Editorial

The award of the federal shipbuilding contract to Halifax’s Irving yard was announced at around 5pm on October 19. By 7pm that evening I received the first press release from a local realtor extolling the possibilities for profit from the decision. Over the next few days dozens more rolled in: “Now is the time to […]

The Coast office is closed this week, and there will be no paper Thursday. The website, too, will be mostly idle, unless there’s some big event (tsunami, earthquake, concert) that pulls one or more of us out of holiday. There’s some chance I’ll write a blog post here or there, as well. We’ll all be […]

There are too many other more pressing community needs to be able to elevate a recreational project when scarce capital resource must be diverted to solid waste, roads, water treatment, etc.” That quote is found on the second page of a 1997 thesis titled “A business plan for Bedford Memorial Sportsplex and the Bedford Memorial […]

Last week, Economy Shoe Shop owner Victor Syperek complained to Chronicle-Herald reporter Remo Zaccagna about the hole in the ground over on Argyle Street, the approved but unbuilt convention centre complex, which has become a cesspool overrun with rats. Zaccagna went on to interview developer Joe Ramia, who admitted that he has no tenant for […]

Judging by my Twitter feed, the Occupy Nova Scotia demonstrators are annoying some people. “Canada didn’t have American-type financial deregulation, so the protests are misplaced,” is a typical tweet dismissing the group camped out in Grand Parade (and who mayor Peter Kelly is threatening to evict). It’s true that Canada didn’t follow the insane deregulation […]

On January 14, 2009, Halifax’s brand-new sewage plant broke, and we went right back to spewing raw sewage into the harbour. How could something so important, something we spent so much time and money on, go so terribly wrong? The people had a right to know, and so I requested a copy of the engineering […]

When I was in college, I worked as a cab driver to supplement my loan money. It’s a difficult job, with long hours, uncertain income and dangerous conditions—statistically, driving cab is more dangerous than being a cop, firefighter or soldier. I stopped driving soon after another driver in my town was shot. Haligonians have a […]

The Nova Scotian government is so dependent on VLT revenue that it has recently adopted a gaming strategy that papers over VLT addiction. The new rules will require that a machine called Gameplan be attached to VLTs, and this will supposedly cause gamblers to realize how much money they’re losing, and therefore slow down. Critics, […]

Competing visions of downtown came clashing up against each other last month when United Gulf Developments dropped a development application at city offices for a parcel of land at the corner of Sackville and Hollis Streets. United Gulf, which couldn’t get financing for its two 27-storey “Twisted Sisters” project on the same site, has decided […]

Reading Richard Starr’s new book, Power Failure, which is about Nova Scotia’s long history of botching energy policy, I was struck by a 1926 quote from future Liberal senator Eugene Forsey. Echoing the local business and political mucky-mucks of the day, who were selling the coal industry as the Next Big Thing, Forsey celebrated Nova […]