Havin’ a Party
It’s been over four years since we discontinued the annual Halifax Examiner subscriber party because of the pandemic, but it’s time to get back to it. So mark your calendars for Sunday, Feb. 11, at 4pm, and please join us at The Wooden Monkey in downtown Dartmouth, just above the ferry terminal.
We’ll have music, finger foods, some swag, and a lot of fun. I’ll give a short presentation about the ‘Original Sin’ research I’m working on, but I promise I won’t drone on forever. Mostly it simply be the opportunity to catch up with people. I miss seeing the Examiner community.
NEWS
1. Starbucks fires employee for using medically prescribed CBD
“A Halifax barista fired after vaping medically prescribed cannabis during a work break hopes to start a conversation around the issue so workers in similar situations don’t face the same fate,” reports Yvette d’Entremont:
Theodore Misseri, 26, started working at the Kaye Street Starbucks in Halifax in May of 2022. He described the workplace as fun, inclusive, and queer and trans-friendly. As a transgender man who had experienced transphobia working other jobs, this was a welcome change. He loved his job, the workplace, and the customers.
On Dec. 18, he said he was pulled aside by the store’s manager and a district manager. A co-worker told them that several months before, Misseri had used cannabis during a break.
Misseri, who used medically prescribed cannabis to deal with chronic pain, said he readily admitted to the co-worker that he’d vaped offsite. While it wasn’t something he did regularly; he said it was an extra long shift and he was in a lot of pain. Because his CBD prescription didn’t cause impairment, he never imagined it would be an issue.
That’s why he wasn’t overly concerned when managers asked to speak with him about it in the cafe on Dec. 18.
“I said, yes, and that it was a medical prescription. I said I’m happy to bring my prescription in, and if I can’t continue my use like that, I can figure out how to do it outside of work hours. Finding an accommodation of some sort,” Misseri said in an interview.
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On Dec. 30, Misseri showed up for what he thought would be a shift. Instead, he said he was fired in front of everyone who happened to be there.
d’Entremont explains the non-intoxicating quality of CBD, and how it differs from THC. She also speaks with labour lawyer David Wallbridge about employers’ obligations to accommodate a disability.
Click or tap here to read “Starbucks employee fired for using medically prescribed and non-intoxicating CBD.”
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2. 104 COVID deaths, more expensive Paxlovid
“The price of protecting vulnerable Nova Scotians from ending up in hospital due to COVID is about to go up,” reports Jennifer Henderson:
Health Canada has notified provincial and territorial governments they’ll soon have to pay for Paxlovid, Pfizer’s anti-viral prescription drug used to treat COVID patients who are at high risk of hospitalization or death.
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The bad news is once Canada’s supply runs out, it will cost more to buy Paxlovid, and that full cost will be shifted to provincial governments.
It’s unclear how much that could cost provincial treasuries, because in Canada negotiations between governments and drug manufacturers for bulk purchases usually remain secret.
However, on Oct. 18, Reuters published an article by reporter Michael Erman that said Pfizer intends to double the cost of Paxlovid when governments are ready to re-order.
“The new list price, which does not include rebates and other discounts to insurers and pharmacy benefit managers, is $1,390 (USD) per course, Pfizer said in an emailed statement,” Erman reported. “The U.S. government paid around $530 (USD) per course for Paxlovid it has made available to Americans at no cost.”
Click or tap here to read “Paxlovid price set to rise, as Nova Scotia’s COVID death count this season rises to 104.”
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3. Sawmill Creek
“The public had a chance to learn more about the next steps of the Sawmill Creek daylighting project during two public engagement sessions hosted by Halifax Water in Dartmouth on Wednesday,” reports Suzanne Rent:
The Sullivan’s Pond stormwater system moves stormwater from Lake Banook and Sullivan’s Pond and the upstream watershed to Halifax Harbour. The system was installed in 1972 to reduce flooding after Hurricane Beth the previous year flooded downtown Dartmouth.
But the corrugated metal pipes in the stormwater system are past their lifespan. Rather than replace the system of pipes, Halifax Water worked with Oceans and Fisheries Canada (DFO) and the community to design a project to daylight the Sawmill Creek and give a new passage for fish to swim from the Halifax Harbour to the system of lakes in Dartmouth.
Click or tap here to read “Halifax Water to start next phase of Sawmill Creek daylighting project this spring.”
I was curious how they’d move the creek through the Alderney-Prince Albert-Portland intersection, and I see that’s accomplished by making the whole intersection a bridge.
One big plus is that this portion of the project won’t be fenced off from the public. It includes a new pond at Starr Park and a creekside trail parallel to Alderney Drive.
A couple of weeks ago, the Court of Appeal issued a decision related to the first portion of the daylighting of the creek. This involves a lawsuit from the owners of the condominium that backs up to Starr Park and the newly daylighted part of the creek. The decision explains the history of the dispute:
Sullivan’s Pond is an artificial lake at the most southerly end of what used to be the Shubenacadie Canal system, connecting Dartmouth with the Bay of Fundy. When it was constructed in the early 19th century the lake drained from a small river into Dartmouth Cove in the Halifax Harbour, about half-a-kilometer away.
In 1972, the former City of Dartmouth expropriated an easement for the installation of a pipe to replace the river as a means of drainage from Sullivan’s Pond. The pipe was installed underground. Halifax County Condominium Corporation No. 277 is now located on part of the lands over which the 1972 easement runs. The individual appellants are unitholders or former unitholders in the Corporation.
In 2017-18, the Halifax Regional Water Commission, successor in title to the former City of Dartmouth, replaced the old drainage pipe from Sullivan’s Pond to Halifax Harbour. In doing so, it opened some of the drainage way to the open air in accordance with directions received from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to facilitate fish passage between Sullivan’s Pond and the Harbour.
The appellants say opening the drain to the surface intruded on the Condominium’s use and enjoyment of their property. So they sued the Commission claiming, among other things, trespass, nuisance and injurious affection.
The Commission moved for summary judgment on the pleadings, arguing the appellants’ claims were unsustainable at law. They also argued that some of the claims were statute barred.
The first judge, Justice Mona Lynch, ruled for Halifax Water, and the condo owners appealed. The Court of Appeal reversed part of Lynch’s ruling, but only in respect to the claim for damages for trespass. That means that particular issue will be kicked back to a lower court judge to decide.
I don’t think any of those issues will arise with the next portion of daylighting because, as I understand it, it all involves public property.
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4. Centennial Pool
“A group of residents and swimmers want Halifax staff to prepare a report on ways to save Centennial Pool in Halifax and to look for funding to build a new pool in the city,” reports Suzanne Rent:
At Halifax regional council’s meeting in June 2022, Coun. Waye Mason put forward a motion for a staff report to potentially dispose of Centennial Pool, build a new 50-metre competitive pool off the peninsula, and rebuild the Needham Pool in the city’s north end. However, that report is not yet complete.
Trevor Brumwell with the Save the Centennial Pool Committee gave a presentation during council’s community planning and economic development standing committee meeting on Thursday. That group formed in July 2023, and its petition to save Centennial has more than 1,200 signatures so far.
During his presentation Thursday, Brumwell said Mason’s motion doesn’t consider Centennial’s value as a community asset.
Click or tap here to read “Group wants Halifax to save Centennial, build another 50-metre pool in HRM.”
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5. Starting fires
Yesterday, the Department of Natural Resources and Renewables charged 22-year-old Dalton Clark Stewart for starting the Barrington Fire last year.
I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of Stewart’s alleged actions, but these things are going to happen. People are people, and that means a lot of people do stupid things like tossing a cigarette, driving through dry grass, and whatever it was that Stewart did.
What’s changed is that years ago, those stupid things didn’t often result in enormous wildfires, as this was typically a wet place where fire had a hard time spreading. But now, the climate has changed such that Nova Scotia is atypically dry and fire can spread like, well, like wildfire.
There’s a learning curve as people will better understand how stuff they used to be able to do before can’t be done with the same carelessness anymore.
Yes, people should be held to account for their stupid actions, but we shouldn’t let the conversations stop there. We should additionally be pulling out all stops to limit further climate change by reducing the use of fossil fuels.
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6. Hydrogen
We’ve taken Joan Baxter’s Dec. 18 article, “Nova Scotia goes all-in on ‘green’ hydrogen, but at what cost?,” out from behind the paywall.
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NOTICED
Typewriters and wheeled suitcases: a parallel history
I’ve been in a lot of archives lately, reading historic documents. On Wednesday, I spent the day at the Provincial Archives on University Avenue, scrolling through microfilm of minutes from the Halifax County Court of General Sessions of the Peace.
It’s important to use primary sources. I’ve found those sources thanks to later essays that reference them written by historians, but I’ve found that those secondary sources sometimes aren’t exactly accurate, or they miss context, or (more typically) they concentrate on issues they found important but not on issues I find important — a historian writing in, say, 1955, had a different world view and a different set of concerns than an amateur historian/journalist working in 2024.
So I’ve learned a lot about the history of governance in this province. There wasn’t a county council until 1879; before that, all the Justices of the Peace in Halifax County would gather once or twice a year to attend to what we would now call municipal matters — livestock ordinances, paying the people responsible for keeping up the roads, and so forth — and by the way, acting as a court in criminal matters. And in the early days “Halifax County” stretched all the way to Cape Breton; over time, as the population grew and it became increasingly impractical for large numbers of JPs to travel the great distance to Halifax, first Pictou County and then Cape Breton County were hived off from Halifax County.
In any event, the minutes were hand-written by the clerk of the General Sessions. I’m old, so grew up reading and writing cursive, but I’m rusty and it takes some getting used to, especially since a lot of the lettering has changed over the centuries — long ‘S’es are just the start of that. But more problematic is that some clerks had better handwriting than others, and depending on how the minute books were stored (and later photographed for microfilm) sometimes the minutes are faded into nearly indecipherable legibility.
So I find myself trying to read a passage, and that can involve alternately zooming in and out, trying to see what exactly is that word, and trying to get meaning from context. And I’m completely ignorant of some of that context — two Archives staffers very kindly and patiently explained how the old pounds-shillings-pence money worked, but even they agreed that the passage I was trying to read was unreadable. When I take notes and copy sections from the minutes, there are a lot of ‘[undecipherable]’s and ‘[?]’s in my notes.
But it struck me that often the JPs would adopt a new county ordinance — for example, one establishing fines for people in Dartmouth who let their pigs and goats roam the streets — and then they’d alert the public to the new ordinance by advertising it in the newspaper. And the clerk would then cut out the ad from the newspaper and paste it right in the minutes book. So there’s a weird juxtaposition — pages and pages of barely legible or illegible cursive writing from the clerk, and then suddenly an easy-to-read newspaper ad printed with moveable type.
The need for the clerk to use a typewriter was painfully obvious, but that was an impossibility as there were no typewriters. People had been using movable typeset for centuries to produce books and newspapers. There was no particularly unique technology that was needed to make a typewriter (and there were occasional patents for such things, but they don’t seem to have been marketed). But it took a change in the world to make the typewriter a reality — the widespread business bureaucracies that developed in the late 19th century.
When I thought about this, I realized the development of the typewriter is parallel to the development of wheeled suitcases.
It seems painfully obvious that suitcases should have wheels, and as with typewriters, no unique technology needed to be developed to make wheeled suitcases (although a change in the production of Polyethylene helped). In fact, some suitcases had wheels, but it did not become the default until there was a change in the world — ubiquitous and affordable air travel — around 1980. I remember taking my first flight as a teenager in the 1970s, lugging a suitcase through the long corridors of an airport, an absurdly difficult operation with a simple solution just waiting to be employed.
It makes me wonder how many other “obvious” things we’ve passed over, just waiting for someone out there to put two and two together and for the world to change in some way so the technology can be widely adopted.
Drunken Darmouthians
It’s not directly related to what I’m researching, but I had to take note of a couple of sections from the County Court of General Sessions of the Peace minutes I came upon Wednesday. My notes:
It has been brought to the notice of the Jury that in several districts of the county a large number of persons are selling liquors without License. The Jury are of opinion that if the Law was so amended as to subject persons exposing liquors (not having a license) to penalty the evil might in some measure be removed. The law at present allows only one license in a gold district. This restriction does not appear to answer its object as the Jury are informed that upward of thirty persons are now selling without license at Waverley and they advise this restriction be withdrawn.
— Halifax County Court of General Sessions of the Peace, 1866.
In 1867, the court heard from a temperance organization in Dartmouth, which noted that “liquors intoxicating are being openly exposed for sale on the same premises where other goods are sold in that town [Dartmouth] in direct opposition to the law and that several of the licensed liquors shops Dartmouth are regularly opened for the sale of intoxicating liquors on the Lord’s Day.” The committee wanted no further licenses issued in Dartmouth, but the Grand Jury was of the opinion that more licenses should be issued so that the sale of liquor could be better regulated.
If you think about it, that’s how we eventually got the Woodside Beverage Room.
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Government
No meetings
On campus
Dalhousie
Dal Innovates Breakfast Speaker Series: Health (Friday, 10am, Room 2600, Killam Library) — with Rafaela Andrade and Lynette Peters; free breakfast; more info and registration here
Saint Mary’s
Anthropology: Honours Progress Report Presentation (Friday, 10am, McNally Main 223 and online) — more info here
In the harbour
Halifax
12:00: Bakkafoss, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Portland
15:00: CSL Tacoma, bulker, sails from Gold Bond for Wilmington
15:00: Nolhan Ava, ro-ro cargo, sails from Pier 42 for sea
16:00: AlgoBerta, oil tanker, arrives at anchor from Sainte Victoir, Quebec
17:00: SFL Composer, car carrier, sails from Autoport for sea
18:00: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, sails from Fairview Cove for St. John’s
20:00: STI Pontiac, oil tanker, sails from Irving Oil 3 for sea
20:00: AlgoScotia, oil tanker, moves from Pier 9B to Anchorage
21:00: Bakkafoss, container ship, sails from Pier 42 for sea
21:00: NYK Rumina, container ship, sails from Fairview Cove for sea
Cape Breton
12:30: Otis, oil tanker, arrives at Everwind 1 from Palanca, Angola
16:00: ECO Joshua Park, oil tanker, sails from Everwind 1 for sea
20:00: IT Integrity, supply vessel, sails from Government Wharf for sea
Footnotes
That might be the whitest music video I’ve ever posted, heh.
Not liking this cold weather.
I know people were upset to see a guy starting fires last summer by rolling tires filled with lit fuel into the forest and posting it on Facebook. If that’s who they’ve charged having caused the biggest burn in NS history and lots of lost homes, the deterence alone is worth the charges/punishment.
Question about In the harbour. Why are some of the red ship links in a bolder type than the others?
That’s very strange. They all look the same when I look at that section. Can you email me a screenshot?
That Centennial Pool looks like a 1960s Catholic church, the kind that is always cold and has windows that leak.
As to the difficult-to-read passages, why not crowdsource them? Post them on Twitter/X or Bluesky, or here. I’ve seen people do that in Facebook history groups and it has got results, as well as useful comments as to historical context.
The late Bill Clarke, who was the director of the Restigouche Regional Museum in Dalhousie, N.B., once told me that it was getting increasingly difficult to find interns who could read “cursive” (or what we used to call “longhand” or just “writing”) in old documents. He said this was often the case even with documents that contained beautiful handwriting.
I’m trying hard to imagine Waverly having a happening night life.
Maybe the lesson here is that Mister Charles P Allen had ragers at Dam Road 150 years before CPA students did.
I think the Montague gold mine had a wild west sense to it.
Wheeled suitcases may be obvious in hindsight, but it’s relatively recent that anyone would carry their own suitcase for any distance. I was an airport shuttle bus driver in the late 1980s, and when people arrived at Toronto airport, Skycaps and their carts would be ready for the suitcases. Bell staff would carry your bags at hotels. But as air travel become more common, so to speak, fewer people were willing to pay porters (who were only taking their suitcases to the check-in counter). Then the airlines began charging for checked bags, leading people to desire the largest (and heaviest) carry-on possible, and needing to keep it with them from the entrance to the plane, a trip that has increased in length and time due to security requirements.
How much did typewriters cost in inflation-adjusted terms when they first became available? I see them as sort of analogous to computers, they became ubiquitous as they became cheap. The first computer I encountered cost more, adjusted for inflation, than the most expensive MacBook Pro does today. It had a tiny monochrome orange screen and was the opposite of portable.
Typewriters were very expensive. When my dad was starting out, he rented his typewriter, which was not uncommon. I just looked up a 1914 Remington typewriter ad from the US. It cost $55: $5 down and $5 a month. That works out to almost US$ 1,700 today. This was actually a Remington Junior, so probably a cheaper model.
Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. 2024 people are relatively spoiled by the avalanche of cheap goods from The Land of Stuff. I have a set of calipers (a tool for measuring) manufactured in the late ’40s or early ’50s that someone bothered to engrave his name in, because it probably cost him two weeks wages. A better version of the same tool now costs $30.
It is always a good time for some Southside, having Bruce there makes it a bonus track for me. Thanks Tim!