Tim Bousquet

Voters have given the Nova Scotia Liberal Party a majority government, sending the NDP packing. With leader Stephen McNeil at the helm, the Liberals took 33 seats. Jamie Baillie’s Progressive Conservative Party won 11 seats and status as the official opposition in the new government. The Darrell Dexter-led NDP is left with just seven seats. […]

The Liberals and PCs have “unequivocally” committed themselves to three specific recommendations for improving Nova Scotia’s freedom of information law and process, while the NDP has “rejected all three, arguing, against all the evidence, that there was no need for these reforms,” says the organization that made the recommendations. Last month, the Centre for Law […]

One characteristic of the Chain of Lakes Trail sewage issue is that accurate reporting by The Coast is characterized as inaccurate by the people we have been reporting on. We first saw this in August, when I reported that the entire $20-to-25 million cost of the sewage project would be financed by Halifax Water ratepayers. […]

The Centre for Law and Democracy has published its most recent report, which reviews Nova Scotia’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, and the results, while not at all surprising, are also not at all good. Says CLD: The RTI Rating, a comparative system for assessing right to information laws developed by Centre […]

Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Newcombe as the former president at ISI. His actual title was senior project manager. The Irving family is continuing its long tradition of heavy-handed legal attacks on former employees. Last week, one division of the billionaire family’s holdings, Irving Shipyards Incorporated, which runs the Halifax […]

The city has lost a half a million dollars over five years in ticket revenue at the Metro Centre. The loss is identified in an audit performed by accounting firm Grant Thornton. Since the 1980s, the city has contracted with provincial crown corporation Trade Centre Limited to manage the Metro Centre, which is a city-owned […]

Nova Scotians will be going to the polls. Premier Darrell Dexter formally asked lieutenant governor J.J. Grant to dissolve the assembly Saturday, an action that will lead to an October 8 election. The election will largely be a referendum on the performance of Dexter’s NDP government. That party won power in 2009, in the wake […]

Saint Mary’s University isn’t the only Canadian university that has a rape chant. The now-infamous “N is for No consent” chant has been “going on for many years” at the Sauder School of Business at UBC, reports The Ubyssey, the school’s student newspaper, albeit at UBC the last line was “Go to jail” as opposed […]

Editor’s note: the rape chant story is updated, here. The cluelessness of it is exceeded only by its ugliness. Yesterday, 80 student “leaders” at Saint Mary’s University led 300-to-400 newly arriving students in a chant advocating rape: “Y is for Your little sister, O is for Oh so tight, U is for Underage, N is […]

Trade Centre Limited’s preferred vendor policy is harming small and locally owned companies, says the owner of a Halifax audio visual company. Bruce DeMond is owner of Advanced Systems, a Halifax firm that primarily provides sound and multi-media equipment for conferences and meetings. He says he has annual sales of about a million dollars a […]

Halifax mayor Mike Savage will give peace a chance. Soon after he was elected, Savage told The Coast that he was “open to” joining Mayors For Peace, the international movement that has mayors symbolically declare their cities nuclear-free zones. Now, says Savage, he’s ready to fulfill that pledge. Mayors For Peace was started in 1982 […]