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Ready for a vacation to Cuba? Transat is ready for you
White, sandy beaches, crystal blue waters and clear sunny skies shouldn’t just be dreams that follow you to your work desk all winter—with Transat, they don’t have to be. As one of Canada’s largest tour operators, Transat is currently offering all-inclusive packages this winter in some of the most striking locations in Cuba—Varadero, Holguin, Cayo…
“We don’t want any more money being slicked with oil”
On Wednesday, Mar. 27, roughly 45 students marched through Dalhousie’s campus raising signs reading “Fossil Free Degree,”and “Net Zero by 2040,” from the Student Union Building to the office of Dal’s president, Kim Brooks. Says student campaign organizer Caitlin Lawrence, “we extended a formal invitation to President Kim Brooks but she did not attend or…
Everything you need to know about HRM council’s March 26, 2024 meeting
At this week’s regular Tuesday meeting of city council, multiple councillors wore purple shirts to bring attention to epilepsy. Purple Shirt Day was started in 2009 by a Nova Scotian named Cassidy Megan, who wanted to raise awareness about people living with epilepsy and the challenges they face. It’s a good thing the purple shirt…
The many faces of Hawksley Workman
Hawksley Workman was strung out. It was the early 2000s, and the JUNO Award-winner was hanging onto the twilight of a dizzying—and destructive—period he describes as being “briefly famous” in France. There were tabloid and magazine photo spreads. Television ads with soccer star Zinedine Zidane backed by his music. Shows with Morrissey and Franz Ferdinand.…
King’s invites Jewish and Palestinian co-authors to campus for open discussion with students
On Thursday evening, Mar. 21, three University of King’s College students stayed outside the largest lecture hall on campus discussing what they’d just heard. It was dark and tempestuous outside. At that hour, very few people were moving around the school. In a corner by a window and an exit door, they stood together in…
Halifax Transit planning for a ridership decrease
We’re still in the Budget Season doldrums, the weeks between the end of city council’s regular season of budget debates and the start of playoffs, when the Budget Adjustment List is finalized. So it’s a great time to catch up on a vital piece of budget business that The Coast didn’t fully get into at…
Matchstick Theatre’s Leaving Home is a fresh spin on a Canadian classic
Jake Planinc has been dreaming of this moment for 10 years. Ever since the Matchstick Theatre artistic director picked up David French’s Leaving Home as an undergrad at Mount Allison University, he’s thought of ways to stage it. How the lighting would look; how the script—which follows the Mercer family on one fateful day in…
10,000 teachers will take strike vote April 11 as ‘wake-up call’ to province to reach a fair contract
There are roughly 10,000 teachers in Nova Scotia taking a vote on April 11 on whether or not to strike. The Nova Scotia Teachers Union is negotiating a new collective agreement with their employer—the minister of education and early childhood development—since their old agreement expired Aug. 1, 2023. Bargaining teams for the NSTU and the…
Pit sweat and drug checks: Dispatches from the JUNO Red Carpet
On second thought, the double-helping of afternoon coffee might’ve been a bad idea. They don’t warn you, upon arriving at the press check-in for the JUNO Awards, that you’re better off arriving with an empty bladder. Or a catheter. Either one, really. Beautiful people in immaculate outfits? The JUNOs has plenty of them. Politicians preening…
The Wanderer Grounds podcast: Where does Halifax fall in the CPL’s pre-season power rankings?
Pre-season in sports is a strange and wonderful time. Like the week after New Year’s Day, it’s the one time of year—maybe the only time—that we give ourselves the grace of a blank slate. The detritus of a team’s past—the wins, the losses, the squandered points, the last-minute heartbreaks—is wiped clean, and for however brief…
Everything you need to know about HRM’s March 19 council meeting
Halifax’s budget season is in the break between the normal budget debates and the budget playoffs (the Budget Adjustment List debates), so council got back to normal business this week in a relatively quick city council meeting. So without further ado, here’s what happened at the Tuesday, March 19 council meeting. Things that passed The…
Halifax punk rockers Customer Service spearhead relief concert for unhoused Haligonians
Owen Harris and his bandmates knew they wanted to do something when they saw the HRM had cleared out and fenced off the Grand Parade tent encampment. Raised in Halifax, the Customer Service drummer had watched the city’s housing crisis turn “very severe” in recent years as the province grew and struggled to keep pace…
The Coast’s guide to all the JUNO Week events in Halifax
When Nelly Furtado steps onto the Scotiabank Centre stage to host the 2024 JUNO Awards this Sunday, Mar. 24, it will mark a big moment for Halifax: The first time since 2006 that Nova Scotia—or any part of the Maritimes, for that matter—has hosted the annual awards ceremony, and the first time since 2010 that…
‘I don’t think anyone should graduate from university with any degree and not learn this stuff,’ says Indigenous Peoples and Media prof
On your way up the staircase towards the journalism school, on the third floor at the University of King’s College, you pass a poster on the wall that’s larger than you. There are more of these across campus, but this one focuses on what’s through the doors at the top of the stairs. It’s Call…
A new speed limit exposes design failures
The roads of Downtown Dartmouth just got official recognition that they’re a bit safer for everyone than the HRM’s standard street. This is a result of the city successfully petitioning the provincial government to lower the speed limit in Dartmouth’s downtown core. The provincial government was happy to reduce the posted speed from 50kmh to…
Aysanabee’s long, winding and wild road to the JUNOs
Aysanabee was snowshoeing across a river in below-40-degree weather when he broke through the ice. He was working in the far reaches of Northern Ontario at the time. His job was to stake claims on land that could be mined. The then-teenaged musician would travel by bush plane and snowmobile with an axe. It was…
‘Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t,’ says panelist at Black women in politics event
On Wednesday evening, the Black Cultural Centre was filled with buffet tables of food and rows of chairs facing a long table with six microphones. The table of panelists wore their political bona fides with grace and power–all six are Black Nova Scotian women who work, or worked, in politics and community advocacy. They’re here…
EXCERPT: Martin Bauman’s Hell of a Ride wades into depression, family legacy and cycling across Canada
Writers and alt-weeklies, it goes without saying, have a bit of a co-dependency arrangement. One cannot exist without the other. (May it always be so.) And best believe that in 30 years of telling Halifax’s stories, The Coast has had its share of writers. That includes writers who have gone on to produce books, films,…
HRM clears out Grand Parade tent encampment amid calls for better shelter options
Update: In a statement released on Thursday, Mar. 14, the HRM says the Grand Parade is now vacant. The municipality adds that “the one remaining individual” who had remained at the public square earlier in the week “accepted an indoor housing option from the Province of Nova Scotia” on the evening of Mar. 13. The…
Emily Wilson wants you to read Homer
Emily Wilson is bowing her upper body to the sea goddess Thetis, mother of the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles. Facing her is a packed lecture hall at the University of King’s College, where Wilson is giving this year’s Alex Fountain Memorial Lecture Wednesday Mar. 6. She sports a golden brooch of a hippocampus—a Greek mythological sea-horse—to…
Alana Yorke’s Destroyer got her through trauma recovery. And then a stroke, too.
Alana Yorke ran out of air. Years before the Mount Uniacke musician debuted the art-pop Dream Magic—an album The Coast hailed upon its 2015 release as “vast and otherworldly”—she was a graduate student at Dalhousie researching underwater invertebrates. The work involved scuba diving. She’d been collecting samples at the end of a long day when…
Back to school at MSVU
Students returned to class at Mount Saint Vincent University on Thursday, Mar. 7 after faculty settled their three-plus week strike on Tuesday. The largest union at MSVU—representing 160 full-time faculty, lab technicians and librarians—returned to work on Wednesday, a day before students. But everyone had to wait until Friday evening, after the school’s senate met…
Nova Scotia’s forests actually generate carbon now
Halifax’s Environment and Sustainability Standing Committee had a sobering meeting on Thursday, Mar. 7 about the work required to prevent the dire future currently in store for humanity. First on the agenda was a presentation from Donna Crossland, who’s been working to prevent the spread of the hemlock woolly adelgid in Nova Scotia. This invasive…
How a Dartmouth speed change exposes HRM council’s political failures…
Will be live tomorrow. If you are seeing this, you’ve followed a newsletter link that wasn’t working. This will be fixed in time for tomorrow’s newsletter, but we’ve had some St. Patrick’s weekend scheduling issues.
Building for the future in Halifax
As housing providers in Halifax look for ways to meet the city’s housing crisis, some are turning to green building practices. In addition to renewable energy from sources like rooftop solar, passive design principles—which include extra insulation, airtight construction, triple-paned windows and strategic building siting—help create low- or no-emission buildings. But two non-profit housing providers…
Good news for MSVU students as union votes ‘Yes’ on tentative agreement with employer
Update March 5: After this story was published, the Mount Saint Vincent University Faculty Association released a statement that answers one of the story’s key unknowns: Classes at The Mount are starting up again on Thursday, Mar. 7. At this point, it remains unknown if the semester is going to be extended to make up…
Latest budget just the beginning for education spending
Nova Scotia’s budget for 2024-25 was released Wednesday Feb. 29. Think of it as a collection of estimates the government makes now, for what it expects to spend on all provincial departments from April 2024 through March 2025. It is planning for a total of $16.5 billion, including an estimated $2.72 billion on education. The…
Police reform takes big little step forward in Halifax
The city of Halifax made a major advance in the agonizingly slow process of police reform on Wednesday, Feb. 28, when councillors had the city’s first ever Department of Community Safety budget debate. The issue of police reform has been a hot topic in Halifax in recent years, with the Wortley Report, the Defunding the…