From 1900 to 1913, four different Maritime hockey clubs played for the Stanley Cup. Back then, it was a challenge cup. Any league champion could vie for its glory, as long as its trustees deemed them worthy contenders. “Between 1893 and 1926, sixteen different leagues produced Stanley Cup champions, and fifty-seven teams challenged for it,” […]
Chris Benjamin
Posted inNews + Opinion
Sustainable news
This isn’t a column I chose to write. That’s unusual. The only interference The Coast has ever run with my topic selection has been on Earth Day (“ya gotta cover Earth Day, even if you hate the concept”) and Halloween (“we want the whole issue scary!”). Those instances led to some of my favourite columns: […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Bloomfield re-deployment
Nothing is ever perfect, or done quite how we’d envisioned—especially when government is involved—but after nine years pushing the city to restore the Bloomfield Centre’s former glory, the mountain has moved. On December 11, council approved a Bloomfield redevelopment plan by the highest bidder, Nova Scotia Housing Development Corporation, the provincial government’s affordable housing agency. […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Off the grid: Nova Scotians power down
Two years ago, Phillip Vannini moved from the hustle-bustle city to out-of-the-way Gabriola Island on the left coast. It was his first exposure to the vagaries of well water, and it fostered in him an appreciation of the precious source of all life. “I wondered what it was like to be self-sufficient on all resources,” […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Acid river
In the 1980s, acid rain was a wake-up call. The idea that the sky could open up and rain poison on us, and it was our own fault for being energy pigs—it’s mainly caused by sulfur and nitrogen compounds from electricity production, cars and factories—was a shocker. Acid rain’s impacts were obvious. It killed animals […]
Posted inLifestyle
Spotlight on schizophrenia
Last April, Andre Denny received a one-hour unescorted pass from the East Coast Forensic Hospital. The next day, he was charged with the second-degree murder of gay activist Raymond Taavel. Denny has paranoid schizophrenia. He was committed to the forensic hospital after being found not criminally responsible on a charge of assault causing bodily harm […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Tantallon Transitions
This weekend, Transition St. Margaret’s Bay is coming out. The “Great Unleashing: Building Resilience in an era of Limits to Growth” is at St. Luke’s Church on St. Margaret’s Bay Road. “Once a transition group has had a certain amount of success, they have this sort of coming out party,” says organizer David Wimberly. A […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Mobile home
J>ust over a month ago, artist Anna Sprague surrounded the boarded-up Morris House with giant white balloons, turning the building itself into a hot air balloon, symbolizing perhaps its journeyman history. And future. On a to-be-determined Sunday in early December, the storied house will be hoisted onto a truck and hauled 4.5 kilometres from Hollis […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Land grab
Nova Scotian Joan Baxter spent decades in Africa reporting for the BBC, CBC, AP and newspapers without acronyms. She’s written four books on the continent. For three years, she’s worked for a bevy of multi-faith organizations, visiting African farms and researching the 21st-century land grab, the biggest since colonialism. She’s now in Sierra Leone, which […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Outskirts wisdom
Sue Goyette, whose outskirts has won three significant poetry prizes this year, exhales pearls of wisdom like they’re commonplace. “I drive my kids crazy with this stuff,” she says when I tell her she speaks in verse. Goyette is an environmental poet. Not to pigeonhole her. By environment I mean our habitat, surroundings, home and […]
Posted inArts + Music
Rock Reject
Williams’ debut novel, winner of the inaugural Beacon Award for Social Justice Literature, packs a solid educational punch and boasts an engaging plot. In 1974 Peter, heartbroken and guilt ridden, flees his urban home and the unbearable pressures and perpetual disappointment of his successful perfectionist father, to be a grunt monkey in an asbestos mine […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Gottingen Street’s affordable housing crisis
Everyone agrees: too many low-income people can’t afford a decent home in Halifax. So how come housing activists, developers and governments aren’t producing new options? Part of the answer is that affordable housing is tossed like a hot potato between the province and city. But the province has initiated talks with the city to determine […]