There’s an indescribable hum of excitement over the room of karaoke regulars just before the show begins. Like sprinters waiting for the start gun to fire, singers anxiously flip through songbooks—though they already know what they’ll perform—watch a stack of request slips grow at the front of the room, ask for the lights to be […]
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Posted inLifestyle
Making the Mooseheads
On Friday night, April 5, at the Metro Centre, the Halifax Mooseheads—the number-one-ranked team in all of Canadian junior hockey—begin the second round of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League Championships. The team steamrolled through the first, no-need-to-break-a-sweat, tune-up round, sweeping away the Saint John Sea Dogs in the minimum four games, outscoring their opponents […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Dear Mayor Savage
Congratulations on winning election as Halifax’s new mayor. We wish you the best of luck over the next four years, and hope that your term will be productive and fruitful, and that with you at the helm, Halifax becomes a nicer place to live. You should be proud that a clear and convincing percentage of […]
Posted inArts + Music
Playing Indian
Fall: It’s the best of times and the worst of times. Shellacked root vegetables find their hand-painted way onto tables everywhere, orange and black-themed displays festoon shop windows and with the chill of October comes my spooky sixth-sense that craves old ’80s horror movies and an unhealthy amount of candy corn. It’s itchy sweater, apple […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Cousin & wife
A group of volunteers sits in a circle of chairs in the lunch room of The Red Cross in Halifax. They’re all activists for different kinds of equality: an environmentalist; a social worker; a children’s rights activist; a gay rights advocate and a youth worker with the YMCA named Fadi. Fadi, 28, is a Kuwaiti-born […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
The long, strange story of Mary Thibeault’s property
According to documents filed with the court by Halifax mayor Peter Kelly in 2005, Mary Thibeault’s estate was valued at $503,730.37, almost all of it in cash and bonds. That amount, plus the $160,000 or so that Kelly had transferred from Thibeault’s personal bank account to his and his son’s control (see “A trust betrayed,” […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
From Nova Scotia with love
High Arctic, 2002: A team of researchers from the United States and Greenland studies the movements of narwhals through Baffin Bay and the maze of straits and bays of northern Canada. The researchers attach Seimac SSC3 transmitters to the whales. Manufactured in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, the transmitters send signals to satellites orbiting high above, and […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Gun crazy
Thirty minutes after Halifax rang in the new year, a 16-year-old boy refused to turn over his earrings to a stranger at the Bridge Terminal in Dartmouth. Eighteen-year-old Jerrell Shephard allegedly pulled out a gun and shot the younger boy twice. Once in the chest and once in the head. Kyle Gallupe survived the gunshots. […]
Posted inLifestyle
Is medical marijuana going to pot?
In an early-’90s Civic we drive eastward, away from the Halifax-Dartmouth sprawl, toward the tiny hamlets and villages that tuck themselves into the myriad bays and coves of the eastern shore. In the car the conversation flits quickly from topic to topic, like some conspiratorially minded hummingbird, and runs the gamut of water-cooler fringe-news talk. […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
A trust betrayed: Peter Kelly and the estate of Mary Thibeault
When Halifax resident Mary Thibeault died in her St. Petersburg, Florida, winter home, she left an estate valued at over half a million dollars and a will naming 13 people and five charities as beneficiaries. One of the beneficiaries was Halifax mayor Peter Kelly. Thibeault called Kelly a friend and valued his judgement: In addition […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
How Halifax’s concert scandal played out
Last spring, Halifax’s now-infamous “concert scandal” broke when city staffer Cathie O’Toole revealed that mayor Peter Kelly and the city’s deputy CAO, Wayne Anstey, had improperly extended millions of dollars in loans to concert promoter Harold MacKay’s firm, Power Promotional Events, and that the last two of those loans, totalling $400,000, were not repaid. Anstey […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Encounters with The Sleep Watcher
Editor’s note: After this story was first published, some of the people interviewed for the story requested that their names and other identifying details be changed. We are honouring these requests, indicating pseudonyms with an asterix (*). (November 15, 2011). Hillary Windsor was enrolled in a summer course at Dalhousie in July 2010. The 22-year-old […]