, in France, this forest settlement was ahead of its time. Today, all that’s left are some stone foundations, covered by forest. Access to the site is forbidden, and the land, which belongs to the province, is protected. (Translated from the original French.)
If you want to know more, I highly recommend the book _The Electric City_, by Paul H. Stehelin, published by Nimbus.
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### **Government**
No meetings this week.
### **On campus**
No events this week.
* * *
### **In the harbour**
**Halifax**
05:30: **SFL Conductor**, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from Emden, Germany
07:00: **IT Infinity** , offshore supply ship, arrives at Pier 9 from Fiskarstranda, Norway
07:00: **One Ibis** , container ship (144,285 tonnes), arrives at Pier 41 from Norfolk
11:30: **SFL Conductor** sails for sea
12:00: **Nolhan Ava**, ro-ro cargo, arrives at Pier 42 from Saint-Pierre
15:30: **Morning Pride** , car carrier, sails from Pier 9 for sea
16:00: **Nolhan Ava** sails for Saint-Pierre
16:30: **One Ibis** sails for sea
**Cape Breton**
05:00: **AlgoScotia**, oil tanker, arrives at Atlantic Bulk Terminal from Halifax
09:00: **CSL Tarantau**, bulker, moves from anchorage to Aulds Cove quarry
12:00: **Algoma Vision**, bulker, sails from Port Hawkesbury anchorage for sea
19:00: **AlgoScotia** sails for sea
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### **Footnotes**
Thanks to a Tim Bousquet post on Bluesky this morning, I wound up stepping away from this Morning File and looking up Walkman-related stories on newspapers.com. And I found this gem from conservative columnist George Will, writing in 1981:
> Some sociologists and other cranks are quite cross about the popularity of the Walkman. They say the device is ‘isolating’ and prevents people from ‘relating.’ I say: ‘Yes, and isn’t that great?’
I know this is probably not my last Morning File of the year, but who knows how many of you will be reading next week — so I want to take this opportunity to say thank you to Bousquet for creating the Examiner and giving me the opportunity to write here regularly; thank you to the Examiner crew, a dedicated and talented group of people whose strengths complement each other; and thank you to all of you for reading and continuing to support independent media.
* * * https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/morning-file/i-have-a-supposedly-useless-university-degree-heres-why-i-dont-regret-it/
