This is a 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 us today. This, the second in...
City councillors approve increased police budget despite ongoing racial profiling
You don’t have to be Negrodamus to have predicted that the Halifax City Council would approve the police budget increase of about a million dollars, but even for the cynical the budget committee meeting on Wednesday demonstrated some surprising depths of unaccountability. Calls to freeze the police budget in response to the Halifax Regional Police’s […]
Halifax police officers in Santina Rao case still working, chief waiting for investigation
The officers involved are still on the job and Halifax Regional Police Chief Dan Kinsella had little to say publicly on Monday about the violent arrest of a young Black mother at Walmart last week, citing an ongoing court case and a potential investigation. Kinsella addressed reporters after a meeting of the Halifax board of...
Board recommends council approve Halifax police budget with extra $1 million
Halifax Regional Police Chief Dan Kinsella says he needs a budget increase of nearly $1 million for the next year to create eight new sergeant positions “to better serve the community.” The department presented its 2020-2021 budget request to the city’s board of police commissioners on Thursday, asking for an increase of $993,300 over the...
City still ridin’ the stadium train
Morning File, Wednesday, October 23, 2019
News 1. Stadium This item is written by Tim Bousquet. Halifax council yesterday rejected Sam Austin’s bid to immediately end a staff review of the Schooners’ stadium proposal. Had Austin been successful, the stadium proposal would have effectively been rejected. In October 2018, council passed a motion outlining how it would deal with the stadium […]
An astonishing display of cowardice: city councillors are ignoring police misconduct in the Assoun case
As we are learning that the Halifax police willfully acted to keep an innocent man in prison, the politicians responsible for civilian oversight of the police department are deafeningly silent. Meanwhile, unelected bureaucrats and lawyers at City Hall have attempted to keep the police misconduct hidden by a publication ban. According to his lawyers, police […]
IMPing along: under Halifax’s new transportation plan, what will change?
Highlights from council's opening budget talks on transportation and the Integrated Mobility Plan.
Last week, Halifax council met with city staffers to talk budgets, big picture style, in advance of nitty-gritty budget deliberations in the coming months. It’s worth recapping some of the highlights from the discussions for the city’s two big transportation departments — Transportation and Public Works (TPW) and Halifax Transit. (You can check out the...
Halifax has too many fireworks displays: Morning File, Monday, October 23, 2017
News 1. An expert explains why there’s no hotel at the Nova Centre Why hasn’t an operator been named for the hotel being constructed above Halifax’s new convention centre? That’s the question I asked last week of Jan deRoos, a professor of Hotel Finance and Real Estate at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. A […]