🗞 Local baker vies for victory

EDUCATION

Two years later, what are your thoughts on $10-a-day child care?

Since 2021, families in Nova Scotia have been promised $10-a-day child care, on average, by March 2026. This promise, made through the Canada-Nova Scotia Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care Agreement, pledges $605 million from Ottawa plus $40 million from Nova Scotia over five years to end child care deserts and prioritize the funding of not-for-profit and public child care programs and services to combat costs to parents.

So, two years later, what has the agreement achieved? 

With approximately $500 million still to be released, how the province will achieve its ambitious goals of $10/day child care, opening of 9,500 new child care spaces and continuing to raise ECE wages by 2026 remains to be seen. Why? Because the province is late.

Read more from Lauren Phillips at The Coast.

We just launched a new weekly newsletter that compiles everything you need to know that’s happening at City Hall and, more importantly, where and how your tax dollars are being spent.

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Need to know

✅ Today is the last day of weekly green cart collection for the year. Bi-weekly collection will resume on Oct. 2.

💰 The province has announced a $15.4 million top-up to its Communities Challenge Fund, meant to help communities prepare and respond to the challenges of climate change.

🗣️ The province is reviewing the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy legislation and wants your input.

SPONSORED BY LIVE ART DANCE

Live Art Dance presents Christopher House

Live Art Dance presents Canadian dance icon Christopher House on October 27th & 28th at DANSpace, in the Light House Arts Centre!

New Tricks is an intimate solo work created and performed by Christopher House. It uses costume, disguise, ritual and 44 years of choreographic research to explore new ways of being in a veteran body. The work is personal and playful and is governed by a desire to embody liveness, the ambiguity of gesture, the poetry of failure and inefficiency, the beauty of the ordinary, and the queering of the imagination and the body.

Don’t miss this riveting solo show or the rest of the Live Art Dance season! Get your tickets today! ✨

On The Coast

In other news

♿️ Dalhousie University's MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance will look into accessibility in tourism as part of a fall study.

🏗️ The HRM’s building height restrictions could be a barrier in the path of constructing more affordable housing units. However, councillor Waye Mason doesn’t believe it’ll be an issue.

🩺 Due to new requirements from the College of Family Physicians of Canada, Dalhousie is preparing to add an extra year to its residency program for family physicians, a change the province isn’t too happy about.

🚨 A man was rushed to hospital on Wednesday night after a stabbing at a Dartmouth apartment building on Primrose Street.

🌀 Today marks 20 years since Hurricane Juan swept over the province. CBC took a look back at the natural disaster and how it permanently impacted Nova Scotia.

🐶 16 dogs who were rescued from the wildfires happening in the Northwest Territories have made it to the Nova Scotia SPCA where they’ll be cared for and rehomed.

🎓 Cape Breton University’s new medical school is on course to open in the fall of 2025.

BAKE OFF

Halifax’s Sydney Hayden vies for cake crown on The Great Canadian Baking Show

It was 1am in February, and Sydney Hayden was baking up a kitchen flurry. The goal: A three-tier, eight-layer snowman cake that would impress the judges enough to nab her a spot on the upcoming season of The Great Canadian Baking Show. Auditions were the following morning at Marriott’s Residence Inn on Grafton Street. The late night wasn’t exactly by design—Hayden had been up all day, working two full-time jobs. But it wasn’t just a regular cake she was baking, either.

“It was designed to get lit on fire,” Hayden, 23, recalls, speaking by phone with The Coast. That would lead to some haggling on Hayden’s part. The Residence Inn’s staff, understandably, had mild concerns about the idea of setting something ablaze in a building where hundreds of people slept. The persistence worked: Hayden convinced the show’s producers to let her light the cake outside the hotel. In the end, it helped to win her a spot as one of 10 contestants on the show’s 7th season—premiering Sunday, Oct. 1 on CBC.

Read reporter Martin Bauman’s full interview with Hayden at The Coast.