1. Minimum wage
The minimum wage will go up to $15.20/hr on April 1. The minimum wage in Nova Scotia is currently $15/hr. That increase took effect on Oct. 1, 2023. From a press release:
The increase follows the formula previously recommended by the Minimum Wage Review Committee and accepted by the government. Starting this year, the rate is to be adjusted by the national consumer price index plus one percentage point from the minimum wage rate set the preceding April. That means an increase this year of 4.7 per cent from the April 2023 rate.
The press release also said about 6% of workers, or 26,200 Nova Scotians, worked for minimum wage during the period from April 2022 to March 2023. Most of those workers are in retail and the hospitality industry.
The living wage in Halifax is currently at $26.50/hr. According to this story by Yvette d’Entremont in September, more than half of Nova Scotians make less than the living wage.
I once thought about writing a Morning File detailing how much one hour of minimum wage could purchase, but I realized it would sadly be a very short list.
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2. Electricity at tent encampment
“Critics have been grumbling online about a recent arrangement that’s brought free power to a homeless encampment in Halifax,” reports Bruce Frisko with CTV Atlantic.
The man who’s led the charge to provide electricity says it’s a small concession that should be available in every camp.
“It’s amazing. It’s the equivalent of running into the woods and handing somebody power,” said volunteer Stephen Wilsack. “This has given new life to a lot of the residents. Their ability to charge a phone, to have light, to have devices just to play music.”
The source is nearby city hall. The electricity runs from there to a rented generator and backup battery, where it’s distributed through cables all over the encampment.
But there is a lot of grumbling on social media about this arrangement with people saying it’s a fire hazard and is enabling the people who live there.
Wilsack is having none of it and said while it’s good to have electricity at the camp, the real solution is permanent housing.
“Let’s put them in a housing situation. It’s going to cost, but the alternative is, if we don’t do it, it’s going to cost lives.”
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3. Pete’s striking workers
“As the strike by workers at the downtown Halifax Pete’s Frootique location enters its seventh week, Tyson Boyd said he and his colleagues are starting to feel ‘a little angry and a little fed up,’” reports Michael Gorman with CBC.
“We’ve given Sobeys every opportunity to come back to the table and bargain in good faith and they have yet to do so at all,” said Boyd, speaking outside the store on Dresden Row that’s owned by grocery giant Sobeys.
The company closed the store indefinitely when the strike started on Nov. 18. About 90 workers represented by the Service Employees International Union Local 2 walked off the job after failing to negotiate a contract with the company, which is headquartered in Stellarton, N.S.
Because most people who work at Pete’s make minimum wage, union officials have said a pay increase of five cents per hour offered by Sobeys doesn’t come close to helping employees meet growing cost-of-living pressures. The minimum wage in Nova Scotia is $15 an hour. A report published in September calculated a living wage in Halifax to be $26.50.
Sobeys, meanwhile, told CBC it’s ready to go back to the bargaining table once the union leadership is ready.
The workers have a Facebook page here and are getting support from across the country. The workers are planning a national day of action for Saturday.
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4. Pallet shelters
“After an October 2023 promise to have Pallet shelters in place by the colder months, Nova Scotia opposition parties are calling for clarity on when the shelters will be delivered,” reports Zack Power for Global.
The province said $7.5 million was spent to purchase 200 units from the rapid-response shelter provider Pallet, as well as new bed frames, mattresses and additional support.
Since then, Deputy Minister Melissa MacKinnon said there have been unexpected delays in obtaining the units.
In a statement on Wednesday, provincial spokespeople told Global News the province is working to find “suitable land and services to support the Pallet villages” and that it will be weeks before the province can identify the first site.
The U.S.-based company Pallet requires lands to hold a set of standards before delivery, including access to services, water, sewer, electricity and more. The provider does not ship units until suitable land has been chosen.
In a statement, Christina Deveau, a spokesperson with the Department of Community Services, told Global that once the land is chosen, the department will work to get water, power, and sewer to the site, and then the Pallet shelters can go in.
“The department feels the sense of urgency with getting the Pallet shelters in place, and we must balance that with getting this complex work done right.”
Back in October, Lucia Peth, a spokesperson with Pallet, contacted me to see if I wanted to interview their CEO Amy King about the shelters and how they will be set up in Halifax. I said I was interested in learning about the Halifax deployment, and never heard back. Here’s what Peth told me in an email about Pallet:
The company’s shelters span more than 100 sites across 85 cities. The company has launched a series of new initiatives to ensure that shelter and housing are not the only solutions cities and governments employ in addressing this crisis. This includes five dignity standards that all city, government and onsite operator partners must follow when contracting a Pallet village, as well as advisory services, which provide cities with individualized plans.
The housing solution narrative – no matter the city – always blames cost and time as barriers. Still, Pallet’s model goes up in hours and is a necessary stepping stone in the continuum of care for those experiencing homelessness.
Again, this announcement about the shelters was made in October and it’s now January. The days will only get colder.
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Femicide, media bias, and telling the real stories of women behind the headlines
On the weekend, Melissa Hoskins,a two-time Olympic cyclist from Australia, was killed by her husband when he was behind the wheel of his car. Rohan Dennis, also a world champion cyclist, was charged in her death this weekend.
But from some of the headlines that were popping up online and social, you’d never guess Hoskins’ husband was even involved or that Hoskins had a name. Here is one: “Two-time Olympic cyclist, 32, dies after being hit by car.”
I recall similar headlines several years ago when Dr. Elana Fric Shamji, a respected and well known physician in Toronto and mother to three, was murdered by her husband.
In April 2019, Anne Kingston wrote in Macleans about Fric’s murder and media bias in reporting on domestic violence.
There has yet to be a #MeToo equivalent for the largely private crime of family violence. That leaves it to others, including media, to train a spotlight on the reality. A first step would be to stop illustrating stories involving charges of intimate-partner violence with “Fakebook,” or upbeat, heart-warming imagery of the accused and victim, seen in coverage of Fric’s death. It’s a media reflex to want the wedding pic. But showing couples in what could be staged happy moments mitigates the reality of violence and inadvertently creates sympathy and bias for the accused. These stories often are mistakenly framed as a “love story” gone tragically wrong or a crime of “passion,” a perception hard-wired into the legal system, according to a 2015 study that found that men who kill their wives, girlfriends or family members receive shorter sentences than men who kill strangers. Its author, Myrna Dawson, a professor at the University of Guelph and Director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Legal Responses to Violence (CSSLRV), refers to this as the “intimacy discount,” and notes it contains vestiges of the days when women were men’s legal property.
This week, I contacted a few violence-against-women organizations to learn more about how media can do better when it comes to reporting on women who’ve been killed by men.
Ann de Ste Croix is the provincial coordinator for the Transition House Association of Nova Scotia (THANS), the umbrella organization representing women’s shelters in the province. She pointed me to this statement THANS made in November regarding femicide and gender-based violence. Femicide is the broad term for the killing of a woman or girl because of her gender.
As the statement notes, between 2018 and 2022, 850 women in Canada were victims of femicide. The most common form of femicide is intimate partner violence, followed by familial violence. On its website, THANS notes that the spectrum of violence against women includes sexual assaults, family violence, intimate partner violence, financial abuse, and psychological abuse.
According to these stats from December 2022 from the Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women, women continue to be the most predominant victims of domestic violence in Nova Scotia: 79% of victims were women, compared to 21% who were men.
That statement from THANS included this mention about the media and femicide:
In most media reporting on femicides, the word “femicides” itself is hardly used. Using the term “femicide” is crucial as it acknowledges the crucial gender-based nature of these killings, highlighting the targeted violence against women and emphasizing that these are not random incidents but part of a wider problem.
Then, I contacted Women’s Shelters Canada for their input. Executive director Lise Martin had this to say:
Media bias in femicide reporting perpetuates a dangerous narrative that may influence societal responses to gender-based violence. When women are killed by their partners, using euphemisms like ‘died’ instead of more accurate descriptions like ‘killed’ or ‘murdered’ deflects blame. Such bias not only undermines the gravity of the individual tragedy but also contributes to minimizing the broader issue socially and politically.
They suggested I contact the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH), which has several resources on how to report on femicide, including this chart that examines how media reported on femicides in Ontario in 2022-2023.
In 2021, OAITH also did this report of recommendations on how to report on femicide. The report here details each best practice, including use of the term femicide, language do’s and don’ts, adding contact information for local resources, contextualizing femicide and violence against women as a social problem, using expert sources as well as friends and family, appropriate photos, including statistics, and not assigning the responsibility of violence to the women.
Here’s what Marlene Ham, executive director of OAITH, told me:
When femicide killings are framed within the media as isolated incidents, the focus remains on individual circumstances and consequences rather than the larger context of a social problem rooted in patriarchy, gendered power relationships and broken systems.
By excluding important facts concerning the reality of gender-based violence, journalists are contributing indirectly to ideologies and institutions that uphold gender inequality.
The media plays a powerful role in helping Canadians understand the root causes of gender-based violence and action needed towards femicide prevention. When a femicide occurs in Canada, it’s journalists who ultimately decide how this killing is framed- not just in the headline and imagery but in how present a victim will be in the story of her own death. Well-informed, best practice media coverage gives us the knowledge we need (such as past history of violence) to understand and contextualize femicides within larger gender inequity.
One of those suggestions from OAITH — using friends and family as sources on reporting of femicide— reminded me of Joan Baxter’s story about Susie Butlin, who was killed by her neighbour, Ernest (“Junior”) Ross Duggan.
In that story from June 2020, just two months after the mass killings in Portapique, Baxter spoke with Suzanne Davis, Butlin’s best friend, about the threats Duggan was making to Butlin in the weeks before he murdered her, and how the RCMP failed to protect Butlin.
In July 2022, Baxter spoke with Brenda Forbes who used to live in Portapique and who warned police about her neighbour, but no one listened. That neighbour went on to kill 22 people on April 18 and 19, 2020. Forbes told Baxter about the warning signs that she saw, but that the RCMP refused to listen to, including how controlling and abusive that neighbour was of his common-law partner, Lisa Banfield.
Both of Baxter’s stories should remind us that we need to listen to women, believe women.
In April 2020, I wrote this piece “Male violence: “A pandemic in its own right” about how experts knew the killings in Portapique started with domestic violence. This quote from Andrea Gunraj, vice-president, public engagement with the Canadian Women’s Foundation, who I interviewed, still sticks with me: “Men who are privately dangerous to women are publicly dangerous to everyone.”
This is true, and so media’s reporting on the issue should not only reflect the stories of women who are killed, but how the violence they faced affects us all. Because it does. We’ve seen it over and over: at École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, in Portapique in 2020, when women including Melissa Hoskins and Dr. Elana Fric Shamji are killed, when hundreds of others are killed and their names don’t even get a mention in a headline. We can do better.
Michael MacDonald, the commissioner for the Mass Casualty Commission, had this to say to reporters about violence against women. From a story in CTV:
Women have been carrying, through community-based organizations, the burden of protecting women almost exclusively for far too long,” MCC commissioner Michael MacDonald said to reporters Thursday, while urging men — especially men in positions of power — to call out gender-based violence.
“Men who are leaders in society have to call it out for what it is, it’s an epidemic,”
Any woman in Nova Scotia who needs support can call or text the provincial toll-free line 1-855-225-0220, available 24/7 or their local shelter organization or call 911 if you’re in an emergency situation.
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If you didn’t know, the longtime supper-hour show Live at 5 was cut by 30 minutes in December. The show still runs from 5pm to 5:30pm, and CTV national news takes over that last half hour.
Now, some longtime viewers of Live at 5 and fans of its hosts Maria Panopalis, Jayson Baxter, and Katie Kelly, want the full 60 minutes back. This post was making the rounds on Wednesday:
It’s Mark and I miss “Live at 5”. Yes CTV destroyed totally our Atlantic content news stories. I can switch my channel to the CTVnews channels to get world news. But I have enjoyed our Atlantic broadcasts since tv had rabbit ears out of Moncton and Live at 5 since 1982..
CTV has become a glorified CNN and we do not need a politically correct news broadcast we need and deserve our Atlantic news. We want the sweet little Maritimer’s backyard stories.
A comment on CTV page asked for a poll on this, well do one, CTV does it for everything else. We like Maria and Jason and Katie and Bruce and rest of the team because they are Maritimers and dedicated to us!
Let’s go CTV, swallow your pride and give us back Live at 5, we can pretend it never happened!
Like to hear Steve Murphy’s opinion on this!
People love Live at 5 and are clearly missing the show. I think the hosts on shows like this really connect with their audiences and with local stories. What’s up with the change, I don’t know. Katie Kelly, one of the show’s hosts, shared this message on Facebook:
Thank you so much for the messages. We really have the best viewers in the world.
I was on vacation the week that the changes happened so that’s why you haven’t seen me. (in case you missed it, CTV’s Live at 5 is now a 30 minute show and a new national show has been added from 5:30-6)
From now until the beginning of January, I will be hosting CTV morning live with the lovely morning team… and in the new year I will be back on in the evening with arts and entertainment news on the 6pm show.
Sending so much love from Maria, Jay and I and we thank you for your support as we navigate these changes
