Just two months after being granted approval to commence deepwater exploratory drilling, the BP Canada oil platform sitting 300 kilometres offshore sprung a leak last Friday. Quickly, 136,000 litres of toxic “drilling mud” spewed into the ocean from a pipe 30 metres below sea level. For the time being, both the leak and the drilling […]
Chris Benjamin
Posted inNews + Opinion
Offshore drilling a recipe for disaster
Robert Bea is a professor emeritus at the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management at the University of California Berkeley. He has five decades experience in engineering and management of design, construction, maintenance, operation and decommissioning marine systems including offshore platforms, pipelines and floating facilities. He was also one of several experts to provide analysis at […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
What’s causing all the (concern about) right whale deaths?
When Fisheries minister Dominic LeBlanc recently took the podium and described the “absolutely majestic sight” of witnessing 15 right whales during an aerial tour of Miscou Island off the northeast tip of New Brunswick, you had to be impressed. He shut down the lucrative snow crab industry early and committed “all the resources necessary” and […]
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Liberals get another shot at saving Nova Scotia’s ecology
The Liberals started their re-election campaign promising decisive new actions on environmental policy: Implementing the party’s cap-and-trade proposal, holding another review on forestry and clearcutting, legally protecting our coasts and passing a Biodiversity Act. Now that Stephen McNeil’s government has won a second majority, environmentalists are waiting to see how quickly the Liberals follow up […]
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Tapped out in Harrietsfield
This March, Nova Scotia Supreme Court justice Timothy Gabriel rejected an appeal from two companies with the catchy names of 3012334 and 3076525 Nova Scotia Ltd—AKA RDM Recycling Ltd. It was the third time the companies had tried, unsuccessfully, to appeal a 2016 Ministerial Order—itself a revised version of a 2010 order—to complete a $10.6-million […]
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Nova Scotia’s recycling efforts plateaued 15 years ago
In a recent self-assessed report card, the Otter Lake Community Monitoring Committee released the results of a December waste audit that found 52 percent of residential waste and 71 percent of business waste was reusable, recyclable or compostable material. “It was a surprise to us that the numbers were that high,” says Ken Donnelly, a […]
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Questions about senator’s Fall River quarry conflict
Opponents of the Fall River quarry are wondering why the Halifax International Airport Authority (HIAA) withdrew its appeal of the contentious project, and what role a former senator made in that decision. James Cowan served Nova Scotia in the senate from 2005 until his retirement this year. He also has an association with HIAA. As […]
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Halifax to Paris, by way of Syria
[Image-1] “When you have drought, when people can’t grow their crops, they’re going to migrate into cities, and when people migrate into cities and they don’t have jobs, there’s going to be a lot more instability, a lot more unemployment and people will be subject to the types of propaganda that al-Qaeda and ISIS are […]
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This Changes Everything says change or be changed
[Image-1] Avi Lewis was filming This Changes Everything in nine different counties as his partner Naomi Klein wrote the book of the same name. The duo’s third film collaboration argues that climate change is fundamentally an existential crisis that can be seized upon to create a more just and sustainable economic system. Lewis spoke with […]
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Lessons learned on the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees
[Image-1] In 2005, Iranian queer activist Arsham Parsi became a refugee in Canada. Through his Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees, he’s helped more than 1,100 other LGBTQIA Iranians escape a country where the punishment for having a same-sex relationship is death. In Halifax, LGBTQIA Iranians are supported by the Rainbow Refugee Association of Nova Scotia. […]
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Bring the paint
Quinpool Road sports bright new colours—mayor Mike Savage applied the final brushstrokes on the weekend. The street was one of 20 in North America selected for a makeover by American paint producer Benjamin Moore. The Quinpool Road Mainstreet District Association, headed by Karla Nicholson, has campaigned long and hard for the sprucing up, which includes […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Bookmark’s for sale
Halifax’s only independent adult bookstore is for sale, along with its Charlottetown counterpart. Bookmark is the longest running independent bookstore in Atlantic Canada. The news comes a year after the death of the stores’ founder and owner, Rodney Jones, at 66. His family—daughters Tarra Drevet and Charla Jones, and brother Larry Jones—has been running the […]