The Halifax Examiner is an independent, adversarial news site devoted to holding the powerful accountable. We pry the lid off Halifax City Hall and offer a fresh look into Province House. We expose grifters, bullshitters, and business interests putting profit over people and the environment. We keep an eye on the police, and amplify the voices of the marginalized. And we focus on the health, housing, and climate crises of our time.
Tim Bousquet founded the Halifax Examiner in 2014. Before that, he exposed corruption and misspending in Halifax for seven years as the news editor of The Coast altweekly. He uncovered the waste of millions of dollars in the Commonwealth Games bid fiasco. He revealed the dirty details of Halifax’s concert scandal. When no one would say what had happened to the sewage plant in 2009, he explained how it had broken.
Bousquet’s 2012 article “A trust betrayed,” about Mayor Peter Kelly’s impropriety in handling the estate of a family friend, was named the best investigative news reporting of that year in the country by the Canadian Association of Journalists; as a result of the article, Kelly declined to run for reelection. In 2013, Bousquet investigated the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of a promising young woman in 2010; after “Holly Bartlett’s unlikely journey” was published, the police department announced it was reviewing its investigation.
Bousquet is responsible for fearless investigative reporting that makes a difference, and the Halifax Examiner continues that tradition. At the Examiner, Bousquet investigated the wrongful conviction of Glen Assoun for the murder of Brenda Way; for that work, the Examiner was a finalist for the Michener Awards.
The Examiner crew:
Ethan Lycan-Lang is a graduate of the Journalism School at the University of King’s College. He’s a Morning File regular, and also writes about environmental issues, poverty, justice, and the rights of the unhoused. And baseball. He’s currently on a hiatus from the Examiner, writing for the Yukon leg of the Whitehorse Star.
El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor, community advocate, and activist. Her work focuses on social justice issues such as feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism, and decolonization. A long-time Halifax Examiner contributor, she has also written for The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post, Huffington Post Canada, and the Breach, among others.
Jones was Halifax’s Poet Laureate from 2013 to 2015, a two-time National Spoken Word Champion, and has performed her spoken-word poetry all over Canada. Her book, Live From the Afrikan Resistance! is a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. She has co-hosted Black Power Hour on CKDU-FM since 2016. She received the Burnley “Rocky” Jones human rights award in 2016, and Atlantic Journalism Gold Awards for her Halifax Examiner commentary in 2018 and 2019. In 2020 Halifax’s board of police commissioners appointed her to propose a committee to define defunding the police.
Jones holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University, and currently teaches Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University.
Evelyn C. White is a journalist and author whose books include Chain, Chain, Change: For Black Women in Abusive Relationships (Seal Press, 1985,) The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves (Seal Press, 1990,) and the biography Alice Walker: A Life (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.) A graduate of the Wellesley College, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Harvard University, and a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, she now lives and writes in Halifax, and has published articles in the Halifax Examiner, The Coast, The Nova Scotia Advocate, and other local publications.
In 2021 White was awarded the Nova Scotia Rainbow Action Project’s (NSRAP) Raymond Taavel Media Award, which recognizes an individual or organization for work in the traditional or social media education of the public on news or issues affecting Nova Scotia’s 2SLGBTQIA+ community.
Jennifer Henderson is a freelance journalist and retired CBC News reporter. She covers provincial politics, health, and environmental issues. You can often find her at Province House, at the front of the scrum.
Joan Baxter is an award-winning author and journalist, who lived in and reported from several African countries over three decades, including for Reuters and The Associated Press. She was the BBC World Service correspondent in Mali for six years, and before that, also in northern Ghana and Burkina Faso, where she covered the 1987 assassination of the visionary president, Thomas Sankara.
Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, BBC Focus on Africa Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Al Jazeera, and the National Observer, among others, and she has contributed to several national CBC radio programs. She has also worked as a science writer and editor for international agricultural research organizations, and researched and wrote several reports on crucial development issues in Africa for international agencies, including the Oakland Institute, where she is a senior research fellow.
Joan’s seven books include The Mill: Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest (winner of the Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing), Dust From Our Eyes: An Unblinkered Look at Africa (shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), and A Serious Pair of Shoes: An African Journal (which won the Evelyn Richardson award for non-fiction in 2001.) Her Halifax Examiner reportage includes environmental and investigative work, for which she won Atlantic Journalism awards for excellence in digital journalism in 2018 and 2020.
Matthew Byard is a graduate of the Radio Television Journalism Program at Nova Scotia Community College. He writes stories about the people and issues in Nova Scotia’s Black community. Matthew Byard’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.
Philip Moscovitch is a freelance journalist, editor and audio producer with wide-ranging interests. He is one of the Halifax Examiner’s regular Morning Filers, and has also written for the Examiner on topics including cycling infrastructure, heritage and development, technology, and mental health.
For this article on AI writing tools Moscovitch won a Silver 2023 Atlantic Journalism Award: Commentary.
Beyond the Examiner, Philip is the editor of Write, the magazine of the Writers’ Union of Canada, the producer of the Canadian Museum of Immigration’s French-language podcast, D’innombrables voyages, and the former editor of Canadian Screenwriter magazine. His journalism has appeared in dozens of publications, including Saltscapes, Unravel, The Walrus (where one of his pieces was a National Magazine Award finalist), Atlantic Books Today, the Globe and Mail, and The Montreal Gazette, and his radio pieces have been broadcast nationally on CBC Radio.
Philip is the author of the fermentation book Adventures in Bubbles and Brine, and has contributed poetry, essays, and fiction to several anthologies. He made his crime writing debut in the 2022 anthology Jacked, edited by Vern Smith and published by Run Amok Crime.
Suzanne Rent has been a writer, editor, and reporter since 2001. A graduate of Saint Mary’s University and Toronto Metropolitan University, she’s worked in television, radio, magazines, and newspapers, and her work has appeared in publications locally and nationally. She writes about living wages, labour, women’s issues, grifters, housing, and domestic violence.
Rent is also the coordinator of the Not Without Us Project, with Easter Seals Nova Scotia and the Nova Scotia League for Equal Opportunities; this researched the barriers faced by Nova Scotian women with disabilities experiencing domestic violence.
@SuzanneR70@mstdn.ca
Twitter: @Suzanne_Rent
Stephen Kimber is an award-winning writer, editor, broadcaster, and educator. A journalist for more than 50 years whose work has appeared in most Canadian newspapers and magazines, he is the author of 13 books, including two novels and 11 works of nonfiction. Kimber was a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax for more than 40 years, serving as its director for close to a decade.
In 2013, he co-founded the King’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction program, where he serves as a cohort director. In June 2023, he will become the first cohort director for the university’s new MFA in Fiction program. He has been writing a weekly column for the Examiner since November 2016.
Yvette d’Entremont is a general assignment reporter and editor, covering the COVID-19 pandemic and health issues. Before joining the Examiner team, d’Entremont was a reporter with Metro Halifax. She also teaches courses at the Journalism School at the University of King’s College.
Zane Woodford is the Halifax Examiner’s municipal reporter. He covers Halifax City Hall and contributes to our ongoing PRICED OUT housing series. Before joining the Halifax Examiner, Woodford was a reporter with Metro Halifax, where he was part of an investigation into lead in drinking water that won the Atlantic Journalism Award for Enterprise Reporting: Newspaper, the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Data Journalism Award, and the Radio Television Digital News Association’s Data Storytelling Award.
For this article, Woodford won a Gold 2023 Atlantic Journalism Award: Breaking News.
Woodford also sometimes works as an instructor at the Journalism School at the University of King’s College.
Iris is the Halifax Examiner’s privacy-loving, customer-supporting, tech-untangling, bill-paying, Mailchimp-writing, site-designing, and occasionally amazing manager. Sometimes also referred to as “Tim’s Boss.”
Sometimes she’s on Mastodon.