Months after Transportation Canada said it would rescind its approval of a pyrite infilling project in Dartmouth Cove, Atlantic Road Construction and Paving Ltd. installed barriers blocking the nearby trails on Wednesday—a threat that ARCP will start work despite a lack of approval. It began with ARCP installing a safety fence. Later on Wednesday, […]
Opinion
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The Grand Parade podcast: Who wields the most power with Halifax’s Housing Accelerator Fund plans?
Some good news on Halifax’s housing front: Construction is booming across Nova Scotia—and the bulk of those new units underway are in the HRM. In the first three months of 2024, the province saw more housing starts—2,158 units—than in any other first quarter in its recorded history. It’s about time. Related Both Halifax and Nova […]
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The Grand Parade podcast: Halifax’s budget season is (almost) over. How did councillors perform?
Halifax council is one week away from approving its 2024/25 budget—a capital plan tasked with both guiding the HRM out of a $105-million shortfall and setting the course for a region on pace to reach 525,000 residents by the end of the year. On Tuesday, Apr. 23, 2024, councillors will review a revised budget that […]
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The Grand Parade podcast: HRM still not learning its lessons about road safety
Last October, Halifax’s Transportation Standing Committee had a lengthy discussion about road safety that, if recent history gives any indication, went rather poorly. It started with a presentation from the HRM’s director of traffic management, Lucas Pitts. Pitts told the committee that in 2022, Halifax’s streets saw 11 fatal crashes and 776 more that resulted […]
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We asked: How would you solve journalism in Canada?
Don’t become the story…don’t become the story….don’t become the story. This journalism-school adage for reporters feels as important as it is impossible to avoid amid yet another round of mass layoffs across the media industry. Earlier this month, Bell Media made the “garbage” decision of cutting 4,800 jobs across all levels of the company—the media […]
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Let’s have a look at Tim Houston’s worst verbal blunders as premier, shall we?
Never mess with a Cape Bretoner. That memo seemed to have missed Tim Houston’s office last week, when the Nova Scotia premier publicly pondered whether Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s choice to declare a state of emergency—one the region issued in the wake of historic snowfall that, quite literally, blocked some residents into their homes—was “just […]
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The Grand Parade podcast: It’s time for Halifax to ban drive-thrus for real
When former HRM councillor Richard Zurawski made a pitch for regional staff to explore banning drive-thrus in Halifax back in 2018, he was hoping for a different future from what we see today. At the time, the Timberlea-Beechville-Clayton Park-Wedgewood councillor and Green Party hopeful told his Environment and Sustainability Standing Committee peers he was “deeply […]
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The Grand Parade podcast: Two fixes for Halifax’s money problems
The New Year always comes with the worst hangovers, doesn’t it? When HRM council resumes on Tuesday, Jan. 9, Halifax’s councillors will be confronted once again with a thorny problem: How to dig the region out of a $68.7 million deficit that no-one on council seems to know how to wriggle out from under. (That […]
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8 ways to save money on heating this winter
We’ve had a milder mid-December with daytime highs reaching 13C and 11C earlier this week, but as the days churn on toward the coldest time of the year, there’s one thing on many Haligonians’ minds: Heating costs. The price of home heating oil has “never, never been this high,” Scotia Fuels general manager James Farquhar […]
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The Grand Parade podcast: How to fix the HRM’s road safety problems, starting today
Municipal engineer Paul Young has a vision for a “major behavioural change” within Halifax: Converting all urban speed limits in the HRM to 30 kilometres per hour. The reason? Not just to lower the likelihood of deadly collisions, which findings resoundingly show drop off significantly compared to 50km/h, but to cut back on things like […]
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The Grand Parade podcast: Should Halifax de-amalgamate?
In this week’s Grand Parade episode, Coast reporters Matt Stickland and Martin Bauman dive into the HRM’s Integrated Mobility Plan and what it secretly not-so-secretly suggests: Maybe Halifax would’ve been better off had the province not amalgamated the region in 1996? Matt fills Martin in on why John Lohr’s housing power play is a recipe […]
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The Grand Parade podcast: Here lies the Integrated Mobility Plan. It was nice while it lasted.
Remember the Integrated Mobility Plan—that vaunted guide that was meant to usher Halifax into a new era of transportation? The one where people could walk, wheelchair, bike or take the bus from their home and feel safe doing so? The same one that was meant to help the HRM slash its carbon output amid a […]