NEWS
1. Saltwire
“At an emergency court hearing on Wednesday, Justice John Keith issued a creditor protection order for SaltWire Network and its affiliated companies,” Tim Bousquet reports.
SaltWire is the largest newspaper chain in Atlantic Canada. It owns 26 papers in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island. Its largest papers are the Halifax Herald, the St. John’s Telegram, and the Charlottetown Guardian. At stake are the jobs of 390 employees and 836 contracted carriers.
The emergency hearing for creditor protection was the result of two applications to the court. The first came from Fiera Debt Fund, a private equity firm that owns the loan that allowed SaltWire to purchase most of the newspapers in 2017. SaltWire owes Fiera more than $32 million.
On Monday, Fiera asked the court to declare SaltWire insolvent, remove the company’s executive team, place SaltWire under creditor protection, and name the financial firm KSV as the court-sanctioned monitor of SaltWire.
The second application to the court came from SaltWire, which agreed that the company is insolvent and should be placed under creditor protection, but under less onerous terms than desired by Fiera. Specifically, SaltWire wanted the local financial firm Grant Thornton to be the monitor.
Keith sided with Fiera.
His order provides the possibility of “a future in which SaltWire will continue,” said Keith. “There’s no guarantee that future will be achieved, but at least it’s an objective.”
Given the financial morass of SaltWire, that may be wishful thinking.
Bousquet gets into the details of what happened in court on Wednesday, writing that we should know more about SaltWire’s future by March 22.
Click or tap here to read “SaltWire placed under creditor protection.”
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2. ‘Green’ hydrogen and the wind energy fray
“Bear Head Energy is proposing a massive wind project with 97 turbines in Pictou County,” reports Joan Baxter.
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.
While Bear Head doesn’t appear to have any clear markets yet for any hydrogen or ammonia it intends to produce, it does boast on its website that its location on the Strait of Canso offers, “Short Shipping Distances to Key European and U.S. Green Energy Markets.”
In other words, for export.
Click or tap here to read “Another would-be ‘green’ hydrogen and ammonia producer in Nova Scotia enters the wind energy fray.”
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3. Police review
“Nearly a full year after the Mass Casualty Commission (MCC) produced its final report on the worst mass murder in the country’s history, Nova Scotia will begin a review of policing services,” reports Jennifer Henderson.
On Wednesday, Nova Scotia Attorney General and Justice Minister Brad Johns announced the government has hired Deloitte as its external consultant in charge of the “technical review” process. Nova Scotia is policed by 10 municipal forces and the RCMP through a contract with the province which expires in 2032. The total of police officer positions is approximately 2,000.
Johns also appointed a broad 16-person “engagement advisory committee” with a mandate to talk to Nova Scotians and report back to the minister in April 2025. The news release from the Department of Justice said “the committee includes people from the provincial government, police agencies, subject matter experts and equity-deserving groups, including those from faith-based communities, gender-based violence organizations, and newcomers.”
Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia begins review of police services in aftermath of Portapique.”
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4. Nova Scotia Power
“Nova Scotia Power is asking the Utility and Review Board (UARB) to order the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables (DNRR) to cough up the entire file that led to the minister’s decision to impose a $10 million fine on the power company,” Jennifer Henderson reports.
The fine – the largest administrative penalty in the history of the province – was made under regulations in the Electricity Act that required the utility to generate 40% of electricity from renewable sources between 2020-2022. Nova Scotia Power failed to hit that target when huge amounts of hydroelectricity from Labrador’s Muskrat Falls were several years late arriving.
The regulations in the Electricity Act also allow the Natural Resources and Renewables minister to waive the fine if the minister believes the company demonstrated “due diligence” towards meeting the renewables target. Nova Scotia Power is in the process of appealing to the UARB the fine its shareholders have to pay under the regulations. Ratepayers are excluded.
Tuesday’s oral hearing before the UARB was an attempt by Nova Scotia Power’s lawyer Geoff Breen to convince the regulator to compel the minister to remove the blacked-out (redacted) sections of briefing notes that staff provided in the days before deciding to levy the penalty.
Click or tap here to read “Nova Scotia Power critical of province’s redacted documents around $10 million fine.”
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5. Halifax Water
“The proposed $89-million price tag for a new Halifax Water operations centre in Burnside is not justified, according to an evaluation carried out for the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board,” reports Paul Withers for CBC.
The regulator sought a second opinion after the project’s budget jumped from $52 million in April 2023 to $89 million by November 2023 — a $37 million or 71 per cent increase.
The estimate has since been pared back slightly and the building size enlarged by 14 per cent.
“It is our recommendation that the current funding request does not get approved until further design, scope, and budget validation are completed,” said real estate services firm CBRE, which conducted the review.
Its 38-page report was posted this week by the board.
Halifax Water has plans to move staff from four sites across HRM to the new building on Jennett Drive in Burnside. Withers writes that CBRE said the budget for the project has “excessive” contingencies.
Meanwhile, Halifax Water, in a statement to CBC, said they are working with the consultant’s report and will address concerns.
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6. Donkin
“A Cape Breton coal mine that had been ordered to cease operations after two roof falls last summer is being permitted to resume year-round production,” The Canadian Press reports.
The underground operation at the Donkin mine has been closed, and 130 workers laid off, since a July 15 roof fall, which followed a smaller roof fall on July 9.
The announcement today from the Nova Scotia Labour Department says a third-party consultant has reviewed a plan to deal with humidity that affects roof stability in the warmer months and concluded a stop-work order can be lifted.
As Tim Bousquet reported in November, the province gave Kameron Coal, the owner of the mine, permission to open once it met the terms of two work orders.
Last September, the Department of Labour hired Andrew Corkum, Dalhousie University professor and geotechnical engineer, to study the Donkin mine. Bousquet detailed Corkum’s two-phase approach to reopening the mine here.
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NOTICING:
Halifax with Stephen Archibald
Stephen Archibald pays attention to details.
You may know Archibald from his Twitter/X account where he shares photos from travels in the city and across the province.
In his Twitter bio, he has this motto: “When you notice everything, you see beautiful patterns.”
At the Examiner, we often share Archibald’s photos via his Halifax Bloggers page, Noticed in Nova Scotia, in this ‘Noticed’ section. So, this week, I contacted Archibald to see if I could tag along on a walkabout, just to notice what he notices about the city. We could call it “Suzanne Rent noticing what Stephen Archibald notices in Halifax and then writing about it in Noticed.”
On Tuesday, Archibald and I met at Mount Olivet Cemetery on Mumford Road, a spot he said has become a regular walk for he and his wife, Sheila Stevenson. In November, they moved from their longtime home in Ferguson’s Cove with its spectacular gardens into a ninth-floor apartment in West 22, a new high-rise just across the street from the cemetery. The windows in their home overlook Mount Olivet and the streets of the city’s west end.
For a time, Archibald said he and Sheila thought about moving to Wolfville because then they could still garden. But they also thought about still having a place to stay, a pied-à-terre, in Halifax. Archibald had one in mind in a building on Olivet Street called Fort Lawrence, built in the 1960s. Other apartment buildings on the street are named after forts, too, including a Fort Knox.
Each apartment at Fort Lawrence has a wide balcony with tall windows that offer a perfect view of Mount Olivet across the street.
“For me, it’s a model of what apartment buildings could have looked like,” Archibald said. “It seemed like the perfect little space. It’s one of those places that could be anywhere, like in the south of France.”
But those plans were changed because an apartment at West 22 was what was available. That new building has its own patterns that Archibald likes, including the lattice that scales the sides of the building.
Mount Olivet, which was created in 1896, is owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Halifax-Yarmouth. Archibald tells me the church used to own much of the land along Mumford Road, from Mount Olivet to Saint Agnes church on Chebucto Road. There were a lot of Catholic institutions, including a reform school for boys, along what was once considered the edge of town.
This cemetery used to be wetland, Archibald said. He’s not sure if it was filled in, but there is still a stream that runs through the cemetery, just below a neighbourhood on the south side of the cemetery. Water from ponds in Ashburn Golf Course flow through this stream that winds its way though Mount Olivet and through culverts under street intersections and eventually to the Northwest Arm.
“When you look at maps from the time, there were several streams running through here,” Archibald said. “All of this was wetland, and Catholic wetland at that.”
“It’s a stream we have lots of connections to.”
When we were at Mount Olivet on Tuesday,a grandmother and her grandchild were feeding the ducks that swim in the stream.
“It would be wonderful to float sticks in there,” Archibald said about the stream.
Archibald doesn’t really pay attention to who is buried in Mount Olivet, the cemetery where some victims of the Halifax Explosion, including train dispatcher Vince Coleman, as well as the Titanic were laid to rest. He leaves that work to Craig Ferguson, who runs the Dead in Halifax X/Twitter account where he chronicles the stories of people buried in the city’s oldest cemeteries.
Archibald is more interested in the details of the stones, the landscape, the patterns of the layout of the cemetery, and some of the architectural features of the homes in the neighbourhoods that surround the cemetery.
One of the patterns Archibald likes in Mount Olivet are the two rows of simple white iron crosses marking the graves of nuns and mothers from the Sisters of Charity. In between those crosses are a single row of black flat headstones on the grass.
The inscriptions on the crosses include the name of the sister, along with the date she died. Archibald said he noticed that the months of death were often shortened to fit onto the narrow post of the cross. So, December was shortened to Dec., September becomes Sept. This is like the Canadian Press style we use in our writing.
But one of the months stood out to Archibald. It was the month of death on the marker for Sister M. Rosalina Pothier, who died in 1925. The month March is written on a diagonal across the cross’s post. The engraver broke away from the pattern.
And at the bottom of each cross, Archibald points out a detail I didn’t see right away. An inscription of RIP.
“That sort of thing works in a tweet,” Archibald said.
Archibald has noticed other details in his west-end neighbourhood beyond Mount Olivet. On the streets on the north side of Mumford is his walking route to the nearby grocery store. The houses in this area were built in the 1950s and 1960s. One day, he noticed an aluminium red-and-white canopy above a door on a house at the corner of Mumford and Hemlock. He points it out to me when we’re at the cemetery. I think it looks like it belongs above the door of a candy shop.
He noticed more of those canopies on other homes.
More recently, he started looking at chimneys on those houses. Some of them have an angled bit at the bottom, a design he has since learned is called a shoulder.
In November, when he and Sheila just moved to West 22, he started noticing the jettied fronts, “the slight overhang of the second floor,” on some of the neighbourhood homes. He wrote about that in this blog.
“That’s the pattern of things. Once you see something, and once you’re able to name it, you remember it,” he said.
Then there are the homes in the district on the south side of the cemetery. Those homes, Archibald said, are slightly more upmarket that have garages attached to the houses. Archibald said he doesn’t have a favourite neighbourhood he likes to visit, although he said he always likes visiting somewhere new. Some of these outings just happen, like when he drops off his car to the garage to get the tires changed or when his wife goes to the salon for a haircut. Archibald said wherever he is, he will get outside and wander.
Archibald even had a career noticing things. He worked in museums and on excavations at Louisbourg, the Debert Palaeo-Indian National Historic Site, Signal Hill in Newfoundland, and Fort Beauséjour in New Brunswick.
“That’s all about looking at stuff and trying to interpret what’s going on,” Archibald said.
He eventually took a museum course at the University of Leicester in the industrial Midlands and then “things just worked out.” That “working out” included a stint working at Sherbrooke Village in its early development stage.
“I came on the market just as there was a lot of federal money available to provincial museums. Anybody who came to the Nova Scotia Museum for about a month and a half in the fall of 1972 got a job,” he said.
But he traces his love of stuff back to his mother, Margaret Armstrong.
“It was the education that’s been most useful to me,” he said. “[She was] a housewife with many little interests and didn’t keep a tidy house and kept lots of stuff.”
Even though Archibald has many photos he shares via Halifax Bloggers and on Twitter/X, he said his collection isn’t that large. Still, it’s a treasure trove for his followers who haven’t seen these images of the city and province from 50 and 60 years ago. He started tweeting out some of those photos and details in 2009.
“It was very exciting for me to realize that I had this resource,” Archibald said. “When I signed up for Twitter, I had no idea what it really was. But I realized that because I was so much older than everyone else at that time that I had something I could offer.”
Then Halifax Bloggers came along.
Brenden Sommerhalder, one of the site’s founding members, approached Archibald asking if he wanted to write a blog. Halifax Bloggers provided the templates and the support, and Archibald supplied the photos and stories.
His first blog was this one in May 2014, which he titled “A Dutch Village Ramble.” Archibald details a walk through areas around Dutch Village Road, Bayers Road, and Mount Olivet Cemetery.
Eventually, Halifax Bloggers was taken over by Kate Kirkpatrick and Michael Judge.
“They’re incredibly supportive,” he said.
Then, starting 10 years ago, Tim Bousquet started linking to Archibald’s Noticed blog in his Morning Files. Over the years, Philip Moscovitch and I have done the same.
“When I look at the analytics, which I don’t really understand, but there was a time I would be doing that and suddenly there’d be a blip. Why are all these people reading it? Oh, look it’s in the Examiner,” he said.
His recent blogs include this one about tactile markings on sidewalks that help pedestrians who are blind or visually impaired navigate city streets. In that same blog, Archibald writes about the audible pedestrian signals (APS) that assist people crossing the street. Archibald learned the sounds from the APS have a name: the Canada Melody.
Archibald said sharing stories and photos of what he notices gives him “great pleasure.”
“And I guess it helps me understand where I am. I recognize things change and things go, so I’m not too sentimental about that happening,” he said.
He doesn’t really plan his outings, but he does have one plan he’d like to research: a route to get from Point Pleasant Park in Halifax’s south end to Seaview Park in the north end without hitting any traffic lights.
“I believe one can do it, and I think I can do it there and back, picking a different route,” he said. “It won’t be a straight line. I’m looking forward to that. I’ll walk it when it’s done. I’m waiting for better weather.”
What Archibald notices about his surroundings has inspired others to look closer at details when they’re out and about.
Archibald said he once got a tweet from a follower who was in Davos, Switzerland and saw a boot scraper in the chalet where he was staying. So, like Archibald would, that follower took a photo, and shared it online, saying he knew what a boot scraper was because Archibald wrote about them.
“The things I like best is when I hear, usually from someone from Twitter, who will say, ‘I took this picture because of Cove 17 [his Twitter/X handle],'” Archibald said.
“You can look at things and give you permission to be excited about tiny little things.”
After Archibald and I wrap up our chat, I take another walk through Mount Olivet, just to see the patterns I notice for myself. There’s those granite borders Archibald pointed out, which in one spot are laid out in a pattern like steps along the paved driveway that loops around at the top end of the cemetery.
Then, there are the ducks in the stream, including four mallards with their yellow beaks and green heads. I tried to get a photo of the ducks in the row, a pattern many of us struggle with, and wasn’t terribly successful.
Then I wondered if other passersby in the cemetery noticed me, a 53-year-old woman, following ducks for some reason.
But it didn’t matter because I remembered a piece of advice Archibald told me as we ended our interview.
“Just give yourself permission to look.”
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Government
No meetings
On campus
Dalhousie
Today
Brain Fair (Thursday, 10am, 1348 Summer Street, Halifax) — a showcase of brain-related research at Dalhousie; games, competitions, prizes, experiments, demonstrations, and interactive booths; all ages welcome
Why is Neurotransmitter Release Synaptic (Thursday, 12pm, Room 3H01, Tupper Medical Building) — Abigail LeBlanc will talk
Tomorrow
Noon Hour Recital: Piano (Friday, 11:45am, Strug Concert Hall)
NSCAD
Today
The Land on Which You Sleep is Ours (Thursday, 6pm, Treaty Space Gallery) — group exhibition curated by Cameron Walker
Tomorrow
The Land on Which You Sleep is Ours: Letter Writing Event (Friday, 2pm, Treaty Space Gallery) — more info here
In the harbour
Halifax
08:00: IT Integrity, supply vessel, sails from Pier 9A for offshore subsea ops
09:00: Nolhan Ava, ro-ro cargo, arrives at Pier 41 from Saint Pierre
17:00: Atlantic Star, container ship, sails from Fairview Cove for sea
17:00: Sonderborg, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from St. Thomas
18:30: Asian Captain, car carrier, moves from Autoport to Pier 9C
Cape Breton
13:00: Algoma Valour, bulker, sails from Quarry for Port Manatee, Florida
20:00: Sheila Ann, bulker, arrives at Quarry from Rio Haina, Dominican Republic
23:59: NCC Danah, oil tanker, arrives at Everwind 2 from Le Havre, France
Footnotes
I’ve been working on a lot of stories this week, but am also distracted by videos of a mare giving birth at the farm where I take horseback riding lessons. The new, yet-to-be named filly is adorable.
Kaila and Anna, the farm owners and trainers, are so talented and knowledgeable. I continue to learn a lot about horses from them (last May, I wrote this piece about my lessons and some of the horses).
Kaila and Anna have a YouTube channel with lots of fun and educational videos. You can find and subscribe to that here.
Wonderful story. Mr. Archibald is a city treasure.
I think that the first of Stephen’s articles I can remember reading was about storm porches in Halifax, and he’s exactly right about how being able to name something gives it a permanent place in the mind, and helps you keep on noticing it. It must be 10 years later now, and we still remark about storm porches, and Scottish dormers, and all sorts of quirky and unusual things he’s encouraged us to have our eyes open for as we walk about the city. We’re very grateful to him.
Stephen’s work inspires me and I often incorporate it into my history classes at Saint Mary’s University. It inspires my students, too. His blog and photos make a huge contribution to understanding the history that is all around us.