1 Mattea Roach talks drag, hate comments and weed
By Kaija Jussinoja
May 17
The most-read Coast story of the year is a recap of Halifax-raised Jeopardy! Champion Mattea Roach’s Reddit “ask me anything” session, done shortly after Roach’s record-setting time on the show ended. One thing we learned is that Roach didn’t study much beforehand, as Coast reporter Jussinoja wrote. “The fact that Roach never used her flashcards and didn’t prepare for the show until three weeks before airing obviously didn’t hinder her ability to become Canada’s winningest Jeopardy! contestant.”
2 A Titanic fraud?
By Kaija Jussinoja and Matt Stickland
June 9
After the Chronicle-Herald published not one, not two, but *three* stories about a massive Titanic-themed hotel-and-aquarium development some guy was supposedly going to bring to the Halifax waterfront, a pair of intrepid Coast reporters spent a day digging into the project. They discovered that “something about it just doesn’t smell right. And that stink is not just the insensitivity of capitalizing on the deaths of 1,504 people.”
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3How Sobeys and Superstore legally steal from small businesses
By Matt Stickland
December 8
Readers flocked to check out Stickland’s detailed investigation of the grocery giants’ practises. “There is very little small companies can do to stand up against the exploitation of the functional grocery monopoly in Canada. Without governmental and regulatory intervention, small and medium food suppliers will slowly but surely be churned out of the market as Sobeys and Superstore consolidate their operations.”
4 Vandal Doughnuts is closing its doors—for now
By Martin Bauman
October 28
This story began with a tweet about the popular Gottingen Street donut shop’s rumoured demise. The tweet caught the attention of Coast journalist Bauman, who called Vandal owner Jens Heidenreich to get to the bottom of the rumours with some reporting. “The key issue for us is do we have enough bakers in order to fill a consistent shift and be able to give our employees time off,” Heidenreich explained, “and we've got right now only one and a half bakers, and you can't run a shop with one and a half bakers.”
5 7 food spots opening soon in Halifax to get excited—and hungry—for
By Chris Stoodley
January 25
“Just a few weeks into 2022, it already seems as if the local restaurant scene will be thriving this year,” Stoodley wrote back in January. “Tons of new cafes, bars and eateries in Halifax are set to make grand openings in the next several weeks, with many bringing a taste of international flavours.” This good news was much appreciated by Coast readers, who kept checking out this story all year.
6 Saving Canadian hockey from a goalie crisis
By Matt Stickland
October 5
During this year dominated by horrible news about how Hockey Canada mishandled sexual assault allegations, people were clearly ready for some good hockey news. “What Cole Harbour is trying to do this season is a bold new direction for minor hockey, even though it shouldn’t be,” Stickland explained. “Cole Harbour’s minor hockey association is trying to put a goalie coach on every team.”
7 CBC is taking the Halifax Regional Police to court
By Kaija Jussinoja
August 11
CBC couldn’t report this story about itself because—well, we don’t know why, because once it decided not to cover itself, it couldn’t very well publish a story explaining why it wasn’t covering itself—but the public was definitely interested in the public broadcaster’s legal efforts to get public information from the Halifax Regional Police, as reported by The Coast. “In short,” as Jussinoja put it, “the CBC is on to something, and the HRP doesn’t like it.”
8 We asked, you answered: The results of our Quality Street candy poll
By Jenn Lee
December 13
Are you sensing a theme in this list? Groceries, donuts, new restaurants…and now Quality Street candy. Apparently Halifax really eats up food stories (and awful puns too, hopefully). After we ran a poll asking people to pick the best of the Quality Street offerings, Lee, The Coast’s social media editor and resident Toffee Penny fan, analysed the results with unflinchingly entertaining gusto. “An alarming number of you enjoy Strawberry Crème. It ranks third overall on our website poll, above the Hazelnut Triangle, Caramel Cup and the Toffee Penny. Despicable. And they know it. The majority of voters who confessed to enjoying any of the fruit creme flavours did so with rightful shame and acknowledgement that their tastes are, putting it nicely this time, unconventional.”
9 RCMP leader ridicules officers after Portapique
By Kyle Shaw
November 17
At the end of October, the Mass Casualty Commission—which is investigating the April 2020 shootings that started in Portapique, NS—dumped a giant batch of documents onto its website for the public to explore. Among the memos and letters, The Coast found some texts and WhatsApp messages that reveal in disheartening detail how police officers on the ground in Portapique were regarded with disdain by their superior. “The Mass Casualty Commission has taken pains to be a ‘trauma-informed’ process,” Coast editor Shaw wrote in the story that first brought these messages to light. “An RCMP boss describing officers’ legitimate request to work together through a horrifying experience as a ‘circle-jerk’ is profoundly trauma-misinformed.”
10 Gaps in OBGYN care in Nova Scotia: “The medical system just isn’t structured to help”
By Lyndsay Armstrong
February 15
The province is failing at gynecological health care. That’s the message you’ll understand by the end of this story, after reading thousands of interesting words backed up by research and crunched numbers and expert interviews. And that’s the message you’ll get from the very beginning of the story, as reporter Armstrong opens the tale with an anecdote about a woman named April McTavish during an emergency room visit. “But the on-call doctor, when he came to examine McTavish at 2am, wasn’t thinking about emergency surgery. Patients with ruptured ovarian cysts typically have a fever, and she didn’t. This was normal for McTavish—all but one of her [five previous] ruptures happened without a fever. Still, the doctor told her he wouldn’t send her for an ultrasound, despite her other symptoms: extreme pain, bleeding, vomiting. He asked if she was experiencing period pains, then told her she should go home. She refused. ‘I wasn’t leaving. I had waited 14 hours, throwing up into a bag, I was put in a room with an angry drunk man while nearly naked and left unattended,’ McTavish says. ‘I’m obviously suffering or I wouldn’t have left myself in that situation.’ The doctor didn’t seem to believe her. ‘I remember his exact words to me: ‘You know this looks like drug-seeking.’” She left without an ultrasound.”