Is Joan Jessome most hated woman in Nova Scotia?

Let’s start with a question: is Joan Jessome the most hated woman in Nova Scotia? Google “Joan Jessome” and “hated,” and you’ll get 5,630 hits in less than a Google second. The top three results are news stories following the December 11, 2015, announcement she would be retiring as president of the Nova Scotia […]

Making the Mooseheads

(“Making the Mooseheads” won an award for best sports journalism at the 2013 Atlantic Journalism Awards.) Behind the scenes of how Halifax’s junior team went from worst in the country to being the kings of Canadian hockey. By Stephen Kimber On Friday, April 5, at the Metro Centre, the Halifax Mooseheads—the number-one-ranked team in all of Canadian junior […]

Dexter profile wins 2009 AJA

Stephen Kimber’s election-eve profile of the man who would become Nova Scotia’s first ever New Democratic Party premier won the Gold Award for Best Feature at the 2009 Atlantic Journalism Awards. AJA presentation The story, "Who is Darrell Dexter?", appeared in the June 3, 2009 edition of The Coast, Halifax’s alternative weekly. Coast writers were […]

Is Corey Wright the wrong man?

When American sailor Damon Crooks was killed on Argyle Street, police had a strong suspect but a weak case. Luckily for a city embarrassed by the murder, the suspect cooperated. Stephen Kimber finds out how pleading guilty became Corey Wright’s best move, right or wrong. Corey Wright Photo essay by Aaron Fraser […]

Coast story Atlantic Journalism Award finalist

Stephen Kimber’s cover feature for the June 9, 2009th issue of The Coast—"Who is Premier Darrell Dexter?"—has been selected as one of the finalists for this year’s Atlantic Journalism Awards. The Dexter story is up against two other stories—Tim Bousquet’s "Doolittle, Darwin and the Deeply Dumb" from The Coast and Andrew McGilligan’s "Long Journey’s Home" […]

Reclaiming black history, acknowledging our own

Nova Scotia’s black history is rich and remarkable—Birchtown, for example, was North America’s largest settlement of free blacks when it was founded in 1783—but that realty is rarely acknowledged. Now finally, that may be about to change… Shortly before 10 on the evening of March 31, 2006, residents along the Old Birchtown Road near Shelburne […]

Rebuttal to the chief

Tom Martin had it wrong, Halifax Police Chief Frank Beazley told CBC Radio’s Information Morning on December 1. In my story for The Coast (November 19, 2009) on the city’s striking number of unsolved homicides, I’d quoted Martin, a respected retired homicide detective as saying: “To my knowledge, the cold case unit has not laid […]

Dead Wrong

From the November 19, 2009 edition of The Coast Why is our police department one of the worst in Canada at finding killers? Stephen Kimber investigates. OK, boys… Pack it up… Back to what you were doing… We’re done here… Tom Martin had known it was coming. Call it his experience, or—perhaps, more to the […]

Child Welfare (The Coast) Oct. 25, 2007

Lost Children The province took Tina’s daughter in September 1999. "I honestly didn’t understand any of this and why it happened," she says. "I cried real hard." “I feel like Jesus,” Tina announces to no one in particular. We are sitting on a hard wooden bench outside Courtroom 1 in the Dartmouth law courts building, […]

High School Confidential (Aug. 30, 2007)

Whatever Happened to the Class of ’67? With Queen Elizabeth High School about to become history, Coast Senior Feature Writer Stephen Kimber — QE Class of ’67 — set out to rediscover some of his own. Whatever happened to his classmates? Did high school change their lives? Did it even matter? *** “For many of […]