Tim Bousquet

At last week’s council meeting, as council was setting its “priority” items for next year, police chief Jean-Michel Blais told council he had initiated discussions with the province in hopes of changing bar closing time. “Ideally,” Blais told The Coast in an interview, “I’d like to see everyone close at the same time, at two […]

Last week, the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia published its annual report card on homeless, timed to come out during the now annual Housing and Homelessness Conference. The report notes that in HRM in 2012, there were 1,880 people who stayed in a shelter, and staying a total of 66,154 shelter nights. About 10 […]

People involved in agencies that help and advocate for the homeless are good people, trying to make the world a better place, but they can get caught up in the inside baseball of the non-profit and social service agency world, employing buzzwords and acronyms at a head-spinning rate, sometimes losing the forest for the trees. […]

Halifax council voted 10-7 Tuesday to forgo its traditional weekly meeting schedule, and to instead to switch to meetings every other week. The change comes as a result of two processes that has reduced the number of items coming to regional council. The first is CAO Richard Butts’ determination to reduce the number of “politically […]

The grey seal is a political and social scapegoat, a convenient distraction from tackling the hard issues facing Canada’s fisheries, says award-winning journalist Linda Pannozzo. She details that argument in her new book, The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: An Investigation into the Scapegoating of Canada’s Grey Seal. Pannozzo began studying the seal issue […]

Halifax Water says it will be happy to process a Freedom of Information request filed by The Coast, so long as we pay a $5,220 processing fee. Effectively, the fee kills our effort to examine public records. At issue is the proposal to put a sewer pipe beneath the entire length of the 7.25 Chain […]

Blackberry announced last week that it is closing its HRM office, where 350 people work. A handful of the local workers will be offered the opportunity to work at home, said the company, but the vast majority have been given notice that January 10 is their last day. The company has been in a tail-spin […]

With more of the cart-before-horse planning process that has characterized the Halifax convention centre from the start, construction has started on the site, even though a final design for the project has yet to be officially approved. When Halifax council approved the HRM By Design planning policies for downtown in 2008, it specifically included a […]

Through 1868 and 1869, Stephen Martin Saxby, a lieutenant in the English navy, repeatedly warned that astronomical conditions would create exceptionally high tides on the upper reaches of the Bay of Fundy on October 5, 1869. “There will be time for the repair of unsafe sea walls,” wrote Saxby, but that warning was largely ignored. […]