News

A couple of months ago, Halifax council was considering entering into a contract with a vendor to provide some service or another—I forget the particulars. But one of the councillors wanted to discuss it, a request that threw top bureaucrat Dan English into a logical conundrum. “This is a contractual matter, which should be discussed […]

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If all goes according to plan, downtown Halifax will be rebuilt as a Shangri-La on the Atlantic, with attractive buildings constructed on a human scale along pedestrian-friendly corridors leading to parks on the waterfront. People will live and work and play downtown in celebratory exultation, sidewalk cafes will flourish, puppy dogs will be petted, babies […]

Commonwealth Games? “No one wants to hear about that anymore,” a city councillor told me Tuesday. Okay, I’ll set it aside for a bit, and let’s talk about abandoned railroad lines instead. In June, CN announced that it was giving up the Chester Spur line, which stretches from Fairview through the Bayers Lake Industrial Park […]

Halifax councillor Gary Martin was well known for his non-stop work habits. Back in 2002, Coast editor Kyle Shaw wrote of Martin’s new job as coordinator of the city’s community response initiative: “Gary Martin answers his phone. He takes calls over lunch, he phones people back after 5pm. Martin is skilled at dealing with the […]

Founders Corner, yet another condo development going into downtown Dartmouth, sells itself as being “Smart & Green,” and the developer of the project, Nova New England of Dartmouth, uses its website to celebrate an efficient heating and hot water system. But while saving on heating bills certainly makes good business sense, the building doesn’t strike […]

The Daily News is no more. This morning at 10 am, some 85 employees of the Daily News were gathered together for a meeting with representatives from Transcontinental Media, corporate owner of the paper, and told they no longer had a job. The news came as a complete surprise, leaving the employees wondering how to […]

One of my favourite places in Halifax is the Holy Cross Cemetery at South and South Park Streets. Its terrain, with unexpected swales and depressions and interesting hillocks, is a snapshot of what the entire peninsula must have looked like before Europeans showed up and started scraping off the highlands to fill in the gullies, […]

Sure, news of King’s College’s so-called “beer class” has made the Washington Post and all the other big-name fancy-smancy international media outlets, but only one reporter is actually attending the class, taking notes from a chair at the back of the room. Read The Coast blog, thecoast.ca.

“Early bird” tix are on sale for Keith Urban’s concert on the Common this summer—just 89 bucks or $219 for VIP seats. Concert rules prohibit umbrellas and strollers and no food unless you’ve got a doctor’s note for it. You’re allowed to bring “one fold-up bag-style chair” per person, which I note merely to lamely […]

Speaking of human rights, there’s a relatively new (started in August) local group called the James McGregor Stewart Society, advocating for accessibility throughout the region. 
 Stewart was a Pictou boy whose stellar academic record brought him to Dalhousie University, where he was a potential candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship reserved for a Dal student. […]

February is African Heritage Month, and celebratory events are scheduled locally nearly every day through the month. The focus of most of the events is rightly on the broad range and depth of African-Canadian culture and history, which, however, necessarily includes discussion of the historic wrongs done to African-Nova Scotians. 
 Halifax has a troubled […]