Dec 4-31, 2023

Dec 4-31, 2023 / Vol. 29 / No. 30

Meet the Halifax couple who kayaked 400 kms from the city’s north end to Cape Breton

Four words have been etched in marker on a whiteboard in Noah Booth’s Halifax basement for years: Kayak the Eastern Shore. The words were there, scrawled in black, long before the 32-year-old geologist ever tried sea kayaking—never mind a 15-day ocean voyage. They were there longer still before Booth and his partner, Rachyl MacPhail, started…

by Martin Bauman

School’s out for the year! Should Halifax get an “L” in school infrastructure in 2023?

Don’t shoot the messenger, but school’s back in session Tuesday. Before we say goodbye to 2023, let’s gaze back longingly into the halls of learning and growing that got us through another year, bidding farewell to schools that closed and welcoming in ones that opened. So, how did 2023 balance out? According to the Department…

by Lauren Phillips, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Halifax’s police board presents accountability theatre

In much the same way an elementary school puts on a holiday show to end the year, Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners used its last meeting before the holidays for a bit of theatre. At its Dec. 13 meeting, the board got a pitch from the RCMP about its recommendation of approximately $1.1 million in…

by Matt Stickland

Halifax’s 2023 in sports was an absolute whirlwind

You didn’t have to look far for good sports headlines in Halifax in 2023. Unlike some years, in which the silver linings could be as flimsy and brittle as your Christmas tree’s needles in mid-January, they seemed to be everywhere this year. Behold, a World Junior triumph. A historic Mooseheads season. A night to remember,…

by Martin Bauman

Everything you need to know about HRM council’s Dec. 12 meeting

Halifax’s budget pre-season is in the books, and reading the tea leaves, it is wildly unclear what the future will hold. (More on that in the Notable Debates section below.) This meeting was quite quotable as various councillors started coming to terms with the realities of the society we built. Councillor Pam Lovelace said homes…

by Matt Stickland

The Grand Parade podcast: Where did Halifax’s budget crunch come from?

Halifax councillors have a choice to make, and neither option will leave them looking good: They can either opt to raise property taxes to cover a $68.7 million shortfall—a move council seems especially reluctant to do—or they can cut a mix of programs, services and capital projects from a growing list of the region’s needs.…

by Martin Bauman and Matt Stickland

Ring in 2024 with these New Year’s Eve events

Well folks, another year is coming to an end but there’s still one decision left to make, how will you be saying goodbye to 2023? Luckily The Coast is here to help your planning. From comedy shows to concerts and every party in between, choose how you want to ring in 2024 with this guide…

by Alyssa Goulart

6 books by Nova Scotia authors you need on your end-of-year reading lists

There’s a well-loved equation among bicycle enthusiasts that answers how many bikes a person should own: n+1, where the variable “n” is however many bikes you already have. Book lovers will know the same rule applies to the printed page—except the n, in this case, can also extend to however many books you currently have…

by Martin Bauman

The Wanderer Grounds podcast: A Christmas Extravaganza

The Halifax Wanderers were a gift to watch in 2023: After two straight years of missed playoff appearances and MVP runs cut short by injury, the Canadian Premier League soccer club won back the hearts of its supporters with fluid football, a roster loaded with more talent than ever before and a slew of instant…

by Martin Bauman and Matt Stickland

Daring to question city hall’s new-car habit

During the HRM’s final budget preseason meeting, on December 12, councillor Trish Purdy caught a lot of stick. Tuesday’s budget meeting was the Capital Updates and Advance Tenders meeting. The capital update is bleak: We need a lot of capital projects—arenas, libraries, fire stations and the like—but we have no money. We have no money…

by Matt Stickland

Propeller Arcade’s holiday telethon is just the feel-good thing for your weekend

Andrew Neville wears a lot of hats—poet, musician, This Hour Has 22 Minutes researcher and erstwhile podcast co-host, for starters—but he might never have worn a hat quite like this one. This Saturday, Dec. 16, he’ll be co-running the first-ever Propeller Arcade Family Christmas, a telethon-style fundraiser with a lineup of performers that sounds about…

by Martin Bauman

Halifax team brings university learning to people behind bars

What is anti-oppressive education? “It begins with the idea that education is a right for all,” says El Jones, an assistant professor at Mount St. Vincent University–MSVU–a spoken word poet, a writer, a journalist, and a community activist whose work focuses on feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism and decolonization. “Everybody has the capacity for education, and…

by Lauren Phillips, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

7 targets for the Halifax Wanderers’ 2024 roster additions

The Halifax Wanderers will enter 2024 with an unfamiliar feeling: Promise. Five years into the Canadian Premier League soccer club’s existence—one that, for much of its history, could be summarized as unfulfilled—there’s a newfound sense of hope around the club’s potential. Expectation, even. In Patrice Gheisar’s first season as head coach, the Wanderers finished with…

by Martin Bauman

A massive Blue Jay meets an Icelandic hotspot in Halifax Harbour this week—sort of

Sports fandom is a funny thing: Utterly miserable, and yet—for the afflicted—impossible to live without. Fans of the Toronto Blue Jays were reminded of that this past week. If you were near a sports radio station on Friday, or refreshing your Twitter feed, you’ll have stumbled across the half-million half-baked theories and threads of misinformation…

by Martin Bauman

Ask the Hole your questions and the Hole shall provide

Don’t worry. Ask Hole has you covered, once again. The Coast sat down with our historic and illustrious advice-giver who ran a monthly column in The Coast, in 2017. As a holiday treat, join Ask Hole for another dip in the anonymous Q and A pond as Hole answers a couple of readers’ questions during…

by Lauren Phillips, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

“History will not be kind to us” warns councillor

There is a growing disconnect between what our governments think is progress and what we think is progress. Nowhere is that more evident than in municipal committee meetings, especially with old-school progressives. There is a mindset common in an older generation of progressives whereby incremental action towards the right thing is, or should be, celebrated…

by Matt Stickland

Why can’t Nova Scotia phase out of fossil fuels faster?

Amid the dizzying displays of oil wealth and lofty visions of AI’s potential to save the planet at the United Nations-led global climate summit (COP28) happening now in Dubai, one neon-emblazoned sign stood out for its brutal honesty: “Act as if your house is on fire,” the conference pavilion display read, “because it is.” The…

by Martin Bauman

Rolling the dice on the coast

There are so many similarities between visiting coastal areas and playing in casinos. Take relaxation as an example. Many people travel to water bodies just to gaze at the water and experience the refreshing feelings that overwhelm them from being next to a water body. In the same way, playing casino games helps you lose…

Content by Lidia Moore

Stop the build on new French-language school on the peninsula, says suspended school board member

Parents of Francophone children on the Halifax peninsula face a bleak reality: switch their kids out of French schools before Grade 10 in order to assimilate them into English schools, or send them on a bus to the nearest French high school–l’École secondaire Mosaïque in Burnside. Frustration has reached a boiling point over years drawn…

by Lauren Phillips, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The Grand Parade podcast: How HRM council might just have radically changed budgets for the better

It would be natural to think that Halifax’s five-year Strategic Priorities Plan, a vision set forth to clearly identify HRM council’s priorities—things like a “prosperous economy” with “safe, inclusive and affordable communities” and a “sustainable mobility network”—would have a bearing on how the region determines its annual budget. (Why else call them priorities?) But in…

by Martin Bauman and Matt Stickland

A giant load of cars and one enormous container ship arrive in Halifax Harbour this week

One hundred and six years ago, on the morning of Dec. 6, 1917, Halifax was forever changed. That morning, the SS Mont-Blanc cargo ship collided with the SS Imo steamship in Halifax Harbour—an incident that would have posed a problem for those aboard the two ships, no matter the circumstances, but was made catastrophic by…

by Martin Bauman

How close is the Halifax Wanderers women’s soccer team to a reality?

Charlottetown’s Sarah Eden has dreams of playing professional soccer. The fourth-year central midfielder for the UPEI Panthers has grown up idolizing Canadian national team midfielder Jessie Fleming, imagining what it would be like to suit up for the likes of soccer giant Chelsea FC—or maybe Hollywood-owned Wrexham AFC, “because of Ryan Reynolds, of course,” she…

by Martin Bauman

Will $1.4 million fix the police scheduling problem?

Halifax Regional Police’s acting chief Don MacLean has a scheduling problem. It’s a big scheduling problem. A $1.4 million scheduling problem. But it can’t be fixed by the $1.4 million Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners is recommending council give him, a decision the board made at its Nov. 29 meeting, the culmination of a series…

by Matt Stickland

Best of Halifax 2023 Readers’ Choice Awards winners

We’ve been doing this for 29 years, The Coast and the people of Halifax working together to create the city’s biggest spotlight. The Coast has the easy job—hosting the Best of Halifax survey, counting the votes, having the honour of presenting the results. It’s you (or if not actually you, thousands and thousands of Coast…

by Kyle Shaw

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Dec 4-31, 2023