Last week, the Shelburne town council held a town hall meeting to discuss the old Morvan Road dump, which is correctly recognized as an example of environmental racism against Shelburne’s Black community.
But during the meeting, reports Elizabeth Chiu for the CBC, Mayor Stan Jacklin “rose to his feet “to make something more clear” to approximately 80 people gathered in the fire hall’s auditorium.”:
He said the south end of Shelburne, where the Morvan Road dump was located, is not a Black community but a community of mixed race people, Black people, Caucasian people and Indigenous people.
His comments were met with heckling from several people in the audience.
Moreover, he said the dump’s establishment in the 1940s was not environmental racism because his uncle, who was Black, sold the property to the town.
Jacklin said he grew up near the site and takes issue with characterizations that the south end of Shelburne was a marginalized community.
There’s a lot to unpack there, including the suggestion that racism can’t happen to people who aren’t poor. That is ridiculous. Ask the very wealthy Kamala Harris or Barack Obama if they’ve ever experienced racism.
From the article, I’m thinking Jacklin thinks acknowledging the racist act of building the dump implicates his kin, the seller of the property, as responsible for racism against his own community, and by implication Jacklin himself bears some of that responsibility. But that line of thought doesn’t hold up either. There’s a long history of people caught in impossible situations in the constructed racism around them. Jacklin’s uncle had whatever motivations he had for selling the property, but it was the powers-that-be that decided to site the dump, apparently against the wishes of the broader community.
But I don’t know Jacklin, and it’s unfair of me to psychoanalyze him from a distance.
What I can do, however, is fact check Jacklin’s claim that the south end of Shelburne was not a Black community.
I don’t have records from the 1950s, when the dump was built. But the 1931 census of Shelburne is published, and it helpfully provides a street-by-street listing of people and their racial background. (It’s possible that the south end experienced a wave of diversification in the 1940s, but I find that unlikely.)
The census shows that there was a cluster of Black families living on Wright Road north of town, and a handful on the eastern end of Kings Street and on and near Parr’s Road, which I think was the start of the old Annapolis-Shelburne Road, now abandoned.
But most of the Black families were clustered in the south end: starting at about George Street and moving south: William Street, Digby Street, Harriet Street, Charlotte Street. Thomas Street was about half Black.
The census is full of interesting stories. The widow Sophia Davis, 52, is listed as the “English” head of household, living on Digby Street with her three “Negro” children and three “Negro” grandchildren.
Sophia rented her home for $5/month, but to Stan Jacklin’s point, most of the Black people in the neighbourhood owned their homes. Among the priciest was the 10-room house on Harriet Street owned by 64-year-old Thomas Jacklin, valued at $1,500. Thomas was a house painter, and lived with his wife Florence and their seven children. (There are several Jacklin families in the neighbourhood.)
Black people worked a range of jobs, including what must have been well-paid positions on the railroad and at the shipyard. There’s a cobbler, a carpenter, several truckmen. I don’t see any Black people working as fishermen, which seems exclusively a white profession. At the lower end of the employment spectrum are labourers and people working odd jobs; several Black women worked and lived as “servants” in the homes of wealthy white families along the waterfront, but more women worked as a “domestic” in a “private home” while actually living in their own homes in the south end.
It’s true that the south end wasn’t exclusively Black. There were people described as “German,” “Scotch,” and “English” among them.
One family seemed to confound the census taker. The handwriting is barely legible, so I may have the spelling wrong, but there’s an Albert Asker on Hammond Street who is described as “German,” living with his “Indian” wife Nancy. They had 10 children, ranging from the 11-month-old Helen to the 18-year-old Russell, all of whom the census taker initially described as “German,” but that was subsequently crossed off and replaced with “mix.”
But that diversity in the neighbourhood was the exception. The south end of Shelburne was overwhelmingly Black, and to characterize it otherwise is a misreading of history.
You can see and search the 1931 census yourself here. Search for 1931, Nova Scotia, Shelburne, District 16, Subsection 23.
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NOTICED
1. The Nakba exhibit
Last week, El Jones went with her mother and sister for the opening of the Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. She wrote about her experience for The Breach:
Hundreds of protestors have gathered by the entrances, many holding signs denying the Nakba, as elderly survivors, young families, and members of the Palestinian community and their supporters walk past.
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The protest was called by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) after months of attempts to have the exhibit canceled or delayed, with their efforts being joined by groups like B’nai Brith and an Israeli legal organization who threatened an injunction.
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As calls to shut down the museum exhibit from pro-Israel groups, the Israeli ambassador, and a blitz of right-wing media have failed to have its intended effect, CIJA are now resorting to protesting the opening ceremonies.
Among the protestors, holding a sign that reads “Nothing About Us Without Us” is Gail Asper, daughter of Israel “Izzy” Asper, who initially conceived of and funded the museum as an institution to commemorate the Holocaust. That sign in many ways sums up a controversy manufactured by the national media. It insists that the story of Palestinians can only be told through the lens of Israel. It claims that Palestinians’ experiences are a threat to the Jewish community. And it positions Palestinians’ very existence as a matter to be decided, and decided alone, by Jewish people.
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After weeks of hysterical articles, allegations of Palestinian foreign interference in the media and in parliament, the resignation of a Jewish trustee from the board of the museum, and claims that the exhibit would lead to “discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students,” the size of the exhibit comes as a surprise.
Taking up just twelve metres of an existing gallery, the exhibit consists of a couple of placards, artwork, and a screen surrounded by artifacts including an embroidered dress, a land deed, the keys to Rana Abullah’s family house, and a keffiyeh. All of it comprises approximately 250 words of historical context in one small corner in a vast 7 floor museum.
The language describing the Nakba is notably passive and restrained. Palestinians are “shaped by wars” in which the perpetrator is not named. One gets the impression that the wording has been carefully designed to avoid the word “Israel,” except when absolutely necessary. Palestinians “remain refugees” with no mention of the denial of their right to return. “Present-day violence” simply “occurs,” as if it emerges untethered from any culprit. Palestinians experience “intergenerational trauma” as if that trauma is not enhanced by the Canadian government exploiting loopholes to send weapons to Israel that kill Palestinians; by the accusation that to speak of the genocide of their relatives is hateful and antisemitic; as if the people outside the museum organized by CIJA and other Israel advocacy groups are not trying to perpetuate that silencing and erasure.
Jones discusses the history and contested role of the museum and “the contradictions of human rights discourse and the ways it is wielded in the national Canadian narrative.” Along the way, she intersperses her narrative with first-person accounts from Palestinians speaking to their own experiences.
Click or tap here to read “The Nakba exhibit is a breakthrough for a long-silenced Palestinian narrative.”
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2. Google is destroying our environment
“I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Google’s latest climate report, but holy hell, I did not expect this,” writes Ketan Joshi, a Norwegian-based analyst who studies AI and its reliance on fossil fuels:
The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever, and it puts them way ahead of Microsoft. It is almost certainly a reflection of the obscene energy hunger of their ever-expanding bloated generative AI systems, and a vindication of the warnings we’ve been raising for several years now.
Joshi calls out Google’s false claims, including the mostly bogus “Power Adjustment” in the graph above.
I was particularly angered by Google’s conflation of machine learning processes and generative AI programs with the catchall “AI”:
We also found Google was among many companies smooshing together old, low-energy forms of AI (like wind forecasting) with the generative slop tsunami: falsely coupling them to pretend you can’t have one without the other. Essentially, justifying their private jet sales because they also sold a bicycle.
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Everything presented here is ‘traditional’ AI, ie, the old, low energy machine learning systems. Nowhere do Google explain these technologies are wildly different to generative AI.
Google’s total claim for emissions reductions “enabled” by their products is a whopping 41 million megatonnes of CO2-e, more than the company’s entire footprint by a good margin. Most of this comes from the extremely absurd claim that Google Earth (!) enables the siting of clean energy projects – and so Google claims credit for the entire emissions reductions of all those projects for the full year of 2025…
I mean. Come on. There are so many satellite imagery programs out there. They could do the same thing for Google Docs or Gmail and get similarly huge numbers. This is such weak logic, and it’s the bulk of this headline number.
These are very, very significant claims from one of the world’s biggest companies, but the entire space of ‘avoided emissions’ statements like these is totally unregulated. Every single claim comes with the footnote “The data and claims have not been independently verified”. And Google doesn’t share enough information for anyone to even try to do an independent verification for things like ‘fuel efficient routing in Google maps’ or thermostat energy efficiency savings.
Google also says a lot of nonsense about the power (and therefore environmental) cost per query coming down, but ignoring that much, much larger costs come from generative AI programs:
What is happening is that GenAI’s climate harm comes from the system design, such as Google’s AI overview triggering constantly whether users want it or not, in addition to significantly worse digital bloat tools dominating overconsumption.
Joshi quotes an International Energy Agency report:
This arithmetic raises a question that the available disclosures do not yet answer. If text- based inference at massive scale would account for such a thin slice of projected electricity demand, the bulk of planned capacity must be destined for other workloads, such as large-scale model training, video and image generation, autonomous agents running multi-step pipelines, or enterprise deployments not yet reflected in public usage figures.
How big of a problem is this? Consider this graph, comparing Google’s power demands to that of entire countries:
And increasingly, that demand is being met by burning fossil fuels. On his Bluesky account, Joshi quotes data centre developers justifying that usage. The first is from Ian Black:
I did renewables for 15 years. I got into power because I grew up in the mountains and I’m a big skier and I wanted to save winter. Okay. That’s my 25-year-old self-talking. This year was the worst winter in the history of my home state, Colorado. It breaks my heart and now I’m developing 10 gas plants. So I have weekly conversations with myself about what it is I’m doing and why. There is no future of data centers without gas…
The second is from Holly Adams:
I think coming from renewables, we always used to say that, look, we needed gas to bridge it until we could get to 100% renewables. It’s flipped, but right now we are actually needing renewables to bridge to gas because gas turbines, the lead times are pretty long.
The gas industry is having a resurgence thanks to AI data centres. And in large part, Google is driving this. I noted a couple of weeks ago that even the search workaround, including “-ai” in your queries, has been disabled, such that you can’t make a search without getting the AI-generated summaries.
My shorthand for this is that every time you use AI, you’re burning down a rainforest.
I don’t think people should be held individually responsible for reining in carbon emissions — we should have laws and government regulation of tech companies, affordable transit, and so forth. The individual responsibility thing perhaps reached peak absurd when Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the French minister of energy transition, told us all to address climate change by deleting our old emails, just as Google was seeing an exponential growth in emissions because it shoves GenAI into every damn thing against our will.
Still, I’ve mostly stopped using Google search, opting instead for Qwant, which I set to prohibit AI-generated responses, and I haven’t really noticed much of a difference, as Google search had already gone down the toilet.
My next step is to stop using Chrome; it’s not my primary browser, but I do use it for a few things, and I’ll transfer saved passwords and such to a different browser.
It isn’t much, but I feel I have to do something to get off the Google train.
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3. As the planet burns, Carney doubles down on fossil fuels
I was going to write a whole thing about this, but Suzanne Rent beat me to the punch with an open letter to Mark Carney, so I’ll let that speak for itself:
Dear Prime Minister Mark Carney;
I saw the news story that your Canada Day speech in Edmonton was cancelledbecause the extreme weather, including heavy rain, hail, and thunder and lightning, in Ottawa prevented your plane and dozens of others from taking off that day.
Still, you got to give your speech on Parliament Hill in which you urged Canadians to work together because “in a crisis, fortune favours the bold.”
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Canadians are rightfully worried about the environment and how climate change is affecting their country and their lives. They are living its effects right this moment, as are you.
Still, just yesterday we all had to read the news about the pipeline in Alberta.
On Tuesday, you talked about the push for more oil and gas, saying that the Trudeau-era climate emissions plan was “too expensive.”
What we can’t afford is to continue to ignore climate change. Canada is lagging behind other G7 countries when it comes to reducing emissions. That doesn’t sound too bold to me.
We also have to continue to listen to your push for artificial intelligence (AI) — AI for All — as communities across Canada fight against data centres. That includes in Lorneville, N.B., which has been fighting a proposed AI data centre since last year.
Just last week in Nova Scotia, Cumberland County voted to start working on a moratorium on data centres, as a rumour circulated that a company has plans to build one in Malagash. The rumour may not be true, but the county was bold in its push to get ahead of the plans.
You can’t say you’re listening to Canadians and then call them illiterate about AI.
Click or tap here to read “Dear Prime Minister Mark Carney: Canada can’t afford to ignore climate change.”
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THE LATEST FROM THE HALIFAX EXAMINER:
‘It’s time for someone new to sit in this role’: New Glasgow Mayor Nancy Dicks on her decision to not reoffer
Suzanne Rent continues her profiles of Nova Scotia’s mayors, this time with an interview with New Glasgow Mayor Nancy Dicks:
Nancy Dicks is just about halfway through her third term as mayor of New Glasgow, and she’s already made a decision about her future: Dicks is not running for a fourth term as mayor.
That’s what I learned when I met with Dicks in her office in New Glasgow Town Hall on Provost Street on May 28.
Before Dicks got into municipal politics in 2012, she worked for 35 years as an elementary school teacher in Stellarton.
After her first term as councillor, she ran for mayor in 2016 and won. She won again in both 2020 and 2024.
“It’s the most interesting opportunity,” Dicks said of being on council. “When I ran for council, I really enjoyed it. It was a learning experience, for sure.”
Like other mayors I spoke with in this series, Dicks say going from being a councillor to a mayor was a big transition.
“For me, I needed that first opportunity [to be councillor] before I even would have considered the next role,” Dicks said. “When you move into the mayor’s role, you have to be ready to be the spokesperson for the town and you have to be ready for what comes your way.”
Dicks said what came her way — especially starting in her second term as mayor — was the criticism and negativity. She said that’s because her second term coincided with the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That changed everything. It changed how we communicated. It changed how we connected with our community,” Dicks said. “So, it was getting through that term that was interesting.”
That term also included an assault charge against Dicks by Angela Bowden, a poet and author in New Glasgow. Matthew Byard wrote about the incident that led to the charges, which were later dropped.
Bowden’s thoughts on the dropped charges were shared in this article from December 2021.
As for her third term as mayor, Dicks describes it as “very different” yet again.
“I find in many ways we’re working our way through what happened during COVID, how the world changed, how people changed, how communication changed,” Dicks said. “I would say of my three terms, this one is more difficult.”
Part of that difficulty, Dicks said, comes from social media, which she has pulled back from using very often.
“I don’t use it from a personal perspective. I share things the town prioritizes, and that is shared information from the council and the town,” Dicks said. “I don’t interject my opinions or my thoughts. I pulled back from that.”
Dicks said there have been allegations and personal attacks about her on social media.
“If I don’t give the opportunity for it to happen, then it feels safer,” Dicks said.
“What I’ve become over the years is more resilient. I try not to personalize everything. I think sometimes you’re the easy target. I don’t let it bother me. I learned that over the last number of years.”
Click or tap here to read “‘It’s time for someone new to sit in this role’: New Glasgow Mayor Nancy Dicks on her decision to not reoffer.”
I know nothing at all about the alleged assault. I haven’t read the complaint, I wasn’t in court when the complaint was dismissed, I haven’t talked with anyone at all about it. So I have no comment about it.
What I’m about to say has nothing at all to do with the above, but it got me thinking about the trials of being a somewhat public person. I usually don’t acknowledge that to myself, and am blissfully unaware that at least some people out there know who I am while I have no idea who they are.
Sometimes, however, that bliss is broken in disturbing ways, even threatening ways. I’ve been verbally harassed. I get vitriolic emails on the regular. People around me who have nothing to do with my work have been doxxed. Twice in the past few weeks I’ve been accosted on the sidewalk by quite angry people; in one instance, guns were mentioned. I guess I signed up for this, and I have thick skin. Plus, I’m a dude, which carries some protection. I don’t overly worry about it.
But I don’t like that we live in this world. Like Dicks, I’ve mostly retreated from social media, which all too often is used by bad faith actors and anonymous personal attacks, not to mention the misinformation and fascism. I long ago got off Twitter. I don’t use Facebook at all. I have an Instagram account that I use to check in on my friends, but I don’t post on it. I’m on Bluesky, but I don’t use it obsessively like I did back in the days of pre-Musk Twitter.
Instead, I’ve been leaning into my third spaces, meeting people out in the world.
I think that’s probably all for the best. Let’s build connected lives unmediated by digital spaces.
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Government
No meetings
On campus
No events
Literary Events
Latte Lit Open Mic (Friday, 6:30pm, Halifax) — details
In the harbour
Halifax
07:00: RCC Classic, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from Shanghai, China
07:00: Elene, cargo ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Saint-Pierre
07:00: Pictor, container ship, arrives at Pier 42 from Portland
15:30: Seawolf, Mike Potter’s yacht, sails from Dartmouth Cove for sea
16:30: Elene sails for sea
17:00: Pictor sails for Argentia, Newfoundland
19:00: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, sails from Fairview Cove for St. John’s
Cape Breton
09:00: High Loyalty, oil tanker, sails from EverWind for sea
Footnotes
This will be the coolest summer for the rest of your life.
