Unravel Nov/Dec 2021 - Telling Halifax Stories

UNRAVELHALIFAX.CA

NOV/DEC 21

The premier is promising Nova Scotia a lot — will he deliver?

THE STORY BEHIND THE CBC HIT DIGGSTOWN P.48

CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM GREETS GREEN STRATEGY P.54

RESTAURANTS COMING AND GOING P.62

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the issue Departments 5 UNRAVEL No more crystal balls — just a roadmap 8 THE LIST

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The city comes alive for the holidays

Features

15 THE PERSPECTIVE

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The ordeal of finding an apartment in Halifax

THE YEAR OF HARD TRUTHS

17 THE BACKSTORY A name that shaped Halifax

Where is Halifax headed in 2022?

21 THE CONVERSATION Halifax Mutual Aid

40

24 THE HOUSING MARKET

CAN HOUSTON DO IT?

Halifax’s housing crisis could be a lot worse

The premier is promising Nova Scotia a lot in 2022 — will he deliver?

29 THE VIEW

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Downtown art tour

BUILDING A BEACHHEAD

31 THE SOUND

Floyd Kane didn’t see Black

Countless Journeys at Pier 21

Nova Scotians on the screen or behind the cameras. With

60 THE FLAVOUR

his hit TV show Diggstown,

Gifts for tipplers Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

he’s changing all that

54 GREENER BUT LEANER The new provincial government isn’t spending much to fight climate change, but environmentalists are cautiously optimistic

DeRico Symonds

nov/dec

62 THE FLAVOUR Restaurants coming and going 66 THE STANCE Everyone deserves a place to live

vol 1 / no 2 On the cover Tim Houston has a lot planned for Nova Scotia — will we like what he’s giving?

Photo by Bruce Murray/VisionFire

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or 30 years, ABM Integrated Solutions, a Halifax-based IT solutions provider and integrator, has been serving large and small organizations across a wide range of industries in Atlantic Canada.

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Retiring the crystal ball

Tammy Fancy

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By Trevor J. Adams trevoradams@unravelhalifax.ca

ast January, I imagined the editor’s message I’d write at the end 2021.

“Congratulations to us!” I envisioned. “We beat COVID! Life is back to normal! Now let’s focus this same pandemic-inspired spirit of cooperation on overcoming the climate crisis, systemic racism, and income inequality. We need to make sure the Liberal government turns its focus to these issues over the coming year.”

It was a simpler time.

I didn’t imagine a world where a noisy minority of otherwise intelligent, educated people would become passionately mistrustful of science. Of course there would be selfish people who don’t see the need to mask or follow health rules, but surely it would be apparent to everyone that vaccination is the way to beat a plague?

I knew that Stephen McNeil might eventually retire, but based on the polls, I assumed some sort of McNeil Lite replacement would keep the Liberals safely clinging to power for at least another term or two.

Yet here we are, still up to our hips in COVID, and with a government only the most diehard Tories imagined possible a year ago. Further defying prognostication, recently elected premier Tim Houston is revealing himself to be surprisingly progressive in some ways. (Unkind comments about miniumwage workers aside. These things are relative; at least he seems to make decisions based on science and facts, which makes him unusual compared to, say, Conservative contemporaries Jason Kenney and Doug Ford).

I suspect historians will someday write about 2021 as a “lost” year, a time spent chasing our COVID tail, instead of progressing to new challenges and building our post-pandemic lives. Yet despite that appearance, change keeps brewing.

In our cover story, Houston says he is confident that at some point in 2022, the pandemic will be behind us, COVID just another manageable, scary-butrare, illness like measles or Legionnaire’s disease. Unless everything the epidemiologists know is wrong (which is vanishingly unlikely), Houston is bound to be right.

Life as we remember it is gone. We’ll emerge into something different, a world of periodic outbreaks, vaccine passports, and strange new complications we haven’t imagined yet.

But this also gives us the opportunity to leave behind our old challenges.

In this issue of Unravel Halifax, writer Janet Whitman looks at the issues (see page 32) that are going to shape our city in 2022: the housing crisis, the growing wealth gap, climate change, and mental health.

She talks with the people living with those issues every day. Based on their revelations and concerns, we quizzed the premier about his priorities for the coming year. Turn to “Can Houston do it?” on page 40 for Ameeta Vohra’s interview with about Nova Scotia’s journey and where we’re going next.

No more predictions — just a roadmap.

Unravel HIGHLIGHTS

Unravel NEWS

Unravel ONLINE

Floyd Kane didn’t see people like him on TV, so he set out to change Nova Scotia’s entertainment industry. Read more in Ameeta Vohra’s report on page 48.

As the holidays approach, Halifax is looking more like its old self, bursting with sports, music, art, and live events. Alec Bruce rounds up the season’s hottest events on page 8.

Visit unravelhalifax.ca for photo galleries, video interviews, web exclusive reports, and more. This month, highlights include an exclusive book excerpt, a new historical column from Dorothy Grant, and an essay from local author Steven Laffoley.

NOV / DEC 2021

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ISSUE 02 / VOL 01 • DATE OF ISSUE: NOVEMBER 2021 UNRAVELHALIFAX.CA

“A very strong debut.”

PUBLISHER Fred Fiander • fredfiander@unravelhalifax.ca

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Crystal Murray • crystalmurray@unravelhalifax.ca

“In her deeply intimate memoir, Joanne Gallant writes with vulnerability and honestly about her journey through multiple miscarriages, the intensity of grief, the premature birth of her son and the unimaginable love and gratitude she feels as a mother.”

SENIOR EDITOR Trevor J. Adams • trevoradams@unravelhalifax.ca CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Jodi DeLong • jodidelong@unravelhalifax.ca Janet Whitman • janetwhitman@unravelhalifax.ca VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Linda Gourlay • lindagourlay@unravelhalifax.ca

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ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Susan Giffin • susangiffin@unravelhalifax.ca Pam Hancock • pamhancock@unravelhalifax.ca Stephanie Balcom • stephaniebalcom@unravelhalifax.ca Connie Cogan • conniecogan@unravelhalifax.ca SENIOR DIRECTOR CREATIVE DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Shawn Dalton • shawndalton@unravelhalifax.ca PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Nicole McNeil • nicolemcneil@unravelhalifax.ca

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THE VOICES

BROOKLYN CONNOLLY is a freelance journalist based in Halifax. She’s the 2021 recipient of the Investintech – CAJ data journalism scholarship, and has written for the CBC, the Guardian (U.S.), the Chronicle Herald, and the Nova Scotia Advocate, among others.

PAULINE DAKIN is a journalist, professor of journalism at the University of King’s College, and the award-winning author of Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood.

MARIANNE SIMON is a writer and subeditor and has published many children’s stories, articles and poems in magazines and newspapers. Her interests include teaching and conducting Englishconversation classes.

KATIE INGRAM is a freelance writer, author, and journalism instructor based in Halifax.

JANET WHITMAN Contributing editor Janet Whitman is a cityand nature-loving journalist who divides her time between Halifax and her cottage on the Northumberland Shore. She’s happiest digging in the dirt, picking up a hammer, or messing around in the kitchen.

ALEC BRUCE is an awardwinning journalist whose bylines regularly appear in major Canadian and American publications.

He is completing a master of fine arts (2022) in creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College in Halifax.

CHRIS BENJAMIN is a journalist, editor, and fiction writer. His fourth book, Boy With A Problem, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Prize for Short Fiction.

His book Eco-Innovators: Sustainability in Atlantic Canada, won the Best Atlantic-Published Book Award and was a finalist for the Richardson Non-Fiction Prize.

AMEETA VOHRA is a news and sports writer with work published throughout North America. Her Halifax Magazine story “Thunderstruck” was a 2020 Atlantic Journalism Awards silver medallist.

BRUCE MURRAY has been creating food and lifestyle photography for more than 20 years in the Maritimes and in his original studio in Vancouver. visionfire.ca @VisionFire.

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THE LIST

ALIVE

HALIFAX COMES

As the pandemic waxes and wanes, the city abounds with sports, concerts, theatre, festivals, film, and lights — just in time for the holidays

BY ALEC BRUCE

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NOV / DEC 2021

City of light Feeling a bit too virtual these days? A little drained and screen-dried? Lockdowns, masking, and distancing will do that.

Despite another autumn of high COVID numbers, increased vaccination rates mean Halifax, dare we say it, is awakening.

Don’t expect everything to return to normal (whatever that means) just yet, but the pandemic’s housebound days seem to be behind us. Check out Unravel’s very own proof of life up close and personal as we count the days to a new, a better, year.

Editor’s Note: Things change fast during COVID and event plans may evolve. Confirm details before finalizing plans.

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Evergreen Festival NOV. 26–DEC. 19, HALIFAX

Festival of Trees NOV. 20–27, DOWNTOWN HALIFAX

The Festival of Trees from the Mental Health Foundation of Nova Scotia marks its 30th anniversary with a live, in-person event. Celebrate the new, old-fashioned way, filled with magical moments, local entertainment, and prizes in downtown Halifax, Nov. 20 to 27.

Visit the Advocate Forest of Trees, sponsored

by Unravel Halifax owner Advocate Printing and Publishing, at the Doyle.

“The Advocate Forest of Trees is back for another year and we couldn’t be happier,” says Unravel editor-in-chief Crystal Murray. “This year you will find two Advocate trees in the forest. To celebrate the launch of our new city magazine, Unravel Halifax, we decided to have a little fun with the concept of unravelling the tight knit communities that makes Halifax one of the best cities in the country. Look for a tree decked out with lots of colours, woolly textures, and mitts.”

Also, bid on the stunning designer evergreens and other prizes in the online auction, and cap things off in style with the Parkland 30th Anniversary Reception and Black Tie Gala Saturday Nov. 27 at the Halifax Convention Centre.

One in four Nova Scotians now lives with a psychological disorder, says Jill Chappell, spokesperson for the Mental Health Foundation.

Funds raised go to the work of making a difference in the lives of Nova Scotians living with mental illness and addiction, and their loved ones. mentalhealthns.ca

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Halifax Christmas Tree Lighting NOV. 27, GRAND PARADE

This year’s entertainment lineup was still in the works at press time. Last year’s virtual event included Garrett Gloade (Indigenous drum); Robert Leek, Ayo Aladejebi, and Moriah Aladejebi (African drums), and singers Joseph Goodwin and Alyse Delaney. The Dartmouth Tree Lighting & Christmas Program is tentatively scheduled for Dec. 4. HRM will announce details of this year’s event on its website. halifax.ca

Destination Halifax

The Evergreen Festival invites Halifax to come alive “with music, light, and joy.” Slated for Nov. 26 to Dec. 19., Festival 2021 is a four-week-long outdoor winter showcase of Nova Scotian culture, food, spirits, craft, art, and memorable experiences to celebrate and embrace the essence of the holiday season.

Last year’s inaugural event was virtual. This year’s is a hybrid affair (online and in person). Still, retailers, restaurants, hotels, attractions, public spaces, and more will bring walkable and safe outdoor experiences to life with illuminations, programming, and animations. Bottom line: Evergreen Festival invites locals and visitors alike to bundle up and get outside — gasp! — together.

Evergreen Stage will host events (lineup TBA) on the Halifax waterfront throughout the festival.

Evergreen Market will be an outdoor venue, also on the waterfront, consisting of temporary wooden “chalets” hosting vendors from across Nova Scotia.

Key locations throughout the city will be illuminated with holiday light installations to create a walkable outdoor trail-like experience. Gambol along it at your pleasure from Spring Garden Road to Peace and Friendship Park, along Argyle Street to Grand Parade, and down the Halifax waterfront, from Historic Properties to the Halifax Seaport. evergreenfestns.com

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THE LIST

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Light Up Bedford Parade NOV. 21

Stoo Metz

Organizers say: “We’ve already written our letter to Santa asking for a full parade this year and he said that we’ve been very good, so we are thinking good thoughts and accepting applications.” lightupbedfordparade.com

Play on 5

Neptune Theatre RETURNS ON NOV. 23

The Neptune Theatre team is so happy to see actual faces in the crowd; Jeremy Webb is almost (and uncharacteristically) speechless.

“As the artistic director of Neptune Theatre, it’s my job to gauge what the Nova Scotia theatre audience might want to see on stage,” he tells Unravel. “Coming out of an 18-month shutdown has been an incredibly emotional experience. Seeing plays being rehearsed, seeing sets and props being built, seeing artists reunite, and seeing the audience walk through our doors for the first time, ticket in hand. Many people have expressed how good it is to be back as they stand in our lobby for the first time, eyes wide and smiles visible even through a mask!”

Webb wrote and directs the musical comedy Alice in Pantoland (Nov. 23 to Jan. 9). The titular Pantoland is in jeopardy when the evil Queen of Hearts unleashes a plot that threatens the magical land. It’s up to Alice and a star-studded team of magnificent characters to save the day. Packed with punchy pop songs, laughs, and zany antics, this show is a trip down the rabbit hole.

Webb also adapted and directs Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (Nov. 23 to Dec. 26), a heartwarming, spooky tale for the whole family. Rhys Bevan-John returns to the role of Ebenezer Scrooge for the fifth consecutive year. Since its 2003 premiere, over 600,000 people have seen this production of the seasonal classic. neptunetheatre.com NOV 23 - JAN 9

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NOV / DEC 2021

There’s a song in the air

World Flamenco NOV. 16 & NOV. 28

World Flamenco celebrations are in full swing in Halifax with two in-person events at the Paul O’Regan Hall at Halifax Central Library. On Nov. 16 at noon, get up and dance with Flamenco dancer and teacher Maria Osende. Free, no experience necessary. On Nov. 28 from 2 to 4 p.m., watch dance and musical performances by artists of Atlantic Flamenco. mariaosende.com

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Supernova Celebration NOV. 20, SCOTIABANK CENTRE

This Halifax concert is slated to be Nova Scotia’s biggest, live-music event in almost two years. Says event organizer Brookes Diamond: “Nova Scotians have made a lot of sacrifices through this pandemic. It’s been a tough year-and-a-half and now it’s time to give ourselves applause.”

The local all-star roster includes: Classified, JRDN, Matt Andersen, Ria Mae, and The Trews, along with Breagh Isabel, Eastern Eagle, Reeny Smith, Roland Grant, and a special appearance by Ricky and Julian from the Trailer Park Boys.

“SuperNova is our chance to celebrate together again with many of our best musical artists,” Diamond says.

Scotiabank Centre management are keen to see fans return. “We’re thrilled,” says Carrie Cussons, president and CEO of Scotiabank Centre. “Live events are a part of the fabric of our community and I know fans are more than ready to come back to Scotiabank Centre and experience live performances once again.”

It will be hip-hop giant Classified’s first show in his hometown in almost five years. “I’ve been waiting to come back and do something special for the province I live and grew up in and this is it: the biggest Nova Scotia kitchen party you ever saw,” he says. ticketatlantic.com/events/supernova-celebration

Mosaic Film Festival NOV. 26

The Mosaic Film Festival celebrates and showcases diverse filmmaking and storytelling from around the world. The 2020 Festival featured submissions from three different continents, and organizers say they’ve already surpassed last year’s submission totals. mosaicfestival.ca

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Doyle 10 Alan NOV. 13, REBECCA COHN AUDITORIUM Alan Doyle, former front man of Great Big Sea, brings his isolation-defying folk-rock music to the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on Nov. 13. Currently on tour to promote his new album, Back to the Harbour, Doyle says: “I recorded these songs with some of my best friends and musical inspirations around an old upright piano at Joel Plaskett’s amazing New Scotland Yard studio in Dartmouth with Cory Tetford and Kendel Carson.” dal.ca/dept/arts-centre.html

Atlantic Jewish Film Festival NOV. 18–21

This year brings another season of films highlighting Jewish life and culture around the world. 2021’s hybrid festival hosts virtual cinema screenings in Atlantic Canada and inperson events at Halifax’s Cineplex Cinemas at Park Lane and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21. theajc.ca Dave Howells

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John James Photography

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THE LIST

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Satinder Sartaaj NOV. 21, REBECCA COHN AUDITORIUM

Satinder Sartaaj, an internationally known singer with a well-decorated career in Punjabi-Sufi music, is set to perform at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on Nov. 21. His stock took a rise after his recent Hollywood acting debut depicting the Maharaja Duleep Singh in the acclaimed movie The Black Prince. dal.ca/dept/arts-centre.html

Jazz Ensemble 12 Dalhousie DEC. 2, ST. ANDREWS CHURCH Dalhousie Jazz Ensemble in partnership with Halifax Regional Arts Senior Jazz Ensemble comes to St. Andrews Church on Dec. 2. This annual event features both ensembles performing exciting big band arrangements offering an evening of wonderful music. standrewshfx.ca

Christmas 13 Innkeeper’s DEC. 11, SPATZ THEATRE

At your own pace

Dave Brosha Photography

Join Lennie Gallant and band for a celebration of the season with the fourth annual Innkeeper’s Christmas show at the Spatz Theatre on Dec. 11. This year, the highly popular multimedia show will feature songs from his new Christmas record, plus favourites from his 14-album catalogue. spatztheatre.ca

14 Walk with Gus the Tortoise WEEKDAYS, MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

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Walk Through Africville TUES. – SAT, HALIFAX CONVENTION CENTRE

Walk Through Africville, open from noon to 6 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays at the Halifax Convention Centre, provides an opportunity to learn what it might have been like to walk down a street in Africville.

This traveling exhibit created by the Africville Museum highlights the things that were important to the people who lived in the now-razed community, sharing its history and the vital role it played in shaping Halifax and Nova Scotia. africvillemuseum.org

Christian LaForce

Halifax Municipal Archives, Halifax Safety Committee photograph, 102-38A-63-3

Take a walk with Gus the Tortoise, who — at 98 years old — is older than most people’s grandparents. Gus has been a resident of the Museum of Natural History for over 70 years and comes out for a public stroll every day at 3 p.m. When you join Gus for a walk, you may get a chance to feed him and get up close to examine his beautiful shell. naturalhistory.novascotia.ca

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THE LIST

Game time 16

Halifax Mooseheads NOV.–DEC., SCOTIABANK CENTRE

Halifax Thunderbirds

After two COVID-truncated seasons, the Halifax Mooseheads play a full slate of hockey throughout November and December; Holiday season promotional games include: ‘90s Night (Nov. 27), Minor Hockey Night (Dec. 11), Teddy Bear Toss (Dec. 17), and the Hurley Cup (Dec. 31). halifaxmooseheads.ca

Halifax Mooseheads

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Halifax Thunderbirds DEC. 4, SCOTIABANK CENTRE

The pandemic forced the National Lacrosse League to shut down for a year and a half, and the Halifax Thunderbirds are finally back, hosting the Saskatchewan Rush in the home opener at Scotiabank Centre on Dec. 4. The 2021–22 season includes nine home games, the last on Apr. 1 against the Rochester Knighthawks. halifaxthunderbirds.com

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THE PERSPECTIVE

The ordeal of finding an apartment in Halifax One newcomer came east from Vancouver, hoping it would be easier to find her financial footing. Instead, she found high rents, low vacancy rates, and tiny incomes

BY MARIANNE SIMON

O

Discha-AS

ne of our basic needs is a home. A place where the family can live and grow, love and nurture, dream dreams, and be encouraged to achieve goals. Newcomers to Halifax usually look for apartments as these are typically more affordable than buying a house, and easier to maintain.

Until two years ago, rents in Halifax were reasonable. I recall looking for apartments and seeing rents of $1,200 to $1,700. Today those same apartments are listed in the $1,600 to $2,000 range. These are not highend luxury apartments, but middle-class units with basic amenities. And there aren’t enough of them.

The provincial government recently announced an ambitious housing program. It will be a while before we know how that affects the situation, but meanwhile, people are struggling.

Elaine Silva (name changed) is a new immigrant who recently moved to Halifax. “The government encouraged people from other provinces to settle down here,” she says. “Also, more and more immigrants came to live and work in Halifax because it is easier for them to get permanent residency if they do so.”

Elaine and her husband came to Vancouver in April 2019. She had an international student visa. “After two years in Vancouver, when the time came to renew my visa, I was given the option of going back to my country or continuing here as a student,” she recalls. “I decided to be a student for some more time. And we wanted to move to Hali-

fax because we heard that it is less expensive to live there. Also, the tuition will be half of what I will pay in Vancouver.”

But it wasn’t that easy.

“We started our apartment hunting in September 2020 for a move-in on June 1, 2021,” she says. “We sent out over 30 applications to rental companies. We were even willing to pay a whole year’s rent in advance, but none of them responded. The waiting was frustrating.

It is wrong not to let the applicants know whether the apartment is available or not.”

Finally in March 2021, two replies came. “One of them had a vacancy close to our move-in date,” Elaine says. “I contacted an organization in my hometown that helps immigrants to find accommodation in foreign lands, and they advised me that I should find someone living in the building or at least close to it so that I can get first-hand information from him about the apartment we are looking at. Then followed a frantic search for such a person.”

Through social media she found someone from her native country living in the building.

“Through him we were able to get more details about the building and the facilities provided,” she says. “We had many long-distance conversations. Since housing in Halifax had become very competitive, I realized I had to make a quick decision on whether to rent the apartment or not, even though the rent was high.”

They took the apartment, arriving in Halifax in April 2021. They had an expensive stay at an Airbnb until their June 1 move-in date. And then, an unpleasant discovery: life in Halifax is no cheaper than it was in Vancouver.

“It’s a very unfair situation,” Elaine says. “Rent keeps increasing, but the minimum wage remains the same. Nova Scotia has one of the lowest minimum wage rates. Where will people find the extra money?

Even if they find the money, there are no apartments available.”

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THE BACKSTORY

A name that shaped

HALIFAX

Clayton was once just a name on a clothing business — as the family’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, they helped shape their city

T

heir name is well-known to Haligonians, but the Clayton family’s history in the city stretches back long before the sprawling development that bears their name.

The family’s influence on the city began far from Clayton Park. On the site that now houses Scotia Square, Clayton & Sons, a clothing manufacturer, was a Halifax mainstay for almost a century, one that started with a small second-hand clothing store on Duke Street.

Originally from England, Mary and George Clayton immigrated to Nova Scotia with their eight children in 1863. The next year, George, who worked as a tailor, died from a stroke.

“He died rather quickly and unexpectedly,” says Erika Wilson, curator of collections at the Nova Scotia Museum of Industry. “They had quite a few children and his widow, Mary was left to try and come up with a way to support her family.”

By 1866, Mary had established her second-hand clothing shop out of the family home on Duke Street.

Over the next 30 years, under her leadership and that of her sons Edward and William, Claytons would grow.

“They did open one of the city’s biggest, most progressive industries,” says Wilson.

They offered workers profit sharing and banking options. Their factory, located on the corner of Barrington and Jacob streets, was recognized for its well-lit and clean conditions. At its busiest, it employed about 500 people.

By the late 1890s, the factory housed everything the business needed under one roof including two work

rooms, a special order department, a clothing and furnishing stock rooms, a cutting room, and a packing and shipping room.

According to a booklet celebrating the company’s 30th anniversary, Claytons was a name that was “synonymous with the growth of the clothing trade in Canada ...

The firm stands in the front rank.”

By the 1930s, the company was no longer so progressive. Reports suggest the factory wasn’t as clean and appealing as it once was, and the company was losing money. William and Edward died during this decade, with William’s daughter Mary Louise taking over.

“The company wasn’t really keeping up with the fashions and trends at the time; they were more kind of focusing on ready-made pieces that they had been making for a while,” says Wilson. “Another reason was that they had kind of shifted focus into making uniforms, especially for the military. After the Second World War, they had had a huge contract … that had fallen through and so they had lost quite a bit of money in that venture.”

By 1955, to avoid having to file for bankruptcy, Claytons closed. The factory building was demolished in the 1960s.

Yet the family name would return to play a big part in Halifax’s future. In the family’s turn-of-the-century heyday, they bough a sprawling tract of land in Rockingham. After their fortunes shifted in the late 1950s, they sold the 40 hectares to a developer. From that, grew Clayton Park, one of the city’s fastest-growing neighbourhoods over the last two decades.

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HRM Archives, Halifax Police Department photograph, 102-16N-0016.08

BY KATIE INGRAM

17

Jean Holder Nova Scotia Archives 1980-195 no. 24 / neg. no.: N-0172

TIMELINE

THE BACKSTORY

While it looks Dickensian today, Clayton & Sons was a remarkably progressive business in its 19th-century heyday, even sharing profits with workers

• May 23, 1819: Mary Clayton (nee Davies) was born in Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire, England.

• March 22, 1844: Mary marries George Clayton, a tailor from her hometown.

• 1863: The Claytons, now with eight children, immigrate to Nova Scotia.

• Dec. 24, 1864: George dies, leaving Mary to raise and provide for their children.

• 1866: Mary’s second hand-clothing business is registered in the Halifax City Directory.

• 1869: The first shop, separate from the family home, opens on Argyle Street. At this time, the business is known as M. Clayton & Sons Tailors and Clothiers. It’s unclear when the family moved from second-hand clothing to manufacturing.

• 1875: Clayton & Sons moves to Jacob Street. Over the next 50 years, the company would expand, as did the family’s ownership of buildings in now-razed downtown neighbourhood.

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• 1880–1881: The Halifax City Directory lists Mary as Mary Clayton, widow of George. It previously listed her as Mrs. Mary Clayton of M. Clayton & Sons, leading to the assumption she had retired from the business. By this time, sons George and William were active in the company.

• 1891: The family now owns much of the land between Jacob and Birmingham streets and starts building a new factory.

• 1895: The new factory, at the corner of Jacob and Barrington streets, opens.

• 1895: Claytons starts a savings bank for workers.

Deposits could be as low as five cents, which would then see a return with an interest of four per cent.

• 1897: A fire severely damages the factory and causes a power outage in downtown Halifax. Using their insurance money, the company buys 90 new sewing machines.

• February 1907: Mary dies.

• Dec. 6, 1917: The Halifax Explosion damages the factory.

• 1935: William dies.

• 1938: Edward dies.

• 1950s: Claytons incorporates as Claytons Ltd. with three shareholders: William’s daughter Mary Louise, A.D. Walker, and C.F. MacKenzie.

• 1955: Clayton & Sons closes.

• Post-1955: The Clayton buildings would remain listed in the city directories until 1959, housing various tenants.

• 1968: Jacob Street and its buildings are demolished to make way for Scotia Square. Its construction begins in 1970.

• 1974: Mary Louise dies.

• 1978: Dunbrack Street opens, giving better access to the Clayton Park area, previously only reachable via the Bedford Highway.

• 1991: The original Lacewood bus terminal near Willet Street opens.

HRM Archives, Halifax Police Department photograph, 102-16N-0016.33

• Early 1900s: George and William start buying more land in the Rockingham area. The family would eventually own over 40 hectares.

• Late 1950s–early 1960s: Mary Louise starts selling the family’s real estate holdings, a process that continues for the next few years. The family sells its Rockingham land to a developer, who starts working in 1962 on a project known today as Clayton Park.

Robert Alfers

• 1899: The Claytons introduce a profit-sharing option for workers. Ten per cent of future profits would be divided among participating workers with an interest rate of seven per cent. The 10 per cent would be divvied among workers, based on job type.

First-class workers would get 40 per cent of the allotted profits, while the fourth class would receive 10 per cent.

Katie Ingram

Nova Scotia Museum

Mary Clayton’s gravestone stands in Camp Hill cemetery on Summer Street.

• 1997–2003: The area of Clayton Park West is added to Clayton Park, bringing new housing and commercial developments.

• 1999: Thrush Hermit, a Canadian rock band featuring Joel Plaskett, releases their second album, titled Clayton Park.

• 2013: The Willet Street Reserve in the Clayton Park area is renamed Mary Clayton Memorial Park.

Clayton & Sons, on the site Scotia Square now occupies.

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Halifax’s exclusive parenting magazine

Subscribe to receive the FREE digital edition of Our Children ourchildrenmagazine.com | Follow us @OurChildrenMag F Õ

THE CONVERSATION

BY AMEETA VOHRA

Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

When a police operation against unhoused people turned violent, many blamed Halifax Mutual Aid. Volunteer Campbell McClintlock shares a different perspective on the organization and its work

Kieran Delamont

Halifax Mutual Aid

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Ben Murray

THE CONVERSATION

H

alifax’s housing crunch hit a breaking point in August, when police razed shelters and violently clashed with unhoused people and their advocates in front of the former Central Library on Spring Garden Road.

Halifax Mutual Aid volunteer Campbell McClintock has been on the front lines of the crisis, serving at a local shelter as a residential support worker. With Mutual Aid, McClintock and dozens of volunteers built the small insulated shelters that drew the municipality’s ire during the summer.

McClintock brings a groundlevel perspective on homelessness, including how social inequality plays a role, why different levels of government have failed to resolve the issue, and how the city goes forward to remedy the problem that is gripping the city.

Advocacy passion: “In university, I studied international development studies. My idea was to go into other countries and assist in developing economically deprived resource-deprived areas. I was excited to work in that field until I realized about halfway through that program, as a North American, I didn’t have any right to turn my back on the social complex issues we experienced here in Canada and in the U.S. An opportunity to work at a shelter felt meaningful because in a country as wealthy as Canada, for there to be people that are homeless at all, there’s something wrong with that. It was exciting and important for me to feel like I could participate in a solution.”

Today’s critical issues: “The present issue of houses is growing exponentially, and that’s compounded very much by the COVID-19 pandemic and skyrocketing rental

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prices. The reason this is happening is not that the city or the province or other levels of government lack the resources to be able to stop homelessness ... The homelessness situation in Halifax has been avoidable and preventable, but it has not been the priority of the people we elect to represent us. We’re at a point now where people in the community are not going to stop talking about this issue until it’s clear that there is a long-term sustainable plan.”

Housing inequality: “There are many policies in our province, in our country, that favour wealthy people and favour developers to develop properties that are not affordable to charge very high rates, and there are policies that incentivize these practices.

Essentially, if you have the resources to develop high-cost luxury housing, there are rewards from the government. If you are born into poverty or forced into poverty at some point in your life, it is very expensive to be poor, as we saw at the Aug. 18 police evictions.”

Why Aug. 18’s police operation turned violent: “That was a very violent and targeted act from a powerful governing body ... People on the street are not only routinely harassed and violated by police, but because of the constant stress of this, they are prevented from ever being able to be involved in society in a meaningful way or to do anything that might increase their wealth to be able to have a natural home, so we have so many policies and values in Canada — despite how nice we might like to pretend we are — that favour wealthy people to remain wealthy and to become wealthier while people in poverty experience deeper poverty.”

The government’s failure to resolve the issue: “Their priority is a short-term gain they received by allowing luxury real estate developers to come in and hand money over to the government is much more appealing to them than the long-term economic boon of actually investing in the health and safety of all their citizens. I think most economists would probably be able to demonstrate that the best thing for an economy is investing in your citizens’ health, happiness, and safety. Unfortunately, the priority for our politicians seems to be short-term financial gain.”

What we need: “One is enough available housing to

Kieran Delamont

Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

Understanding the housing crisis: “Everybody is entitled to housing. Unfortunately, many of our programs in Canada, if you’re a homeless person, involve jumping through hoops and facing all sorts of barriers to be considered for anything resembling housing ... You have to abstain from drugs, you have to work 80 hours a week, or do any of these moralistic things to be deserving of the simple comfort of a home ... We’re saying for ourselves that we need to be a certain way to deserve a roof over our head. We don’t recognize that, in a country as resource-rich as our own, we have the capacity to house everybody and that that should be the starting point. We would have a much healthier, happier, and cohesive society if we could integrate that very basic principle into our lives.”

house the entirety of Canada’s population. Two means implementing rent control and other measures to maintain rents at a minimum wage rate that people can afford. The reality is that so many people in Canada work on minimum wage, including new residents. For us to say, come to Canada, we’re so wonderfully kind and diverse, and then force people into the most menial underpaid jobs and then ask them to find housing in the middle of the housing crisis.”

Government focuses on short-term gain, at the expense of solving structural problems, says Campbell McClintlock.

How you can help: “One of the most basic things people can do is develop relationships with the houseless neighbours and their community if they’re able to inquire about what might be needed. If people have the capacity, food, and warm clothing can go a long way in the winter. People who put time and energy into developing those relationships with our houseless neighbours will quickly reveal that unhoused people are not different from us ... It’s important that we work to make sure that people are not isolated and that we are not operating our lives in a way where we are blind to do this very pervasive injustice.”

Off duty: “I like recording and playing music, riding my bike, gardening, and hanging out with friends. Being involved in this work, it is crucial to take time to take care of your health and rest. Otherwise, I’m not going to be able to do the work long term. I’m going to burn out.”

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THE HOUSING MARKET

Silver linings Halifax’s housing crisis could be a lot worse

BY JANET WHITMAN

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Allen Crooks

I

n other parts of Canada, developers are mowing down houses and apartments to make way for higher-end developments.

That happens here too — Pauline Dakin’s latest column (see page 66) noting the disappearance of Robie Street Victorians is a glaring example. But more often, the trend is to spruce up existing stock.

“Halifax does not yet seem to be following the pattern observed in other Canadian cities where this important older rental stock is being lost permanently to redevelopment and condominium conversion,” says local housing expert Neil Lovitt. “Ours is getting more expensive, and is being renovated in many cases, but it is not disappearing entirely.”

This “silver lining” risks getting erased if Halifax isn’t aggressive about adding more housing, a problem the provincial government is starting to face with a strategy to tackle a housing crisis that’s been decades in the making. (Read more about the plan at unravelhalifax.ca).

“If we can get back to a balanced market, (the older, more affordable marketrate rentals) may be preserved for longer,” says Lovitt, vice-president of planning and economic intelligence with real-estate consultancy Turner Drake & Partners Ltd. “But if the shortage persists, we will lose more and more of this inventory over time.”

These rentals, with their modest and relatively stable prices, are the main source of lower-cost housing and an important stopgap.

Lovitt estimates Halifax is short as many as 25,000 housing units. On the affordable housing front, provincial governments of all stripes have failed to add to the supply of public housing over the past four decades. Cranes dot the skyline, meanwhile, as developers build higher-end apartments and condos amid surging population growth.

The homeless situation has gotten so dire that HRM is bringing in two dozen emergency modular bunkhouses, enough to house 73 people. Even with the twoper-cent cap on rent increases that Premier Tim Houston plans to continue for two years, there’s been a spate of so-called renovictions (landlords turfing tenants out of rentals by claiming the need for major renovations so they can jack up rents).

“Older market-rate apartments served us well for many years in the absence of more ambitious public-sector investment,” says Lovitt. “We are lucky ... we can see how this has played out elsewhere and understand the importance of taking action early and decisively.” *Data Sources: Turner Drake, Statistics Canada, Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia.

if you spend this much pre-tax household income on shelter, you're in a state of “core housing need.”

30

%

if you spend half your pre-tax income on housing, you're in “extreme housing need.”

50%

23,000

The number of Halifax households in core housing need, according to the most recent census data, which pre-dates most of the dramatic changes in housing affordability over the past few years.

12,400 the number of Halifax households in “extreme housing need.”

Housing Nova Scotia, the provincial government agency that administers most of the nonmarket housing in Halifax, operates a few more than 12,000 “deeply affordable dwellings,” which are priced according to income, intended to be affordable to anyone.

7.4%:

the amount of Nova Scotia's affordable-housing stock built in the last 30 years.

12.1%

35%: the amount of the province's supply of affordable housing that's in HRM, which is home to 50% of the population.

Nova Scotians living below the poverty line in 2019.

$46,147: The average annual income required for a family of two children and two adults to afford a “basic standard of living” in Halifax according to Statistics Canada's 2019 income survey.

399 81:

$

The number of unhoused people in Halifax.

Of those, 230 are men, 156 are women, 10 are non-binary, and three are unknown.

The number of unhoused people in Halifax of First Nations descent, almost one-fifth the total.

128: The number of unhoused people in Halifax experiencing mental-health or addiction issues.

1,100: The number of new affordable housing units that Premier Tim Houston has promised to create.

$35 million

Government money earmarked to keep that promise.

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telling halifax stories.

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A tree you’ll want to get your mitts on!

The Unravel Halifax tree will come to life at the Advocate Forest of Trees in support of the Mental Health Foundation of Nova Scotia’s Festival of Trees.

Decorated with 75 pairs of hand-knitted mittens from East Coast knitters!

Visit The Doyle building in Halifax (Spring Garden Rd.) to unravel the spirit of the holidays from

advocate November 20 – 27 Forest of Trees full page To bid, visit FOTauction.ca

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Winning bidders will be announced November 27. We encourage the winning bidder to donate these incredible gifts of warmth and love to a local community organization.

Unravel is published by Metro Guide Publishing, an Advocate Company.

THE VIEW

Self-Guided Title: Urban Character Mural Date: 2017 Medium: Mural Location: 1717 Barrington St.

Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

Downtown Art Tour

BY JASON SKINNER A product of an ongoing placemaking program to beautify the downtown, this tour showcases murals and local installations throughout the neighbourhood.

Among the featured talents is local illustrator, painter, chalker, and “community artist” Jason Skinner. His whimsical and light-hearted “Urban Character Mural” and “Daisies in the Wind” (the latter drawing inspiration from street-art legend Tom Bob) are highlights of the tour. downtownhalifax.ca/arttour

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THE SOUND

Countless Journeys Newcomers share their raw, unvarnished coming-to-Canada stories

Welcome Home to Canada” sign at Pier21, October 1950. Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 [DI2013.839.32].

BY TREVOR J. ADAMS

Qwerty caption

A

Courtesy Of Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 Podcasts

t the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, first-person storytelling is key — newcomers share their experiences in their own words, unfiltered by the lens of history.

And that goes beyond the exhibitions. Last month the museum launched season two of its Countless Journeys podcast.

Hosts Mark Sakamoto and Kim Thúy are acclaimed storytellers: Thúy ‘s debut novel Ru won the Governor General’s Award for French-language and a TV miniseries based on Sakamoto’s memoir Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents is in the works.

The podcasts are structured as informal, yet insightful, conversations.

“Podcasts combine the intimacy of a conversation with everything that’s great about a good story,” says co-producer Tina Pittaway in a post on the Pier 21 website.

Helping listeners understand newcomers’ journeys — not just physical journeys but emotional ones — is the mission.

“Understanding the kinds of experiences that have shaped the lives of Canadians, no matter how deep their roots that are here, goes a long way towards fostering strong connections among all of us,” Pittaway adds. “And there’s so much to learn from one another, as well as from our own family histories.”

T

O

Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

“As we make different strides forward ... it seems we get a reminder that, ‘Hey, hey, you’re moving too quick. We don’t like it,’” says activist DeRico Symonds.

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BY JANET WHITMAN

COVID-19 opened a lot of eyes in Nova Scotia.

It exposed the vulnerabilities of essential workers, people with lower incomes, older populations, and the Black and Indigenous communities. And now, as we haltingly emerge from the crisis, people are seeing ways to make the city a better place to live.

Better support for mental health, tackling climate change, pushing back against systemic racism, addressing income inequality, and attracting the right population while making sure people can afford to live with roofs over their heads are all in the mix.

Where is Halifax headed in 2022?

THE YEAR

OF HARD

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Kordeena Clayton

“Collective Unity Among Allyship” June 1 2020, Spring Garden Road.

BARRIERS

Daily

34

The unbalanced scales of justice

DeRico Symonds, co-founder of the grassroots activism group GameChangers902, knows what he’ll do if he’s out driving alone at night and sees the flashing lights of a police car behind him.

“I’m not stopping until I get to a public place, like a gas station where it’s lit up, because I do not trust law enforcement,” says the advocate for racialized and marginalized communities. “I certainly know it’s not all law enforcement, but I have a fear and distrust for a very good reason.”

The July “driving while Black” incident — the RCMP pulled over a Halifax police superintendent driving in North Preston with his wife (who has since been elected as an MLA), and then, he says, ordered him out of the car at gunpoint — put a spotlight on systemic racism in policing.

The persistence, despite a ban on street checks, is one of many ways the system keeps African Nova Scotians, Indigenous people, and other visible minorities at a disadvantage.

Things haven’t gotten any better since Halifax felt the need to enlist a white criminology professor and a white retired judge to validate what Black Nova Scotians have been saying all along: that street checks are a violation of human rights. Halifax Regional Police apologized for the practice two years ago, but the RCMP recently opted not to follow suit. The RCMP said in an email to the Canadian Press that it “acknowledges” the disproportionate harm that street checks have caused, but then went on to say the force still supports the practice as a national policy.

Newly elected Premier Tim Houston showed he, too, can be tone deaf on the issue, enlisting a white man, Pat Dunn, as minister of African Nova Scotian Affairs. He says the absence of any Black PC MLAs tied his hands, but he has the power to appoint whomever he wants: a cabinet minister need not be a member of the governing party, or even an MLA. After meeting with Black community leaders, Houston opted to name Dwayne Provo, a Black educational administrator and former football pro, as associate deputy minister.

Symonds shakes his head over Dunn’s appointment but says little, because he works for the provincial government as a senior policy analyst.

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In Nova Scotia, police are six “I will say generally times more likely to pull over that, as we make differBlack people than other drivers, ent strides forward, like the highest rate of that disparity funding for the African in Canada, according to a landNova Scotian Justice Inmark 2019 report by criminologist stitute, it seems we get a Scot Wortley. He also found that reminder that, ‘Hey, hey, between 2015 and 2016, 30 per you’re moving too quick. cent of Black men in Halifax had We don’t like it,’” he says. faced criminal charges, compared “The powers that be will with 6.8 per cent of white men. then make changes as a reminder.”

Halifax’s history of racism is as old as the city itself.

Many Black people arrived as slaves, and the city later razed their descendants’ homes in Africville.

“This distinct group of people has been here for hundreds of years and contributed to the social fabric and the physical environments that we see today but have received no recognition and little appreciation,” says Symonds, an eighth generation African Nova Scotian, who grew up in public housing in the city. “Citadel Hill in Halifax was built by Jamaican Maroons. But you would never know that if you go there because there’s no statue. There’s no monument. There’s nothing there to say that happened.”

The displacement of Blacks into public housing on the outskirts of the city keeps them disadvantaged.

Symonds has heard countless first-hand accounts of how businesses won’t hire from certain neighbourhoods or people with Black-sounding names. He sees overpolicing in Black communities.

“You can imagine if there’s a police station across the street or in your community, they’re going to see you do something. Maybe I turn in my driveway without my blinker on,” says Symonds. “This over-surveillance can lead to confirmation bias. If media say Black people are committing more crimes, you’re eventually going to find what you’re looking for.”

Symonds recognizes that some white people have difficult lives and struggles.

“The distinct difference is skin colour isn’t something that contributed into making those lives difficult,” he says. “Almost at every single stop, there is a particular barrier that Black people face every single day.”

Population

PRESSURES

Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

For many Generation Xers graduating from school in Halifax in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving the province was the only way to find a decent job.

“I remember myself as a teen in the 1980s talking with all my friends about who’s going where and not that many seeing opportunities in the Maritimes,” says Ian Munro, chief economist with the Halifax Partnership, the city’s economic development agency. “People would be having those dinner table discussions with their parents, saying, ‘I guess I’m moving three provinces away.’”

For Millennials and Gen Zers, the tables have turned. There are jobs aplenty.

It’s been an important population booster, a welcome trend to bolster the city’s economy as Baby Boomers retire, spend less, and require more costly services such as health care.

Long-term data, for a 30-year swath from the mid1980s until 2015, show Nova Scotia was losing an average of 1,300 young people, aged 20 to 29, every year for other provinces. But since 2017, interprovincial migration had more comers than goers.

“We’ve actually been importing young people from other provinces,” says Munro. “That’s a pretty dramatic turnaround.”

Migration from other provinces for the first quarter of 2021 came in at 1,870. Munro looked at the data as far

Nova Scotia needs to add more people in their 20s and 30s to fill the rush of jobs as Baby Boomers retire, says economist Ian Munro.

Employers will have to change their thinking: for the first time in generations, they’re competing for workers. The winners will be the workplaces offering the best pay and working conditions. lower than the influx of people either too young or too old to work. Kids up to age 14 and the 65-and-up set rose 3.1 per cent. Those in between, aged 15 to 64, grew a much smaller 1.6 per cent.

“A rise in the dependency ratio by small amount isn’t necessarily something to get worried about. It’s when that really starts to ratchet up it becomes problematic,” says Munro. “That what we’re trying to forestall by having this continued focus on population growth, and in particular working-age population growth.”

The effort is crucial now that Halifax has shifted from a labour surplus to a shortage. “That’s the big policy issue we’re going to have to grapple with for the next 10 or 20 years: finding the people for the jobs, not finding the jobs for the people as it was in the 70s and 80s,” Munro says.

And employers will have to change their thinking: for the first time in generations, they’re competing for workers. The winners will be the workplaces offering the best pay and working conditions.

back as it goes to 1961 (about 239 quarters). “Over the entire series, there’s only been four times that the net migration number has been higher,” he says.

The last time was in the third quarter of 1984, which coincided with a Western Canadian oil crash.

“The particular spike in 2021 might be linked to the phenomenon of, ‘Alright, this COVID thing has shown me that I don’t need to live in the big city anymore. I’m heading East,’” says Munro.

But there’s also been deliberate effort over the past several years by the Halifax Partnership and others to woo working-age people to the city to fill the gap as Baby Boomers age out of the workforce.

“We don’t want 747s full of 90-year-olds coming in,” says Munro. “We want people coming in the door who are in their 20s and 30s and able to fill the jobs that employers need filled.”

Halifax’s “dependency ratio” shows why. In 2020, the city boasted the second-highest population growth rate across Canada. But the gain in working-age folks is

POPULATION GROWTH

12k

2.4 %

9K

1.8%

6K

1.2 %

3K

0.6 %

0

0% 2012

2013

2014

Additional People Statistics Canada, Annual Demographic Estimates, Table 17-10-0135-01

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2015

2016

2017

2018

Growth Rate

2019

2020

Growth Rate

Net Persons

Net Persons and Annual Growth Rate, Halifax, 2012 to 2020

Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

Life after

COVID

“We all thought the vaccine was going to be our ticket out of this, that there would be an end, and it would be sooner rather than later,” says clinical psychologist Dayna Lee-Baggley. “People are feeling disappointed.”

In a disheartening twist after more than a year and a half of COVID precautions, the long-promised life-after-the-pandemic seems no closer, even in Halifax, where low case counts have been the envy of other cities, leaving many expecting things would be back to “normal” by now.

“We all thought the vaccine was going to be our ticket out of this, that there would be an end, and it would be sooner rather than later,” says clinical psychologist Dayna LeeBaggley, who offers virtual group therapy sessions to treat COVID fallout. “People are feeling disappointed. There’s a good chance we’re going to have to figure out how to live with COVID.” Lee-Baggley, a frontline health-care worker before shifting to private practice after the pandemic’s second wave, says many people underestimate the amount of stress we’re all carrying around.

“Had this been World War Three, we would have gotten rid of all kinds of expectations and just focused on the war effort,” she says. “But what we’ve done is just added the stress of the pandemic on to the stress of everyday life. Many people are struggling.”

Two sections of our brains have been in a constant tug of war: the survival part, which is an automatic, unconscious system, versus the frontal lobe, which controls behaviour, willpower, self-control, decisionmaking, and planning.

The latter is like a battery. “At this point in the pandemic, there’s no frontal lobes anywhere,” says Lee-Baggley. “Everybody is so exhausted that everybody is feeling depleted. It’s hard to recharge those batteries back to the same level they were.”

It’s giving the survival brain more play in people’s day-to-day lives. “Survival brains don’t work on probabilities, they work on worst-case scenarios,” says Lee-Baggley.

“Even if we can logically understand that people are vaccinated in our workplaces or things like that, survival brains interpret these things as threats.”

To combat COVID-induced depression and anxiety people need to continuously

make sure their batteries are recharged. “At this point, we want to think about adding joy back into our lives,” says Lee-Baggley. “The antidote to burnout isn’t rest. It’s reigniting a sense of meaning and purpose. It’s reconnecting.”

That doesn’t mean scrolling through social media. “It’s not great for mental health,” says Lee-Baggley. But when COVID makes in-person visits inadvisable, texting or video calls can make people feel less isolated.

“They don’t feel as good as in-person connections, but they’re still an expression of that value of connecting with people,” she says.

While Halifax will one day see a return to something like normal, perhaps after the current fourth wave, or a fifth, a sixth, COVID’s impact on mental health could be long lasting.

Lee-Baggley expects burnout and “moral injury,” where a person’s morals feel violated because of something done by them or to them, to persist, particularly among those on the frontlines in health care and other essential services. “They’re still treating Vietnam vets for moral injury in the United States,” she says. “These things last a long time.”

COVID can have an upside. For many, it’s a chance to reassess their lives, not unlike the people with life-threatening conditions Lee-Baggley counselled in her nearly 15 years of practise at hospitals in Halifax.

“When cancer patients go through cancer, they can either respond once they’re done (treatment) by acting like cancer never happened and wanting to go back to life exactly to the way it was before,” she says.

“Or they can make use of that experience to reprioritize their lives, to think about what really matters to them, and to live their lives more meaningfully from that point forward.”

By offering group therapy, her goal is to help fill gaps in a mental health-care system plagued by long waiting lists.

“It does require some intention and reflection,” she says. “We’ve been in survival mode for a long time.”

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Climate’s

She’s confident she can meet the 2030 goal of net zero municipal operations. “We can offset what we need to hit that target, she says. “We’re looking at buying a bunch of wind power.”

Homeowners can do their part by making their houses more energy efficient. Miedema says HRM is aiming to make that easier by hiring a “navigator” to steer people through the myriad of options to make their homes greener and take advantage of government rebates.

“Homeowners have said there’s so much confusion,” she says. “That’s the thing we’re trying to test right now: if we can fulfill that need with an actual human that holds the hand of a willing participant through a deep energy retrofit, will they actually go for it?”

Halifax’s climate change expert Shannon Miedema says electric vehicles, like the Next Ride program one pictured here, are one way Haligonians can do their part to get to net zero emissions.

Activists met Halifax’s ambitious plan to drive down carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 with a collective “hooray” when it won unanimous HRM Council approval in June 2020.

But since then, the wheels have turned slowly.

“We are not on track,” says Shannon Miedema, who’s heading up the effort as the municipality’s manager of environment and climate change. “We need to shift from a business-as-usual approach. We need to treat it like an emergency.”

A big part of Halifax’s success hinges on more aggressive environmental policies from Ottawa and the province. The challenge on the ground is getting the municipality’s various departments up to speed with a sense of urgency, Miedema says. “Just because this plan passed doesn’t mean people know what do with it.”

When the Halifact climate action strategy was greenlit just as COVID hit, the various departments were working on their business plans. Budgeting for climate change wasn’t their bailiwick. It fell on Miedema and her tiny team of five to make sure the new goals were included.

“We can do educated guesses, and a lot of financial analysis based on what we know the average cost of X, Y, or Z is,” she says. “But it’s really up to the different departments to figure out what they need…If we said we’ve budgeted this many people for corporate fleet and this much money, they might say, ‘Well, that’s not how it works here.’ We don’t know what they need.”

Miedema spent the summer in meetings to get each of the departments, from transit to public works to finance, up to speed. “It wasn’t like it was going to be just a flip of a switch be integrated,” she says. “That was a bit of a reality check for us.”

The pandemic put the brakes on budget requests.

But now HRM staffers are trying to figure out the appropriate resources, both money and people, each department needs each year for the next four to 10 years to implement the climate action plan.

All the 46 actions are urgent. But from the get-go, the list was winnowed down by the municipality to seven priorities. Retrofitting municipal buildings, electrifying city buses and ferries, coming up with a framework to assess and protect critical infrastructure, and figuring out a financing strategy to pay for the $22billion plan over the next 30 years made the shortlist.

HRM will cover part of the cost but is also looking for the federal and provincial governments, private partners, and homeowners to chip in too.

The payoff is in the savings: an estimated $22 billion by 2050 fuelled by cheaper energy bills and lower operating and maintenance costs.

As the implementation revs up, Miedema’s gotten approval to hire six more workers, doubling the size of the team.

Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

TICKING CLOCK

The municipality got provincial and federal funding for not-for-profits and homeowners but would like to see that expanded to commercial properties, since old buildings are the city’s single biggest carbon emitters.

“A lot of our buildings are still on fuel oil,” says Miedema. “We have a lot of old buildings that are very leaky with poor insulation. Our climate dictates energy use all year long.”

Switching to an electric vehicle also will help make the city greener, she says. Before taking the plunge, Haligonians can set up a test drive through the “Next Ride” program offered by green not-for-profit Clean Foundation Nova Scotia.

Miedema says Halifax has lots to be proud of so far, but lots to work on to meet the ambitious goals.

“Ethically, we’re a high GDP city with a high intensity grid, so we should be trying to drive down our emissions steeply right now, she says. “It’s a strategic investment that pays off, but it’s the crunch of right now that’s the tricky part.”

The affordability

GAP

The latest calculations from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that Haligonians need to earn $22.05 an hour to have a proper living wage.

Saulnier says she isn’t suggesting the minimum wage be jacked up to that amount. But at $12.95, it’s far too low.

Now, with the cost of housing skyrocketing and other expenses rising, more people are going into debt just to maintain their status quo.

“People are using credit to fill in the gaps, or living paycheque to paycheque, not knowing what’s going to happen with shelter costs should the rent cap come off.

People are just feeling very, very insecure,” says Saulnier. “We need government to figure out what its role is in public services.”

She’s heartened by an increasingly noisy, and now perhaps more heard, minority of Haligonians that is pushing back, saying homelessness is unacceptable, that Black lives matter, that Indigenous people deserve reverence and respect, that temporary foreign workers should enjoy the same rights as others.

“That’s how change happens,” says Saulnier. “From the bottom up.”

Anti-poverty advocate Christine Saulnier says we’d have permanent paid sick days if lessons were learned from COVID.

Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

A surge in the cost of rent, homes, food, and gasoline, and heating bills is making Halifax a more expensive place to live, especially for those who were already feeling the crunch.

COVID exposed wide gaps in the and highlighted how many Haligonians are barely scraping by, pandemic or not. Emerging from the crisis is an opportunity to fix the gaps, to give everyone a chance to thrive.

So far, the effort’s been spotty.

“Our systems and supports should already be strong enough to endure a shock. Isn’t that the point of a safety net?” says Christine Saulnier, director of the Nova Scotia branch of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

“Instead, most of the initiatives are seen as temporary.”

Paid sick leave ended up a stopgap program the province phased out at the end of July as concerns about COVID abated. Governments have also said that rent control, additional funds for those on social assistance, and support to access the internet won’t extend indefinitely.

The promise by the federal and provincial governments to halve the cost of child care to an average of $10 a day shows the kinds of steps that we could take.

But Saulnier says she’s seeing few real signs yet of a change in course. “Permanent paid sick days would be the obvious and clear signal if there was commitment to learn the lessons from COVID,” she says.

Ignoring society’s problems can lead to more costly fixes down the road, as highlighted by Halifax’s affordable housing crisis. The city is now short an estimated 25,000 units and is scrambling to come up with temporary solutions while trying to secure a more permanent supply.

The situation is all the more dire as the housing crunch enables landlords to opt for “renovictions” where landlords turf tenants claiming the need for major renovations so they can jack up rents. As part of sweeping new measures by Premier Tim Houston to address the housing crisis, landlords now must give three months notice of an eviction to renovate. If the tenant doesn’t agree, the landlord must apply with the province.

The mess could have been skirted if the province had considered the growing affordable housing shortfall as the city embarked on a construction boom after the 2008 financial crisis.

“That was when we needed to be thinking about inclusive growth, where we’re being very intentional ensuring that everyone is benefitting, that you aren’t just doing the gentrification that’s pushing people out of their neighbourhoods,” says Saulnier. “We were very keen to grow Halifax. There were a lot of positive changes. But politicians and governments have been too focused on growth. GDP growth, if it’s not shared, just feeds into income inequality and all the other inequities.”

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H

Tim Houston says he has a lot he wants to give this province, but what’s really in the box?

Nova Scotians will find out over the next four years.

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Houston CAN

DO IT?

Looking ahead to 2022, the premier is promising Nova Scotia a lot

— can he deliver?

Bruce Murphy/VisionFire

at the end

of his first 100 days in office, Premier Tim Houston has been hearing a lot about the Nova Scotia’s challenges and inequities.

“I feel an incredible sense of urgency to respond to the challenges, so I do think we’re moving very fast,” he says. “I know that if we move fast, sometimes you make mistakes. That’s the kind of thing you have to balance, but when we make those mistakes, we have to have the confidence to say, ‘That was a mistake; we have to fix that’ ... Sometimes, if you find it hard to admit you don’t know something, it’s not the right role for you because this is a role where you have to be humble a lot.”

Houston believes the pandemic has taught governments a lot about the need to be nimble and willing to change.

“When you know better, you do better, and I think it should be the motto of our government,” he says. “We’ve seen pretty significant moves in housing and health care. I think these moves in the fullness of time will prove to have served Nova Scotians very well, so sometimes you have to stop and study and reflect and sometimes you got to act.”

Health-care reform was the centrepiece of Houston’s electoral platform. One of his first acts as premier was to head out on a provincial tour to talk with frontline health-care workers.

“The health-care file is so big, so complex, and the issues are so significant,” he says. “We just sat down with health-care workers from one end of the province to the other and just looked them in the eye and heard their stories. I will tell you that after that tour, I’m more and more focused on supporting them and fixing health care.”

BY AMEETA VOHRA

That tour has sharpened his focus on recruiting and retaining health-care workers, but also highlighted some immediate steps, such as the recent announcement in Cape Breton about opening an urgent treatment care centre to take some pressure off emergency rooms and a new transfer system for ambulances.

But Houston asks for patience.

“There’s no one solution, so there’ll be a number of things that will take a bit longer,” he says. “I want Nova Scotians to know that we’re very focused. I know in some communities, including my own (Pictou County), to be honest, things are getting worse. The momentum is all going the wrong way. The system’s been deteriorating for over eight years, so we have to take steps to stop this train from moving.”

Houston said little about the housing crisis during the campaign, but it’s rocketed to the top of his priority list since he took office. He continues to preach development as the long-term solution, but recently released a plan promising short-term relief, including a twoyear cap on rent increases (for existing leases) and the construction of new NSCC residences in Halifax, Dartmouth, and Pictou County.

“That will increase housing stock in the short term,” Houston says. “If (students) can’t live with their parents ... they’re absorbing housing units that are on the market, so if we can add to the stock specifically for them, that’s going to open up stock too.”

He also intends to work with HRM on a transportation task force. “You have to be able to move around; you can’t live somewhere if you can’t get to your work or school or whatever,” he says.

Houston has been open about his personal opposition to rent caps, but says the one he’s enshrined until 2023 was necessary.

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“This is a role where you have to be humble a lot”

Premier’s Office

— Tim Houston

“We have to protect tenants,” he explains. “It became obvious to me that it’s not the fault of the tenants or the renters of this province that we are where we are. It’s the failures of governments, and they shouldn’t be made to pay the price for that.”

He’s not willing to cap rents on new leases, though.

“It’s in place ... so that people don’t get forced to move,” he says. “Those that choose to move, that’s a different story.”

White men have dominated Nova Scotia’s government for the province’s entire history. Despite some early missteps (read on), Houston feels he’s progressing to a more inclusive government, pointing to the composition of his cabinet, which features more woman than any previous provincial government.

“Certainly across the bureaucracy, diversity — listening to, making sure that every Nova Scotian knows that their voice matters, that their voice will be respected and that their perspective they’re bringing to the table will be respected — is incredibly important,” he says.

“My personal commitment is to continue to work at that and to be better.”

He’s responding to the intense criticism he made after naming a white man, Pat Dunn, minister of African Nova Scotia Affairs. At the time, he defended the choice, saying he had few options because voters didn’t elect any Black PC MLAs. (Clarification: A person doesn’t need to be an MLA, or even a member of the governing party, to be named to cabinet.) He continues to defend his choice, but recently met with a group of community stakeholders and attempted to assuage concerns by naming prominent Black educator Dwayne Provo as an associate deputy minister in the department.

Another recent stumble was saying that people who work for minimum wage don’t have “real jobs.” He says he misspoke in the heat of a Province House debate, and has apologized again.

“We continue to work to make sure that we rebuild those relationships that may have been damaged, but above it all is that the government of this province cares about people,” Houston says. “They understand that

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everyone brings a different perspective to the table, and that perspective is to be respected.”

Along those lines, he says he also wants to dial down the partisanship at Province House. Since taking office, he’s invited the other party leaders to meetings with public health officials, and with federal politicians to discuss green energy.

“Opposition parties are doing their best to hold us to account,” he says. “(That tension is) always going to exist, but I think we’re taking as many steps that are possible to make sure that the opposition feels that this is a fair place.”

He points to the Public Accounts Committee. It used to sit many times throughout the year, calling witnesses and scrutinizing government policy. When Stephen McNeil was the Liberal premier, he neutered it, reducing it to monthly meetings without witnesses, which could only deal with reports from the auditor general. Houston is restoring its more rigorous function.

And over everything, the pandemic looms — one day the end seems in sight, the next people are talking about living with COVID indefinitely. Houston believes the end is closer than most people realize, and that presents opportunities for Nova Scotia.

“Nova Scotia got on the radar of a lot of people,” he says. “People want to move here, business owners that are saying maybe that’s a good place to establish because we had continuity ... so I’m excited about the future of this province. I know that the potential of the economy will only ever be realized when we deliver on health care, housing, education — so my confidence in the economic recovery allows me to spend more time focused on doing what government should be doing.”

While COVID’s stubbornness is discouraging, Houston gives Nova Scotians high marks for how they’ve carried on. For 2022, he wants to give the province a more “normal” year.

“At some point in the year, (pandemic restrictions) should be gone, so I would say a return to more normal will be a good thing. With a return to more normal work, we’re pretty excited about the prospects of growing the population of this province and, therefore, growing the economy of this province. I would hope Nova Scotians would share any optimism that I feel.”

2

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1 Watches for everyone

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The Gallery Shop is proud to feature a selection of hand made products by Indigenous artists and makers from the region and across Canada. Pick out an original piece of jewelry, smoke-fired pottery, or soapstone sculpture.

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Gift Box of Handmade Chocolates

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Quarterdeck Resort Gift Card

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22 Holiday Collections

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24 Bearloom Teddies

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Art1274 Hollis Gallery

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A Natural Balance Hardcover (illustrated)

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esme ORIGINAL JACKET

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Floyd Kane didn’t see Black Nova Scotians on the screen or behind the cameras. With his hit TV show Diggstown, he’s changing all that

BY AMEETA VOHRA

F

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Floyd Kane wants to create opportunities for Black people to both star in shows and shape them behind the scenes.

But he didn’t intend to create a legal show.

“The first thought around ... Diggstown was the idea of a Black woman surfing on Martinique Beach — that image,” he recalls. “Everything in the show stems from that. When I was thinking about the show, it was more so about ... what haven’t we seen on television.”

Two things came to mind. Canadians never saw a

Dan Callis; Courtesy of CBC

loyd Kane saw a big problem in the local film and television industry.

There were few people of colour writing and fewer opportunities for marginalized groups in the industry.

Tourism Nova Scotia’s advertisements socked it home.

“They used to have tours of Nova Scotia which were either beauty shots of Nova Scotia, people sailing, being on Citadel Hill, having like lobster dinners, and whatnot,” he says. “Everyone in those commercials was a white person. There were no people of colour selling those commercials, so you never felt included. You didn’t feel connected because that’s not a reflection of the real population and the diversity and the people of the province.”

Years later, Kane’s goal was to find a way to reframe Nova Scotia’s narrative, to also prominently includes people of colour. He slowly found this way in the most unlikely of circumstances.

Today, he’s the creator, showrunner, executive producer and writer for CBC legal drama Diggstown. Getting here wasn’t easy.

Law school at Dalhousie taught Kane a lot more than how to be a lawyer. It gave him new inspiration for creative writing. Studying books and screenplays, he learned about film writing.

Vinessa Antoine as “Marcie Diggs” in the CBC original series Diggstown.

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“The experience of women of colour, particularly Black women in this country, has not been looked at in a real way” —Vinessa Antoine Veteran actor Vinessa Antoine plays Marcie Diggs, the show’s eponymous lead character. After acting stints in New York and Los Angeles, the Torontonian came back to Canada to take on the lead role. After auditioning, Antoine felt she was on the cusp of something special.

“Oh wow, this is for the lead,” she says. “This is cool.

This is different. I had gone out on a couple of lead shows, but I hadn’t gone out on anything in Canada.

It was within the first couple of pages of the script I was like, ‘Whoa, she’s a surfer.’ This is very different; I haven’t seen this. It was more about the writing that kept me drawn to it. I was like, ‘Well I want to have an opportunity to be seen for this, and I feel like I can do this.’”

Marcie Diggs is intense. The character is complex: emotional, tenacious, tough, and vulnerable. A Halifax

Dan Callis; Courtesy of CBC

Black Nova Scotian woman in a period piece or a story about a contemporary racialized career woman. The other was that recurring image of a surfer on Martinique Beach.

“I just remember thinking like it would be the image of Marcie ... surfing on that body of water,” he says.

“That was the thing that inspired me right off the bat.”

From there, the show started taking shape. Kane began mapping out his vision, and talked with some friends who were legal aid lawyers.

“I thought, ‘Oh, we haven’t seen this before,’” he says. “We haven’t seen the lawyers who represent people who don’t have the money to go out and afford a private lawyer. It was really interesting, and that was interesting to me. That’s how the bones of the show started to take shape.”

Guest star Jully Black (left) and Vinessa Antoine in Diggstown.

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Dan Callis; Courtesy of CBC

Behind the scenes: Brandon Oakes (Doug Paul) and Shailene Garnett (Iris Beals) in Diggstown.

Legal Aid lawyer born and raised in North Preston, one of Canada’s first and largest Black communities. The character deals with personal trauma as her aunt, who she was defending in a case, dies by suicide. “(It) led her into the question of what is important, what does she want to do with her life,” Antoine says.

“She decided to become a legal aid lawyer to help people who don’t have the money and the means and resources to get a good lawyer. By season one, we’ve met her after she’s been gone for a long time. Now it’s her first days into legal aid, she rolls up her sleeves and she starts helping people in her community.”

The character resonates for Antoine.

“I think the experience of women of colour, particularly Black women in this country, has not been looked at in a real way,” she says. “I related to her obviously for the racism that many women and I endured in this country and also this real need to find a place, as a Canadian woman and be seen in a predominantly white, male, straight community.”

On the show, Shailene Garnett plays Iris Beals, a smart-ass social worker devoted to helping others. As with Antoine, the audition hooked her.

“It’s one-of-a-kind in Canada,” she says. “Floyd believes in it, and he’s done a lot to make the most of it.

He’s talking about real-life stories or heavily inspired by

real life stories that you don’t often see on the air. I’ve had people reach out and say, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool that we’re talking about it.’”

Iris has gone through a career transformation within the first two seasons. In season one, she was an intake coordinator at Halifax Legal Aid. Since then, Iris went to school and worked toward becoming a social worker at the office, a move that pays off in the upcoming season.

“Season two, she was learning the ropes,” Garnett says. “She has her mentors, she asks a lot of questions, but she was taking a lot of flak from people because she didn’t know when to stand up. In season three, she’s found her footing, and she can stand up for what she believes is right ... She has a lot of more opportunities to make a difference, and you can start to see what her passions are.”

Transformation is a key theme through the upcoming season. While the pandemic was initially not part of the script, Kane rethought that during the long hiatus.

“Looking at post-COVID, what are lawsuits going to look like ... out of this situation that’s impacted all of us,” Kane says. “The most obvious one was the long-term care home situation.”

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Dan Callis; Courtesy of CBC

Nicole Muñoz plays Ellery Lopez.

McNeil gave where he referred to the Preston area as a hotspot for COVID-19 cases, while not singling out any white communities.

“You saw it play out in terms of the outrage people expressed,” he says. “(It) felt like more of the same ...

Why are we being stigmatized? So I wanted to kind of dig into that.”

Diggstown will introduce new characters in season three, including Nina Francis (played by Jully Black).

She is a continuing care assistant charged with criminal negligence and assault during the pandemic.

“We get into the institutional aspects of the longterm care facility, trying to put actual blame on Nina, for the other support workers bringing COVID into the facility, and Marcie challenging that idea,” Kane says. “It became about how do we change ... There’s a moment where Doug realizes that he may not want to be a legal aid anymore. There’s a moment where everybody’s just getting tired of the basic legal aid system, and it’s overworked, it’s overrun.”

Nicole Munoz joins the cast as competitive Crown attorney Ellery Lopez.

She fell in love with the show when she saw the first episode.

“It’s a Canadian show talking about real problems in an incredible, well thought-out way,” she says. “I think Floyd does an incredible job of presenting these types of systemic issues to an audience, Canadian families,

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people who might not necessarily have their eyes open to what’s going on but can get a taste of what’s happening in our political world.”

Munoz see parallels in her own life.

“We have some things in common in terms of growth and self-discovery,” she says. “It’s the opportunity to look into oneself and be faced with what your values are, who you support, and realizing what you can do to make a difference in this world. With COVID, it’s put a stop to many things … You had time to realize what was going on and feel how that made you feel. I got to do some work on what I can do to change these things or what I can do to help change these things. Both Ellery and I go through that this year.”

While researching for her role, Munoz came across something reflecting what Diggstown represents to her.

“I was looking online about the Halifax law system and courts,” she says. “There are tons of videos, and I was watching a young man in court. He was speaking on something, and he said, ‘The law itself has been used to perpetuate racism, and thus should play a part in remedying that.’ I think that’s pretty much sums it up.”

Antoine says Season 3 will undergo a significant shift at the midpoint.

“If you have been watching season one or two and are expecting something similar in three, you’re going to be taken for a whole new ride,” she says. “We are hitting very intense subject matter and you know it’s been a

“I want to be part of the creation of this group of artists who are there and available and more hungry to work” —Floyd Kane

Dan Callis; Courtesy of CBC

students who identify as being of African descent to support their work towards careers of writing. Kane also has created positions in his writing room for women of colour.

“When it comes to building crew who are BIPOC in Nova Scotia, I want the show to have that same effect,” he says. “I want the people who work on my show to work on Moonshine and to work on that Bill Nye Netflix show. I want to be part of the creation of this group of artists who are there and available and more hungry to work, so that people can stop saying ‘I can’t find anybody.’ We have more BIPOC writers working in Canada than ever before.”

Karen Wentzell

year or so since we’ve seen these characters ... What we know is Diggstown so far will be pretty much flipped on its head, and then we go on a major change.”

Antoine wants her work to encourage people.

“I hope people aren’t feeling as lonely, helpless, angry, sad, and all of the that we’ve all had to endure,” she says. “We’ve had a big emotional time in the last couple of years in this country. I hope that they’re able to see themselves and know that they’re not crazy ... I hope that they know, not that it’s going to get better, but know it’s heavy, and it’s going to be OK.” Kane has already changed Nova Scotia’s film and television industry. Recently, he created the Edna and Velma Thomas Kane Writers Award, a scholarship for

Left: Shooting Season 2. Right: Executive producer Amos Adetuyi and creator Floyd Kane, who also works as showrunner.

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Nova Scotia’s government isn’t prepared to spend much on climate change, but environmentalists are cautiously optimistic about its plans

BY CHRIS BENJAMIN

D

uring the recent Nova Scotia provincial election, I had my eyes on the TV and my phone in a sweat-soaked palm as I watched the punditry. Twitter is such a bubble. An echo chamber of panic from people who share my worry that humanity is in trouble, due to raging toxicity, biodiversity, and climate crises.

With the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative party set for a big win, it was prognosis negative.

Until a hopeful beacon from Brendan Haley.

He’s the policy director for Efficiency Canada, a former energy coordinator at Halifax’s Ecology Action Centre, and long-time Nova Scotia political commentator.

He noted that the Progressive Conservatives had campaigned left of the provincial Liberals on many issues.

Even more importantly, they “have a legacy of climate leadership.”

The party’s election platform builds on that legacy and its language, which brought us the Environmental Goals and Sustainable Prosperity Act of 2007. The PCs promise a new “Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act,” intended as a renewal and expansion of its predecessor.

The 2007 act set the goals and laid the framework for significant growth in the portion of our energy use coming from renewable sources (like solar, wind and hydro) from nine per cent a decade ago to a projected 60 per cent next year, according to Nova Scotia Power. Some key commitments from the PC election platform:

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• 80 per cent renewable energy by 2030, eliminating dependence on coal, • Improved energy efficiency programs; greater access to affordable clean energy, • Greener agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, • Implementing 2018’s “Independent Review of Forest Practices in Nova Scotia,” • Protect at least 20 per cent of land and water by 2030, • Ensure “low-impact, sustainable aquaculture,” • 30 per cent zero-emission vehicles by 2030, • Up to 50 per cent off the installation cost of an EV charging station for each gas station, • All new provincial buildings will be net-zero emitters, • New provincial active transportation strategy with walking trails and cycling paths.

In all, the PCs promised just over $7 million in new environmental spending, most of it going to eco-friendly building and active-transportation infrastructure. By comparison, the entire Liberal pre-election budget plan for the Department of Environment and Climate Change was about $42 million (from an overall budget of nearly $12 billion). Nobody spends much on environment.

Perhaps the most significant component of the 17page sustainability platform is the opening sentence: “We are facing a climate emergency and human activities are the main cause, producing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with no signs of slowing down.”

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Nova Scotia is “doing the things the rest of the country needs to do.”

—Brendan Haley Twenty years ago, far more leftist parties scoffed at phrases like “climate emergency.” This time, every party promised at least 80 per cent renewable energy by 2030.

“They all had substantial and at least in parts ambitious environmental platforms,” says Maggy Burns, executive director of Ecology Action Centre in Halifax.

“It’s gratifying to see. The recognition of the need for progressive climate targets is really important. It appears to be a genuine platform.”

“I’m committed to greater land and water protection,” Premier Houston says in a recent interview with Unravel Halifax, “(and) having more renewable sources for electricity and strengthening programs to meet our clean energy goals.”

Brendan Haley’s comforting tweets the night of the Nova Scotian election were aimed at the whole country.

He later told The Energy Mix that Nova Scotia is “the most important province to look at in terms of Canada’s energy transition. It’s doing the things the rest of the country needs to do to transition to a low-carbon economy.”

Those things started with the PCs and their 2007 environmental legislation, but they continued with subsequent NDP and Liberal provincial governments. Haley feels that the door is open to carefully consider the most effective next steps, based on proven approaches to addressing climate change.

“Renaming (the existing act) actually welcomes a deeper dive into what the agenda should look like,” he explains. “A lot of the successes have stemmed from a strong evidence-based process.” Haley says that was the case in developing feed-in tariffs, which gave specific communities buy-in and ownership over their own renewable energy programs, making them much less controversial than they were elsewhere.

When the new government officially introduced its environmental legislation in late October (with a Climate Change Plan promised for spring), however, Haley was underwhelmed by its vague commitments to future energy efficiency programming. There were no clear targets and Haley noted that Nova Scotia Power undervalued energy savings by failing to include carbon pricing in its long-term modelling. The language around net-zero building codes is also unclear and seems to lack ambition. However, “there is still potential to add in some energy efficiency goals,” Haley tweeted.

The yet-unknown details of what specific measures the province will use to meet its targets, especially the 80-per-cent renewable target, are of course where the devil resides. Haley notes two significant risks. First, our dependence on hydroelectric imports from Quebec, using a still uncertain transmission system.

Second, our overall demand for energy could grow with an increased population, or if the province succeeds in getting more electric vehicles on the road. That one looks like a tall task.

“The latest data says only 0.3 per cent of new vehicle registrations are electric in Nova Scotia,” Haley says.

“British Columbia is at 8.4 per cent. They have a regula-

tion that requires that a certain percentage of auto sales be electric. They have very strong consumer incentives.

They have much more comprehensive charging networks.”

Haley applauds the goal of expanding the charging network with incentives for gas stations, but says that consumer incentives are also needed. “The policy measures do not match the target. Nova Scotia’s charging network is well behind Prince Edward Island.”

Whether or not Nova Scotia meets the electricvehicle and renewable energy goals, our energy use needs to be more efficient. “An Efficiency Resource Standard fits very well with this platform,” Haley says. That means setting goals not only on how much of our grid is from renewable sources, but also reduction targets for overall energy use — for example, a two-per-cent annual reduction due to improved efficiency. He’d like to see such targets added to the new legislation.

Haley hopes the PCs will take things a step further when it comes to net-zero buildings, wondering why they would stop at provincial buildings when they could simply adopt a new “net-zero, energy-ready and zerocarbon heating building code. Nova Scotia has a long history of adopting latest building codes rapidly. There are going to be clear codes [federally] on how to make all new buildings net zero,” as British Columbia has, he says.

“We are facing a climate emergency and human activities are the main cause.”

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The Houston government has promised to protect at least 20 per cent of Nova Scotian land and water by 2030.

Efficiency should also reduce energy poverty (the situation in which a household spends more than six per cent of its income on home energy). That applies to 37 per cent of Nova Scotian households — third highest in Canada. It should be natural for a government that campaigned heavily on improved health care to address energy poverty, since the inability to properly heat, or ventilate, your home is a serious health concern.

Despite those devilish details, Haley sees an opportunity to set a progressive course against the climate crisis. “It’s up to Nova Scotians to demand the new government take this seriously,” he says. “Remind them of

“The investment was not adequate for the commitments.”

—Maggy Burns their own history and the larger history of achieving meaningful greenhouse gas reductions.”

Maggy Burns of the Ecology Action Centre is confident that people will hold the new government accountable. “Part of what makes me optimistic is that we know how much people care,” she says. “We’re seeing the impacts of the biodiversity crisis. It’s making businesses and other stakeholders cognizant of the costs.”

A significant concern is what is considered renewable.

The current goal includes four per cent biomass, which is touted as a more efficient use of forestry byproducts, while crticis say it amounts to clear cutting trees to burn for energy. The target also includes 10 per cent natural gas. The problem with that, according to the Ecology Action Centre, is that “Natural gas infra-

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structure has methane and other emissions associated with it. Methane is 84 times as powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.”

Burns was happy to see land and water protection in the PC platform: “They’re the only party that included freshwater protection.” She’s also pleased to see the aquaculture question raised. “We want to see the phase out of the open-pen fish farming,” she says, in favour of land-based facilities and shellfish aquaculture.

But on the whole, Burns says she and her cleagues are ready to “spring out of bed to call all the new ministers,” because they committed to legislate ambitious targets.

True to its red Tory roots, the Nova Scotia PC Party platform did not back its commitment with big spending. “The investment was not adequate for the commitments,” Burns says. “It’s inconsistent with the scale of the crisis and what the public wants.” She points specifically to a commitment of $100,000 for six kilometres of painted bike lanes as insufficient.

What’s worse is that the PCs inherit a commitment to offshore oil exploration; the last budget the Liberals tabled committed about $10-million to it. Houston isn’t planning to reverse course.

“Government supports the development of our offshore resources when it is appropriate to do so,” he says.

“A good example of this is our continued commitment to the moratorium on George’s Bank. As well, we have one of the strongest offshore regulatory regimes in the world, which has established processes for considering and balancing the various interests before allowing any exploration or development activity.”

However strong the regulations, oil and gas exploration doesn’t jibe with broader human goals of preventing catastrophic climate change. As Burns says, “You can’t chip away at the edges while continuing to exacerbate the crises.” The $10 million investment exceeds

Maddi Tang

It’s heart warming season.

Ecology Action Centre executive director Maggy Burns calls on government to match its environment promises with the money needed to get the job done.

promised new spending on climate action, wildland protection, and active transportation combined.

There are also some odd digressions in the platform. The PCs want more environmental education in classrooms. That’s good, but the focus is to teach kids “how their actions affect the environment and climate change” and “how they can do their part.”

It’s your fault, kids. Now get busy, it’s cleanup time.

More bizarrely, there’s a hefty portion of the platform committed to ramping up fines for litterers (including illegal dumping), as if that will magically generate revenue for active transportation infrastructure. No mention of added bylaw officers.

Litter is unsightly but there are deeper roots to address. Nova Scotia’s waste management system draws praise around the globe, but waste diversion numbers plateaued nearly two decades ago.

“What you need to be thinking about is extended producer responsibility,” Burns says. Instead of hunting down slobs too lazy to find the nearest bin, focus on the corporations that create the waste in the first place, and hold them responsible. That would be the kind of bold solution that gives us a fighting chance against climate and biodiversity crises.

Burns feels Nova Scotia is ready for that kind of leadership. “I’m hopeful they’ll want to work with civil society organizations.”

With additional reporting by Ameeta Vohra.

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TIPPLERS

THE FLAVOUR

Gifts for

Reaching for a six-pack or a bottle of wine? Read on and find something memorable

BY BROOKLYN CONNOLLY

Unfiltered: An Irreverent History of Beer in Nova Scotia by Steven Laffoley Today, craft brewing is a Nova Scotian success story. Residents of the province consume about eight litres of beer annually per capita. But the beverage hasn’t always been so loved. It’s long hidden history on the East Coast is full of strange stories, which local author Steven Laffoley explores to good effect in his latest book from Pottersfield Press, available through the usual online retailers or independent shops like Bookmark Halifax or the King’s Co-Op Book Store. stevenlaffoley.wordpress.com

A day trip to Schoolhouse Brewery Tourism Nova Scotia / Photographer: Aaron McKenzie Fraser

You could justify a day trip to any of Nova Scotia’s many breweries. If you’re taking someone on their first beery expedition, we recommend a trip to Windsor.

Schoolhouse Brewery pairs a unique setting (the eponymous school dates back to the 1860s) with a broad range of approachable beers. The Principal pale ale, a light and flavourful sipper, is the best way to get started. schoolhousebrewery.ca

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Got a local beverage enthusiast on your holiday gift list? Sure, you can get them a six-pack or a bottle of wine, but if you want to get more creative, we can help

Bitters from Compass Distillers

Nine Locks Russian Imperial Stout & Barley Wine Gift Set

Most local mixologists are well stocked with mainstay spirits like vodka and gin, but gift givers often overlook the other ingredients they need for quality cocktails. Compass Distillers makes its artisanal craft spirits from scratch with locally sourced ingredients. The store at 2533 Agricola Street in Halifax offers a giddiness-inducing selection; you can't go wrong with bitters, an essential for many beloved cocktails. Grapefruit & Honey hops and Aromatic Orange will be sure to spice up your stocking, and later, cocktail. compassdistillers.ca

Boxed with a bow for any occasion, Nine Locks has you covered with this pairing of big, boozy, special-occasion beers.

(An ideal thank-you for a dinner invitation). It includes a Belgian beer glass, plus bombers of barrel-aged imperial stout and barleywine. “Explore the complexities of dark, barrelaged beers,” says the brewer. ninelocksbrewing.ca

with bar supplies and glassware. “Canada’s original fully stocked online cocktail supply shop” offers glassware sets at a shockingly reasonable $40, and they're dishwasher safe. (Give them a rinse after, though. No one wants to examine their brandy through a spotty snifter). With lots of styles in stock for martinis, classic cocktails, or your basic on-the-rocks, your lucky recipient will learn that the right glassware really does make a difference. thecraftybartender.com

Cocktail Shakers from Big Eric's

Coldstream Clear Liquor Collection

Owned and operated in Atlantic Canada, Big Eric’s is the supplier of choice for many local bars and restaurants, selling everything from cleaning supplies to cocktail shakers. For $24.59 you can pick up a classic 30-ounce stainless steel cocktail shaker set, just like the one your favourite bartender uses, from the store at 171 John Savage Ave. in Burnside. bigerics.com

Warm up with Coldstream’s collection of artisanal liquors, made in Nova Scotia at the Stewiacke distillery. The sweet flavours of salted caramel, classic coffee, homemade apple pie, crazy coconut, and cinnamon hot shots pair perfectly with a hot chocolate or morning coffee. coldstreamclear.com

The Crafty Bartender Glassware Set This one isn't locally made, but is at least made in Canada, which often isn't the case

with Alexander Keith's IPA. And there's nothing wrong with that; drink what makes you happy, we say. And for those loyalists, a Keith's Classic IPA Beer Glass will be a most welcome gift, a way to fly their flag while enjoying Nova Scotia's most famous beer. keiths.ca

Sparkling Mead from Planter's Ridge

Tankard from Nova Scotia Makers Market There's nothing like 24 ounces of clay to say, "This is a person who is serious about their beverages." Ostentatious, unnecessary, and certain to become the recipient's favourite vessel, the $55 tankard is made by local artisans and glazed in liquorice black and bronze.

Keep your cold ones cool and your bling game on point. novascotiamakers.ca

Mead is a latecomer to Nova Scotia's craft beverage game, but it's making up for lost time.

If you're new to its honey-fuelled goodness, this one is an ideal introduction. Made from Wolfville’’s wild clover honey, Planter’s Ridge sparkling mead is quite unlike anything you'd expect to find at a winery. The medium-sweet finish and delightful sparkles will surely bring your senses back to spring — the perfect present for that one friend who’s counting down the days till equinox. plantersridge.ca

Alexander Keith's Classic IPA Beer Glass There is a certain segment of the population for whom the conversation about locally made beer begins and ends NOV / DEC 2021

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THE FLAVOUR

Coming and going Halifax’s dining scene has been in flux since the pandemic began

Paul Thomas

BY BROOKLYN CONNOLLY

A

year-and-a-half of change fills the city’s dining scene, and it’s more than masking up to head inside. Behind the host who checks your proof of vaccination and reminds you to leave your contact tracing details, there’s an entire industry in upheaval. Some restaurants have crumbled, others have switched things up, and they’re all navigating pandemic challenges, new competition, and diners’ fast shifting preferences.

What we’ve lost Some of Halifax’s most familiar favourites turned their ovens off for good during the pandemic. With lockdowns, rental spikes, and trouble finding workers, the dining industry has had a run for its money —and some have decided to leave with the bill. Cheers to the bites that Haligonians will surely miss.

WATER AND BONE (2016–2021)

Athens Family Restaurant

5687 Charles St. Ramen house When the pandemic struck, Water and Bone owner Jamie MacAulay closed his ramen restaurant on Charles Street.

Rather than opening it again, he launched a new restaurant: Coda Ramen at 2157 Gottingen St., writing on the restaurant’s website, “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I need to be.” But the new venture couldn’t weather the COVID storm either, closing for good earlier this year.

THE SUBMARINE (1975–2020) 5384 Ingis St. Subs, sandwiches & Lebanese cuisine Best known for: Donair subs

THE FICKLE FROG PUB (2000–2020) 5675 Spring Garden Road Pub grub Best known for: Wild yellow amberjack

What we’ve gained Amidst the gloom, some restaurateurs see opportunity.

Meet these brave newcomers.

QUINN’S ARMS 6285 Quinpool Rd. British gastropub Must try: Sunday roast

THE FEASTS ATHENS FAMILY RESTAURANT (1982–2021) 6273 Quinpool Rd. Greek cuisine Best known for: Weekend brunch

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6293 Quinpool Rd. Indian, Thai, and Korean cuisine Must try: Biryani

THE FLAVOUR

BUSAN KOREAN BBQ 6311 Quinpool Rd. Korean Barbecue Must try: Bibimbab

What’s changed

For restaurateurs with changes in the works, the pandemic offered a chance to pause and reset. As you return to the dining scene, you’ll find some old favourites have a new look.

LION’S HEAD TAVERN 3085 Robie St. Classic pub-style cuisine What’s changed: Gone is the dark and gloomy dining room, the scene of so many half-remembered karaoke nights.

Lion’s Head Tavern took it up a notch (literally) with a new rooftop patio, but didn’t move too far. The new location is shining at the corner of Robie and Young, adjacent to the old site.

Since the 1970s, Bud the Spud has been a local institution.

Next summer, it reopens under new ownership.

BUD THE SPUD

Brian Munroe

Brian Munroe

Downtown Halifax The original food truck What’s changed: Since the 1970s, Bud the Spud has been a Halifax mainstay. Not only is it where you’ll find the best fries, it’s also a harbinger of summer. Leonard True (who died in 2020) launched the food truck, but Buds come and go — since then it’s passed through many hands. No one knows yet what next summer holds for it, but there will be another change. The latest owner, Jody LeBlanc, recently sold it to new operators Kathleen Porter and Kyle Conrod.

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THE INDEX

ABM integrated solutions (p. 4) abmis.ca

The Little Shop Box (p. 46) thelittleshopbox.com

Advocate Forest of Trees (p. 28) mentalhealthns.ca

LÜVO Life Co. Wines (p. 47) luvolife.ca

Advocate Printing (p. 64) advocateprinting.com

The Newfoundland Tea Company (p. 45) thenewfoundlandteaco.com

Art 1274 Hollis Gallery (p. 46) art1274hollis.ca

Nimbus Publishing (p. 6, 44, 45, 46) nimbus.ca

Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (p. 43) artgalleryofnovascotia.ca

Northern Watters Knitwear & Tartan Shop (p. 16, 45) nwknitwear.com

Atlantic News (p. 45, 47, 65) atlanticnews.ns.ca Audi Halifax (p. 2) audihalifax.com Bearloom Teddies (p. 46) bearloomteddies.com Bluenose Lodge (p. 22) bluenoselodge.ca Cox & Palmer (p. 14) coxandpalmerlaw.com Doodle Lovely (p. 45, 46) doodlelovely.com East Coast Living (p. 59) eastcoastliving.ca The Esmé Original Jacket (p. 44, 47) esmejacket.com Goose Lane (p. 43, 47) gooselane.com Grand Banker (p. 43) grandbanker.com Halifax Marriott Harbourfront Hotel (p. 12) marriott.com/hotels/travel/yhzmc Inglis Jewellers (p. 43) inglisjewellers.ca Ivan’s Cameras (p. 43, 44) ivanscamera.fotosource.com Jost Vineyards (p. 44) jostwine.ca

Our Children Magazine (p. 20) ourchildrenmagazine.ca Pleasures n’ Treasures (p. 43, 47) pleasuresntreasures.com The Quarterdeck Resort (p. 44) quarterdeck.ca Red Door Realty (p. 65) reddoorrealty.ca Rousseau Chocolatier (p. 44) rousseauchocolatier.ca Saltscapes Comfort and Joy (p. 30) saltscapes.com/subscriptions Shelby Ranch (p. 45) shelbyranch.ca Shore Thing (p. 46) facebook.com/ shorethingstudioandemporium Subaru (p. 68) subaru.ca Town of Kentville (p. 16) kentville.ca Trainyard General Store (p. 6, 44) trainyardstore.com Unravel Halifax Magazine (p. 26) Unravelhalifax.ca White Point Beach Resort (p. 47, 59) whitepoint.com

902-499-1323 Jarrett@reddoorrealty.ca reddoorrealty.ca NOV / DEC 2021

UNRAVEL

65

THE STANCE

Everyone deserves a place to live We have a housing crisis and we can’t wait any longer for solutions

BY PAULINE DAKIN

O

n my street in Halifax there are home-made posters in a couple of windows — including at our house — that say, “Everyone deserves a place to live” and “Affordable Housing Now.” My 25-year-old daughter, and our nine-year-old neighbour Alta, got together to make those colourful placards before going to one of last summer’s housing protests. To me, they are a stark reminder that housing has become something people of all ages and backgrounds worry about in Halifax.

Alta’s mom told me her daughter can see a small park nearby which over the last year became home to people in a Mutual Aid shelter and some tents. When it was cold, snowy, or rainy, Alta would look across to those emergency shelters and worry about the people living there without any of the usual comforts of home: heat, plumbing or electricity, family. Alta’s poster-making and activism grew from empathy.

But both our daughters, and many other young people, must also be wondering how they’ll ever afford homes, to own or rent.

In my lifetime, and those of my parents and grandparents, home ownership was the dream and its fulfilment an indicator of a successful life. Halifax housing prices mean for many the dream will have to be different, or at least deferred. And our red-hot real estate and rental market means many more of us could be on the precipice of homelessness. If renovations push you out of an affordable apartment, good luck finding something similarly priced.

Recent rental ads in Halifax included a single room with kitchen, tub, and toilet jumbled together, no separating walls, for more than $1,300 a month. (Um, do you mind stepping into the hall while I use the loo?)

There is a lot of construction underway that we’re told will ease the housing crisis. But if you look at the “coming soon” signs at development sites around the city, it appears there’s nothing but luxury apartments and condos on the way. And this is exacerbating the problem because of what they’re replacing.

Old Victorian homes with five and six bedrooms

66

UNRAVEL

NOV / DEC 2021

have been the go-to affordable housing option for students and young people. They get a room for maybe $700 a month, all in, and share the bathroom and kitchen.

That’s a type of affordable housing option that’s disappearing as those houses are bought up by developers in land assemblies for large condo or apartment buildings.

Yes, there will be more housing per square metre on those sites, but nothing as affordable as what they’re supplanting. Witness the block of big old houses that will be gone with the redevelopment between Robie, Spring Garden, Carlton, and College streets. The Promenade, as the project is called, will have two towers, 28 and 29 storeys. It won’t be those with limited incomes living there when they’re complete.

Halifax council has taken some steps to address the crisis. Modular housing, a converted motel, and new affordable housing units are on the way. And zoning changes are allowing back-yard or garage-top suites for “gentle densification” in former single-family neighbourhoods.

But that will all take time, and for people still in tents as winter begins, it’s not soon enough.

What we really need is an understanding at all levels of government that housing is a human right and homelessness is intolerable. Finland is the first country to implement a so-called housing-first policy. It no longer has shelters and temporary housing. It provides housing with social supports to anyone who needs it.

And here’s the thing: every person they house saves the country 15,000 euros in other services, according to a study that evaluated and compared costs. That’s well over $20,000 Cdn. Per person housed.

Finland also mandates that 25 per cent of all new housing developments are affordable. It’s not alone.

Other communities in the U.S. and U.K. are placing similar requirements on developers.

It takes a lot of courage and fortitude to try something different, to adopt a new philosophy. But as Alta, my daughter, and other housing advocates would say, making sure everyone has a place to live is just the right thing to do.

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