The Office of the Auditor General has agreed to investigate last month’s breach of Nova Scotia’s FOIPOP website, after a request for help from the province. In a letter asking for the aid of auditor general Michael Pickup, Internal Services minister Patricia Arab writes that the province would “greatly benefit” from the OAG’s support. “As […]
Jacob Boon
Posted inArts + Music
Afua Cooper is Halifax’s new poet laureate
The municipality’s next poet laureate has no shortage of work experience. Afua Cooper, best-selling author and one of the country’s most celebrated voices of Black Canadian history, is now Halifax’s poet-in-residence. “Poetry brings people together,” Cooper writes in a press release announcing the news. “It is my honour to serve as the municipality’s poetry ambassador.” […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Nova Scotia’s FOIPOP site won’t be back online anytime soon
Nova Scotians filing a Freedom of Information request will have to do so with pen and paper for the foreseeable future. The province’s defective Access to Information portal is still offline, and provincial spokesperson Brian Taylor says there’s no estimate of when the site will be back up and running. The page was taken down […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
UPDATED: Tory leadership candidate worries weed will make Nova Scotians lazy like Jamaicans
Another Update: Adams has also now apologized for her remarks, writing on Facebook that she travelled to a tiny village in Africa on a medical mission and is “so sorry I generalized the state of their industry.” Smith-McCrossin has also expanded on her original apology: “I am not as knowledgeable about racism as I should […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Police desperately need new headquarters
There’s little question Halifax Regional Police need a new base of operations, but where it’ll be located and how much it’ll cost are questions still being worked out. An update on HRP’s new facilities plan was presented to the Board of Police Commissioners on Tuesday afternoon, detailing options for consolidating and improving the department’s undersized, […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Plenty to protest as Trudeau comes to Halifax (again)
From pipelines to airstrikes, Justin Trudeau will arrive in Halifax later this week still dealing with the fallout from a week of controversial political decisions. The prime minister will join hundreds of other Party faithful attending the Liberal’s national convention, which takes place Thursday through Saturday at the newly opened and already burdensome Halifax Convention Centre. Trudeau […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Province was warned about sloppy database security over a year ago
The government’s cozy and “highly-dependent” relationship with systems service provider Unisys opened up some big holes in Nova Scotia’s IT security. So says a damning auditor general report from 2016 conducted on the same database system used for Nova Scotia’s recently breached Freedom of Information web portal. The purpose of the audit was to investigate […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Council stuck with Convention Centre quagmire
City council is finally coming around to the notion that the Halifax Convention Centre might not be the boffo moneymaker that was promised. Halifax’s elected leaders begrudgingly voted on Tuesday to pay an additional $301,500 in marketing costs the province claims we owe for setting up downtown’s new crown jewel. The city also agreed to […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Province just sort of stumbles across massive data breach
With minimal effort, it appears a Halifax teenager was able to download 7,000 confidential documents containing personal information on thousands of Nova Scotians—and the government only found out about it by accident. At a press conference Wednesday, deputy minister of Internal Services Jeff Conrad described how an unauthorized user had—over two days in March—accessed private […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Glut of office space disastrous for Halifax Convention Centre financials
The Halifax Convention Centre just opened its doors and it’s already costing the city far more than initial estimates. New financial figures are projecting that a planned $1.8-million shortfall in the city’s HCC reserve fund has now nearly doubled to $3.5-million. Worse still, a projected $6-million surplus after 10 years of convention centre operations has […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Matt Whitman has a media sensitivity problem
City councillor Matt Whitman says he should have been explicitly warned that his conversation with a CBC reporter was on the record, but the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s ombudsman disagrees. Whitman submitted an official complaint to CBC’s ombudsman back in February after a phone interview with journalist Emma Davie about his retweet of a white supremacist […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Council looks at options for curbing “driveway spam”
Halifax wants to install some real-life spam filters for unwanted flyer deliveries. On Thursday HRM’s Environment and Sustainability committee approved a staff recommendation to strengthen regulations on how printed commercial advertisements can be distributed to the city’s doorsteps. The motion—which still needs final approval from Regional Council—would create a new bylaw banning bagged commercial leaflets […]