News
1. Ward 5 back to cooking
Steve Williams donates a commercial dishwasher, allowing the kitchen to re-open, serving meals in the north end.
2. Ship of Theseus
Global News has obtained the latest inspection report of the Bluenose Whatever. It lists 57 “minor” deficiencies, including “poorly stepped masts, a vent that interferes with an anchor wire, loose deck planks, leaking pipes, and hatchways with missing handrails.” You can read the report here.
3. UFO almost kills dozens
An Air Canada Jazz turbofan plane leaving Stanfield International came perilously close to hitting something at around 6,000 metres altitude. The pilot described the object as a “red and white vertical tube with rotor,” and thought it might have been a drone or some sort of weather equipment, but no one seems to know what it was, so we can speculate that it was an American spy craft or the first arrival of the Kanamit.
4. Berlin Wall
Artist Vid Ingelevics goes to Truro to find the slabs of the Berlin Wall at the Ag School.
5. Black Educators Association found guilty of discrimination
6. Northern Pulp Mill
Just a month after an effluent leak, the mill amped up production to record levels, having its five most productive days in the mill’s 57-year history of operation, reports the Chronicle Herald’s Aaron Beswick. This would correspond with anecdotal observations from an Examiner reader that clear-cutting this year seems to be higher than in previous years, and sure enough the Forest Products Association of Nova Scotia tells us that the mill buys $80 million worth of wood chips from loggers annually, and that “sawmilling is starting to come back.”
Views
1. Ottawa
Stephen Archibald sure has a lot of time on his hands.
2. Dropkick Murphys
A younger me who doesn’t get up at 5am every day to write Morning File went to the show, got crazy drunk, and was beat up by 250-pound guy with no teeth. It was a great time.
Government
City
Harbour East-Marine Drive Community Council (6pm, Nantucket Room, Dartmouth Sportsplex)—back in 2011, the council approved a 13-storey 75-unit apartment building and 17 townhouses at Shepherd’s Island, that slab of land sticking out into Wrights Cove next to Burnside. That development approval went to a company called Shepherd’s Island Inc, which isn’t listed in the Registry of Joint Stocks (I’m continually amazed at how often both the city and provincial governments make deals with companies that can’t legally operate in Nova Scotia). Since then, the property has been bought by a company called Halifax Harbour Isle, which is owned by Romspen, a Toronto firm, and suddenly Harbour Isle wants to add two 16-storey buildings and “some” townhouses to the project. This is another data point for my suspicion that Halifax’s over-heated real estate market is being driven in part by investors from Toronto and Vancouver who understand that their own real estate markets are tremendously over-valued and so are dumping their money in Halifax because for some reason they think the same thing can’t happen here. But really, even with the harbour views, who wants to live in an industrial park in the middle of a concrete nowhere?
Province
No public meetings.
On Campus
Saint Mary’s
Thesis defence (1:30pm, Science Building, S345)—Alicia Irwin, a masters student in Applied Science, will defend her thesis, “Social Structure, Emergence Behaviour and Roost Switching in Female Little Brown Bats (Myotis Lucifugus).”
King’s College
Can Chimpanzees Forgive Us? (7pm, KTS Lecture Hall, Academic Building)—Andrew Westoll, the writer-in-residence for the King’s MFA in creative nonfiction summer residency, is going to talk about his book, The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary.
Daily Plug
George Monbiot is always a good read, but for some reason his most recent column,”Sick of this market-driven world? You should be,” has been especially making the rounds in my circles. Check it out.
In the harbour
(click on vessel names for pictures and more information about the ships)
Arrivals
APL Belgium, container ship, Cagliari, Italy to Fairview Cove West
Atlantic Conveyor, con-ro, Liverpool, England to Fairview Cove East
Mainport Pine, research/survey vessel, BP Exploration Area to Pier 25
Heritiage Leader, ro-ro passenger ship, Emden, Germany to Autoport
Jan S, general cargo, Helsingborg to Pier 27
Departures
Jan S to Mariel, Cuba
Atlantic Converyor to New York
Heritage Leader to sea
Footnotes
Lisa MacLean, of Beaver Bank, has started Tutus on the Run, which will “make and sell tutus, primarily to runners and donate part of the proceeds to a run club for pre-teen girls in Halifax.” Running in tutus goes back to a woman’s battle with brain cancer; MacLean is making each by hand and giving five bucks out of every $25 purchase to Girls Gone Gazelle.
GM’s review of What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is really interesting. This sentence from the review summarizes the gamification of the workplace: “The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers.” But not only has work been turned into a game in which workers are chips in a vast corporate casino but healthcare is rapidly becoming gamified as workers eat apples for meaningless points that signify conformity and sell precious biometric information to cynical corporations in exchange for discounts on insurance premiums. Elsewhere bets are being placed on who will fall prey to a “catastrophic” illness. Going to get a coy of Prof Verhaeghe’s book. Thanks Tim.
Are there regulations about development projects “from away?” With so little skin in the game, I would hope that developers from out of province would face tougher requirements around proving their model is needed, long-term and relevant to the community of the proposal. I guess what I’m asking is “can somebody google that for me?”
This housing bubble is deeply troubling; I have no faith that more apartments will lead to lower rental prices as many sites are being marketed as luxury pads. I also find the council vote for St. Theresa’s development fishy, given how obstinate council was for a similar proposal by St. John’s United just blocks away – a proposal that included extensive community consultation and potential space for community non-profits, and had the endorsement (if I recall correctly) of the councillor. Why council would prefer to go with private developers’ proposals rather than community-member-led boards is beyond me — maybe Willow Street’s NIMBY neighbours were better organized? Had more sway with council? Coming back to the Burnside development, we need to examine the level of community engagement with development agencies both from here and from other provinces, particularly if they are coming from regions with such poor housing management records.
Re: joint stocks, they actively refuse to enforce it. Complained several times a few years ago about a few.