When Tyler Morton was growing up in Uniacke Square in the ’90s, he knew the neighbourhood’s “bad guys,” including its drug dealers. Sometimes, he says, they’d offer him money to—wait for it—go to school. Or threaten to beat him up if he didn’t. At the time, he says he thought they were picking on him; […]
Stephen Kimber
Posted inNews + Opinion
The last best hope
Tom Martin wasn’t “full.” Not yet. He could still remember what Frank Hoskins, Sr., the legendary Halifax cop, used to tell the younger guys: No matter how much you love this job, he’d say, one day you’re gonna wake up and know you’re full. The first time Frank had said that, Martin was just a […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
A dream deferred
Irvine Carvery has reason to be cautious. And he is. But he could be cynical too. And he isn’t. Since 1976, when the birth of his first son taught him the “true meaning of Africville,” Carvery has been on a seemingly doomed quest. He wants the City of Halifax to acknowledge it screwed up in […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Theodore’s struggles
Andrew Cochran and I are sitting in a Halifax coffee shop. He’s moving my Olympus mini-recorder and his bottle of Dasani water around the table top—sort of like play ships sailing on a play harbour—to explain some otherwise inexplicable concept of intellectual property law. He’s already told me a recent study by the Law Commission […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The contender?
“Got it!” the young woman announces triumphantly as she breezes back into the NDP’s storefront office off Wolfville’s main drag, holding aloft a roll of inch-wide orange ribbon. “Told you,” King’s South candidate David Mangle says to no one in particular. “Anything you need you can get at the Home Hardware.” It’s 4:25 on a […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The trials of Dr. Horne
Her first “light-bulb moment” occurred sometime on a Friday morning in the spring of 1999, probably in the stairwell between her tiny, windowless office on the second floor of the new Halifax Infirmary and the hospital’s Heart Function Clinic two flights up. Dr. Gabrielle Horne was on call at the clinic that morning—the nurses would […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Table manners
Get it out of the way early. You probably already have an opinion about Douglas Sparks, and it almost certainly isn’t good. That’s OK. Get in line. In January, Sparks, the Halifax Regional School Board’s African-Nova Scotian member, transformed what one newspaper reporter described as a “seemingly innocuous motion” to change the order of seating […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Paying for power
There are things we know about Rodney MacDonald, the man who will be our next premier. He is 34 years old, the second youngest man in Nova Scotia history to hold that office. When he is sworn in next week, he will be the youngest premier in the country. We also know he is a […]