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Bill Mont, Rest in peace

Bill Mont, who died on October 28, 2025, at the age of 96, was one of Halifax’s legendary characters. He would become best known as Nova Scotia’s “Flea Market King” during the 1970s and 1980s. But he was also one of the “characters” who helped me bring to life everyday life in Halifax during World […]

Alexa

As the first female leader of a mainstream Canadian political party, she helped transform Nova Scotia and Canadian politics. In the process, she transcended party affiliation and gender to become simply “Alexa” to Canadians across the country.

“It’s everything I hoped for — a portrait of one of our great political leaders, written by one of our best writers.”

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Filmmaker Floyd Kane talks life in East Preston, making Diggstown and opening doors for Black Nova Scotians

By Stephen Kimber Floyd Kane was frustrated, restless, anxious. On one level, he knew he shouldn’t have to carry the burden of all those angst-anchoring emotions. He should be basking in the glow of everything he’d accomplished and all he was yet to accomplish, thank you very much. He’d grown up in East Preston, a […]

From ‘Reparations’ by Stephen Kimber

July 1976 He shouldn’t have been in this hellhole on a summer Sunday morning. He should have been home sleeping it off. So why was he standing here in his one, drizzle-dampened suit trying desperately not to let his brain process the smell of shit and salt that wafted up from the sewer outfall down […]

Calvin Lawrence: Black Panther Party’s ‘unlikely cub’

His hiring as a Halifax police officer in 1969 happened only because the city feared what might happen if it didn’t at least pay lip service to inclusion. But over the course of his 36-year policing career, Calvin Lawrence proved a more than worthy fighter against racism. Calvin Lawrence remembers the life-altering moment well. It […]

Encounter re-encountered, with lessons for today

In 1970, a dozen outside experts came to Halifax for a week to turn the city ‘upside down.’ Last week, a local group played excerpts from ‘Encounter on Urban Environment,’ the NFB’s documentary on that cataclysmic week in Halifax, and discussed whether it’s time for another upside-downing. This column first appeared in the Halifax Examiner January 28, 2019. I […]

Encountering Halifax

“Encounter on the Urban Environment,” 1970, became the week that shook Halifax to its core “In the final week of February 1970, 12 specialists—most of them men of international reputation—gathered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to take part in an experiment utterly new to the Western Hemisphere,” wrote Ken Hartnett, a Washington-based urban affairs reporter for […]

Does Cornwallis matter? More than I thought

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner February 5, 2018. Count me among the countless Nova Scotians happy to see the back of Eddie Cornwallis’s scraggy, statue-head as it was ignominiously carted off last week to some dank, secret storage depot somewhere, out of sight and — hopefully — out of mind for at least […]

Reparations raises the racism disconnect

This column originally appeared in the Halifax Examiner on October 10, 2017. On Sept. 25, the United Nations Human Rights Council discussed a report on Canada by its Working Group of Experts on Peoples of African Descent. The report, which shone its white-hot light on our country’s sordid history of slavery and racism in virtually […]

Who is Lyle Howe? And why are so many people saying such nasty things about him? (Part I)

PART I: The Making of Lyle Howe “High school taught me what to think. Philosophy taught me how to think. Law school will teach me why all this thinking is necessary.” Lyle Howe Dalhousie University “Discover the Unexpected” marketing campaign 2006 “The Complaints Investigation Committee of the NOVA SCOTIA BARRISTERS’ SOCIETY gives notice that the practising […]