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NEWS

1. Budget

Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland tabled a new budget on Tuesday that includes $52.9 million in new spending over the next five years. As Catharine Tunney at CBC reports, that spending includes money for housing, carbon rebates, and CBC.

Jennifer Henderson has this story on Finance Minister Allan MacMaster’s reaction to the federal budget. Here are a few of his responses:

“The housing initiatives they have put forward, we want to see more collaboration on housing and work with Ottawa to make sure we get the biggest bang for the buck and the housing gets built and is not delayed,” MacMaster said.

…

“We would have liked to see the carbon tax eliminated. That’s placing a strain on people and making the cost of everything higher, including housing,” he said.

Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia finance minister’s picks and pans of federal budget.”

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2. Bear Head Energy

Premier Tim Houston is hosting a community town hall in New Glasgow Thursday night to talk about Bear Head Energy’s proposed wind farm in the Blue Mountain area.

Joan Baxter has been covering the story of Bear Head and its plans for a 97-turbine wind farm in Pictou County, most recently in this article from March 14. From Baxter’s story:

First it was EverWind Fuels, owned by Australian national Trent Vichie, which wants to put up nearly 400 giant wind turbines on many thousands of acres of woodland in Nova Scotia for electricity to produce “green” hydrogen and ammonia, most slated for export to Europe – with hefty subsidies from the public purse, starting with $166 million in financing from Export Development Canada.

Now, it’s Bear Head Energy – owned by Texas-based Buckeye Partners, “one of the largest independent liquid petroleum products pipeline operators in the U.S.,” which is in turn owned by Australian private equity firm IFM Investors – that is proposing the massive Pictou County wind project.

Like EverWind, Bear Head Energy has environmental approval from the Nova Scotia Department of Environment and Climate Change to produce green hydrogen and ammonia on property it owns in Point Tupper.

The community town hall takes place tomorrow night from 6:30pm to 8pm at the Blue Mountain and District Volunteer Fire Department, 1687 Tower Rd. in New Glasgow.

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3. Baby formula

“As the cost of infant formula continues to climb across Canada, many families are being forced to hustle for coupons or rely on charity to feed their babies,” reports Angela MacIvor with CBC.

The average price of formula jumped 30 per cent between February 2022 and February 2024, according to Statistics Canada.

But Shadia Foster believes the gap has widened even farther in the last two months since store-brand formula seemingly vanished off store shelves in Nova Scotia — part of a North America-wide shortage that began two years ago.

She has no choice but to buy the more expensive brand-name products for her three-month-old daughter, Lila.

“When we had to switch fully to formula and I started looking around, it was just really disheartening to see the high cost and the lack of variety in different formulas,” said Foster.

She said she’s paying about double the amount compared to when she had her first daughter four years ago.

MacIvor spoke with other parents, as well as community groups, about the rising cost of formula. She also spoke with Dr. J Mathew Abraham, a Nova Scotia family physician who said parents are watering down formula to make it last longer.

Abraham is advocating that formula be included in feds’ proposed pharmacare plan because formula is a “medical essential item.” And it is.

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4. Child care

Shaina Luck at CBC has this story on round-the-clock daycare for health care workers in Cape Breton. That service is offered by Health Park Early Learning Centre in Sydney and it’s a pilot project aimed at giving flexible child care options to parents who work in health care. To date, 22 families have taken part.

From Luck’s story:

“I spoke with a single mom who was going back to work,” said Helen Gamble, who owns Health Park Early Learning Centre. “She had to put it off because she didn’t have child care. She was here and she was in tears, she was so happy.

“It gave her the ability to go back to work and provide for her family.”

Gamble is able to offer the service because of a recent collaboration with the Nova Scotia government. The province covers the wages when extra staff are required, food for the evening program, and a quarter of the operating costs of the daycare, such as heat and electricity. It also subsidizes half the daycare fees for parents. 

As Luck reports, one of the ideas submitted in that health care contest was offering child care at hospital sites. She writes that many parents who are health care workers end up quitting their jobs because they can’t find appropriate and flexible child care.

Such child care programs are not new. Luck spoke with Matt Badger, the senior vice-president of strategic people solutions with the Mass General Brigham hospital network in Boston, about its 24-hour child care services.

“It essentially comes close to paying for itself,” he said. “But right now, we do spend a couple million dollars a year on subsidization of these programs because we think they’re so important to support our workforce and their families.”

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5. Staff shortages for ferries

“Halifax Transit staffing shortages are still being felt as service interruptions continue across the city,” reports Amber Fryday with Global.

The union that represents ferry operators is sounding the alarm, saying workers are burnt out and cannot keep up with demand.

“(Staff) are not getting as much time with their family because they’re working a lot of overtime,” said Ray MacKenzie, president of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 508.

“That happened on the weekend as well. One of the deckhands called off sick and nobody was there to fill in. People worked overtime all week.”

Ferry service was cancelled on one route during rush hour Tuesday morning. That’s in addition to one cancellation on the weekend due to staffing shortages.

One ferry passenger, Paddy Williams, told Global there should be more incentives to find and keep ferry crew. That includes better pay, Williams said.

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VIEWS

Babes in the Dartmouth wood: The story of Jane Elizabeth and Margaret Meagher

Last week, Nova Scotia Archives shared on its Facebook page this photo of a map. The caption with the post reads: “Sketch: The place where the two Daughters of John Meagher were lost in the woods. Near Dartmouth, N.S. April 1842.”

Meagher’s two daughters were Jane Elizabeth and Margaret, who went missing after they went for a walk in woods in Dartmouth on April 11, 1842. Over the course of a week, thousands of people went searching for the girls, who were aged six and four, but the girls were lost and died from exposure.

At the Woodlawn Cemetery in Dartmouth, there is a headstone with the names of all of John and Jane Meagher’s children engraved on the front. John and Jane’s names are engraved on the side of the headstone. On top of a stone tabletop monument is a plaque honouring Jane Elizabeth and Margaret, who went by Maggie.

I heard a bit about the story of the young Jane Elizabeth and Maggie before, the Babes in the Wood of Dartmouth, but I didn’t know all the details. So, I went looking for more information.

Joanne Pepers, the executive director at the Dartmouth Heritage Museum who I interviewed in late January about the increase in funding the museum received from HRM, sent along a few items about the story of the Meagher girls.

Pepers made this video about the story in a YouTube segment called Curator’s Corner:

On the day Jane Elizabeth and Maggie went missing, John Meagher was in bed with the measles, while his wife, Jane, was taking care of their newborn. The eldest daughter, Martha, who was 11, was at home taking care of chores.

Jane Elizabeth and Maggie went for a walk in the woods to pick berries. When they didn’t return for supper, John sent a hired hand to go look for them.

John and neighbours eventually joined the search, but there was no sign of the girls. A couple inches of snow fell that first night they were missing.

A couple of days later, hundreds of people joined the search. The searchers found footprints, and a scrap of clothing.

After the Saturday newspaper published a story about the missing girls and the need for searchers, 3,000 people showed up in Dartmouth to help.

“What really got me after the story ends and the results in it was seeing the map afterwards,” Pepers said in her video. “Shortly after the tragedy, a map was created, and the map shows the route that the children probably took. And what struck me was the distance that they travelled. This is something that is well known now in search and rescue, people travel a lot further than we think that they might when they’re lost. You lose your bearings.”

That’s this map Nova Scotia Archives shared last week. The girls travelled about six kilometres through the woods.

Here’s a more current map of the same area.

The tabletop monument was put in place at the cemetery by Peter Currie. His dog, Rover, found the girls’ bodies on Huckleberry Hill, which is now known as Melancholy Mountain. Currie was given a reward for his part in the search for the girls, but used that money to pay for the monument.

John and Jane Meagher are also buried at the same gravesite as Jane Elizabeth and Margaret. So are the Meagher’s other two children, Martha and George.

Dartmouth historian J.P. Martin wrote about Jane Elizabeth and Margaret in a pamphlet from the museum collection that Pepers sent along to me. Robert H. Lindsay wrote a book about the Meagher girls called Melancholy Mountain: What happened in 1842?

Pepers also sent a poem about the tragedy from a collection that belonged to Dr. Lawlor of Dartmouth. Here are the last verses:

For, to describe that hill,
It far transcends my pen;
But a mighty concourse was gathered there
Of feeling hearted men

And the bereaved father stood
And thanked them for their aid,
And he hoped that no such tragedy,
Would on this earth be made.

A little monument was built
To mark the direful spot
Where those helpless little children,
Did meet their destined lot.

That spot is now a popular hiking spot. You can find photos of the cairn here. Pepers said a marble statue of the girls is also in storage at the museum.

The Nova Scotia Archives has in its Helen Creighton collection several audio recordings of people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick singing a song called “Babes in the Woods.” You can listen to those here.

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NOTICED

More on the Titanic doping

Last week, Tim Bousquet wrote about Tricia Ralph, Nova Scotia’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, weighing in about a freedom of information request about the doping of the Titanic film crew in Halifax in 1996. Eighty people were taken to hospital for what was first thought to be food poisoning. But it turned out the chowder the crew ate was laced with phencyclidine (PCP).

Someone applied for a freedom of information request with Halifax Regional Police to get the investigative files. The cops said no, but the applicant appealed that decision. Bousquet wrote:

Ralph, the information commissioner, found in favour of the appellant and recommended that the police “Disclose de-identified factual observations made by third party witnesses within 45 days of the date of this review report.”

Yesterday, the Guardian in its section Pass Notes, has this writeup about the doping incident. From the article:

This cannot be true. It really is! It’s a matter of record. Police in Halifax, Nova Scotia, closed the case in 1999, but its information and privacy commissioner Tricia Ralph has just ordered the police to release all the information it has about the incident.

It hasn’t already? No. Police created a 10-page rapid incident report, but passages from witness testimony were redacted. Ralph has asked that the redactions be removed. If the police complies, we might know the truth about the poisonings by mid-May.

Cameron spoke about the doping incident with Tom Power on CBC’s Q last November.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve been high on PCP, which by the way, I do not recommend to anyone,” Cameron told Power.

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Government

City

Today

Audit and Finance Standing Committee (Wednesday, 10am, City Hall and online) — agenda

Heritage Advisory Committee (Wednesday, 3pm, online) — agenda

Tomorrow

Active Transportation Advisory Committee (Thursday, 4:30pm, online) — agenda

Province

Public Accounts (Wednesday, 9am, Province House and online) —  Government Procurement Process and Practice; with representatives from Department of Service Nova Scotia; Department of Public Works; and Build Nova Scotia

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On campus

Dalhousie

Today

No events

Tomorrow

Neuroimmune interaction: how microglia sense and regulate neuronal activity (Thursday, 12pm, Room 3H01, Tupper Building) — Long-Jun Wu from UT Health Houston McGovern Medical School will talk

NSCAD

Today

Noon Talk (Wednesday, 12pm, Anna Leonowens Gallery) — Melanie Barnett will discuss her MFA thesis exhibition

Tomorrow

Noon Talk (Thursday, 12pm, Anna Leonowens Gallery) — participants in the “Of The Flesh” photography group exhibition will discuss their work

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In the harbour

Halifax

08:00: CGC William Chadwick, US Coast Guard cutter, arrives at Tall Ship Quay from Boston
11:00: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, arrives at Fairview Cove west from St. John’s
13:00: Algoscotia, oil tanker, arrives at Pier 25 from Sydney
15:30: Volga Maersk, container ship, sails from Pier 41 for sea
16:00: Bakkafoss, sails from Pier 42 for sea
16:30: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, moves from Fairview Cove west to Autoport
17:00: Algoberta, oil tanker, arrives at Irving Oil 3 from Montreal
17:00: Acadian, oil tanker, arrives at Irving Oil Woodside from Saint John
23:30: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, moves from Autoport to anchorage #7

Cape Breton

05:50: Algoma Value, bulk carrier, arrives at Coal Pier from Norfolk
15:30: Forever Melody, oil tanker, moves from Everwind 2 to Pirate Harbour anchorage
19:00: Algoma Value, bulk carrier, sails from Coal Pier for sea

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Footnotes

“I should have been born 70 years ago when you could buy houses at Sears.” — my 21-year-old daughter looking at places to live.

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