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...
Hijacking “reasoned debate” for right-wing noise at MSVU
In the middle of last week's MSVU discussion over who should teach a course on residential schools, a solemn-sounding group called the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship weighed in. It claims to promote “reasoned debate on issues of academic freedom and scholarship.” It does no such thing.
Mount Saint Vincent University grappled this month with a complex web of issues that will feel uncomfortably familiar to academics at plenty of other Canadian universities: how to (belatedly but quickly) increase the numbers of professors from traditionally under-represented Indigenous and other marginalized communities; how to (belatedly but quickly) add academically rigorous course offerings on...
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...
From who me to #metoo
In which Stephen McNeil continues to be Stephen McNeil, dismissing calls to apologize to a young man for the province's own security failure. But there is also some small hint of change in the #metoo air. We take our good news where we find it.
Why am I not surprised? Last Monday, Halifax police dropped all charges against the 19-year-old they’d arrested less than a month before for “unauthorized use of a computer with fraudulent intent.” The fact is this case has been a cock-up from the beginning. Even before the beginning. Perhaps especially before the beginning. Let’s review. 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...
Access denied: the Nova Scotia Health Authority refuses to share the results of its transportation survey
Last November, the QE2 Redevelopment Project very wisely conducted a survey of its staff, asking about how they get to and from work. I heard about the survey from a QE2 staffer, and immediately decided to ask for a look at the results. In Halifax, we don’t have too much in the way of detailed...
The Liberals’ Fang-less Five ‘pre-empt’ public interest
There's a clear public interest in knowing how well the province is protecting our personal data. So why are Liberal MLAs refusing to let the public accounts committee question witnesses about the latest data breaches?
Really? Of course, really. Last Wednesday, five Liberal MLAs — Gordon Wilson, Suzanne Lohnes-Croft, Ben Jessome, Brendan Maguire, and Hugh MacKay — voted, not with their minds, or their hearts, or their common sense, or even in the interests of the taxpayers who put them there, but in the craven service of their self-interested my-way-or-no-way...
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...
What’s wrong with the Barrington Street bridge ramp, and can we fix it?
Last week I wrote about the new street network being proposed for the land currently occupied by the Cogswell interchange, and asked why the city was proposing not to include a transit priority corridor along the full stretch of Barrington Street that’s being re-designed. The current plan does include some transit priority lanes on Barrington...
Obama advisor David Axelrod’s advice to Canadian Liberals: “Know who you are”
The gleaming new Halifax Convention Centre — subsidized by federal, provincial, and municipal taxpayers like you and me — was festooned with red Liberal banners all weekend, with the ubiquitous slogan “Hope and Hard Work” splashed on screens throughout the super-sized conference room. The 2,800 federal Liberal party members came to Halifax to brainstorm ideas...
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