News

In Saving Private Ryan, the 1998 World War II film starring Tom Hanks, there is a scene with a sniper. It starts off simply enough: Hanks and his squad enter a French village, where they find a family with children in a bombed-out house. The family begs the soldiers to take the kids out of […]

On Wednesday, December 18, the Board of Police Commissioners met to discuss the police budgets for the next fiscal year. Unlike the municipality’s other business units, Halifax’s police departments get extra budget scrutiny. Also, unlike other municipal business units, the police have been the subject of not one, not two, but three massive reports about […]

Blink and you’d have missed it, but a routine community council vote—passed with little fanfare—might be heralding a new era of bureaucratic nimbleness. It happened at the Halifax and West Community Council meeting on Dec 16. The owner of 918 South Bland Street wants to put a secondary suite in his back yard, which—on the […]

The Community Planning and Economic Development standing committee met Dec 12 and talked about lights in parks. This conversation dates back to 2021, when councillor Sam Austin put forward a motion asking for the city to come up with a plan to light municipal parks, because not having lights made people feel unsafe and not […]

  After an exciting off-season in which we decided to change up our roster at City Hall, the moment we’ve all been waiting for is here. That’s right, we’re talking budget season! For those who need an introduction or refresher, budget season is the planning period of months from now to April 2025 when the […]

In 2023, the provincial and federal governments put together a group called the Progress Monitoring Committee. Chaired by former Nova Scotia lieutenant-governor Myra Freeman, the PMC was an oversight panel, a way to monitor, report on, provide accountability and exchange knowledge and information as the governments implement a response to Turning the Tide Together, the […]

In June 2022, Sunny Marriner from the Improving Institutional Accountability Project posed a question to Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners: If women who’ve been sexually assaulted aren’t coming forward to the police, and even when they do, there’s very rarely a conviction. Shouldn’t we try to figure out why? She made her case when she […]

On December 27, 2005—still in the warm glow of Christmas and one week from her daughter Anna’s first birthday—36-year-old Paula Gallant was violently murdered. Her lifeless body was put in the trunk of her car and driven to the parking lot of the elementary school where she taught Grade 3. The crime shocked the community […]

Tuesday’s council meeting was dominated by old business being rehashed by new mayor Andy Fillmore. Last council meeting, Fillmore caused a procedural kerfuffle when he put forward a motion to rescind Halifax’s list of potential encampment sites without a staff report. Since Fillmore’s motion did not have a staff report, it was deferred to the […]

  This Friday, Dec 6 marks the 30th annual National Day of Remembrance & Action on Violence Against Women. It will also be the 35th anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre. Activist groups are holding events across the city that day in remembrance of the 14 women who were killed during the Polytechnique mass shooting, […]