In late January 1994, Glenn Ells’ phone rang. It was newly-minted Nova Scotia premier John Savage. His officials had just returned from a checking-out-trade-prospects trip to Cuba, he explained to the president of Kings Produce Ltd., and “I think there might be something there for you.” Two years later, Ells’ Wolfville-based fruit and vegetable wholesale […]
Stephen Kimber
Posted inNews + Opinion
Building a better Mooseheads
I f you ask Bobby Smith to choose his “more rewarding experience”—winning the 2013 Memorial Cup championship as the up-in-the-stands owner of the Halifax Mooseheads major junior hockey team, or hoisting the 1986 Stanley Cup as an on-the-ice star with the legendary National Hockey League Montreal Canadiens—he answers surprisingly but without hesitation. “The Memorial Cup. […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Unbreakable Joan Jessome
Let’s start with a question: Is Joan Jessome the most hated woman in Nova Scotia? Google “Joan Jessome” and “hated,” and you’ll get 5,630 hits in less than a Google second. The top three results are news stories following the December 11, 2015, announcement she would be retiring as president of the Nova Scotia Government […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
How I helped the Cuban Five escape from a Cold War prison
Halifax: December 17, 2014 Inside the second-floor King’s College boardroom, close to a dozen of us huddled around a meeting table, wake-up coffees in hand, listening while our university’s director of finance walked us through her PowerPoint presentation of bad news we already knew, but in far more excruciating detail than any of us wanted […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
What happened: the creation tale
This newspaper you hold in your hands…the one whose weekly listings have long since become required reading for anyone in Halifax going anywhere at anytime to do anything; whose annual Best of Halifax plaques are sought-after cultural seals-of-approval for local businesses from restaurants to clothing boutiques to neighbourhood barber shops; whose commercial success has spawned […]
Posted inLifestyle
Making the Mooseheads
On Friday night, April 5, at the Metro Centre, the Halifax Mooseheads—the number-one-ranked team in all of Canadian junior hockey—begin the second round of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League Championships. The team steamrolled through the first, no-need-to-break-a-sweat, tune-up round, sweeping away the Saint John Sea Dogs in the minimum four games, outscoring their opponents […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Is Corey Wright the wrong man?
My blood is my ink / My tears are my tales / I did a couple years in jail / But I shall prevail —rhymes by Corey Wrght AKA Vinny Deniroz He smiled. Big smile. “What you doing after?” It was nudging four in the morning on Saturday, November 4, 2006, closing time at Rain, […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Celebrating our story (at last)
Shortly before 10pm on March 31, 2006, residents along the Old Birchtown Road near Shelburne reported seeing what looked like a white Pontiac Sunfire speeding away from the site of the one-storey wooden bungalow that housed the offices of Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalist Heritage Society. Within minutes of the car’s disappearance into the night, hot […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Tracey turns 19
“You’re wearing my sneakers.” The voice—hard, flat, insistent—is coming from behind us in the line at the A&W in the food court at Scotia Square. I turn to see who it is. She’s a big girl, probably in her late teens, blonde hair pulled back tight against her skull, a belligerent, don’t-fuck-with-me look permanent-markered onto […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Kimber: police chief’s explanation fails
Tom Martin had it wrong, Halifax Police Chief Frank Beazley told CBC Radio’s Information Morning on December 1. In my story for The Coast (November 19, 2009) on the city’s striking number of unsolved homicides, I’d quoted Martin, a respected retired homicide detective as saying: “To my knowledge, the cold case unit has not laid […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Dead Wrong: Halifax’s unsolved murders
OK, boys…Pack it up…Back to what you were doing…We’re done here… Tom Martin had known it was coming. Call it his experience or—perhaps, more to the point—his boss’s lack of experience. Whatever, Martin had guessed this morning’s outcome even before Bill Hollis, the staff sergeant in charge of major crimes, descended from the department’s executive […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The V-E Day sailor party
Halifax’s wildest-ever sailors’ celebration began at 5pm on May 7, 1945, when Admiral Leonard Murray unleashed 9,000 war-weary, ready-to-party sailors on a city that didn’t want them. City fathers had made that abundantly clear. The head of the provincial liquor commission closed all its outlets until further notice in order to keep—or so he thought— […]