With only a couple weeks to go until the municipal election the main comment I hear is "It's hard to get interested in local politics." Peop

Wait a sec. Before you read this answer one question. Where do you live? Don't think of what you'd say to someone from somewhere else. Don't think of others opinions, or even your own. Just your feeling. Direct. Where do you live? You may live in Waverley, Bedford, Dartmouth, Musquodoboit Harbour, Hubbards, Fall River. There's a good chance you have a very specific sense of where you live. Most people do. There's an old joke that no one lives in New York City. People live in

The site banner is a photo from the wonderful local book Bikers of Halifax by Don Cunningham. It's a photo from the 30's of motorcycle hill climbing races on Citadel Hill. The photo strikes me as very unusual and unlikely. It's just so hard to imagine such a thing being allowed today. Imagine the permits, insurance, rules, and politics involved. And yet the craziest things get green lights. The idea of using muscle and modern machinery to overcome steep hills is also deeply s

The future asks very little from us. But it rewards certain things more than others. The future rewards, education, effort, courage, change, clear thinking, big picture thinking, inclusivity, new ideas and careful planning. We learned all this from The Three Little Pigs and other nursery rhymes we all heard before we were 7. This Councilor Matt Whitman launched a campaign for Mayor in Halifax. He's the only challenger. Today a poll released by some of the Halifax establi

With only weeks to go until the municipal election most people are going to the polls with the impression the Mayor runs the city. This is wrong and we should get it sorted. "Without a Mayor Quimby, our town would really stink. We wouldn't have a tire yard or a midsize roller rink. We wouldn't have our gallows, or our shiny big foot traps. It's not the mayor's fault that the stadium collapsed! The Simpsons The Mayor, whoever it turns out to be, does not have the offi

Generations of Halifax politicians and bureaucrats have often had a muddled understanding of the economy they preside over. Nowhere is that more muddled today than in Halifax. Here’s the top five countdown of the economic mistakes that got us in the current mess and what to do about it. 5/ People are rational and corporations are kept honest by the market The notion that people are rational is a convenient fictional construct for politicians. Politicians forget

I'm calling this Halifax Politics blog The Outs, not just because we're on the outs, or it's an outsider's view. Though it's all those things. "The Outs" comes from a line Charles Dickens wrote about Halifax. In the winter of 1842 Charles Dickens, the celebrated novelist and seasoned traveler visited Halifax as the first short stop on a North American tour. It was a stormy crossing from England and the ship nearly wrecked navigating the Eastern Passage to deliver mail at Hali