Today, BP has reported a small spill of synthetic lubricating mud at its West Aquarius drill site on the Scotia Shelf drill site, and the government regulator has ordered drilling suspended until an investigation is complete. News of the spill is posted to the incident page of the Canada–Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board website. The incident […]
Fool’s Gold
Nova Scotia's Myopic Pursuit of Metals & Minerals (Part 4)
A Halifax Examiner / Cape Breton Spectator investigation. This is the fourth and final instalment in a series of articles on the push for mines and quarries in Nova Scotia. You can find Part I here. How the mining lobby is working to undermine environmental protection in Nova Scotia On a cold day in late November...
BREAKING: Transport Canada detains French cable repair ship after suspected oil spill in Halifax Harbour
Responding to an inquiry by the Halifax Examiner, Transport Canada confirms that it has detained the French cable repair ship Ile d’Aix, which has been anchored off McNabs Island since Tuesday. Soon after the ship arrived, the Halifax Examiner learned of a suspected oil spill from the Ile d’Aix. Thursday afternoon, Fisheries & Oceans spokesperson Stephen […]
Fool’s Gold
Nova Scotia's Myopic Pursuit of Metals & Minerals (Part 3)
A Halifax Examiner / Cape Breton Spectator investigation. This is the third in a series of articles on the push for mines and quarries in Nova Scotia. You can find Part I here. Cobequid Gold and Tatamagouche water The news broke in November 2017 on the front page of the free monthly community paper, The Tatamagouche...
Fool’s gold
Nova Scotia's Myopic Pursuit of Metals & Minerals (Part 2)
A Halifax Examiner / Cape Breton Spectator investigation. This is the second in a series of articles on the push for mines and quarries in Nova Scotia. You can find Part I here. Going for gold The CEO and chairman of Vancouver-based Atlantic Gold Corporation, Steven Dean, a man with a history of international coal and...
Nova Scotia’s looming oil-drilling disaster
Canadian regulators have failed to reduce the likelihood of a Deepwater Horizon-like blowout at BP's deep-sea well on the Scotian Slope, and the company plans to respond to a blowout with an oil dispersant that could compound the catastrophe.
When BP named its exploratory well in the Mississippi Canyon the Macondo Prospect after the doomed fictional town of Macondo from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, that alone should have raised alarm bells. The story of seven generations of the Buendía family are set in the Colombian town, which is beset by […]
Fool’s Gold
Nova Scotia's Myopic Pursuit of Metals & Minerals
A Halifax Examiner / Cape Breton Spectator investigation. Part 1: Welcome to the Gold Rush There’s a 21st century gold rush starting in Nova Scotia, just as industrial gold mining is increasingly coming into disrepute around the world. It has been described as an “environmental disaster” which often leads to contamination of water sources on […]
Politicians’ snake oil hopes and dreams meet economic, environmental reality
"Many international companies believe we have resources off our coast that we have not tapped into," says Premier Stephen McNeil, "and we want the ability to do so." Forget the reality. And damn the consequences.
You can draw a neat, straight line. Start with the October 5, 1971, front page of the Halifax Chronicle Herald, with its photo of a beaming Premier Gerald Regan holding a tiny vial of oil supposedly sucked to the surface during offshore drilling off Nova Scotia. Above the photo across the entire top of the...
Raw sewage was dumped into the harbour Saturday morning, and Halifax Water tried to cover it up
An apparent act of sabotage on the MacKay Bridge resulted in a loss of communications between sewage pumping stations and the Dartmouth sewage plant; that in turn led to raw sewage being dumped into Halifax Harbour. When we asked a Halifax Water spokesperson about it, he denied there was a discharge of raw sewage and gave us a counter-narrative that was patently not true. Today, the Department of Environment confirms that in fact raw sewage was discharged into the harbour.
At around 3:30am on Saturday, a man was seen walking on the catwalk under the MacKay Bridge, confirms Sergeant Stephanie Carlisle of the Halifax Regional Police Department. Security around the bridge has increased in recent years, especially since Holly Bartlett was found mortally wounded under the bridge on the Halifax side of the harbour. Barbed wire […]
Dirty Dealing
Part 4: Message Control and the Northern Pulp Mill’s Cancer-Causing Air Emissions
Nova Scotia Lands, a provincial crown corporation charged with cleaning up Boat Harbour, played a role in silencing two Dalhousie University researchers whose work studied air pollution coming from the Northern Pulp mill, the Halifax Examiner has learned. In Part 3 of the Dirty Dealing series, I reported on the researchers’ 2017 ambient air study, which revealed […]
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