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Most people in the ocean die from “rogue waves,” adds Worm. And it turns out the most deadly organism in the ocean isn't a shark, but a jellyfish (like the Box Jellyfish found off the coast of Australia). "There’s a lot of things out to get us and sharks are the least of our worries," Worm adds with a laugh.
He also says that of the 500 known species of sharks, only three to four have ever caused harm to humans. The put-upon predators have also been around for over 450 million years—making them older than trees. (Worm adds that if you wanna learn more about sharks and the ocean in general, you need to check out the new Ocean School, an online learning hub backed by both Dal and the National Film Board that he is the scientific director of. It's totally free, totally awesome and you can check it out here.)
Friends of NSCAD is still frustrated with the school’s board of governors about its refusal to give details on Aoife Mac Namara’s dismissal. Today, August 13, the group will be rallying at the NSCAD Fountain Campus to demand the reinstatement of the former president and the firing of the board of governors.
On August 11, the NSCAD Board of governors released a statement online about the institution’s new leadership that still did not satisfy the NSCAD community’s questions.
“The NSCAD Board recognizes there have been questions raised about the conclusion of the former President’s term, as well as comments about the Board’s role in such a process. We cannot and will not get into details on decisions made regarding confidential personnel matters that rest between the Board and the President of the institution,” the statement reads, adding that “Reinstatement of the former President is not under consideration.”
Friends of NSCAD is also demanding more BIPOC representation to at least one-third of numbers on the school’s board of governors; tuition waivers for Black Canadian and Indigenous students; and the provincial government’s interference. “Because the board of governors has continually refused to explain why they have fired Aoife or responded to our criticisms of them which included a 95.6% no-confidence vote by the faculty union,” Brody Weaver, a member of Friends of NSCAD says.
Weaver also says they hope the rally puts pressure on the board and shows them that the students care about the issues at hand. “The way that they communicate with us kind of feels like they feel like we’re just causing an unnecessary stink, but really these issues are important and we need dialogue on them,” Weaver says.
Ada Denil, a fourth year student at NSCAD and a member of the school's student union, says she will be attending the rally.
She says that the fact that the faculty union voted 95% of no confidence sends a strong message. “I hope that the provincial government recognizes that they do have a responsibility to step into this situation,” she says.
Denil also says it’s an uncommon and extreme moment for NSCAD and asked members of the community to show their support for the school any way they can.
The Friends of NSCAD group is protesting online today to request that the NSCAD board of governors be fired—and that recently deposed Aoife Mac Namara be reinstated as the president of the institution.
The event, Online Day of Action To Fire The NSCAD Board, comes after the Friends’ petition to oust the current board and reinstate Mac Namara reached over 4,000 signatures. (To catch you up: On June 26, the board dismissed Mac Namara as president—and is yet to give an explanation why.)
Brody Weaver, a member of Friends of NSCAD, says the rally is to ensure that the issue keeps getting attention and keeps applying pressure: “Specifically the board’s employers, to potentially ask them to resign,” they say.
The rally was originally planned as a gathering at the NSCAD Fountain Campus and a short march. However, as a post at FON’s Facebook page says, due to the “extreme heat warning, we have decided to postpone the physical rally and focus on online actions. ”
Instead, FON has created an online action plan, dubbed "six acts of resistance in 60 minutes." The schedule of online happenings includes things like sending emails to the premier and to ministers, asking for an investigation into the board’s behaviour and for Mac Namara to be reinstated; posting photos online and tagging Friends of NSCAD; and, as FON puts it, "calling the Department of Labour and Advanced Education to request a meeting with the minister concerning NSCAD’s crisis."
FON members hope these actions will at least convince the board to explain the decisions behind Mac Namara's dismissal. Weaver says if after the protest the members of the board don’t resign, they hope the provincial ministers interfere with the issue at hand: “And kind of hold at least the governors in council that they have elected, accountable.”
Ann Lin celebrated the end of her Dental Hygiene program by throwing a zoom party with her classmates. She should’ve had a convocation to attend on May 21 instead, but since COVID-19 caused campuses to shutter, an online party would have to do. “It’s definitely connected me more with my classmates,” Lin says of learning and graduating during a pandemic. “It’s been a lot of FaceTime meetings, zoom calls, late-night calls and texts, tagging each other in pictures.”
It feels like it won’t be until 2021 that Lin will be able to hit the workforce and job hunt in earnest. “There are a lot of feelings—I think I went through a rollercoaster there for awhile,” she says. “You just take it one day at a time but you have these moments where you're like ‘was this the right choice going into this program? is there job security once this is over?’ A lot of regret and also a bittersweet end to two years of work.”
It doesn’t feel real. It doesn’t feel over. But it is: “I went to campus yesterday to clean out my locker, which was just the saddest thing.”
Catie Mace had big plans for the best season: “I was dreaming of this amazing, last university summer before I start my real life and now I feel like I don’t have that transition,” the Bachelor of Social Work grad explains. “I’ve moved back in with my parents. I lost one of my jobs with COVID. It’s a little painful at times because I definitely went through the past four years, I had this idea set in my mind and now that it’s all changed it feels a little anti-climatic,” she says. “I was working three jobs and going to school this year so I could have this nice relaxing summer—and I’m certainly relaxed during quarantine, but not the way I wanted to.”
With a summer job on pause and her plans for school in the fall feeling less certain, Mace sums it up: “My school is having this online convocation, but I don’t even think the majority of the people in my class are going to participate in it—because it’s not the same, you know? For me personally, I’m not going to get the same feeling of watching this online thing as with my actual convocation and walking across that stage,” she explains. “It’s just—I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just not it, it’s not what I was looking for. I wasn’t dreaming this whole four years of having a 30-minute zoom call with the Dal chancellor.”
“When I graduated from Saint Mary’s in 2013, the economy was really bad for teaching—it seemed like a waste of money so I didn’t go into it,” starts Julie Cameron, who’s just graduating from her Bachelor of Education degree this month. “I worked a number of other jobs; I worked in the banking industry for a number of years, and it finally started to turn around in 2017-2018 and I was like OK, now’s a good time to go into teaching. So, I decided to go back to school,” she says before calling it “a big decision,” as her household’s income structure would have to change while she became a full-time student.
Now, of course, Cameron’s dreams are on pause again—because as she reminds us, school in September is still being discussed and “You can’t get a subbing job right now because they don’t need substitutes and everything’s online.”
“This year was the year I’d been waiting for, 2020 was. All the sacrifices of the last three or four years, this year was the reward from all that hard work,” she adds. “A lot of people have lost a lot of things this year. I just spent $18,000 on a degree that I hope still has a career in September—but it’s gonna be impossible to say until they tell us.”
“The Mount has offered to do a grad in the Fall if gatherings are even allowed by then but it just feels irrelevant,” Cameron says. “Like, I was supposed to graduate a week ago today and it already feels irrelevant. It’s over, it’s done—it feels like a moment in time you just never get back.”
“It’s very different than I saw April and May to look like back in February,” says Shana Graves, who moved into a new, more central apartment in May as her Bachelor of Education wrapped up and she began prepping to substitute teach more. Graves made the jump to study education after thinking of how her time teaching in Japan in the 2010s made her feel.
She’s nervous about finances, about what opportunities her new career might have left.
But she’s staying positive: “I’ve been using this time to think about and make steps towards the type of person I want to be in The After, whereas when you’re working and worrying about school and whatever you’re worrying about in The Before, you just don’t have time to work on yourself and grow,” she explains. “So that’s been a big thing for me: Just making myself a better person.”
Katie Billard, like all of us, doesn’t quite know how to explain how it feels to live through COVID-19. “I would just say weird—it’s the first thing I can think of,” the Bachelor of Arts student says. “We are connected and even if something is going on somewhere else, we all need to work together—and this virus has kind of taught us that.”
Finishing her honours thesis this spring, Billard planned to go on to take her Master’s this fall in Montreal or Ottawa—plans she’s shelved for a year: “I’m going to wait to next fall because both those places, Ottawa and Montreal, have been really hit by the pandemic and I want to give them time to recover.”
“With graduating at this time, it feels kind of odd because I was expecting more celebration—all the events that were planned, and now it kind of is like ‘maybe I did finish, maybe I didn’t, maybe I’m on summer vacation’,” she continues.
Hours before her phone call with The Coast, Billard watched her live, virtual grad. “The virtual graduation had all the names of those of us graduating and it felt like ‘yes! now I finally feel like I’m graduating’,” she says—making up for the flat feeling of just picking up your parchment across the street. “They let them scroll up the screen like Star Wars, it as exciting waiting for your name to go up—it did make it feel a little more better about graduating. I knew my family was watching at home and my friends were watching and that everyone was gonna see my name scroll across that screen at the same time,” Billard adds. “At least everyone got to see my name who knows me; just like if they got to see me walk across that stage.”
The first confirmed case arrived on the east coast March 11, in New Brunswick. Three days later it was found in PEI. And on the fourth day, COVID-19 was in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. This Coast chart shows how the disease is spreading throughout every Atlantic Canadian province; it will be regularly updated with the numbers each province reports.
With social distancing measures put in last week and tightened earlier this week, we won't be able to see any flattening of the curve until a week or two from now. Most diagnosed and confirmed cases on this chart caught the SARS-CoV-2 virus before social distancing and self-isolation went into full force.
As of today, one percent of the population of Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan have confirmed COVID-19 diagnoses, putting them ahead of Ontario—even though it has the highest number of cases with 489.
The energy was palpable as hundreds of people gathered at Cornwallis Park in Halifax on Sunday to listen to community leaders speak about the importance of Indigenous sovereignty and voice their support for the Wet’suwet'en nation.
Wet’suwet'en hereditary chiefs have been opposing a pipeline project that would cut through their traditional territory in British Columbia.
In early February, RCMP moved in to enforce a court order against opponents blocking the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
In response, solidarity actions sprung up across the country, including several railway blockades, demonstrations, and this gathering in Halifax, several thousands of kilometres from the centre of the conflict.
“There is only one path out of this struggle and that is stopping CGL pipeline, and removing the RCMP from the Wet’suwet’en territory,” said event emcee Darius Mirshahi as the crowd erupted in cheers.
"It is beautiful to see people rising up across Turtle Island right now in defence of the Wet'suwet'en nation, in defence of the Unist'ot'en hereditary chiefs that have been saying no for the last decade,” he said.
Speaker Sakura Saunders highlighted that Mi’kma’ki and Wet’suwet'en have something important in common: both territories are unceded and unconquered.
"We know that the future is Indigenous sovereignty, is environmental justice," she said, "We need to disrupt business as usual. We need to disrupt the way things are operating because it is putting us on a crash course to climate catastrophe.”
The crowd chanted “Consent means the right to say no,” and “We support the Wet’suwet’en Nation, this is not reconciliation,” as they marched down Barrington Street and up Spring Garden Road.
At the intersection of Spring Garden and South Park, the group concluded the day with a large round dance to the rhythm of drums while onlookers watched from the sidelines.
It was a dark and stormy night in Halifax, which meant the event hosted by Dalhousie's Roméo Dallaire Child Soldier Initiative was delayed, as its namesake founder was stuck on the tarmac at Stanfield airport.
On Monday, hundreds of Haligonians of all ages gathered at the Rebecca Cohn auditorium for Children’s Rights Upfront: Preventing the Recruitment and Use of Children in Violence.
The event, a conversation between child soldiers Omar Khadr and Ishmael Beah, was lined up in advance of February 12 the International day against the use of child soldiers.
Security was tight, which meant there was a long wait to get inside from the rain— giving ample opportunity for the attendees to be heckled by a vocal veteran. The medals on his jacket indicated he’d been to Afghanistan, maybe more than once.
“I thought this was the city that named a ferry after Chris Stannix?” he shouted. It is—in 2014, after public voting the city named the Woodside ferry after the soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2007.
The interesting parts of the conversation at Dalhousie centred around the difference between Omar Khadr and Ishmael Beah, in how the two men are treated. As a child soldier coming out of Africa, it was easy for Beah to earn sympathy. Years of Sarah McLachlan-scored commercials conditioned Canadians to feel sympathy for child soldiers in his part of the world. Khadr's reception by Canadians has been decidedly different, a point which Beah himself made.
“If Omar Khadr was your child, would you feel differently?” asked Beah. “I don’t want your sympathy if it’s selective.”
One of the issues facing Khadr is that he was brainwashed as a child into fighting for al-Qaeda. The veteran outside the event believed that his colleagues have been abandoned by the federal government, with many of their ranks homeless, struggling to access benefits and ending their suffering by their own hand.
Khadr, goes the argument, is undeserving of the $10.5 million settlement he received for the violation of his rights as a citizen after 10 years of imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay. And the human-rights argument for giving him a payout doesn't wash with veterans who have lost friends to al-Qaeda or government neglect.
Of this resentment, Khadr said: “It’s hard to forgive when people think you hurt them directly," adding “My critics are human. They are in pain and need help.” When asked what he would say to the veteran outside, he said “I wouldn’t say anything...it’s a free country.”
Beah spoke of how recovering from his time at war took years. He says it’s unrealistic to think that a single conversation will change anyone’s point of view, but it starts the process. “I’m really proud of what happened tonight,” said Beah after the event. “Otherwise we’re just polarized. Everybody just clings to their version of the story and nobody can contest it.”
For the veteran in front of the Cohn, perhaps shouting into the wind was part of a healing process. Maybe it’s an expression of anger that of the two men, only one is seen to have been adequately compensated by the government for being a Canadian who suffered through war.
It’s time for a little re-organizing at Halifax Police Headquarters now that regional council has approved a slew of recommendations designed to amp up the “effectiveness and efficiencies” of policing in HRM, including new roles for civilians.
In November 2019, Vancouver-based Perivale and Taylor Consulting prepared a $195,000 report on the internal workings of Halifax’s policing, resulting in 29 recommendations to help streamline the organization.
The report itself, including the justifications for those nearly 30 suggestions, won’t be made available to the public. Staff told council there was a significant amount of “sensitive information” in the report, and even a redacted version would be too “heavily redacted” to be worth releasing.
Still, council approved all but three of the recommendations, noting that the consultants made some suggestions that wouldn’t be feasible under HRM’s unique joint-policing model—which shares policing responsibility between the Halifax Regional Police (HRP) and the RCMP.
Police Chief Dan Kinsella told council he’s been working on reviewing and reshaping the organization since being hired in July, though this external process was initiated at council in April 2018.
“I've taken that time trying to learn the organization see how and where we're deploying and ensuring that we put our members in the appropriate positions, making sure that we have appropriate lines of command, oversight accountability and risk management mechanisms in place,” Kinsella told reporters on Tuesday.
Kinsella said some of the suggested changes are already underway in upper management: the HRP is currently transitioning from one deputy chief to two (though neither have been hired just yet)—one to oversee an administrative branch and the other to oversee an operational branch.
“The organizational chart really balances out the workload across the organization and allows for that better accountability,” Kinsella said.
Part of the new organizational flow is the addition of a support division, intended to provide support to the patrol division and “anywhere else in the organization that's required,” Kinsella said.
He noted that one place the support division might lend a hand with is traffic enforcement, an area many councillors noted was a high priority for their constituents.
Speaking of constituent priorities, the HRP is now planning to conduct a regular, HRM-wide survey to collect information on community priorities and service expectations. The ball is already tentatively rolling on this, staff said, and the aim is to have the first survey ready by the spring.
The report also recommended the ‘civilianization’ of nine HRP positions, though there’s some lingering mystery as to what that process could look like: The report outlines nine specific roles to be shifted from sworn officers to civilian employees, but HRP can’t say exactly which roles they are.
What HRP have said so far is that they’ve hired their first civilians in the forensic identification section and IT and are looking to civilianize the evaluation of electronic evidence.
“We have to look at the impact on the organization, number one as it relates to public safety, number two there is collective agreement issues that we have to look at,” Kinsella said. “We also have to look at making sure that we have the right people in the right positions with the appropriate skills.”
There’s no official timeline on these shifts, or any indication that an official timeline is to come, but Kinsella said his team is committed to reporting to council through the Board of Police Commissioner as changes come into play.
Hundreds of Unifor protestors gathered outside of the Halifax Legislature Building on Thursday, rallying for an extension for the closure of the Northern Pulp mill from Premier Stephen McNeil.
Premier McNeil announced Friday that there would be no extension, and the Boat Harbour Act—which called for the closure of the effluent treatment facility that poured toxic waste into Boat Harbour—would move forward as legislated.
Scott Doherty, Executive Assistant to the President of Unifor, began speeches by saying, “Our message today to the Premier is to extend the Boat Harbour Act and save at least 11,000 jobs.”
There are over 300 employees at at Northern Pulp. The other jobs Doherty is including consider a spinoff of the decision–the loss of truck driving and transport jobs, among others.
The messages of the six speakers centered strongly around three primary arguments: That the initial construction of Boat Harbor was unethical, that the Boat Harbour pulp mill should be closed, and that it should be closed in a manner that maintains forestry jobs according to a realistic timeline.
Surrounded by protestors holding signs bearing “Houston, We Have a Problem” and “Nova Scotia Needs Forestry,” Unifor’s Atlantic Regional Director, Linda MacNeil, addressed her statement directly to Premier McNeil.
“Do not make another mistake," said MacNeil, "We can support good jobs, protect the environment, and respect First Nations. And that, Mr. Premier, is what we need to do."
Sawmills across the province ceased work today in solidarity with Unifor workers. Richard Freeman, a part-owner of Freeman Lumber c. 1832, stated in his speech, “I see a lot of signs around that say ‘Houston, We Have a Problem,’ but who is at mission control, folks? Nobody is at mission control.”
This week, all parties were anxiously awaiting a decision from the Premier. These parties include Northern Pulp, the fisheries industry, Mi’kmaq communities, and Friends of Northumblerand Strait that have been involved in this contentious saga for decades.
Friends of the Northumberland Strait are gathering Friday in Pictou, calling for promise to the community with the Boat Harbour Act to be honoured, urging Premier McNeil to respect the initial January 31st closure date.