Editorial

Who hates downtown Halifax? Certainly not the thousands of people who head to Argyle Street for post-work drinks. Most definitely not the shoppers mobbing the Spring Garden Road shopping district. And unquestioningly, without a doubt, not the crowds that flock to the boardwalk every chance they get. By all indications, regular Haligonians love downtown. And […]

Economist Tim O’Neill should have dedicated his report on Nova Scotia universities to Marshall McLuhan. “School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is,” McLuhan wryly observed. Yes, believe hard enough in the status quo and, as O’Neill points out, your lowly BA will earn you $765,000 more […]

When I heard last week that Brindi, the Jimmy Melvin, Jr. of the canine world, has been accused of attacking yet another dog, the first thing that popped into my head was: “This is exactly like the convention centre.” The Brindi saga isn’t so much about the dog as it is about the dog’s owner, […]

“For most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch,” writes journalist Bill McKibben in his 2007 book Deep Economy. “You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both.” McKibben’s birds are a clever way of illustrating that, in the past, when the economy produced more, life […]

Last week, infrastructure minister Bill Estabrooks told the Chronicle-Herald that he’ll announce a decision about provincial funding for the proposed convention centre in downtown Halifax later this month. I’m guessing from the tenor of his public pronouncements so far that, despite a provincial budget shortfall that will soon loom to perhaps a half-billion dollars, Estabrooks […]

When Don Connolly sat down last Wednesday to play on-air poker with NS Finance Minister Graham Steele, the veteran CBC Information Morning host was holding a royal flush. That winning hand had been dealt to him two days earlier by gambling expert John McMullan. The Saint Mary’s prof told Connolly that the real reason provincial […]

Nova Scotia is poor. That’s a reality that we don’t seem to want to come to terms with. Were it not for transfer payments—$2.9 billion last year, more than a third of the provincial budget—we wouldn’t have health care. Our very health is, quite literally, dependent on the good will of our richer, western compatriots. […]

Darrell Dexter was playing politics when he huffed and puffed this week about Quebec’s objections to federal subsidies for an undersea power line between Newfoundland and Cape Breton. “The reality is that when good things happen for Quebec, it is seen as a triumph of federalism,” the NS premier complained to the Herald. “But when […]

Bucking a relentless PR campaign from the Chamber of Commerce, last week Halifax council voted not to reduce the number of councillors from the present 23. But we haven’t heard the last of the issue. City staff is now preparing an application to the Utility and Review Board to redraw district boundaries to better match […]

There are a lot of reasons to read Jon Tattrie’s new book about Eddie Carvery, The Hermit of Africville (jontattrie.ca/africville/index.html). First, it’s a damn good read. Tattrie, a former Daily News reporter, writes with an engaging novelistic approach, through one- to five-page chapters that give life and colour to what in a lesser writer’s hands […]

Last week, someone walked into the Chronicle-Herald offices and gave the paper a memo from mayor Peter Kelly, which castigated municipal councillors for being drunk in public and warned of the dangers of driving while intoxicated. True to non-committing form, Kelly didn’t actually name any councillors. Kelly subsequently announced he had once taken the car […]

It’s only July and already summer seems a little hotter, a little muggier, a little longer than usual. There’s a sense of impending doom hanging in the air, as if just around the next corner is a catalogue of cataclysm: disastrous changes in climate, resource depletion and wars, a breakdown in the social order. Americans […]