Last fall, photographer Kyle Cunjak and his friends were swarmed while they walked in Halifax’s north end, and Cunjak was stabbed. In hopes of coming to terms with the attack, his photos of his injuries— which required hospitalization and subsequent plastic surgery—were featured in an art show last month. He’s making progress with his health, […]
Justice
Posted inNews + Opinion
Sex workers trapped
Steven Laffin, a 39-year-old Dartmouth man, appeared in court last week on charges of murdering sex worker Nadine Taylor. If Laffin, who was also charged with assaulting a different sex worker in the past, is found guilty, one more violent criminal could be off the streets. Still, those working in the street-based sex trade will […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Saving the worst of the worst
In bureaucratic circles, the child is known as “File #400.” In the neighbourhood, he’s known as a terror. In 2008, he’s just 11 years old, but already well on his way to a life of crime and probably future prison and early death. Between June 2005 and November 2008, he is the subject of 55 […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Bawdy crimes
“I’m an organized criminal,” mutters Valerie Scott in utter disbelief. Scott, a sex worker and executive director of the Toronto-based activist group Sex Professionals of Canada, doesn’t see herself as your typical organized criminal. But new amendments to the Canadian Criminal Code are lumping sex workers in the same category as violent criminals. The Conservative […]
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Is Corey Wright the wrong man?
My blood is my ink / My tears are my tales / I did a couple years in jail / But I shall prevail —rhymes by Corey Wrght AKA Vinny Deniroz He smiled. Big smile. “What you doing after?” It was nudging four in the morning on Saturday, November 4, 2006, closing time at Rain, […]
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Halifax, province of Nova Scotia, poised to make Africville settlement offer
The Halifax and Nova Scotia governments are about to offer a substantial compensation package, rumoured to be into the millions of dollars, to the descendants of Africville, the vibrant black community that was razed in the 1960s to make room for the MacKay Bridge. The site of Africville is now Seaview Park, a stretch of […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
IS SHE SAFE?
Connie Adams grabbed the chest-high length of rusted metal railing and looked down into the hole. The concrete-bottomed window well at St. Patrick’s-Alexandra School where the body of her oldest daughter was found. She opened her mouth, then closed it. “What upset me the most,” she said later, “was that drop.” Tanya Brooks was murdered […]
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Art photo project gets bounced – hard
The weekend before last, NSCAD students on a school project ended up in a planned confrontation with an Alehouse bouncer. The controversy has raged ever since, perhaps giving impetus to a proposal to license bar security. The students were clearly on a mission to cause trouble. Bouncers “tend to get angry and tell you that […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Screaming mad on national day of action
December 6 made Jean Steinberg want to scream. So, last year, to mark the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre and the National Day of Action and Remembrance on Violence Against Women, she did. Steinberg and a friend planned a moment of screaming—not silence—on the corner of Spring Garden Road and South Park Street. “It was […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Kimber: police chief’s explanation fails
Tom Martin had it wrong, Halifax Police Chief Frank Beazley told CBC Radio’s Information Morning on December 1. In my story for The Coast (November 19, 2009) on the city’s striking number of unsolved homicides, I’d quoted Martin, a respected retired homicide detective as saying: “To my knowledge, the cold case unit has not laid […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Bouncer bill looms
A proposed overhaul of the security industry in Nova Scotia could mean fewer in-house bouncer jobs. Justice minister Ross Landry introduced a bill on November 5 that aims to require all bouncers be licensed and professionally trained. If the bill passes, the licence will cost about $60 and will require about 40 hours of training, […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Dead Wrong: Halifax’s unsolved murders
OK, boys…Pack it up…Back to what you were doing…We’re done here… Tom Martin had known it was coming. Call it his experience or—perhaps, more to the point—his boss’s lack of experience. Whatever, Martin had guessed this morning’s outcome even before Bill Hollis, the staff sergeant in charge of major crimes, descended from the department’s executive […]