Larry Haiven on when a raise isn’t a raise, the journalists who fall for it, and what made us lower our expectations so drastically that we now accept cuts to our incomes and becoming poorer as our lot in life.
When journalists recently asked whether the Nova Scotia government is willing to institute paid sick days in Nova Scotia, premier Stephen McNeil flat out refused. There’s a federal program that takes care of it, he said. That’s not quite how it works, NDP labour critic Kendra Coombes tells the Nova Scotia Advocate.
Paul Wozney: “Today, just like they have done every day for the past three months, almost 150,000 Nova Scotian children and adults (up to 35 at a time) crowd into small poorly ventilated classrooms where masks are not universally required, which also lack proper handwashing stations. Nowhere else is this tolerated. If you hosted a gathering like this in your home, you’d be fined.”
Each year Maytree releases a Welfare in Canada report, showing total incomes of people on welfare across Canada, including tax credits and other benefits. Guess how Nova Scotia measures up.
Rachel Zellars is an African-American academic, lawyer, and community organizer who has lived in Canada for more than a decade and a half, and in Halifax for the last couple of years. Wendie Wilson is an African Nova Scotian teacher, artist, writer, and community advocate whose family has been in the province for at least eight generations. Scott Neigh interviews them about the African Nova Scotian Freedom School that they were part of organizing this past summer.
A Nova Scotia Human Rights Board of Inquiry was wrong when it denied the systemic causes underlying the institutionalization of people with disabilities in Nova Scotia. It was also wrong in how it determined the damages it awarded to three individual complainants. That, in a nutshell, is the case against the province being argued in front of Nova Scotia Court of Appeal judges today and tomorrow. This is what happened on day one.
“”Not all these characters are nice people, but they’re all going through interesting things, and so I just want to see the world through their eyes. It often leaves me with a different point of view on things, or a different way of thinking.” An interview with Chris Benjamin about his excellent short stories collection A Boy With a Problem.
Earlier this month the City of Halifax published an online survey to “understand where you would like to see investments into municipal programs and services”. At first glance that seems a great idea, but a closer look reveals some worrisome issues with how the survey was designed, writes Mila McKay
“This lady was given a $600 a month increase to her rent. Now I don’t know all the details, but I imagine she’s another renoviction victim. She’s also a single mother.” A shortage of good quality affordable housing has been an urgent problem in towns like Antigonish long before it reached its current peak here in the city of Halifax.
Judy Haiven looks at rising rents, renovictions and the shameless landlords who take advantage of a rental crisis.