By now, many people in Nova Scotia will have seen the Atlantic Gold ads on television, read words of self-praise from the company in newspaper opinion pieces, or received Atlantic Gold flyers in their mailboxes. For the past month or so, Atlantic Gold has been blanketing the province with its propaganda. As the Halifax Examiner...
Port Wallace Gamble: the real estate boom meets Nova Scotia’s toxic mine legacy
Part 1: The making of a toxic mess and the uncalculated costs of previous gold rushes.
This is Part 1 of a three-part story about the toxic legacy from historic gold mines in Nova Scotia, which its citizens will be paying many millions of dollars to try to clean up, and how the contamination at just one of these sites — Montague Mines in HRM — is still affecting lives today,...
Survey says: Why are people calling me with pro-mining propaganda?
It looks as if someone is getting a little nervous about the growing backlash to the latest gold rush in the province, and to the development of new open pit gold mines along the Eastern Shore, particularly the proposal by the Australian company St. Barbara, which acquired Atlantic Gold in July last year for $722 […]
Halifax is making modest improvements in transit; so why are we preparing to pull the rug out from under transit with Uber?
Morning File, Friday, December 13, 2019
News 1. Cabinet Jennifer Henderson went to yesterday’s post-cabinet scrum. Click here to see what the cabinet ministers had to say. This article is for subscribers. Click here to subscribe. Henderson thinks the decision on the environmental assessment of Northern Pulp Mill’s proposed effluent treatment system and pipe into the Northumberland Strait could come as […]
Drink lead, kid
Morning File, Thursday, November 7, 2019
November subscription drive Stephen Kimber has been around the Examiner for so long, it’s easy to take his weekly columns for granted. Monday morning: Kimber’s got a new column. I got to know Kimber while doing my MFA at King’s over the last couple of years. He was the cohort leader for my class and […]
Nova Scotia government doubles down on gold mining
There were moments during last week’s “Water Not Gold” rally outside the Alt Hotel at the Halifax airport where the “Gold Show” was in progress, when I was reminded of a video from 2011 during Occupy Wall Street. That footage shows protestors marching along Wall Street, calling out money barons, greed, and the neoliberal system […]
Court papers reveal a previously unpublicized industrial accident at the Moose River Gold Mine
Morning File, Friday, August 23, 2019
News 1. Dartmouth lakes “On a hot steamy night more than 150 Dartmouth residents turned up at a ‘Save Our Lakes’ meeting hosted by Claudia Chender and Susan Leblanc, the representatives for Dartmouth South and Dartmouth North in the legislature,” reports Jennifer Henderson: Top among the concerns expressed at the Micmac Aquatic Club last night […]
Roughed up by the RCMP at a public meeting, John Perkins sues Atlantic Gold and the cops
Sixty-eight-year-old John Perkins of Earltown is striking a blow for democracy after he says he was forcibly hauled out of a public meeting by an RCMP officer last May. Perkins held a news conference in Halifax yesterday to explain why he is filing a lawsuit against Atlantic Gold Corporation which hosted two information sessions on […]
After the gold rush
Nova Scotia is ignoring the toxic legacy of past mining manias while rushing headlong into the next
If learning from past mistakes were a government tradition in Nova Scotia, the current government would not be exhibiting all the symptoms of gold fever. But it is, and it looks like a raging bout of the affliction. In the past few years, it has amended legislation based on recommendations made by the industry’s cheerleader-in-chief, […]
The problem with meritocracy: it destroys our humanity
Morning File, Wednesday, June 12, 2019
News 1. Studenting While Black “On June 2, Black graduate student Shelby McPhee was accused by two white women of stealing a laptop while he was attending the Black Canadian Studies Association session at the 88th annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held at the University of British Columbia,” writes El Jones: The white […]