Rocky Jones: The past and future of the Nova Scotia human rights' struggle

I wanted to ask Rocky Jones about his Wednesday lecture: “The Struggle for Human Rights in African Nova Scotian Communities, 1961-2011.” No problem. When? Not today. He’s on a panel at a national conference on public policy. Saturday, he’s in Truro, keynote speaker at an International Year for People of African Descent symposium. Then Ottawa […]

You showed them, Mr. Mayor

Dear Mayor Kelly, Congratulations. You showed those dangerous… democrats. Who knows what calamities might have befallen our fair city if those peaceful hooligans had been allowed to stage yet another one of their interminable, speak-and-repeat, consensus-decision-making general assemblies on our sacredly public Grand Parade (which, until recently, served as a sacredly private parking lot for […]

First contract arbitration: tilting the balance or righting the balance?

So Nova Scotia’s largest non-union employers are eager to preserve an unfettered collective bargaining process. They are, they claim, deeply concerned about “a third party deciding what will be the appropriate terms and conditions of employment.” How progressive. Where were they when the Harper government systematically ripped the guts out of that process during the […]

Occupy protesters speaking for more than just themselves

Occupy Nova Scotia’s campers will decamp—temporarily—from Grand Parade so Remembrance Day ceremonies can take place there next week. Given the respectful, peaceful tenor of the protest, that’s hardly surprising. Neither will it come as any surprise—though it will doubtless disappoint Mayor Peter Kelly—that the protesters also intend to rebuild their tent village and continue the […]

Shipbuilding contract: the good, the better but not the best

The good news is we won. The better news is that we won fair and square. The best news would be for the process by which Halifax’s Irving shipyard last week won a $25-billion federal shipbuilding contract-for-a-generation become the new norm. But that last, of course, is least likely. That’s because the shipbuilding contract was […]

The stadium… moving right along

The good news: there are public consultations. The bad news: those consultations are happening late, and only after the central question has already been answered. “Is a stadium a good idea for HRM?” demands the white-letters-on-red-bristolboard-styled poster on the home page of the Stadium Consultation web page. But the actual questions we are now being […]

Your call is important to us, City Hall edition

Andrew Macdonald had a question. Several. The allnovascotia.com reporter was following up a recent HRM decision not to challenge a Supreme Court ruling that Polycorp Properties could develop a $15-million, 66-unit condo project on Brunswick Street. The city had refused to issue a development permit for the project because it claimed a never-officially-registered 1970 document […]

Africville: The lesson still unlearned

No one asked them. Again. The real lesson of the original Africville relocation—which should be seared into our collective consciousness after 50 years of hard-learned lesson-living—is that outsiders, even well intentioned ones, cannot make decisions for a community without at least asking the people of that community what they really want. Back in the 1960s, […]

Flight 111 and might-have-could-have-possibly-maybe

Friday’s much-hyped Fifth Estate documentary on the crash of Swissair Flight 111 generated much arcing and sparking about its cause but—in the end—no incendiary device, no hard evidence the tragic 1998 accident was anything but. That said, the story raised questions that deserve better than read-the-report, cone-of-silence non-responses from the RCMP and the Transportation Safety […]

Remembering the Citadel (hotel)

Last week, SilverBirch Hotels, the Vancouver-based company that owns the Citadel Halifax hotel, announced plans to flatten it. The company intends to replace the venerable downtown landmark with a $60-million, triple-tower, hotel-apartment complex it says will generate “a lot more” street-level activity in the northern downtown while conforming to HRM by Design—and legislation protecting views […]