According to the province’s count, we are currently in the seventh wave of COVID infections. The first started March 1, 2020, with the earliest known cases in Nova Scotia announced March 15. The pandemic’s omicron era arrived in Nova Scotia on December 8, 2021, making Thursday the first omicronniversary. It’s been a year marked by […]
Kyle Shaw
Loving the arrival of this mysterious climate event people are calling "spring".
Kyle was a founding member of the newspaper in 1993 and was the paper’s first publisher. Kyle occasionally teaches creative nonfiction writing (think magazine-style #longreads) and copy editing at the University of King’s College School of Journalism.
Posted inNews + Opinion
How rising hospital admissions hint at a COVID surge in Nova Scotia
Update December 8: The new provincial COVID numbers came out today, and cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all back down. To find out more about the threat of a winter surge, we got on the phone with Dr. Robert Strang, who thinks Nova Scotia is in a good place right now with the disease. “What […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
RCMP leader ridicules officers after Portapique
Say what you like about the Mass Casualty Commission—call it expensive, disrespectful or a let down—you can’t deny there’s a lot to read on the commission website. And at the end of October, another 2,000 or so documents were made public, adding to the pile of statements, decisions, transcripts, foundational documents and such related to […]
Posted inArts + Music
Jimmy Rankin has a Christmas present for you
With two months to go until Christmas, Sonic Concerts is marking the occasion by announcing a Jimmy Rankin concert in Halifax on November 25, one month before the big Christian holiday. Called Warming Up For Winter, the show will have plenty of seasonal songs from Rankin’s repertoire—his Christmas-themed album Tinsel Town came out in 2012—as […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Watch Dalhousie’s Homecoming party end with police putting out a bonfire
As surely as Dalhousie University warns its students not to have “unsanctioned street parties” at this time of year, hordes of young people wearing Dal shirts gather for the annual Homecoming party in the residential neighbourhood just north of Dal’s Studley campus. HoCo 2022 started on Jennings Street, with public drinking—and urination—happening under the watchful […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The past is present on the Juanniversary
Hurricane Juan made landfall around Peggys Cove, west of the city’s core by about 40km, on September 28, 2003, wreaking havoc on trees, buildings and power lines. That was 19 years ago, but it might as well have been today. When this Juanniversary Wednesday began, more than 100,000 people were still without power in the […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Dal slides HoCo no-no into warm fuzzy Fiona memo
Dalhousie University president Deep Saini was busy Wednesday morning sending out good vibes and thank yous. In a Twitter thread, he put out a touching message about Dal’s resilience through both storm and plague : “We pulled together through the pandemic, and are pulling together after Fiona. It’s a true characteristic trait of our Dal […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Nova Scotians rate Tim Houston one year after his big election win
The election that brought Tim Houston to power as premier of Nova Scotia was a year ago—August 17, 2021. To mark the occasion, we asked readers of The Coast Daily email newsletter to share their thoughts on Houston’s performance. And readers obliged, sending in dozens and dozens of emails. Three main themes emerged from this […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
“There will be some people that die from COVID”
Monday morning at 8:30, the province sent an email to media organizations advising that Dr. Robert Strang would be holding a virtual press conference at 1pm “to answer questions about COVID-19.” My first thought was that Nova Scotia’s chief medical officer of health wanted to talk about the BA4 and BA5 virus variants that are […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Breaking down the dismal statistics on sexual assault
The Coast recently reported on a presentation that Sunny Marriner gave to Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners. Marriner is an expert on sexual violence and the justice system, and has become an advocate for something known as VACR—violence against women advocate case review. VACR is a way of analyzing how sexual assaults are treated in […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
We’ve never had a deadlier COVID week and Tim Houston doesn’t seem to care
The deadliest, and most confusing, phase of Nova Scotia’s pandemic began two months ago on March 21, the day premier Tim Houston removed almost all public health restrictions around masking, distancing and gathering. This was Houston’s “Mission accomplished” moment, acting as if COVID was over and we could finally get back to normal, even though […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Nova Scotia’s deadliest pandemic phase continues even as COVID numbers drop
Cherished reader, we owe you an apology. Last week, after the province’s May 5 COVID numbers came out, we wrote a report about them for The Coast Daily newsletter but didn’t publish any information here at thecoast.ca. One moral to this story is that you should subscribe to the Daily to make sure you get […]