News 1. Cornwallis On Thursday, I interviewed three women who were among the organizers of Saturday’s protest in Cornwallis Park. That interview became Friday’s Examineradio podcast; you can hear it here: (direct download) (RSS feed) (Subscribe via iTunes) I’ve long wondered why the Cornwallis statue was put up in the first place, so Friday I […]
Archives for July 2017
编年史先驱罢工符合“最终也n”
Part of me hopes Kaplan’s mediation can end the strike, but part of me would like to see the process proceed to a full-scale industrial inquiry. Now that could get interesting.
For the sake of the 53 reporters and editors still walking the picket line at the Halifax Chronicle Herald, part of me hopes super-mediator/arbitrator/industrial inquiry commissioner William Kaplan is able — through an initial stage of mediation next month — to find a quick resolution to their seemingly intractable, brutish, one-year-176-days-and-counting dispute with owners Mark...
Cornwallis statue draped in “Removing Cornwallis” ceremony
Several hundred people showed up at Cornwallis Park for a ceremony to “remove” the statue honouring Edward Cornwallis. Speaker Elizabeth Marshall opened the proceedings by telling the crowd that there have been differing opinions in the Indigenous community about what to do with the statue. Some wanted it removed immediately, while others wanted to go through […]
The unveiling of the Cornwallis statue in 1931 was a celebration of imperialism and warning against social unrest
Like the rest of the world, in 1931 Halifax was reeling from the Depression. As downtown merchants were figuring out how to implement a newly minted sales tax (with surprisingly few complaints), Premier Gordon Harrington was fending off rumours of an imminent election call, and despite the foul economy, the Halifax Herald thought prosperity was […]
“We’re not trying to remove history, we’re trying to unearth it”: Examineradio, episode #120
It’s been two weeks since the self-proclaimed Proud Boys disrupted an Indigenous ceremony at the statue of Edward Cornwallis in downtown Halifax. In the meantime, the rocky relationship between the city and its Indigenous citizens has had a significantly higher profile, culminating in a planned protest on Saturday July 15 to finally have the offending statue removed. Joining […]
Halifax financial advisor John LeBlanc wants Google to turn over the names of people who complained about him: Morning File, Friday, July 14, 2017
News 1. Chronicle Herald strike “The Nova Scotia government has called for an inquiry into the 18-month-old labour dispute between the Chronicle Herald, Canada’s largest independently owned daily newspaper, and the union that represents the paper’s editorial staff,” reports the Canadian Press: Ingrid Bulmer, president of the Halifax Typographical Union, said the government’s move was in response to the union’s […]
The PDA fix: public displays of affection could improve your health
Researcher Karen Blair was in Toronto’s gay village recently counting the number of couples walking by holding hands. Over one 15-minute period, researchers saw nine mixed sex couples walk by holding hands and just one same sex couple. “Even just realizing that 10 years after same sex marriage has been legalized, same sex couples in Canada are still not equally comfortable holding hands — that’s still saying something.”
Will a little PDA keep the doctor away? Public displays of affection like hand holding, hugging, or smooching on the street corner are coming under the microscope at St. Francis Xavier University, where Karen Blair, an assistant professor of psychology, is trying to determine how they affect human health. “My overall hypothesis is generally that...
What indigenous oral histories can teach us: Morning File, Thursday, July 13, 2017
News 1. Leibovitz collection “The minister responsible [for] culture in the province is standing behind the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and its repeated attempts to convince a federal body to certify as ‘cultural property’ hundreds of images produced by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz,” reports Jean Laroche for the CBC: As far as Culture Minister Leo Glavine is […]
How the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia participated in an attempted tax scam: Morning File, Wednesday, July 12, 2017
News 1. Annie Leibovitz In October 2015, I wrote the following about the Annie Leibovitz collection: In 2013, it was announced that the Annie Leibovitz collection would be donated to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, but the photographs still haven’t been put on display, and there’s no hope that the collection will be displayed before […]
Policing and 6-foot fences: Five years in, city and province still make Open Streets too costly
“When you look at any city from the air, the biggest public space is the streets. And the streets belong to everybody.” That’s Gil Penalosa, formers parks commissioner of Bogota, Columbia, where he helped pioneer Ciclovia, a weekly event that sees 121 kilometres of city streets closed every Sunday morning to vehicle traffic, and opened […]