The grassroots effort evolved into a network of volunteers pushing for Permanent, Accessible, Dignified and Safer (PADS) housing options.

“For the past five weeks, PADS Community Network has been calling on the Municipality for a moratorium on evictions of crisis shelters and tents to allow time to find solutions, and to shelter unhoused residents from being forced to make decisions under duress,” says Vicky Levack, a PADS Community Network volunteer.

Through a massive volunteer effort, volunteers have filled the role of government, providing wrap-around services including safety, food and water to a growing community of residents. PADS worked collaboratively with residents, including discussing the alternative options available from service providers and the city as they were made available. This included assisting some residents with relocation to facilities including Gray Memorial Arena in Dartmouth, recently put forward as a temporary option by the city.

On Saturday, Erica Fleck, Assistant Chief of Emergency Management at Halifax Regional Municipality, spent several hours at the park, hearing directly from residents about their history, concerns, and plans.

“While some residents have found what they deem to be a safe short-term option at the arena, it is not appropriate for all residents for a range of reasons related to personal health and wellbeing or due to past trauma.” says Amber Zaza with PADS.

“At one point, everyone at the park was willing to move into hotel accommodations,” explained Drew Moore, another volunteer with PADS. “The alternative housing options currently on offer are a significant downgrade from the initial promises, which never materialized.”

Given the unique needs of individuals, and the limited options currently available, many residents continue to feel that People’s Park is the only safe option. They have been working with volunteers to identify areas that may continue to require off-site support, and taking leadership on areas that do not.

The park will complete its transition to resident-run leadership over the weekend, moving to off-site supports.

PADS and the residents of People’s Park received assurances from Fleck on Saturday that no one would be removed from the park without having a temporary accommodation or housing option that best met the unique needs of each individual. Fleck, who is authorized to speak on behalf of the mayor, said that there would be a press conference by Thursday formally announcing that no one would be evicted from tents anywhere in the city. This adds reassurance to the public statements from members of council and the city in recent weeks that all departures will be voluntary.

For members of PADS, the focus now turns to securing a firm moratorium on evictions from the city, and bringing the provincial and federal government to the table. “Mr. Fillmore, Mr. Houston, your invitations are in the mail—it’s time to find a sustainable solution for your constituents.”

The post Press release: People’s Park transitions to resident-run system appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

(Halifax, NS)  Since our new government has made it clear that they are not interested in protecting tenants from unreasonable rent increases past the state of emergency, the ACORN Tenant Union is rallying to demand the government enact permanent rent control.

WHAT: Keep the Rent Cap!
WHEN: Thursday, September 23rd from 10am – ALL DAY
WHERE: Nova Scotia Legislature – 1726 Hollis St. Halifax, NS

Since the temporary rent cap was put in place, ACORN has been hearing stories and receiving rent increases from tenants whose landlords intend to raise rents after the cap lifts. “What we’re seeing is rent increases where the landlord says ‘Your rent is going up by the legal 2%, unless the state of emergency lifts in which case it will go up $100-$1000,” says Halifax-Peninsula Chair Hannah Wood. “We’ve seen rent increases like these for as much as $2000.”

Even though these rent increases are illegal, they have become common since the government made it clear they don’t intend to prosecute landlords who violate the 2% rent cap. 

Marjike Grijm, Chair of the Dartmouth chapter of ACORN, writes: “This isn’t just an issue with the downtown core, people are even getting priced out of traditionally affordable neighbourhoods like Highfield, where a one bedroom apartment can go for as much as $1200 these days.” She disputes claims that the housing crisis was caused by the pandemic, “We were in a crisis before COVID. Cost of living keeps skyrocketing, rents are skyrocketing, but our wages stay the same. Developments that go up in this city aren’t affordable units, and landlords bring up the rent knowing full well that tenants have no other option but to pay. If we don’t fight to keep a rent cap in place, tenants are going to keep getting priced out of the city and the province.”

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Nova Scotia ACORN is an organization of low- and moderate-income people and the largest tenant union in the province, fighting for affordable housing, a living wage, and better communities across Nova Scotia.

The post Media release: ACORN rallying to keep the rent cap appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA – Valent Legal recently filed two civil lawsuits with the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia against a Wendy’s restaurant (the Defendant) located in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The lawsuit alleges that Wendy’s was negligent in failing to protect female employees from repeated sexual assaults by a supervisor. The Plaintiffs, both minors at the time the assaults occurred, claim that the Defendant took no steps to investigate or address the reported sexual misconduct of their supervisor, identified in the lawsuits as David MacDonald. 

The Plaintiffs allege that they (as well as other female employees) made Wendy’s aware of the sexual assaults. In 2019, one of the young female employees filed a police report accusing MacDonald of criminal sexual assault at the workplace. Wendy’s was made aware of the allegations and subsequent investigation. During this time, Wendy’s continued to employ and regularly schedule MacDonald to work with the Plaintiffs and the other female employees. One Plaintiff alleges that MacDonald continued to sexually assault her until his arrest in August of 2020. He has since plead guilty to five counts of sexual assault in relation to sexual assaults that happened at Wendy’s.

One Plaintiff alleges that, following the police investigation, Wendy’s significantly reduced her working hours, eventually removing her from the shift schedule entirely. During her few shifts, she alleges that she was subjected to hostile behaviour, excessive scrutiny, and social exclusion. No formal letter of termination has been issued to date.

“This case highlights the importance of taking allegations of workplace sexual assault seriously. Employers like Wendy’s have a responsibility to protect vulnerable employees from sexual harassment and assault from supervisors,” says Basia Sowinski, a litigation lawyer with Halifax firm Valent Legal. “It is important that employers take active steps to protect their employees and ensure that proper avenues for recourse exist.”
  

About Valent Legal: Valent Legal is a Halifax personal injury and insurance law firm servicing clients throughout Atlantic Canada. Areas of practice include sexual assault and abuse, motor vehicle accidents, long-term disability, class actions, and medical malpractice. For a complete list of services, please visit www.valentlegal.ca.   

The post Media release: Wendy’s Restaurant under fire for sexual assault of multiple minors appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

Halifax/Kjipuktuk. PADS Community Network and housing workers discovered this morning that an entire floor of a hotel that is currently used to shelter unhoused people will be evicted tomorrow morning. The Comfort Inn in Dartmouth says that the city has long known that these rooms were unavailable and booked by other clients, but the city did not warn anyone currently housed there. 

“How can you get somebody’s hope up and then knock them down like this,” implored G. Malcolm Kay, one of the unhoused hotel guests impacted by this decision. “It just destroyed me to get this news.”

Malcolm was previously a resident of PADS People’s Park, and will now return to the park as the hotel room is no longer an option.

This move causes further destabilization and fear amongst unhoused people in this city, as even the intermediate solutions offered by the city are precarious. 

“We expect that the number of residents at People’s Park will continue to expand because of the city’s continued negligence and mismanagement – which is edging on abuse – as an already vulnerable community is left to wonder how much longer they will be left to manage – without word or care,” declared Rachelle Sauve, the site coordinator at People’s Park. “This park exists in response to a crisis that the city created, and is expanding as the city continues to make this crisis worse.”

It is time for the city itself to come clean, apologize and be accountable to its promises to provide intermediary housing options for the city’s unhoused. The city needs to declare a moratorium on all police evictions of tenters across the city until it is prepared to provide intermediary housing, which has not been made available.

The post For immediate release: Houseless residents to be evicted without fault en masse from Dartmouth hotel appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

Today, concerned citizens are camped out on several forested sites approved for aerial spraying with glyphosate-based herbicides, including sites near Otter Brook and Halfway Brook in Colchester County. 

In August,  Nova Scotia Environment approved applications to spray 1,172 ha (2,895 acres) of private forested land in Colchester, Cumberland, Guysborough, Halifax and Hants Counties. Aerial spraying is scheduled to continue until September 30^th. 

In 2020, the sprays planned for Annapolis, Hants and Kings counties were cancelled following the establishment of Don’t Spray Us camps on sites in those counties. 

The Don’t Spray Us campers are asking for a halt to spraying on all approved sites this year. They are calling on Nova Scotians to tell Tim Halman, the new Minister of Environment and Climate Change: End the aerial spraying of forests in Nova Scotia once and for all.

Nina Newington, Extinction Rebellion Annapolis County, said:

“Here we are again, putting our bodies in the way of the government-sanctioned poisoning of forests in Mi’kma’ki. Glyphosate sprayed from a helicopter on clearcuts in order to kill off the natural regrowth of the Wabanaki-Acadian forest, never mind what else and who else gets poisoned: does that sound like something we should be doing in 2021? 

COVID has shown that we Nova Scotians can put our common wellbeing ahead of profit and convenience. As we face the climate and biodiversity crises, it’s obvious we must protect the health of nature if we want a healthy future for ourselves and our children and grandchildren.

Corporations are not allowed to create toxic waste dumps on their land, just because they own it. Spraying the land with poison from the air because it is cheaper than paying workers to thin trees on the ground has to stop. This practice has no place in proper forestry. Cape Breton put a moratorium on aerial spraying of herbicides and pesticides years ago. In 2001, Quebec banned the use of glyphosate in forestry. In New Brunswick this month, Indigenous leaders, consulted about the practice, called for an end to it. Have the Mi’kmaq been consulted in Nova Scotia?” 

The post Press release: Don’t Spray Us camps pop up on glyphosate spray sites appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

KJIPUKTUK (HALIFAX, NS) – Child welfare in Nova Scotia is in a state of crisis. The crisis is rooted in the colonial policies that sought to separate Indigenous children from their families, to control and surveil Black families and the legacy of intergenerational trauma and poverty. Anti-black racism, colonialism, trauma and poverty continue to impact children and families today.

The Child Welfare Advocacy Coalition (CWAC) is a new, community-based organization committed to advocating loudly and independently to the public and government for a radical, progressive approach to child welfare.

“It is clear that current fiscal and social policy has failed to address structural inequalities that undermine the well-being of families,” says CWAC spokesperson Haley Heist “We must do much better for children in this province.”

It is CWAC’s position that the scale of this crisis is too great to be addressed merely through internal review or even reform. A radical new model for child welfare services is the only chance to halt the crisis and build a new hope for children and families in our province.

Part of the problem is that Nova Scotia’s policies and programs that directly serve children and youth have continuously lacked their voices. As a result, programs and services have fallen short of their intended outcomes. The changes to the Child and Family Services Act i 2017 have led to a more intrusive system embedded in social control and surveillance rather than a commitment to eradicating child and family poverty, providing culturally relevant trauma focused mental health and substance use services and robust disability supports. This has negatively impacted the well-being of Nova Scotia’s most vulnerable population.

One of CWAC’s first acts will be to formally request a meeting with the newly appointed Minister of Community Services to discuss the urgent need to implement all provincial recommendations involving child welfare from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action, to ensure that when a child is brought into care the family doesn’t lose the Canada Child Tax Benefit, and to follow through with the recommendations from the Inquiry into Home for Coloured Children to create a Child and Youth Advocate Office.

“With a government who is focused on health care and mental health, we need to ensure that vulnerable children and youth have the support to lead a quality life. Adverse Childhood Experiences like those experienced by children involved in the child welfare system are as statistically relevant to developing a complex mental health issues as smoking is to cancer ” says CWAC spokesperson Haley Hiest.

CWAC is guided by a Coordinating Committee, which is comprised of stakeholders from various professional disciplines, services and supports that impact child protection.

Members of this committee include but are not limited to:

• Liz Wilson
• Haley Heist
• Jackie Barkley
• Peter Duke

Membership to CWAC’s larger membership group is open to the public and should reflect the intersecting identities, and various professional disciplines, services and supports that impact child welfare. Members may participate in the Coalition as individuals or on behalf of another organization.

To learn more about CWAC, please visit www.childwelfarens.org or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Media release: New community-based group advocates for child welfare appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1o_L_HdORWy3DC4n8BNrabET5eahodzO8?usp=sharing

Models include (now approved) Case 20761 (Rouvalis) two ~30-storey towers + penthouses near the corner of Spring Garden and Robie (the Carlton Block.) and Case 22927 (Westwood) a 23-storey building at Robie near Quinpool where HRM staff recommended 6-storeys. 

An additional proposal, Case 2021 (Dexel), for two more towers of similar height on that same block, was NOT be on the agenda on Sept 7. DOH has illustrated how taken together with the Rouvalis the four towers have greater height, scale and mass than the Nova Centre. These will destroy ~110 affordable housing/commercial units and add 31,000t CO2e of greenhouse gas emissions from construction alone-a conservative estimate.

Unfortunately councillors took almost no interest in the actual renderings or modelling or to understand what could be learned by viewing available empty space and a proposed 9-storey option that would require the demolition of a single building instead of 12-14. This scale would be 40% less carbon intensive per square measure than the proposed towers because of less carbon intensive materials used per square measure.

3-D Models should be available to community, HRM staff and council before such failed decisions are made. Sadly HRM Council has changed regulations to accommodate these developments through Development Agreements and the Centre Plan with nothing in return. It now claims nothing can stop them. 

Please view and share these important models, with those interested and keep the discussion alive! HRM needs to provide such models prior to consideration of any development. It is imperative that the Centre Plan should be modelled – citizens have a right to know.

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DEVELOPMENT OPTIONS HALIFAX

https://www.developmentoptionshfx.com/; developmentoptionshfx@gmail.com;

(see attached renderings below)

Note: Some of the files are large and require time to load. 

The post Media advisory: Seeing is Believing — Development Options Halifax 3-D Models and Images appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

Only weeks ago, we were told that a 75% vaccination rate is the minimum required to move to Phase 5 in Nova Scotia, and we would like to see that target remain a priority, and reassessed consistently, as we move through the beginnings of the latest wave of this pandemic. Schools and the Covid protocols applied there should be strengthened based on being proactive and the highest standard of protection for our students and their families, our teachers, and every staff member who is present in our public schools. Regardless of the vaccine numbers, other jurisdictions are showing that removing masks increases cases in the unvaccinated. We call on the government to maintain this important safety measure for our young children in schools. 

NS Parents for Public Education also calls on the government to restore the public notice policies that were in place in the prior school years, returning to making school cases publicly known, and maintaining a publicly accessible list of current school cases and any

closures. While there is a continued publication of possible exposure sites, where 15 minutes is deemed a risk, a list that is growing longer and wider everyday, it makes no sense that schools and buses, where children and teachers and other school staff exist in crowded environments for up to several hours a day, are not treated in a like manner, and perhaps with some more importance. 

Nova Scotia Parents for Public Education was started in 2016 by parents concerned with the government’s deteriorating relationship with teachers. They have 18,000 members on Facebook, and use their platform to promote and protect public education. 

The post Press release: NS parent group calling for minister and public health to leave mask mandate intact in NS public schools appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

No One is Illegal – Halifax/Kjipuktuk is a community organization that is committed to working in radical solidarities with undocumented migrants and those with precarious immigration statuses. Our mission is to advance migrant justice across Nova Scotia and beyond to ensure equal rights, dignities and decencies for all. You can read more about our work, such as our Migrant Worker Program, on our website.

The reason why we’re writing is to invite you, your organization and members to our free community event on September 12 at 1-3pm at the Halifax Commons (behind the Pavilion). For over a year, community members across Halifax came together to build a series of life-sized, collaborative and radical artwork centering migrant justice and solidarity-building. We’re inviting you to join us in challenging the pervasive xenophobic narratives imposed on migrants in our communities, whose stories are made invisibilized due to Canada’ racist two-tier immigration system.

There will be free food, activities for children, beautiful life-sized art, poetry readings, and an impressive silent auction. More importantly, for those who are able to donate, every single dollar raised at this event will go directly to migrants in Nova Scotia requesting emergency support. If you don’t already know about our mutual aid Migrant Solidarity Fund, you can read more on our website and make a monthly/recurring donation as low as $2/month.

We really hope to see you on Sept 12.More details can be found on our Facebook event.

The post PSA: Invitation to United We Call: Status For All appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.

For immediate release

Halifax/Kjipuktuk. Even as the P.A.D.S. Community Network is sending people to fill the small number of available hotel spaces, more people are joining the temporary sheltering place, dubbed “People’s Park”, at the intersection of Chebucto and Dublin streets in Halifax. Volunteers and those housed at People’s Park blame the lack of clarity from the city about where people are allowed to temporarily house themselves safely, when no legal sheltering spaces are even available. They also note that the uncertainty around when hotel rooms will be available has created tension and feelings of inequity that have further compounded the distress felt by those sleeping in the park, who still have no assurance that they won’t be evicted or criminalized while awaiting their own rooms.

“Some councillors say that 4-5 tents are ok, while another might favour a large encampment model with social supports. Meanwhile, we know that the police have harassed and even evicted those tenting in small numbers, at one point recommending that those people come tent with us,” explains Drew Moore, an organizer with P.A.D.S. Community Network. “We need a moratorium on evictions at least until other suitable temporary options are available to people.”

After the city committed publicly to ensuring that all houseless persons in the city would be offered a space in newly available hotel rooms- only a small handful of folks who have once sheltered at the peoples park have received a hotel room while many others have been left to wait indefinitely with no word on when they too will be sheltered. 

“You can’t give people that kind of indecision, it plays in their head all day,” explains Andrew Goodsell, a P.A.D.S. Community network member who was formerly living on the streets. “You are driving people into a state of anxiety.”

Last night, P.A.D.S. Community Network got word that the police had told a couple with a tent near Needham Park that they had one day to leave, or they would face eviction, fines, and the confiscation of their belongings.

This pressure only adds to the difficulties that this vulnerable population experiences.

P.A.D.S. Community Network is also concerned that the hotels are inappropriate and unsafe for many unhoused people, unless social supports, such as food, transportation, and social supports are also available.

“It is hard for us to celebrate that hotels are slowly becoming more available to people, because we know that many will not last in those accommodations,” admits Drew Moore. “We need supportive options to be available as well.”

The People’s Park exists as a temporary measure to protect our houseless neighbours who have nowhere else to go. They are working to find temporary accommodations until permanent, accessible, dignified & safer housing is available, and demand a moratorium on the evictions of unhoused people until appropriate, temporary accommodations are available.

The post Press release: Three weeks after the violent evictions, unhoused people are still living in fear of police action appeared first on Nova Scotia Advocate.