Unravel Mar/Apr 2022 - Telling Halifax Stories

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MAR/APR 22

TORONTO. VANCOUVER. halifax?

Singers like Eriana Willis are at the forefront of Halifax’s musical transformation

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NOREEN MABIZA FIGHTS FOR JUSTICE AND SUSTAINABILITY P. 22

JOEL PLASKETT REFLECTS ON LIFE’S JOURNEYS P. 32

SPRYFIELD OF DREAMS — HALIFAX’S NEWEST BEER DESTINATION P. 48

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Submitted

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the issue Departments

Features 22

5 EDITOR’S MESSAGE

Joel Plaskett

Context is king

NO STRANGER TO A STRANGE LAND

8 THE LIST

Noreen Mabiza believes that

Can’t-miss events

social justice and environmental sustainability are one and the

10 THE BACKSTORY

same, and she won’t rest until she proves it

The Black players who transformed hockey

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13 THE PERSPECTIVE Culture shock

IN THE TRENCHES Developers, buyers, advocates,

14 THE CONVERSATION

and realtors — meet the people

Diversity by design

on the front lines of Nova Scotia’s frenzied real estate market

17 THE HOUSING MARKET Growing up?

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19 THE VIEW

A SOUNDTRACK FOR THE JOURNEY

A city transforms

Talking with Joel Plaskett

21 THE SOUND

about middle age, finding

The Food Professor

one’s way home, and surviving

46 THE FLAVOUR

38

Chkn Chop rises again

BUILDING ON A HISTORIC FOUNDATION

48 THE FLAVOUR Bruce Murray/VisionFire

the pandemic

Sarah B. MacDonald guides Halifax’s 128-year-old Council of Women through new challenges

42 RIDING THE WAVES As Halifax prepares to again welcome cruise ships, COVID continues to raise uncertainty,

Spryfield of dreams — discover Serpent Brewing 50 THE STANCE Ready to blow

mar/apr vol 2 / issue 2

and concerns rise over the

On The Cover Discover the stories behind Halifax’s frenzied real estate market.

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Lem Lian

uneven benefits of the industry

y e r Aud

Whether it’s a quick trip to Halifax for appointments, or an “I never thought this would happen to my child” moment...

Ronald McDonald House Charities© Atlantic ensures Maritime families have a place to call “home” when traveling for the medical care their sick child needs.

Keeping Families Close. rmhcatlantic.ca | 902.429.4044 | @rmhcatlantic

Context is king Clarifying Keonté Beals’s views on how the music industry is changing

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By Trevor J. Adams tadams@unravelhalifax.ca

hen you’re trying to communicate an idea, context is as important as content. That’s not a groundbreaking new concept, but it is an easy one to forget.

It’s one I wish I’d remembered when we put together the last issue of Unravel Halifax. Our cover story, by Robyn McNeil, aimed to explore how Halifax’s music scene is evolving, becoming more inclusive, opening opportunities for more people, after decades of being a place where most of the power and profit ended up in the hands of white people.

Robyn did an excellent dive into the subject, talking with several established and rising talents and industry insiders about their journeys. The story included the following passage, featuring quotes from Keonté Beals about Music Nova Scotia’s efforts to give artists of colour their due at Nova Scotia Music Week.

“They put a lot of effort into diversifying our lineup and making sure that there is a place for everyone,” says Meghan Scott, newly elected president of the MNS board.

“I think we had at least a half dozen new Canadians.”

She’s referring to Music Nova Scotia executive director Allegra Swanson and other staff. “It was extremely important to us ... to present a diverse lineup, and I’m really proud of that,” adds Scott.

Beals is encouraged by the change, at least for now. “Diversity is in,” he says. “So, I just hope that it’s something that continues to move in that direction.”

Beals encourages younger artists to grab the chances suddenly coming within reach. “So many opportunities for funding now are directly targeting African Nova Scotians,” he says. “That’s something to take advantage of. It’s not something to let pass by.”

In the context of the larger story, it’s clear that he’s talking about awareness, not trendiness — a gradual righting of the systemic racism that saw non-white artists often denied funding, venues, and opportunities.

But when we needed a pithy quote to caption a photo, we edited that down to “Diversity is in ... So many opportunities for funding now are directly targeting African Nova Scotians.”

For many readers, that edited quote, prominently displayed without the surrounding explanation, seemed to mean something very different from what Keonté had really said. Some read it as a statement that diversity is trendy, so get in there and make your money.

This misinterpretation is harmful to both Keonté and the Black community and we should have anticipated it. To avoid further misunderstanding, we’ve removed that caption from the digital edition, and we apologize both to readers and to Keonté for not being more attentive to the context of his words. We’re also reexamining how we choose and edit our photo captions, to avoid similar situations in the future.

Read the complete story (unravelhalifax.ca/music-city) to hear Keonté and his peers in the music scene tell their stories, and learn about the opportunities that are finally opening up and the challenges that remain.

Unravel HIGHLIGHTS

Unravel NEWS

Unravel ONLINE

Growing up — new developments are on track to add hundreds of new residential spaces in downtown Halifax. Learn more on page 17.

If all goes as planned, cruise ships will return to Halifax this spring.

What does that mean for our city and the businesses that depend on them? See page 42.

Visit unravelhalifax.ca every weekday for our Roundup — an opinionated selection of highlights from Advocate Media newspapers around the province.

MARCH / APRIL 2022

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VOL 2/ ISSUE 2 • DATE OF ISSUE: MARCH 2022 PUBLISHER Fred Fiander • fredfiander@unravelhalifax.ca

and receive 6 issues

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Crystal Murray • crystalmurray@unravelhalifax.ca 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 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 ART DIRECTOR Mike Cugno • mike@acgstudio.com PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Nicole McNeil • nicolemcneil@unravelhalifax.ca PRODUCTION AND DESIGN ASSISTANT Kathleen Hoang • kathleenhoang@unravelhalifax.ca DESIGNERS Roxanna Boers • roxannaboers@unravelhalifax.ca Rachel Lloyd • rachellloyd@unravelhalifax.ca Andrezza Nascimento • andrezzanascimento@unravelhalifax.ca Unravel is published six times annually by: Metro Guide Publishing, a division of Advocate Printing & Publishing Company Ltd. 2882 Gottingen St., Halifax, N.S. B3K 3E2 Tel: (902) 464-7258, Sales Toll Free: 1-877-311-5877 Contents copyright: No portion of this publication may be reprinted without the consent of the publisher.

Unravel can assume no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, or other materials and cannot return same unless accompanied by SASE. Publisher cannot warranty claims made in advertisements.

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THE VOICES

ALEX MACASKILL is an illustrator, graphic designer, and printer in Halifax, operating a small studio called Midnight Oil Print & Design House. He loves drawing and bringing joy to his projects.

KEAH HANSEN is a freelance writer who has published articles in Unravel Halifax, Maisonneuve Magazine, This Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. She is from Halifax, and currently a doctoral candidate at York University.

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.

JANET WHITMAN is a city- and 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.

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.

LEM LIAN is a multi-award-winning conceptual artist, originally from China. Now Canada-based, she’s an illustrator, art instructor, and collage maker. Her narrative art is discovering esoteric aesthetic from black and white.

PHILIP MOSCOVITCH is a frequent contributor to Saltscapes and East Coast Living, and the author of Adventures in Bubbles and Brine — a book about Nova Scotian fermentation stories and traditions. The closest he’s ever come to being on a cruise is taking overnight ferries.

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.

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.

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.

MARCH / APRIL 2022

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THE LIST

6

Exhibitions, concerts, and sports — can’t-miss events

4

Van Gogh

Timothy Norris

Top

BEYOND VAN GOGH: MAY 8 TO JUNE 12, EXHIBITION PARK VAN GOGH 360 : MAY 27 TO JULY 15, HALIFAX FORUM

Step inside the masterpieces of Dutch Post-Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh at these immersive exhibitions. From different organizers, each exhibition marries some 300 projections with complementary music. Sprawling over their outsized venues, the shows are designed for pandemic-safe viewing.

Advance tickets available. vangoghhalifax.com, vangogh360.ca

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Starr Skates CONTINUING, LOCK 4 @ STARR (124 OCHTERLONEY ST., DARTMOUTH)

With its then-revolutionary skate design, Starr Manufacturing Company was once a world leader, and helped launch Canada’s ice-sport passion. Today, the Lock 4 @ Starr condo development sits on its former site, and in the lobby, you’ll find an informative exhibition by David Carter, an exhibit design and hockey research specialist.

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Halifax Mooseheads MARCH 30, SCOTIABANK CENTRE

The journey to the big leagues is never easy, and COVID has made it a heck of a lot harder for the stars of tomorrow, with two solid years of postponements, cancellations, and games in near-empty rinks. But hockey goes on, and this date with toptier Saint John is sure to offer the Mooseheads another tough test. halifaxmooseheads.ca

John Cleese APRIL 28 TO 29, DALHOUSIE ARTS CENTRE

With An Evening of Exceptional Silliness, 82-year-old British comic John Cleese (AKA “the world’s funniest man”) offers fans the comedic equivalent of a warm bath: you know exactly what you’re going to get, and you’re going to enjoy it — a romp through 50 years of hilarity. dal.ca/dept/arts-centre.html

Judas Priest APRIL 7, SCOTIABANK CENTRE

Pity the heavy-metal purist who has endured umpteen COVID postponements of their date with the legendary Judas Priest.

The latest date features opening act Queensryche — a hardcore double bill that’s sure to blow every ear drum in range. ticketatlantic.com

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MARCH / APRIL 2022

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Halifax Thunderbirds APRIL 1, SCOTIABANK CENTRE

It’s the final regular season home date for the Thunderbirds, as they host the Rochester Knighthawks in National Lacrosse League action. After this game, they finish the season on the road; playoffs begin in early May. halifaxthunderbirds.com

Bruce Murray/VisionFire

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THE BACKSTORY Hammonds Plains Moss Backs

The Maritimers who transformed hockey Long overdue recognition for the sport’s Black pioneers

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The players of the Colored Hockey League introduced innovations that reshaped the sport.

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hey changed the way goalies defend the net. They invented what is now known as the slapshot.

They transformed hockey.

But for years, the Colored Hockey League and its stars went unheralded.

“We didn’t know until later on,” says Wayne Adams.

“All we knew is there were pictures of guys in long johns with hockey sticks.”

The former cabinet minister’s grandfather, Augustus Adams, was part of the league, which showcased Black Maritimers. Other players, like goalie Henry Franklin, was the first to drop to his knees to stop incoming pucks, while Eddie Martin used a technique similar to the slapshot, as did other CHL players.

“It’s certainly a part of building Canada, in terms of the sport that everybody reveres so highly,” says Adams. “We were doing things in the 1800s that the NHL is being credited for in the 1900s.”

Founded in 1895, the CHL aimed to encourage young Black men to attend church. If the men attended the service, they were promised a hockey game against players from another church. The league lasted until 1930, with a break from 1914 to 1919 due to the First World War.

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Adams only found out about the league in the early 2000s, as did many of the players’ descendants. This was due to research done by historians and brothers George and Darril Fosty for their book, Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, 1895 to 1925. The Fostys found a small mention of the league in a newspaper clipping, triggering a decade of research.

“We found it through the most mundane little sources, little artifacts, little pictures,” says George Fosty. “It was a hidden history ... It was a lost history that was in front of us, in plain view, but no one was recognizing or acknowledging it.”

The league thrived for a time. One championship game drew 1,200 fans, and a regular season game 500.

In contrast, the all-white leagues tallied about 300 to 400 fans per game in Halifax.

The CHL existed in a perpetual fight against racism and segregation. Black teams were only allowed to use arenas after white leagues were done, which caused them to have a rushed season, from January to March. They sometimes played at night and often used lakes when arenas were unavailable. In the early 1900s, Africville community members faced the seizure of

1895 The CHL is founded. Its goal is to improve male attendance in church with the added bonus of playing games against other churches. The founders were: Pastor James Borden, James A.R. Kinney, James Robinson Johnston, and Henry Sylvester Williams.

Africville Sea-Sides Africville Brown Bombers

James Carvey (who played centre, forward, and goal) was said to be the fastest player in the league.

Dartmouth Victorias

The Bombers, which formed after the First World War, took their name from an older slang term that means “the successes.”

Dartmouth Jubilees

1901 The championship is split between the Africville Sea-Sides and the West End Rangers, with both teams claiming they won the title.

Halifax Hawks

The Moss Backs name has a connection to the Underground Railroad.

Moss Back is in reference to the moss that grows on dead trees. The moss would act as a marker and would help former slaves stay on route as they travelled.

The Victorias name is not in homage to Queen Victoria, but is a literal reference to being victorious.

Halifax Diamonds

Halifax All-Stars Halifax Eurekas

According to records, Jubliees’ player Thomas Tynes Jr., was among the league’s oldest players, born on June 21, 1856. Tynes is thought to have only missed one game during his career.

Halifax Stanleys

1896 – 1900 The Halifax Eurekas are league champions.

The best players from the Eurekas and Diamonds comprised this All-Star team.

1900 Henry Franklyn pioneers his goalie technique, leaving his feet to make saves.

The Stanleys were the inaugural league champions in 1895.

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their land to make way for a railroad.

When residents opposed the appropriation, arena owners wouldn’t let teams use their ice and newspapers stopped covering games.

Today, the league is finally getting its due. In 2015, it was featured in Soul on Ice: Past Present & Future, a documentary about Black hockey players. In 2020, Canada Post released a commemorative stamp. In 2021, another documentary on the league was announced, with rapper Drake and NBA star LeBron James producing.

For Adams, this recognition is just a start. “(We should) remember them as vividly as possible,” he says, adding that the hockey establishment has only recently started acknowledging the CHL’s contributions. “The NHL has a role to play in terms of sharing the truths they didn’t even know about … They should do more work and share the truth of the story behind hockey.”

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The Diamonds were also Provincial Baseball Coloured Champions in 1921.

In Joan M. Payzant’s book Halifax: Cornerstone of Canada, this team is referenced as having played in the 1930s.

They would have played against teams like the West End Rangers out of Charlottetown (which had been part of the league early) on and the Africville Brown Bombers.

Local white teams drew an average of 300 to 400 spectators, while a game between the Eurekas and the Africville Sea-Sides could attract over 500.

LEARN MORE For a complete timeline of CHL achievements , visit unravelhalifax.ca.

MARCH / APRIL 2022

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THE PERSPECTIVE

Culture shock New home, new language, new values, new job, new everything — an immigrant shares her story of an abrupt transition to life in Halifax

BY MARIANNE SIMON ILLUSTRATION BY LEM LIAN

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hen new immigrants reach Canada, it’s easy to think their journeys are complete. But they’re not, really. Newcomers are caught between different lifestyles, entirely different values.

During the initial weeks and months, some feel completely lost and terribly confused.

“My first five months in Canada was a nightmare,” recalls Sadaf Hakimi (name changed). “I came from Afghanistan, a country teeming with millions of people and open markets where I could shop for anything I wanted. Coming to Halifax was a big shock to me. The place was very small, and there were so few people.

I stayed at home all alone with nothing to do and no one to talk to while my husband was away at work. Life was stagnant and uneventful. It was the unhappiest time of my life in Canada.”

Sadaf came to Canada after a marriage that her father, a businessman, arranged. “On one of his trips to Canada, he befriended my husband’s family,” she says.

“The friendship grew, and it led to my marrying into the family. Before marriage I had many long conversations with my husband over the phone, mostly about education and availability of jobs in Canada. Even though my husband had a well-established small business and there was no pressure on me to earn a living, I was determined to become independent and financially self-sufficient.”

But independence didn’t come easily.

“Shopping was a real torture,” she says. “I had no use for most of the stuff supermarkets displayed on their shelves. Finding the type of food and the ingredients I needed was difficult. My husband and his family helped me out to a great extent.”

While the language is often a big barrier for newcomers, Sadaf cleared that hurdle easily, having studied English in school and college. She was fluent within four months of arriving. Next, came the career hunt.

“I realized a bachelor degree in a science subject alone will not help me find a proper job,” she says. “So, I opted for a course that will make me job ready. When I complete the present course, I will enrol myself for a

two-year university course which will qualify me for a higher position.”

In the meantime, she’s found an entry level job, working weekends and studying during the week. “This has made my life here meaningful,” she adds.

So far, she hasn’t encountered any racism or xenophobia in the workplace. “I suppose I was lucky, and everything worked out well for me,” she says.

But the North American customer service culture is an adjustment. “They shout at me and blame me for things beyond my control,” she says. “It upsets me, but I ignore it and go about my work.”

She often encounters polite curiosity about her hijab (head covering), and is happy to explain it.

“I find Canadians friendly,” she says. “Their lifestyle used to bother me. Now I don’t worry about it.

It is their culture, and I am OK with it. Now that I am busy all day and can interact with people, I am happier.

Working towards a bright future gives me hope and a sense of purpose. And I do not plan to leave Halifax anytime soon.”

MARCH / APRIL 2022

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THE CONVERSATION

Talking with architect Chris Crawford How diverse design tells our city’s story

BY AMEETA VOHRA PHOTOS BY BRUCE MURRAY/VISIONFIRE

B

orn and raised in Halifax, architect Chris Crawford soon learned an old-fashioned East Coast value: if you need something, build it yourself.

While at Dalhousie University, Crawford took classes that gave him a clearer understanding of how his projects could affect people’s lives for the better.

When he worked towards his environmental design studies and architecture degrees, Crawford learned how design work can bring a deeper meaning to communities. He’s now at the helm of some big projects shaping the city, working through Dartmouth’s Fathom Studio.

In the following interview, Crawford shares his unique perspectives on the shift Halifax is undergoing in architecture and design, how diversity plays a crucial role in storytelling, the challenges designers face in the city, and what the future holds.

On the Press Block (a new development between Grand Parade and Province House): “We’re doing concept design, so our office did a fair amount of historical research to the site. There are two heritage buildings ... quite a rich history of buildings that were built, rebuilt, and lost on the site. The Dennis Building itself was rebuilt and added on to ... This site has always been a big missing tooth in the street of Barrington Street.

It’s always been on the architectural community’s mind.

In that process, we were really paying homage to not only the buildings that are there, making sure that the character-defining elements and heritage pieces already that were remaining were celebrated, but also making sure that the new pieces spoke to the past of the site.”

The historical connection to journalism: “It really was the site of the founding of journalism in Halifax, so there were quite a few newspapers that were born and published on that site. That drove us into the branding, pushing this name forward as the Press Block ... Now, we’re working with the (construction) team on even the interior design wayfinding and we’re actually doing some interpretive planning. So, we’re actually going to be telling that story in the street. We’re tackling almost all the design disciplines to really reinforce that story.”

Storytelling through architecture: “This is a new building and a new architecture, but it didn’t completely ignore what was there before. That ties into why people love heritage buildings. They love them not because they’re old; they love them because they’re articulated and they have a human scale … that’s certainly further

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Chris Crawford and his colleagues are reshaping Halifax, to tell a broader story.

enriched when, for example, there’s a terraced planter that steps down George Street. That’s helping transition, that grade change, but we’re using that to have a timeline of the history of the site. That’s where it’s going beyond the building: we’re using the building to tell that interpretive story.”

Diversity adding value to architecture and design: “Our office does a lot of cultural work and is proud and honoured to represent a much more diverse community ... We strive to make sure that our office itself is a diverse group of designers from all over the world and from different backgrounds ... The biggest piece is our clients.

It’s understanding that we’re in service to the client.

When we’re working with someone like the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre, we’re doing it, building, for them ... It’s really important that there’s a deeper understanding and ability to listen and represent your clients and help them get their voice out there. That ties into a lot that we are as interpretive planners. We are storytellers, so we’re used to listening and translating people’s visions to the built environment.”

The vision and concept of the new Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre: “It was a very enlightening experience, as a designer, to get to go through that level of engagement with the Mi’kmaw community to develop that project ... It’s a great example of making sure that we spend the time to listen. It was one of the best design experiences I’ve had and the Mi’kmaw people were very generous in sharing their culture with us to make sure the space represented them. Outside of that and functionally, it’s something that is really needed in the city — a place where Mi’kmaw culture is celebrated and present in the downtown ... The Friendship Centre plays such a huge role in that community, but also in

902-499-1323 Jarrett@reddoorrealty.ca reddoorrealty.ca

Architect Chris Crawford’s philosophy is to use all the design disciplines to tell a site’s story and honour its past.

the greater Halifax community right now in their current space. It’ll be really amazing to see what they can do with a new building.”

Design shift: “Everybody wants to have a little bit more connection to place. In the distant past, there was an international style of architecture and modernism. We’re moving into a place right now, where there’s a bit of a counterpoint to that, in that people want to have that connection to the city and place they’re in ... That’s been a big shift in the design industry.”

Changing population and demographics: “There’s an exciting thing happening in the city; we’re having immigration from all over the world. Cultural diversity and richness is going to continue to increase in the city and that makes the city a much more vibrant and more meaningful place to live. The architectural and design world — whether that’s landscape architecture, or branding, or whatever that is — seeing that represent the diversity that Canada continues to grow

into, is just going to make the city that much more interesting, exciting, and more accepting to people from different places. That’s a huge opportunity.”

Challenges: “My struggle is usually patience. I want to see the city change quickly, and I want to see it embrace these communities faster. I would like to see the pace of change be a bit quicker so the new Friendship Centre would already be open. These kind of projects that we really want to see to make our city a better place — sometimes, I’d like to see them happen faster.”

Five years from now: “It will be a place that celebrates a much more diverse culture and group of people and supports that. I really hope that that’s the case. We’re in a unique opportunity ... a lot of people are moving here — we’re seeing pretty rapid growth. We need to make sure that everybody is a part of that discussion and that we make a city that everybody is proud and happy to live in, and that design is a major priority.”

MARCH / APRIL 2022

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THE HOUSING MARKET Unravel rounds up some of Halifax’s largest apartment buildings under construction

Growing up

620

Richmond Yards

Halifax’s apartment-building boom is in full swing

By Danny Chedrawe’s Westwood Developments 6070 Almon St.

residential units

1.6 hectares

BY JANET WHITMAN

On the corner of Almon and Robie, where the old Acadian Bus terminal and Velos Pizza once stood.

D

anny Chedrawe’s sprawling Richmond Yards on the corner of Almon and Robie streets in the North End is among the city’s largest housing developments yet, with plans for 620 apartments in its five towers, creating homes for as many as 1,000 people.

At 30 storeys and more than 100 metres, its main tower is a close rival to the South End’s former Fenwick Towers as the tallest building in the Maritimes. The old skyscraper, converted from Dalhousie University student housing into luxury apartments and rebranded as the Vuze, has held the claim to fame since its construction in 1971, with a height of 98 metres and 33 storeys. The recent reno by new owners, the Metlege family’s Templeton Properties, included the expansion of its two top floors and the building now stretches 107 metres.

Other sizable high rises are under construction around the city.

“The rules around these types of developments are being updated and modernised, which should lead to more projects in the near term, especially given the demand for housing in our growing city,” says Neil Lovitt, a real-estate expert with consultancy Turner Drake & Partners Ltd. “Though the development that has happened in recent years has used up a lot of the potential sites that can accommodate large projects, there are still many important opportunities.”

30, 13, 12, 10, and 8 storeys

A mixed-use development

with commercial space and underground parking.

Originally called Midtown North, the development’s rebrand plays homage to the historic industrial neighbourhood of Richmond that was destroyed by the Halifax Explosion.

324

residential units

76

affordable units 12 storeys

The Interchange

By the Halef family’s Banc Group of Companies 3514 Joseph Howe Dr. On the site of a former strip mall.

Backed by a federal $115.5-million, low-cost loan.

Affordable units will have rents below 30 per cent of the neighbourhood’s median household income.

A mixed-use space that includes room for retail.

Trinity

By Joe Metlege and Norman Nahas’s Jono Developments 5415 Cogswell St. On the corner of Brunswick and Cogswell, just below the Staples on Gottingen Street on the former Trinity Anglican Church property.

250

residential units 20 storeys

Multi-use development

Includes a Moxy hotel, a brand billed by owner Marriott as stylish and playful.

Dartmouth

Cunard

By Jim Spatz’s Southwest Properties 1325 Lower Water St.

The Elevation The Interchange

Richmond Yards Trinity Oxford North

Halifax Commons

Press Block

Halifax Citadel

George’s Island

The Mills Halifax Public Gardens

No

rth

Cunard

The Vuze

we

st

Multi-use development

Above-ground interior parking, street-level and harbourside retail and restaurants, and large public spaces along Halifax’s waterfront.

Name pays homage to Halifax-born shipping magnate Samuel Cunard.

235

luxury apartments 16 storeys

Ar

m

See unravelhalifax.ca for more development news.

Point Pleasant Park

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Provide critical food today and support our efforts to find long-term solutions tomorrow.

Food insecurity is a crisis in every season. Sign up to donate monthly and provide reliable support that lets us plan ahead. Not only does it help ensure people have access to food, it also fuels our efforts to advocate for sustainable solutions.

Learn more at feednovascotia.ca/donate/give12

THE VIEW

The View: 2454 Agricola St. Reflections on how redevelopment is changing the character of our city

BY FÉLIX BERNIER

Title: 2454 Agricola St Date: 2020 Medium: Latex, wood.

Using photography, installation, sculpture, and digital technologies, interdisciplinary artist Félix Bernier presents the complex interrelations of the physical and the digital as sources of interrogation.

He completed his master of fine arts at NSCAD University in 2021.

From the artist: “2454 Agricola St. was a response to the boom of urban development in Halifax. It involved re-creating the entrance door of Obsolete Records in its old location, using latex and wood.

This project is a meditation on how gentrification pushes lower income families, small businesses, and local communities further away to the outskirts of Halifax.”

The photo above is a still from a film the artist made documenting the project. vimeo.com/506626779

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THE SOUND

The Food Professor Learn the truth about your food and where it comes from

BY TREVOR J. ADAMS

T

Into that fray wades Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University. On The Food Professor podcast, he joins Michael LeBlanc (from The Voice of Retail podcast) to discuss the hot issues in the food, grocery, and restaurant industries. The Feb. 3 episode on “Rating the Health of the Food Supply Chain” is particularly timely, explaining why some people are seeing empty shelves at the supermarket.

the-food-professor.simplecast.com

Bigstock/Aamulya

hroughout the pandemic, fears of grocery shortages have simmered. First there was the Great Toilet Paper Scramble, then — at various times — runs on molasses, yeast, flour, peanut butter, bacon, Nutella, and countless other things. Check your cousin’s Facebook page for the latest.

Add to that the ongoing concerns about everinflating food prices, and there’s a lot of concern and uncertainty around our supply chains, and the security of the staples we take for granted.

F UR N I SH I NG S DESIGN HAS A NEW HOME

3065 ROBIE STREET

HALIFAX

NS

B3K 4P6

902 423 2557

INFO@ATTICA.CA

ATTICA.CA

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No stranger to a strange land Noreen Mabiza believes that social justice and environmental sustainability are one and the same, and she won’t rest until she proves it

BY ALEC BRUCE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROB HANSEN PHOTOS BY BRUCE MURRAY/VISIONFIRE n her first day in a new country, one hemisphere and six time zones from home, Noreen Mabiza knew she had to be somewhere. It was a typical late-August Halifax day, with the sea-salt smell blowing ashore from the outer harbour and old-man summer sun spreading rumours of approaching autumn, and the Dalhousie university-bound newcomer was late for orientation.

But, at that moment, she didn’t care.

“I was just taken in by the views and everything, so I told myself it’s OK,” she says of that afternoon in 2014, when she decided to get lost along the waterfront.

“I thought it was beautiful. I had no map, no working phone. I just kept walking.”

In a sense, Mabiza’s been walking into local terra incognita ever since.

She was born and raised in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, with its embassies and World Bank towers and 1.5 million residents. But since graduating from Dal in 2018 (with a degree in international development and environment, sustainability, and society), she’s become an advocate of housing reform for low-income folks and energy coordinator for sustainable communities at the Ecology Action Centre in her adopted city.

Now, the fiercely effective, increasingly influential social justice champion is about to embark on a whole new journey through territory both foreign and familiar as the project lead for the EAC’s freshly minted Green Jobs For All program.

“It’s about having conversations with immigrants and newcomer youth and identifying the barriers that they face in entering the green economy,” she says. “I’m really excited to dive into this as the coordinator and also work in partnership with other organizations.”

According to her colleagues, few are better suited for the job. The program had been sitting on a shelf for years until Mabiza ran away with it last year.

“She talked to different people and partners and really formulated an approach,” says Marla MacLeod, the centre’s programs director. “It was like following a trail or connecting the dots, kind of like being a detective, to get the right questions to address. How can immigrant

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and newcomer youths participate in the world of green jobs? How can we ensure that this group, that we really want to succeed, get to be part of this transition that’s happening in the world?”

MacLeod adds: “Noreen is deeply curious. And to my mind, that’s an exciting quality. She’s a person who finds something interesting, explores it and then brings it about.” Mabiza’s EAC colleague Gurprasad Gurumurthy concurs: “She always brings new ideas to the work.

After every single meeting, she goes away and comes back with new perspectives.”

A different way of looking at what could have been an intractable problem propelled her here from central Africa in the first place. She had just finished high school and, as the daughter of an engineer-father and lawyer-mother, she was surveying the international landscape for a suitable institute of higher education to continue her studies. Friends suggested Canada. It was a good country, they said, with an excellent reputation for academic achievement.

She recalls her reaction with a laugh: “No way. You won’t find me anywhere in Canada. It’s way too cold.”

She changed her mind after reviewing the course description for Dal’s environment program. The writeup promised, among other things, an “exploration of the links between complex environmental issues and poverty, globalization, consumption and urbanization.”

Studying here, it purred, would give her skills to become “a leader and changemaker” in her chosen career. How could she resist? “I was 100-per-cent determined to go right then and there,” she says.

But it wasn’t just the promise of building her changemaker muscles that intrigued her.

She was genuinely interested in how people can live well, equitably, and sustainably. She was also aware that she was a child of privilege.

“Growing up, I went to boarding school, and I got to do two international trips through school without my parents,” she says. “But really, as part of the regular curriculum (in Zimbabwe), we would go out into nature and see animals and talk to the wildlife rangers. I think it’s really only been within the past couple of years that

I’ve fully realized the big influence those trips had on me. The land, the environment, environmental policy — there’s a relationship there.”

Dal’s program fit her aspirations perfectly and as time passed, she became familiar with the campus and the city, the main streets and side alleys. “I got a map,” she cracks. “My residence was on Morris and South Park streets. So, I had a view of the water from my room. Coming from Harare, it was pretty. It wasn’t big-city rush. It was slow enough that I could find my pace and do what I needed to do. And everyone was really great.”

She threw herself into the university community like a long-lost friend, becoming a residence assistant who needed to be “self-motivated, capable of functioning independently and as part of a team, empathetic and fair, and an excellent communicator,” according to the job description. Her college friends remember how thoroughly she ticked all the boxes.

“What drew me to Noreen is a kind of a calmness, which is an odd trait as I don’t see it in a lot of people,” says Margaret MacDonald, a roommate in 2014 and still a close friend, now working for the Workers’ Compensation Board of Nova Scotia. “But she’s just such a relaxed person that I instantly was like, ‘I could be friends with this person.’ The feeling was like, ‘Oh, we’ve been friends for a long time even though we’ve just met.’”

Ramin Nauman, who met Mabiza in 2015 and who is now an engineer in Halifax, says her friend’s

generosity frequently blew her away. Originally from Pakistan, Nauman missed her family especially around the Muslim holiday Eid. “I was here by myself without my family for the first time and we just we went out to dinner together even though it wasn’t her holiday,” she says. “It’s just been a recurring thing. We’ll check in with each other. We’ll do our holidays together.”

For Falayha Khawaja, a graphic designer in Calgary who got to know Mabiza in 2017, it was her discipline that somehow both impressed and charmed.

“I remember many times when she would come into my room just to practice her speeches and pitch her ideas to me,” she says. “I was always in awe of that. Even with all her work at the Ecology Action Centre, she would practise her

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speeches with me for her webinars there. She definitely knows what she wants. She works hard. And she advocates for what she believes. And she dedicates the time, and gets it done. She’s so passionate about what she does. I believe that if you’re passionate in your work, you don’t work a day in your life.”

If that’s true, then Mabiza definitely isn’t working.

Her passion for fairness, equity and justice sometimes consumes her, she may admit, especially since moving to Halifax.

“We all know that everything is connected, everything is interrelated, and as we call for climate justice, we can’t separate that from social justice,” she says. “You know, I came here as someone who grew up in a community where most people looked like me. I didn’t really have to think about some of the things I was forced to

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think about suddenly being in Halifax, being a Black immigrant. I think those things just became so much more apparent to me.”

And increasingly more irksome. After graduating, she took a job as a social justice coordinator for the Nova Scotia branch of the national Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). There, among other initiatives, she helped launch a mock food drive in 2018 to “support” the Bragg family, owners of Eastlink — a business that claims it’s too small to provide inexpensive internet to low-income Nova Scotians.

According to her press release for the organization, “ACORN’s Internet for All campaign was launched in 2013, pushing telecom companies to lower the cost of internet for low-income families to $10 to help bridge the Digital Divide.”

A year later, she was at it again, literally pounding the pavement in Spryfield in a tenant action to protest landlord MetCap Living’s housing conditions.

“ACORN Nova Scotia continues an ongoing campaign to get landlords to provide healthy and suitable living for low-income Nova Scotians,” her statement to the press said. “MetCap Living has become notorious for low-quality housing and poor management. Many buildings are infested with bedbugs and in dire need of repairs.”

She loved the work, but wanted to find a way to combine the social justice component with her first love, environmental sustainability. “I didn’t want to spend too long being employed without using my environmental experience,” she says. “So, I would always look for new roles.”

When the job came up at EAC, she jumped at it.

Marla MacLeod is glad she did. “Noreen is just so fantastic to work with,” she says. “She brings so many diverse and interesting fields to the work. I’ve gotten to see her both in space of curiosity and in developing a project. And I’ve also gotten to spend time with her in the advocacy world. She and I were the ones who got to go present to the Law Amendments Committee about the Nova Scotia government’s Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act last fall.”

In a press release after the presentation, EAC gave the government its qualified support, noting several positive aspects of the legislation, including: a promise to phase out coal by 2030, an electric vehicle mandate, a commitment to protecting 20 per cent of the province’s land and water by 2030, and a focus on equity as a core principle.

But promises are cheap. Mabiza has her eye on accountability and follow-through.

“We need to ensure we’re not undermining our own progress by continuing with outdated industries, fossil fuel extraction, and unproven carbon capture technologies,” she says. “Missteps here will continue to increase our emis-

sions and threaten our ecosystems. We’ll be watching for meaningful action and specifics on issues like offshore oil and gas, biomass burning, and open net-pen aquaculture ... Consultations on the Sustainable Development Goals Act have shown us that Nova Scotians are ready to get to work on a rapid transition.”

Firebrand, advocate, champion. Sure. But consensus builder? Sound-bite maker? That may be in the cards for Mabiza as she pilots Green Jobs For All and, in the process, assumes a bigger role for herself in Nova Scotia’s slowly evolving social, economic, and environmental landscape.

“A year from now, if I were having this conversation with you, I would be hoping that I’d grown a network of folks who are concerned about these issues and are coming together to talk about them,” she says. “I’d be hoping that the immigrants, themselves, are in the conversation. In the long run, my hopes are that we all identify where the push needs to be. Where are the places that change needs to occur?”

In other words, she’s taking another long walk through Halifax, even perhaps along its brisk, sometimes achingly beautiful, waterfront. She’s no longer a stranger in a strange land and she’ll keep walking, just as she did on that first outing six years ago. Who knows where she’ll end up? But lost? No, not this time.

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In the trenches

BY LOREM IPSOM

DEVELOPERS, BUYERS, ADVOCATES, AND REALTORS — MEET THE PEOPLE ON THE FRONT LINES OF NOVA SCOTIA’S FRENZIED REAL ESTATE MARKET

BY JANET WHITMAN

A

nthony Winston III, his wife, and their two young daughters swooped into Halifax from Southern California for a few days of house-hunting in early January.

It was their first time in Canada, let alone Nova Scotia, and their real-estate agent took them on a tour of their preferred neighbourhoods for a more laidback lifestyle and some acreage close to nature.

With listings scarce, there wasn’t a single suburban property on the market that met their needs in Kingswood North in Hammonds Plains, Fall River’s Schwartzwald, Westwood Hills, or Bedford’s Ridgevale subdivision. But they found something further afield, near the airport in Oakfield, that was within their $700,000 budget.

“We got lucky,” says Winston, who’s opened a subsidiary of his engineering consulting business here to ease his family’s immigration path. “Most people aren’t looking for homes during the holiday break. They got our offer and accepted it.”

The Winstons are part of an unexpected influx of newcomers who have been helping make the Halifax housing market feel more like Toronto or Vancouver over the past two years.

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Photo by:

Looking for a home “more liberal and more accepting” than the United States, the Winstons came to Halifax in January to build a new life

Demand from new immigrants, people moving here from other provinces, Haligonians choosing to stay home, along with Airbnb and other investment purchases, are showing no signs of letting up.

In a market that remains short on supply, prices are poised to keep rising, putting a house or condo further out of the reach of many first-time homebuyers. Renovictions are continuing with landlords offering cash for tenants to move out so they can bring in new ones and raise rents. The city and province can’t move fast enough to grapple with the growing number of unhoused and precariously housed people. Developers are scrambling too.

NO SILVER BULLETS One big reason for the housing shortage: no one anticipated the population boom.

Kelly Denty, who heads up planning and development for Halifax Regional Municipality, remembers working on the amalgamated municipality’s first regional development plan as a staffer in 2006, when one-per-cent population growth targets were considered “pretty ambitious.”

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“We want ... a legacy building, something that will be there for a couple hundred of years” — Mickey MacDonald But for the past six years, the population’s been increasing at two per cent annually, a gain last year that was the equivalent of adding a nearly 10,000-person town.

“Looking backwards now, what really changed was the federal immigration policy in 2016,” Denty says. “And there’s of course the COVID factor. (We became) this hot growth spot in the past two years. ‘If you could work here, why wouldn’t you?’ ” With immigration and migration from other provinces expected to continue, Denty and her team are reviewing the regional plan to look for new tracts for development and possibilities to add more housing in sites already developed.

The 34-year municipal land development veteran also has a seat at the table with the new housing taskforce set up

by Premier Tim Houston to cut red tape and speed up development decisions.

She says the taskforce meetings are focused on ways to streamline efforts, not override the municipality, though that’s within the panel’s powers.

Denty, who took over as chief planner in 2017 from her ousted predecessor Bob Bjerke, says her job is never a black and white exercise. “Everyone wants the silver bullet and there is no silver bullet,” she says “That’s the difficult part to try to explain to folks. Every piece of land is different. The context is different.

You try to be sensitive to that and fair and provide something predictable to the community and the developer and council.”

The toughest part is balancing expectations. “We tend to say if everyone’s a little bit uncomfortable, you’ve probably gotten it right,” she says. “If one group’s really happy, you’ve really messed up something.”

THE LONG GAME

Bruce Mur

ray/VisionF

ire

Mickey MacDonald has been sitting on a prime downtown development opportunity since 2007. That’s the year the serial entrepreneur bought high-end department store Mills Brothers on Spring Garden Road and the Chickenburger fast-food restaurant around the corner on Queen Street.

He tore down the Chickenburger building in 2012 with plans to demolish Mills and partner with Halifax-headquartered apartment behemoth Killam to build on the sprawling site that borders on Birmingham Street.

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AN INFLUX OF NEWCOMERS IS FUELLING HIGH HOUSING DEMAND IN HALIFAX MacDonald tells Unravel Halifax the timing was right, with housing demand set to surge as the federal government awarded J.D. Irving’s Halifax shipyard a multimilliondollar contract to build naval ships. But the development deal fell through.

MacDonald says he needed more time to buy neighbouring properties. “Rather than building out a half or three quarters of the block, it was more economical to do the whole thing,” he says.

He’s since bought the last pieces, including the former home of popular haberdashery Duggers Menswear, and found a new partner: seasoned developer Danny Chedrawe, who owned the now-demolished building on the Queen and Spring Garden corner of the block. “Danny has the knowledge and the connections,” says MacDonald, who’s worked on smaller real-estate developments in Bedford. “We’re riding on his coattails.”

The $100-million-plus, mixed-use eight-storey complex, dubbed The Mills, will have 190 rental apartments, a parkade, commercial space, and pedestrian promenade.

“I ended up playing the long game to get the whole block and it worked out great,” says the high-school dropout, who made his first millions from a business he started by selling cellphones from a car lot in Bedford in the late 1980s. “It’s in the centre of the city. We want to build a legacy building, something that will be there for a couple of hundred years.”

TOO LITTLE, TOO SLOWLY While developments of all sorts are under construction in the city and its suburbs, the supply of housing isn’t coming fast enough to help many.

Michelle Malette, executive director of the communitybased Out of the Cold Association, is worried someone living outside this winter will freeze to death.

“In the last couple of years, things have gotten much more desperate,” she says. “Housing costs have gone up so much and there’s so much scarcity.”

In her previous job as a housing support worker with shelter and housing non-profit Adsum for Women and Children, Malette was able to help most people in need. In the last two years there, before her volunteer job at Out of the Cold turned fulltime, she was finding it increasingly difficult

to find spots in shelters or affordable housing for people.

Buildings with apartments that used to rent in Dartmouth North for $600, for example, have been bought and renovated and now go for more than $1,000, she says.

At the same time, successive federal and provincial governments have failed to build adequate affordable housing, she says.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation by reducing the number of beds shelters can offer.

The Nova Scotia Affordable Housing Association estimates Halifax has more than 475 homeless. “That’s the number of folks that we know of in shelters and couch-surfing,” says Malette. “But there are so many more. Some folks don’t always reach out and there’s much more stigma around using a shelter or being unhoused. I have no idea at this point how many people are living outside.”

Malette never imagined the homeless situation in Halifax would get bad enough to see her volunteering lead to a paid job at Out of the Cold, which formed in 2007 after the closure of low-barrier shelter Pendelton Place. The grassroots outfit got funding from the federal government’s Reaching Home program, which is aimed at reducing chronic homelessness.

In the middle of the pandemic, Mallette spearheaded an effort to transition Out of the Cold from a shelter with several beds in a community centre gym into a hotel, all while managing a growing staff and handling frontline work.

With a new $2.7-million contract from the province, Malette and her team have pivoted again. Out of the Cold will now provide support services for residents of the emergency modular units municipal council ordered to shelter dozens of homeless in Halifax and Dartmouth. The first occupants have moved into the downtown Dartmouth units near the waterfront on Alderney Drive, with space for 26. The modular units planned for the Centennial Pool parking lot in Halifax, with 38 spots, have been delayed. The municipality is spending nearly $4.9 million on the initiative, $1.2 million more than anticipated.

Malette says when she first started working at Adsum and volunteering with Out of the Cold 10 years ago, she had a charitable outlook. “My views on what people need in housing definitely have changed over the years,” she says.

“It’s about solidarity and making sure people have what

THE SUPPLY OF HOUSING ISN’T COMING FAST ENOUGH

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“None of us have ever seen anything like this in our careers, unless we were in Vancouver or Toronto” — Pam Cherington

they need. It’s all those things about redistributing wealth and how a small number of people have a large amount of the wealth, and we allow people to be unhoused and live outside. Those things are not OK.”

Bruce Murra y/VisionFire

HERE TO STAY?

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Realtor Pam Cherington believes Halifax was destined to one day be a hot spot for “come from aways,” but the pandemic has amped things up.

“None of us have ever seen anything like this in our careers, unless we were in Vancouver or Toronto,” says the owner of Red Door Realty. “When you’re living in a big city you kind of expect that stuff. But in Halifax, it’s overwhelming.”

Properties that in a more normal market would take a month or two to sell are snapped up in days, sometimes with a dozen offers or more. Homes that sat around for years have all been sold.

“The lack of supply is the result of all the people who want to live here,” says Cherington. “That’s the difference. Halifax’s small size didn’t work for us in the beginning and now it is working for us.”

Many of the new arrivals have more money to spend on housing, a big part of the surge in home prices over the past two years.

“It’s hard advice to say, ‘I really think you need to offer $220,000 over the list price,’” Cherington says. “Those are words that not everyone can hear. They’re like, ‘What?’”

It’s not only a tough time for buyers. Cherington says one of her agents came to her saying she felt bad after talking clients out of buying a house. “It was so much money and it had gone so over (the listed price),” she says. “Now they probably won’t be able to buy a house, because that’s how much the market’s gone up in four months.”

Making things that much trickier to navigate, as many as a quarter of real-estate agents have less than a year of experience, says Cherington. The Nova Scotia Real Estate Commission says new realtors accounted for 17 per cent of all licences in the province in 2021, up from 10 per cent in 2020.

“It’s very daunting for anybody who has any sort of a moral compass,” she says. “It’s your job to get your clients a house. You have to sit back and say, ‘I did what I could.’”

Cherington arrived in Halifax in 1984 from Calgary after spending her early 20s “chasing booms” across Canada.

While the current market might be the most challenging in her nearly 35-year real-estate career, Cherington is optimistic.

She isn’t sure the market is worth losing sleep over, as she did when the award of a $25-billion shipbuilding contract started a North End home-buying buying frenzy in 2012.

“People were spending $400,000 on prefabricated homes. I was worried they were losing their shirts,” she says. “Now they’re up double. All that worked out just fine. And this will work out just fine too.”

For buyers nowadays, it’s all about “where you set your bar,” she says. That might mean adjusting expectations and looking at less expensive properties so they can afford to bump up their offers.

The biggest issue for sellers is “if they’re going to buy, what are they going to buy?” she says.

What’s next is tough to predict.

“Is it here to stay? I guess it is. I don’t know,” says Cherington.

“I don’t think it can go down.”

WORKING OUT Halifax wasn’t Winston’s first choice after the police killing of African American George Floyd got him thinking about leaving the U.S. He and his wife applied for visas for New Zealand and considered Mexico. When those options didn’t pan out, they decided to try Canada. They were looking at Toronto when his wife, physical education teacher and cheer coach Erin Nicole Winston, stumbled upon Nova Scotia.

“It just fit the lifestyle we wanted. It’s a lot more green … and much more liberal and more accepting than the U.S.,” he says. “What really attracted us was learning about the history in terms of American slavery and reading about how a lot of the southern slaves escaped to Nova Scotia. As an African American, it really struck a chord with me.”

The couple and their daughters, five and seven, visited Africville during their house-hunting trip. “It felt really powerful being there,” he says.

The Chicago native says his consulting business, Winston Engineering, has always operated virtually so opening an outpost here was no stretch. He’s already licensed to practise as an electrical engineer in the province ahead of his family’s plan to relocate in June.

“Personally and professionally, things are working out pretty well,” he says.

“Personally and professionally, things are working out pretty well” — Anthony Winston III

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A soundtrack for the

journey Talking with Joel Plaskett about middle age, finding one's way home, and surviving the pandemic

BY KEAH HANSEN PHOTOS BY BRUCE MURRAY/ VISIONFIRE

A

n early spring day last year found me sitting outside the dentist’s office in my parents’ car. I had driven my sister to her appointment, which was running long. I fiddled with the radio and made occasional eye contact with a man drinking out of a paper bag sitting on a stoop close by.

Between the new sounds, came a familiar voice. It was Joel Plaskett, crooning what sounded like a ballad, about having gratitude for each other and the frontline workers during the pandemic, while the “world is slowing down.” I listened fixedly as this figure from my past sang plainly about my experiences of the past year. Then my sister came out, and we drove home.

It was an unexpected but familiar experience — being seen by Joel, while setting out on an uncertain path. I grew up in Dartmouth and came of age musically right about when he released his Three album. Coming of age musically in the late 2000s meant that I spent more time listening to Rihanna and the Black Eyed Peas than Joel but nonetheless, he was there, making small but frequent appearances on the radio during drives to school, and at free summer concerts.

Just like with “Barrett’s Privateers,” my friends and I would belt out the lyrics of “Love This Town” when we watched him live at Alderney Landing. Even though we did sort of love Halifax, we were also 17, antsy to get going to wherever life was going to take us.

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The lyrics to some of his other songs, like those in “Through and Through and Through” felt more fitting for these unanswered questions. “I’m the Berlin Wall / I’m a Communist / you’re a wrecking ball / in a summer’s dress” was mysterious. Lifted from some future which held knowing, raves, protests, and heartbreak in its distant palm.

In “Work Out Fine” Joel sings, “all my friends / where did they go? / To Montreal / to Toronto.” I also left the East Coast, moving to Montreal for university. When you move away, suddenly you’re branded by where you are from. Being from the Maritimes, it was easy to make friends with other people from the Maritimes. These new friends, old friends from Halifax, and I were suddenly one big Maritime clan.

One of the many things we had in common was our growing love for Joel Plaskett’s music. I think I saw one of his shows every

year of university. They were comforting in their familiarity. Joel would sing the same hits, and we would dance and sing along.

He would make the same jokes while wearing silky printed bowling shirts, and we would all laugh. He would bring the same earnest energy of his performance down onto the floor after the show, and we would stick around a bit to overhear his conversation. Each concert was cool, and an affirmation of home.

Joel’s songs have provided respite when I’ve found myself alone, moving through various cities and small towns for different jobs and studies. I would listen to “Rollin, Rollin, Rollin,” and speak alongside him that I was “gathering no moss.” I would play his rockier sounds when I was feeling angsty and would feel something like pride in my heart when I heard him sing about crossing the harbour via the Dartmouth ferry, or the Macdonald Bridge.

“There was a sense of trying to slow down and ... take time to move at a different pace. And then that got forced upon us” — JOEL PLASKETT

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Sometimes, I feel lonely, but not wanting to listen. It felt too cyclical. I wasn’t back in the Maritimes but nor was I totally in my new home. All the same, his lyricism drew me in. I was also a budding writer, appreciating how he blended the irreverent and aphoristic in his verses. Even as his songs turned ballad for me in their communal re-enactments, the lyrics themselves felt like conversations Joel was having with himself, defining his lessons learned, as he himself felt his way through his early adult life. I listened.

Joel turned 44 in 2020, and released a new album, titled 44. The album contains four sets of 11 songs, each set focusing on a different theme: leaving one’s home, returning to find one’s home unfamiliar, transitioning to being found, then arriving at a personal destination.

Critic Stephen Cooke from the Chronicle Herald calls the album “autobiographical, philosophical, psychoanalytical, and spiritual,” while critic Adam White called it “comfort food,” and Josh O’Kane from the Globe and Mail says it demonstrates the value of “slowing down to enjoy the moment.”

We’re here for a conversation with Joel, not an album review, but it is fitting that he released 44 during a year where we had all been made to slow down, and exist, in very long moments. The pandemic brought me from my freshly carved-out life in Toronto back to Halifax. With this came moments of reflection that many of my friends also say that pandemic had foisted onto them. As we make sense of the changing world, the new album resonates.

So many Haligonians grew up listening to you singing about Halifax — how much is your music influenced by where you are from?

“It’s been a huge influence for me.

Halifax has all these artists in town and a strong sense of place, and it’s also informed my own sense of place as I’ve never lived elsewhere. I remember listening to Bruce Springsteen at this live performance of ‘Rosalita,’ which was 11 minutes long and really celebratory, and I realized that what I really liked about him as a writer, was the sense of New Jersey he had in his music.

And I wasn’t really out to imitate that, but I

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recognized a parallel there, this sort of melancholy sense of place. When I would reference, say, the Dartmouth ferry, I was really digging in my heels, saying that this was a song for back home. But I also think the universal lies in the idiosyncratic, and that it’s an easier place for me to be.”

What is the mood of Halifax that you try to capture in your music?

“I didn’t grow up in a super workingclass neighbourhood; we were in the suburbs. Springsteen writes a lot about working-class Jersey, and that wasn’t my experience. That being said, Halifax definitely wasn’t a bustling place in the ‘90s, and certainly had an underdog status in the national context. There wasn’t a lot going on, but there was a lot of art. Some music did come out East, and there used to be this really cool venue called the Flamingo, that people would come and play at, but there were fewer international musicians touring here generally, so I think that people had to entertain each other ... By the late ‘90s though, a lot of Nova Scotians started leaving. So, when I would tour, there would be a sea of Maritimers at my concerts, and all of the sudden the Nova Scotian flag would go up and everyone would say ‘You’re from back home!’ I think I stayed because of a sense of place, and opportunity, but there was definitely a weird serendipity in my staying, in being able to connect with other Nova Scotians living elsewhere.”

Your 44 album was released right at the beginning of the pandemic; do you feel like any of the themes from your album spoke to themes or experiences from the pandemic?

“I’ve been a touring musician for all my adult life, and I think that in some of the songs, there was sort of this sense of trying to slow down and take time to move through memories and ideas, and life, at a different pace. And then that got forced upon us. The first part of the pandemic was definitely difficult for me, because it happened right before my tour for my 44 album. I think that touring is the period when the music I make becomes gestural and naturally starts changing, after a really hyper-focused creation period. So I had to change my flow. With touring, you tend to move through places so rapidly, you’re just taking in the big picture environment, but I feel like during the pandemic, I’ve been moving really slowly ... I think the album contextualized itself a bit in the sense that it’s a boxset, which inherently takes a lot of time to digest, and I got some really nice notes from people who told me they had listened to the whole thing. So, it’s definitely been difficult and surreal, but I’ve been trying to find blessings in it.”

“Halifax ... had an underdog status in the national context. There wasn’t a lot going on, but there was a lot of art” — JOEL PLASKETT

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“I’m interested to see how the city can grow, and become a busier place ... while keeping a sense of balance” — JOEL PLASKETT

To you, what is your 44 album about?

How do you think it differs from the tenor of your Three album?

“I feel like there are production touches that I’ve developed through experimentation that are still there. I also think that there are lyrical connections that are in both albums, in between the lighthearted and melancholy. I was also processing the loss

of a few friends, which I think appears in my album. I feel like in both projects, I was set out to do something ambitious, and I do feel like the numerical feel of Three relates to 44. I also feel like I don’t often know what I’m doing when I’m doing it, but I have a sense of what I’m doing. I think that themes and ideas in 44 tended to make constellations and relate to themes of Three, and my earlier work, when I’m reflecting later on.”

What is your favourite song from the new album?

“I’m quite fond of ‘Kingfisher.’ It definitely felt like it transitioned something in my mind, with the album. I’m also quite fond of ‘A Benefit for Dreamland.’ We brought a lot of local female musicians on deck to perform it — did a live recording, which you can find on YouTube. The performance itself was kind of emotional, and also cathartic, because I knew that it was going to be the last song on the album.

The last line of the song is ‘you’re a soft drug from a wildflower / life’s a slow dive through the magic hour’ — I think the song itself is about slowness and togetherness.”

What are you looking forward to musically?

“I’m excited to perform, and to feel more relaxed. It doesn’t necessarily have to get back with what it used to be, but I am a hopeful person, and I’m hopeful to perform again. I’ve been doing a lot of introspective and solitary writing, which I’ve been enjoying, and which I think might find a place.

I’ve also been doing some video performances and guitar tutorials for old songs.

There isn’t a lot of urgency at the moment, which I think is OK.” What makes you excited about Halifax now?

“I’m interested to see how the city can grow, and become a busier place, while keeping a balance between capital and a sense of uniqueness. So, for example, if you are removing an old building, you have to be mindful that you are removing a place that held memories for people. Now that’s not to say that every old building can stay, but I’m interested to see how Halifax develops. Sense of history runs through cultures, and not all histories are good, and we have to acknowledge that, but it is through this flow that we develop a sense of who we are.

Histories and cultures keep us alive.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Nova Scotia Archives and Records Managment

BUILDING ON A HISTORIC FOUNDATION Sarah B. MacDonald guides Halifax’s 128-year-old Council of Women through new challenges

BY JANET WHITMAN

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ACW Photography Bruce Murray/VisionFire

D

ays before setting sail on the Titanic, property developer and internationally known publisher George Wright changed his will, bequeathing his stately South End Halifax home to a local feminist organization.

Since Wright’s untimely demise in 1912, the grand Queen Anne Revival manor on the corner of Young Avenue and Inglis Street has been a vital asset for the Local Council of Women Halifax, as it works to improve the lives of women and children.

But, in more recent years, the drafty old building with peeling paint and crumbling façade has become a bit of an albatross.

The not-for-profit’s former president, Sandra MacLennan, recalls getting a $9,000 government grant to repair a back wall, which had mostly rotted out.

“Contractors found so many other things wrong and the price went sky high,” she says.

Her husband ended up making a non-interest-bearing loan to help pay the bills. “That’s how bad it was,” says MacLennan, who led the organization for 7.5 years until stepping down in 2017. “The house was just bleeding us dry.”

She wondered about selling the empty lot next door on the south side of the property that was part of Wright’s gift. She balked when realtors told her it would make George Wright House itself unsalable. The idea of selling the mansion came up but was never seriously considered beyond wondering where they might rent, she says.

“Drowning in day-to-day emergencies” meant the council could do little more than talk about how to use the building to do something more for women and attract new members, she recalls.

Councillor Waye Mason remembers getting a call from MacLennan five years ago.

(He considers her a mentor. As a property manager for Halifax Developments Ltd., she took a chance on him in the 1990s and rented him space in downtown’s old Trade Mart Building when he was setting up a recording studio.)

“She said, ‘I’m in my late 70s. My husband and I are trying to maintain this giant building. The other two active board members are in their 80s and 90s,’ ” Mason recalls. “To lose this historic and amazing space and organization would have been a crying shame.”

The first person he thought of was professional fundraiser Sarah B. MacDonald.

“I knew her from her activism in the community and from social media,” he says. “She’s done a lot of fundraising stuff and she’s also an activist whose personal politics align really well with the history and potential future of the Local Council of Women.”

MacDonald met with MacLennan. It was a match.

She took over as president in May 2017.

HALF LANDLADY, HALF ADVOCATE

MacDonald, 32, is an avid volunteer. Her day job is assistant dean of advancement with Dalhousie University’s law school, and she did fundraising stints with the YMCA and Saint Mary’s University.

The council presidency is like nothing she’s done before. “It’s half landlady, half advocate,” she says.

“Sometimes you get called to comment on something that’s happened in the news. Sometimes you’re calling a plumber in the middle of the night because something’s happened with the toilet.”

One of her first initiatives was reimagining how to best use the 2.5-storey heritage home to serve the community and ensure it’s around for another hundred years.

The main floor, with a large double parlour, sunporch, kitchen, and butler’s pantry, remains open as a community space. The upper floors, long rented as apartments, were renovated to create eight offices for women and gender minorities at below-market rates.

“We had to find a new business model that would further our mission and further the work we wanted to do and also, of course, cover the cost of running a community center with no external funding,” MacDonald says. “We were getting back down to the floorboards, so we made sure we had folks in who knew heritage buildings. It was a big investment, but it really paid off.”

Top left: Philanthropist George Wright bequeathed his South End home to the council.

Left: Local Council of Women president Sarah B. MacDonald.

Above: The historic house seen from Young Avenue.

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“Members range in their level of engagement, for sure,” she says. “What was really encouraging was, just this last fall, when we started in-person meetings again, about half of the folks that attended that first meeting were new.”

At her first meeting five years ago, most of the women were older and homogenous in their makeup and backgrounds. “They were doing fantastic work,” she says. “But without the different points of view and life experiences, you don’t get the full picture of what the community needs.”

The council is electing two new volunteer executives (treasurer and secretary) to work alongside MacDonald and vice-president Rebecca Faria, a local activist and communications coordinator at the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers.

MAKING HISTORY Shakira Weatherdon (second from left at a Strait Area Sister 2 Sister Conference) is the council’s newest tenant with the Black Girls Gather non-profit she launched to give Black women entrepreneurs a boost.

The council hasn’t lost any of its renters during the COVID-19 pandemic, except for one who left to run her business from home. “It’s something we’re proud of,” says MacDonald. “In a lot of other spaces, people lost tenants because they couldn’t pay their rent on time. We took a more community-based approach.”

The council is donating the open spot to Black Girls Gather, a non-profit helping Black women entrepreneurs. “It’s more aligned with the kind of work we want to do moving forward, while still managing to be sustainable,” says MacDonald.

Black Girls Gather founder Shakira Weatherdon says she didn’t know about the Local Council of Women before connecting with MacDonald on LinkedIn. “The history is so unique,” she says. “And what an opportunity for them and us to enter a space that perhaps, historically, we haven’t necessarily been a part of.”

Attracting a new, broader membership with more young and diverse women and “It’s a shame that gender minorities was part of MacDonald’s mission from the get-go. not more of us know She started on that by rewriting half of the council’s bylaws to make them more about the Local inclusive. Gendered language and references to particular religions were removed.

Council of Women” Annual individual membership dues were dropped.

— Janet Guildford The council also nixed a policy granting honorary memberships to the wives of the mayor, premier, and lieutenant-governor.

“That might seem funny to you and me,” says MacDonald. “But imagine if you’re a non-binary or trans person and read that on the website. How would that ever be welcoming?”

The council has around 40 like-minded organizations as affiliate members, with each paying annual fees of $20, and more than a hundred individual members.

MacDonald says between 25 and 40 members tend to show up for general meetings, which are held six times per year.

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The Local Council of Women Halifax was founded in 1894 after Lady Aberdeen, an ardent feminist and wife of Canada’s then-governor general, visited the city and invited women’s groups to gather at Government House.

Representatives from 44 groups showed up. The Halifax chapter of the national multi-faith, non-partisan council was born.

Historian Janet Guildford says inclusivity was a struggle for the council in those early years in Halifax.

“Divisions between Protestants and Catholics were very strong,” she says. “The practice that caused the most contention was the reciting of the Lord’s Prayer … One ultra-Protestant woman kept insisting the Protestant version of the prayer should be used to open every meeting. It flew in the face of what Ishbel Aberdeen had hoped for the council.”

Even so, the local council did a lot of good for the city, says Guildford. She’s unearthed records of members going to restaurants looking for dirty and cracked dishes and reporting them to the health department.

“They would have called it municipal housekeeping,” she says. “It was through these kinds of services and interventions that first-wave feminists believed they could increase their power and influence in their society.”

In 1906, council members established Halifax’s first supervised public playgrounds, part of the North American Playground Movement. A plaque at the North End’s Bloomfield Centre recognizes the spot as the city’s first playground, crediting the council.

Legend has it a chance meeting in London between council president Agnes Dennis and George Wright before he boarded the ill-fated Titanic to sail home led to the donation of his mansion. “I think she’d already asked him to make sure it would go to the council, and she reminded him of that,” says Guildford.

Wright, who made his fortune by creating a wildly popular international business directory, was a reformer who was committed to better housing and living conditions for the working poor. The council’s efforts would have been in line with his thinking, says Guildford.

It also didn’t hurt that Agnes Dennis was married to the publisher of one of the city’s biggest newspapers.

“She was an influential person and there were other influential women among the leadership of the council,” says Guildford. “When they asked for favours and support, they were likely to find it.”

Over the years, the new headquarters was used as a hostel for women, while some rented rooms for longer term as a safe, reliable place to live.

In its advocacy work, the council’s heyday was during the First World War, when members marshalled various women’s groups to help the war effort, says Guildford.

It’s also credited with gaining seats for women on school boards and pushing for the right for women to vote during the suffrage movement.

In the 1960s, the council invited representatives from African Nova Scotian churches and other Black women’s groups to become members.

“It’s a shame that not more of us know about the Local Council of Women,” says Guildford. “From time to time, it exerted a very positive influence over social policy and social conditions in Halifax.”

ed for all the work that should be done over the next decade, she says. “That’s why we’re using part of the funds we have to build a solid understanding of what shape the building is in now and develop a plan.”

Top on the agenda is creating an accessible washroom on the main floor, something that will be a requirement for all buildings by 2030. “What we learned this year is that it’s very expensive to create a truly accessible washroom, whether or not it’s in a heritage building,” MacDonald says.

The estimate is about $60,000.

MacDonald is applying for grants “More and more people and hopes to get the retrofit done in the spring. are interested in the Fixing up the building’s exterior is also high priority, and not advocacy piece” just for aesthetics. “If something isn’t painted, the building under- — Sarah B. MacDonald neath it isn’t going to be in really good shape,” says MacDonald.

One thing already taken care of is the jungle that was growing on the exterior and around the property. “We hired an all-women-owned landscape company that did wonderful job clearing and making it manageable,” says MacDonald.

Mason quietly donated $50,000 left over from his district capital fund to kick off the fundraising effort.

“I’m on board with we need to save this building and we need to save the organization,” he says.

Cash from the new office rentals keep the lights on.

Membership dues and the community space, which is available at $40 an hour for public rentals and half that for members, are a help.

The community rooms were booked up before COVID-19, with events ranging from Pride celebrations to Girl Guide meetings. MacDonald expects things to pick right back up once concerns about the pandemic ease.

“Traditionally, people have always been interested The grand stairwell at in the space,” she says. “More and more people are inGeorge Wright House, terested in the advocacy piece, that really old idea that part of the sprawling downstairs that’s a the council worked to further different political issues. community space.

That’s exciting to see.”

When she took over as president, MacLennan remembers getting help from two women in their eighties: Eva Cromwell and her sister Laura Daye, the quiet force behind her husband Buddy Daye’s activism in the African Nova Scotian community.

“They were there as long as they could hang out,” she says. “That was the problem at that time. People were getting older and there were no new members. Organizations go through those cycles a lot.”

MacLennan, now 83, is happy new life is being breathed into the council and the property. “They both played such an enormous role in the history of Halifax,” she says.

With so many historic homes torn down on upscale Young Avenue, many Haligonians wondered if the decrepit-looking George Wright House was in danger of the same fate. The property is assessed at $1.45 million.

The empty lot next door, without the constraints of a heritage home, is assessed at $2.58 million.

MacDonald says the council has no plans to sell either. “There’s no way,” she says.

Instead, it’s full steam ahead on tending to the home, which was built for Wright between 1902 and 1903 by James Dumaresq, the patriarch of a family of architects who designed many of Halifax’s best-known buildings.

MacDonald says the council is seeking major funding, primarily through grants for now, to renovate the building. Accessibility, longevity, and energy efficiency are the goals.

To ensure its heritage is preserved, the council enlisted Dalhousie Architecture and Planning experts to complete an entire internal and external scan of the home. They produced “as-built” architectural drawings and plans for a more accessible first floor. “Now, when we need to fix things, we can in a really accurate and skillful way,” says MacDonald.

The council isn’t sure yet how much money is need-

Bruce Murray/Visionfire

FULL STEAM AHEAD

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Riding the waves

As Halifax prepares to again welcome cruise ships, COVID continues to raise uncertainty, and concerns rise over the uneven benefits of the industry

BY PHILIP MOSCOVITCH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEXANDER MACASKILL

I

t was cool and cloudy on Nov. 6, 2019, with rain falling and winds gusting. At Pier 22, the Oceania Cruises’s Riviera, a 1,250-passenger vessel on a 16-day, cruise pulled away from shore. It was the last of 179 cruise ships to call on the Port of Halifax that year, and officials were optimistic about the following season, with more than 200 cruises booked.

We know what happened next.

Before COVID-19 had even been given a name, the disease was linked with cruise ships. Quarantined in Yokohama, the Diamond Princess became a floating symbol of contagion. On Feb. 20, 2020, passengers and crew represented half of all cases in the world outside China.

Ultimately, 712 people on the Diamond Princess tested positive for the disease, and 13 of them died.

By mid-March, the cruise industry had essentially shut down, and the federal government banned cruise ships from calling on Canadian ports.

But now, we are getting ready to welcome cruises back for the 2022 tourist season.

“We’re anticipating the first vessels should arrive here in Halifax towards the end of April,” Halifax Port Authority communications manager Lane Farguson says in a recent interview. “But of course throughout this entire situation there have been so many unknowns, and Omicron is another one of those. A month ago, I would have been a lot more optimistic about the season ahead. But now we’re just like everybody else, waiting to see what happens.”

Speaking in October 2020, Halifax Port Authority CEO Allan Gray said he anticipated “a slow return for cruise,” and that the number of ships would take two to three years to reach 2019 levels.

But that seems to have been unduly pessimistic. Farguson says that as of mid-January, the port had “in the neighbourhood of 160 calls” scheduled, mostly ships coming from Boston and New York.

That’s good news for Dennis Campbell. He’s the CEO of Ambassatours Gray Line and Murphy’s The Cable Wharf — businesses that rely heavily on cruise passengers, offering packages including bus excursions, harbour cruises, and winery tours.

“We thought 2022 was going to be a recovery year,” Campbell says. “We are sort of looking at 2023 and hope it will be the recovery year now, but we still believe 2022 will be reasonably decent.”

Campbell says the company rode out the cruise shutdown in part by refinancing, making it “easier to survive in the long term.” He also says he is in “constant communications” with the cruise lines, and they’ve

told him they expect to be operating at full capacity

by May, but “that remains to be seen with the Omicron numbers.”

Bill McArthur is another business owner looking forward to the return of cruise tourists. He is co-founder and co-owner of Liquid Gold, a small local chain of shops selling gourmet oils and vinegars. In spring 2020, the company moved its Halifax shop from the Hydrostone to Lower Water Street. “We wanted to tap the cruise market more efficiently, and of course that’s been a bust from the get-go,” he says. Cruise customers would come into the Hydrostone location “in trickles,” he says, but the neighbourhood seemed to be “on the B-list when it came to cruise passengers.”

Liquid Gold has four locations around the Maritimes, so the company won’t live or die by the fate of its Lower Water Street store. McArthur says they had a “generally pretty strong” year, with Halifax being “notably weak” and that he looks forward to the return of cruise ships when they are no longer “floating Petri dishes.”

Maritime lawyer Jim Walker says Halifax should be “gravely concerned” about welcoming cruise ships back. Based in Miami, Walker runs a practice that exclusively sues cruise lines, primarily representing sick or injured crew members. He’s filed thousands of suits over the last 25 years and writes a blog called Cruise Law News, with the tagline “Everything cruise lines don’t want you to know.”

Walker says his sources who work on cruise ships “paint a very disturbing picture of the industry ... It’s an industry that has a historical propensity to hide the ball, hide the truth, and to lie to government officials and the U.S. Coast Guard” about health and environmental practices. “I’ve been calling them plague ships, ships of pestilence and disease,” he adds.

In January, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control strongly advised against cruise travel, even as it eased restrictions: “People should avoid traveling on cruise ships, including river cruises, worldwide, regardless of vaccination status,” the CDC advisory read. “It is especially important that travellers who are at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19 avoid travel on cruise ships, including river cruises, worldwide, regardless of vaccination status.”

The CDC website tracks outbreaks on cruise ships, using a colour-coded system. Of the more than 100 ships listed in January, only nine showed no cases of COVID-19 — and all of those were ships with no passengers aboard.

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“Cruise will be part of that new normal. What we don’t know ... is just what that is going to look like” — Lane Farguson

But Walker says the CDC reporting is too vague to be helpful. “The CDC does not disclose the number of positive crew members or guests infected,” he says. “It would seem to me the consumer needs sufficient information to decide whether they want to take their family on a cruise.”

Some ports do a good job of protecting their populations from infected passengers by refusing entry to vessels with more than a certain percentage of positive cases, Walker says. For instance, Panama won’t allow a vessel into port if more than one per cent of the passengers and crew have tested positive for COVID-19. Asked if Halifax has a similar requirement, Farguson says the Port will defer to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

At the time of writing, the agency was, according to its website, “developing a comprehensive framework ... focusing on the COVID-19 related health requirements that the cruise industry must abide by, supporting safe cruise activities in Canada.”

Cruise passengers generally “come in for a few hours and then go out,” says Wendi Dewey, who teaches in the business tourism and hospitality program at Nova Scotia Community College. “Some of them go on excursions outside the city and spend their money visiting our tourism sites, and others stay on the waterfront, explore our attractions and shops, and take tours of the harbour. And all those businesses benefit economically, and they really miss those passengers coming in.”

Develop Nova Scotia spokesperson Kelly Rose says between May and October 2020, foot traffic on the Halifax waterfront was down 56 per cent from the year before. The lack of cruises isn’t the only factor contributing to that drop, but Rose says the industry “provides a baseline of business that allows operators [on the waterfront] to stay open and also support other forms of travellers and the local market.”

Cruises were worth $165 million to the Halifax economy in 2019, according to Halifax Port Authority figures.

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Farguson says that takes into account not only the dollars passengers spend while onshore but also waste removal and provisioning: “Everything from refuelling and taking on new supplies, like Nova Scotian wine and lobster that they like to serve for that authentic experience.”

But Ross Klein doesn’t buy those numbers. A professor of social work at Memorial University of Newfoundland, he’s studied the cruise industry for over 20 years, and has written four books on its dark side. He co-authored a 2018 paper published in the journal Tourism in Marine Environments arguing that industry figures for 2016 inflated the value of cruise passenger spending in Halifax by 31.5 per cent. “The data from this study can begin to demonstrate how errors in measuring passenger spending are reflected in erroneous measures of economic impact,” the paper says.

In an interview, Klein scoffs at the stated benefit of cruise ships, calling their economic impact studies “smoke and mirrors” and “a quagmire of bullshit.”

When a tourist buys an excursion to Peggys Cove on board, the cruise line marks it up substantially, but the full cost counts towards economic impact, he says. And as for provisioning? “I’ll bet you that local Nova Scotia wine is a big seller on that cruise ship ... What are they paying you to take their garbage? Is it a fair amount?

They dump their garbage, buy a couple of lobsters, and go on their happy way,” he says. “Everybody loves the cruise lines. They come in and say every passenger spends $100 per port of call, and the port goes: Wow! Let’s spend more money to attract more cruises!”

Campbell, of Ambassatours, says the markup cruise passengers pay for the company’s tours is substantial.

“It varies by line. Many of the cruise companies mark up the excursions anywhere from 60 to 100 per cent.

There are times when the cruise lines almost give the cruises away, and look at their profit centres as the onboard bars, casinos, and on-shore tours. That’s just the way it is.” But that also means they are not particularly

encouraging passengers to spend money ashore.

Spend any amount of time looking into the world of cruises and you can start to feel like you’re dealing with parallel worlds. Campbell, who calls the cruising “the most nimble part of the travel industry,” thinks it will “come back with a vengeance,” and adds, “The cruise lines have done a wonderful job to adjust and create new cleaning and sanitizing protocols. I’ve got to say, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

Klein, on the other hand, says when it comes to health and safety, the cruise industry “puts their head in the sand.”

As of mid-January, Walker said there was “just an unprecedented volume of people getting infected on cruise ships,” many of them crew. “You might not realize you’re a couple of cabins down, breathing the same air as dozens of people who are infected, and nobody on the ships is going to tell you that,” Walker says.

Referring to a 2019 incident in which the U.S. government fined the Carnival Corporation US$40 million for illegally dumping oily wastewater into the Atlantic, he adds, “Nova Scotia is going to invite these corporate felons back? Good luck!”

Farguson says the port has heard concerns about the “different challenges that come with cruise” over the last few years, and that he understands “not everybody sees and feels the benefits of the industry.”

Gray, the port CEO, has set up a Port Community Liaison Committee, “made up of different people who are independent of the Halifax Port Authority, but still have a vested interest in what happens in the harbour,” Farguson says. “And, you know, we have been hearing from that group that not everybody shares in the benefit that comes from cruise ships calling on Halifax.”

While McArthur says the Liquid Gold shop downtown has felt the absence of cruise passengers, he notes

the neighbourhood is changing, becoming a food destination for locals, and that he expects traffic to rebound, with or without the ships.

“The neighbourhood will continue to mature and become more consumer-friendly all the time,” he says.

“As we go on, I think there will be less apprehension about store traffic and coming down with a serious disease. So we have great plans for that store over the coming years, and will continue to evolve consistent with the foodie nature of what we do.”

Rose, of Develop Nova Scotia, says even without cruises, “there was a very strong leisure travel rebound last fall (2021),” in Halifax, which “surpassed pre-pandemic levels.” And foot traffic on the waterfront for September and October increased 94 per cent over 2020 levels — bringing it to just 19 per cent below pre-pandemic levels.

Dewey says some businesses see cruise passengers not as essential, but as a way to extend their season, since ships tend to call from spring to mid-fall. She says we’ll have to wait and see how much the pandemic changes travel, and whether people will prefer travelling in their own vehicles versus being “contained on an airplane or a boat.” But pandemic or no, she says there will always be people who “are avid cruisers and will cruise no matter what. They just want to get back on a boat.”

Farguson says he hopes “a new normal will emerge,” and that “cruise will be a part of that new normal. What we don’t know yet, though, is just what that is going to look like. Will passengers be able to leave the vessel and wander around the downtown on their self-guided tours like they did before? Or will there be some sort of a transition period, where they have to remain in a bubble, remain accounted for, and take those tours where they’re not able to wander off? Those are those type of things that we’re still working through.”

“You’re a couple of cabins down, breathing the same air as dozens of people who are infected, and nobody on the ship is going to tell you” — Ross Klein

MARCH / APRIL 2022

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THE FLAVOUR

STARTING AGAIN

A fire gives Montreal-style joint Chkn Chop a fresh start in the North End

BY BROOKLYN CONNOLLY PHOTOS BY BRUCE MURRAY/VISIONFIRE

T

he aroma of roasting chicken briefly fills the air as I turn the corner from Clifton onto North Street.

It smells of quality, without excess. It won’t stick to those waiting for the bus, nor to passersby. Instead, it lingers in the moment. Passing two houses, a brewery, and a pizza shop, I come to its source.

With large white letters that contrast from the black backdrop, the sign reads: Chkn Chop.

Jenna Mooers is on the phone, steering a customer through the menu. “That one would be more spicy than the pita,” she says, taking the order towards the end of the lunch rush. A man in his mid-20s finishes his meal and gets up to leave while a couple chat softly between bites. It’s Wednesday afternoon, and the sun beams off the restaurant’s white, red, and green tones.

“We all met in Montreal,” says Mooers, explaining the collaborative efforts of her, her husband, and his cousin that went into making the restaurant. “I lived there for almost 10 years, and there was a rotisserie chicken shop in every neighbourhood.”

What North End lacks in chicken, it makes up in its doughnuts, craft breweries, cafés, and second-hand shops. Ten years ago, the hotspot that North End has

Jenna Mooers

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Eighteen months in, an accidental fire proved a blessing for Chkn Chop, giving a chance to start anew.

become would have been on the brink; real estate prices were on the rise, and gentrification was in sight.

Around that same time, in 2012, Mooers and her husband moved back to Halifax, where she’s from. In 2017, they took over the location for Chkn Chop, “before (they) even had a concept for the restaurant,” she says.

“The location chose us.”

Rotisserie chicken is the specialty — paired with sides like macaroni and cheese, brussels sprouts, and green beans — or in a sandwich or poutine. The drinks menu is the usual North End selection, with offerings like Propeller IPA, Chainyard cider, and Good Robot seltzer, plus several Nova Scotian wines.

Inside, the dining area feels full in a way a home does, with carefully cultivated décor. You don’t see how things changed.

Things that, in 2019, burnt and were built again. One night that year, a dryer caught fire in the restaurant. They were closed and no one was hurt. But damage was extensive.

“You know, we were fully insured, but they don’t make it super easy in commercial insurance disasters,” Mooers says. “And in addition to that, the fire was pretty much

contained to our unit. So, it didn’t damage any other buildings or houses in the neighborhood.”

In the five months of negotiation between Mooers and the insurance company, the North End real estate market had instead ignited.

“Not often do you get a chance to just start all over a year and a half in,” Mooers says. “So that was one of the cool things that did come out of burning your restaurant down, you get the chance to start again.”

Funding medical equipment for our community

Together, we can make a difference.

Donate today!

www.cobequidfoundation.ca

Chkn Chop brings a taste of Montreal to its North End neighbourhood.

P:

902 869 6111 -

-

stacey.chapman@nshealth.ca

MARCH / APRIL 2022

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THE FLAVOUR

Glen O’Keefe

might If you build it, they will come

BY BROOKLYN CONNOLLY PHOTOS BY BRUCE MURRAY/VISIONFIRE

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S

pryfield doesn’t spring to mind as a craft-beer destination.

Serpent Brewing is tucked behind a strip mall. Businesses like Bowlarama, No Frills, and Canadian Tire surround it. Much of the area is a construction zone, plastered with signs promising new apartments “Coming Soon.”

Nestled at the end of the row, dimly lit Serpent Brewing looks moody and outof-place.

Serpent opened in spring 2021 after what founder Glen O’Keefe describes as a brutal few months. He expected that it would be easy enough to get the brewery up to code, as it was already a retail space attached to a strip mall, but it turned out to be a “mess of investments to make safe.”

“The city treats us like a restaurant,” he says. “It’s either they treat us as a restaurant, or they’re looking at us as this hazardous manufacturing facility.”

But it’s not a restaurant. Serpent has a license to brew and sell beer. It’s the only brewery in Spryfield, which O’Keefe saw as a market waiting to be tapped.

“It was really the fact that I had moved to Spryfield when I moved here from Newfoundland and understood how shitty it was to live out here and not have decent access to a fun place to go,” he says. “Once that all sort of clicked for me, it was like OK: if I don’t jump on putting a brewery in Spryfield now, someone else is going to.”

In the early days of European settlement, Spryfield was fertile farmland, becoming known for its livestock, grain, and root crops — a place where supply met demand. Today, it’s best known as a maze of roads, semi-industrial space, and Halifax’s least-unaffordable apartments.

Is Serpent the beginning of a shift? Is that why the brewery feels like a speakeasy on a Friday night in January?

“Picnic table or bar barrel?” a friend asks over the swinging jazz as we make our way inside. There are tables, too, but they’re filled with hipsters straight from central

casting. The options get lost in a sea of mid30s plaid, and we settle for the bar barrel.

Before long, we’re drink-in-hand. The brewery’s run out of cider. Despite the website’s claim, cider was a ghost left from the menu’s options of beer, wine, and potato chips. Beer connoisseurs head for Serpent’s well-crafted Belgian-style farmhouse ales.

Jazz Night, and the cash entrance cover, were unmentioned on the website, begging the question: Who is the intended clientele?

Nearing 9 p.m., the band takes a break.

About a dozen seats are filled, but an emptiness hangs in the air with the sudden silence. In a word, the brewery feels early.

There’s not yet an energy for it to offer, but an underlying thought that it’s a gamble.

But there is a low-rise stage, an unfinished mural, acoustic chambers, and a roomful of people. Serpent Brewing has a genuine, natural kind of vibe (like the one that fuels a dad’s garage band). It is bringyour-own-food, after all.

With a paid tab and a buzz, I leave and question whether Spryfield’s attitude can match the brewery’s. The same sheets of pavement that suck a place from its personality may disappear when you’re inside, but what’s the lifespan of a brewery in an industrial patch like this? Will it be long before No Frills turns into Whole Foods, or will our neighbours bowl a strike and calm the waters?

According to O’Keefe, Spryfield is home to a community that he’s still trying to crack into and understand. Some nights, people turn around and back out the door at the sounds of music. Other nights, it’s packed.

But overall, he says the events — trivia, comedy, and sports nights — are gaining the most traction.

O’Keefe explains that he’s been looking to the community, trying to figure it out, and wants to become “the best form of whatever the community needs.”

“People become friends in our taproom,” he says. “People fall in love in our taproom.”

MARCH / APRIL 2022

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THE STANCE

Ready to blow Pandemic frustration has led to a plague of impatience, belying Halifax’s friendly reputation

BY PAULINE DAKIN

R

emember those tacky t-shirts and posters with the wild-haired woman saying “I have one nerve left and you’re getting on it!”? I see her everywhere these days — in real life.

For example, my partner was in the bakery section of a local grocery store. The person behind the counter brought a loaf of bread they’d just sliced to an older woman waiting at the counter. It’s a nice service they offer if you like artisanal bread but don’t like to cut it yourself.

Thanks so much for your help is the response you’d expect, right?

Nope.

“I didn’t want brown bread! I wanted white, you idiot!” she screeched at the poor front-line worker, whose only crime was trying to be helpful.

You might dismiss this as a shocking but isolated example of rude behaviour. Poor gal having a bad day.

Except that it’s anything but isolated.

Maybe you saw the video that went viral last fall of an unmasked woman on a Vancouver bus. She spits on a man who has presumably made some comment about her defying masking rules. He responds by getting up and shoving her, sending her sprawling face first off the bus and onto the sidewalk.

How about the trio of viral videos of flight attendants and airline passengers subduing unruly passengers by duct-taping them to their seats? According to the International Air Transport Association, the number of unruly passenger incidents doubled in 2020 and the trend continued in 2021.

Or you may have thoughts about the way people are driving in the last few months of the pandemic: distracted, aggressive, or oblivious. I beg you, don’t cut someone off in traffic. They’ll vaporize you with a death ray stare and test the limits of their horn. Or worse.

I saw a driver chase down a car on Robie Street after some perceived provocation. When it stopped at the next light he jumped out, ran to the other driver’s window and screamed at the older woman behind the wheel, who appeared terrified. I don’t know what she could possibly have done to invite such uncontrolled fury.

Consider the “freedom” convoy crowd, who held Ottawa residents hostage to mind-numbing horn-blowing and public defecation. A collective temper tantrum for a cause that morphed and broadened with every day.

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You have to think, it’s not really about the bread, the mask, the driving, or even the vaccine mandates.

A surprising number of people seemed primed to erupt, a rage reaction just looking for an excuse to be unleashed.

It’s dumbfounding in a place like Halifax, which prides itself on being a friendly city.

An American study during the pandemic shows that only 39 per cent of the thousand people interviewed thought the tone of public interactions and discourse was civil. It also found that people who don’t have to work with the public were happier than customer service workers.

No surprise to that bakery worker being yelled at.

But maybe you can identify with all those grumpy consumers. Because they’re aren’t wrong; we are being inconvenienced more often, and things we expected to run smoothly before the pandemic just aren’t.

Wait times are longer for customer service calls to banks and utilities. Stores are having trouble keeping stock on the shelves. Items are back-ordered because of supply chain problems.

The Great Resignation has meant many businesses are still trying to rehire staff and many of the people in service industry jobs are new, inexperienced, and making mistakes. And many public-facing businesses are worrying less about customer service than about just trying to survive.

The result is a mounting series of irritations that has all but the most serene among us ready to detonate.

We’ve collectively had enough of COVID, Omicron, masked and distanced life, and all the interruptions and aggravations of the pandemic. We were supposed to be beyond this by now, and our disappointment is great.

There may be strategies that can help while we battle through the last of the COVID pestilence. Because it won’t last forever even if it feels that way now.

Perhaps if employers of front-line workers pay fair wages and train staff properly all of us cranky-pants people can rein in our spleens a bit better.

And maybe we should rethink the old maxim that the customer is always right. The customer is only right if they can express themselves politely, like a grown-up.

Stop taking your anger (or fear, or exhaustion) out on others.

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