A couple of deft touches in Monday night's swearing-in ceremony for CBRM's new mayor and council hint at Cecil Clarke's potential to be a transformative mayor for the island's predominant municipality. [See update below.] [caption id="attachment_11065" align="alignleft" width="150"] Clarke[/caption] The first is a small thing: the musicians Clarke has chosen for the event are (1) young and (2) non-Celtic. This marks a departure from the cliched tartanism that usually dominates such affairs. Check out headliner Kyle Mischiek's rap-remix of "We are an Island" on YouTube and iTunes. The freshening up of a slightly dowdy Cape Breton chestnut will bring welcome symbolic value...

04 November, 2012

Before: After: Lisa Sutt captured this act of civic vandalism this morning on her way to Halifax's Seaport Market. "Brilliant," writes Lisa on her Facebook feed. "So much for history. A bright white stripe is so much better." See this tribute to a dying artform....

27 October, 2012

An astonishing number of Nova Scotians have snapped up the chance to vote electronically in the municipal elections that will wrap up Saturday. In the Halifax Regional Municipality, 22.5 percent of eligible voters cast ballots on line or by phone-—not all that surprising until you realize that only 36.2 percent of eligible voters bothered going to the polls in the 2008 election. You might expect HRM, home to the best educated, most affluent voters in the region, to embrace e-voting. But then what are we to make of working class CBRM, where 32.8 percent of the 82,223 eligible voters cast ballots on...

19 October, 2012

After just 17 days on Mars, NASA's Curiosity Rover has detected strong indications of life—and confirmed a familiar adage at the same time. Photo credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Photo-enhancement credit: Peter Barss...

23 August, 2012

Former you-name-it Norman Spector (@nspector4) points out a glaring omission in my partial list of pundits who inveighed against BC Premier Christy Clark's demand for a share of profits from the Northern Gateway pipeline, while mostly ignoring Quebec's brazen extortion of Newfoundland hydro exports. Stephen Maher, late of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, and now typing for the Postmedia chain, had a terrific column on the dispute last weekend, one that places the Quebec-Newfoundland precedent front-and-center. The nub: History suggests...

02 August, 2012

It would be an exaggeration to say the right wing voices who dominate Canadian media commentary have risen in unison to condemn BC's pitch for a share of Northern Gateway pipeline spoils, but the clamor has certainly been one-sided. BC Premier Christy Clark's "attitude," wrote Kelly McParland, "is disastrous for Canada." John Ibbitson called Clark's demands "dangerous," and urged Prime Minister Harper to step in. Rex Murphy bemoaned the premiers' declining "intellectual and emotional connection to the national understanding." Andrew Coyne called it "extortion." Rob Russo told CBC Radio the fabric of the nation was at stake. A Globe and Mail...

31 July, 2012

The Sydney Tar Ponds cleanup is proceeding apace. The final section of the North Pond is now undergoing solidification and stabilization, a process that increases the bearing capacity of the sediments, and reduces their (already low) water solubility. Capping has been completed in the South Pond and large sections of the North Pond. Seeding and sodding are underway. Here's how the South Pond looks from soon-to-be-reopened Ferry Street: Here's the North Pond, viewed from the Ferry Street Bridge, with the former Sysco crane, now operated by Provincial Energy Ventures, in the background, and Muggah Creek meandering gracefully through the property: When it reopens...

20 July, 2012

Saturday's guest post about the closure and pending demolition of The Old Mill, a seedy Wyse Road bar housed in the only surviving part of Dartmouth's historic Rope Works, criticized peninsular Halifax heritage buffs for not trying to save the building. Our correspondent also said a new Sobeys supermarket on the site would lead to closure of the community Sobeys in Woodside, making life harder for impoverished mothers and seniors. Beverley Miller, a member of the Heritage Trust of Nova Scotia board of directors, responds: Preservationists can only do something if they know about a pending demolition...

18 July, 2012

It's easy to overlook the loss we've suffered as traditional news outlets contract in Nova Scotia and elsewhere. This message from a former Halifax journalist, unpublished for four years, shows he has lost neither the itch nor the knack: My wife, a friend and I went to the Old Mill tavern Thursday night to have a beer and laugh at a Dartmouth dive on the eve of its destruction. What we discovered, instead, was a fascinating story of history, community, and class. The huge wooden beams running across the pub’s ceiling – six of them, at least 16 inches on the side,...

14 July, 2012

Left: Holiday beach-goers at Coney Island, NY, on July 4, 1935, near the height of the resorts popularity. Right, the same  beach, photographed this July 4 7 from the top of of the amusement park's ferris wheel, by Sydney native Angela Honan....

11 July, 2012
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