Halifax reporters describe forcible removal from $10-billion data centre announcement

About 120 people crowded into a university lecture hall in Halifax on Friday to hear the story of how two veteran reporters were evicted from a news conference announcing the development of a $10-billion data centre in Point Tupper, Cape Breton.

“I have had experiences in a lot of countries that weren’t democracies, where I have been asked to leave,” said Halifax Examiner reporter Joan Baxter.

“This was not being asked to leave, this was being told to leave by someone who was extremely angry…it was vindictive, and it was vitriolic, it was nasty,” she added.

Baxter says an angry company official took the cellphone out of her hands, had her backpack taken away and grabbed her a couple of times.

“So yeah, it was very upsetting,” she said. “It took me hours to stop shaking.”

Baxter was referring to an incident on Friday, October 16th during a news conference just outside Port Hawkesbury in Cape Breton where she and her colleague Jennifer Henderson were forcibly removed from an event held to announce “the largest privately funded investment in Nova Scotia history,” according to EverWind Fuels, the American company promoting the data centre project.

“I got a tip on Thursday that there was going to be an announcement of a data centre in Point Tupper,” said Jennifer Henderson.

“We got the tip, a $10 billion event and federal and provincial politicians would be there,” she added.

“I thought, well, there’ll be a news release, the provincial government, the federal government, they’ll be advertising this,” Henderson said.

But the Halifax Examiner, an online, independent, subscriber-based, news outlet, did not receive either a news release or an invitation so Henderson and Baxter drove to Cape Breton to see what was happening for themselves.

Public event, but ‘private’ news conference

Although a security guard at the site told Baxter and Henderson their names weren’t on the list, he directed them to park where a shuttle van would pick them up after they identified themselves as members of the media from Halifax.

So, both reporters ended up sitting in the audience recording audio and taking pictures during speeches delivered by EverWind CEO Trent Vichie, Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston and Liberal MP Kody Blois, parliamentary secretary to the prime minister.

But as soon as the speeches ended and reporters from a wide variety of Nova Scotia news organizations were getting ready to ask questions about the data centre project, angry company officials forced Baxter and Henderson to leave after telling them they were trespassing on private property.

Halifax Examiner editor Tim Bousquet said he worries about how the company could classify a public announcement about a huge data centre as a private event.

“It’s indicative of a larger trend,” he said, adding a company such as EverWind should not be allowed to tell reporters they cannot cover a public announcement because it’s on private property.

“That’s the core of the problem right there,” Bousquet said.

AI turns ‘billionaires into trillionaires’

Bousquet, who founded the Halifax Examiner in 2014, said he’s been thinking about the expulsion of his reporters and how it fits with his reporting and commentary about artificial intelligence or AI.

According to EverWind, its data centre in Point Tupper will be leased for 20 years to the big American AI company Anthropic, which runs the chatbot Claude.

“There is tremendous public anger at data centres globally for good reason,” Bousquet said referring, for example, to their need to consume massive quantities of local water and the noise pollution they generate.

“I think the public anger is reflective additionally or maybe even foundationally of an anger at AI completely. We’re sick of that shit,” he added, to laughter and applause.

“I see AI as part and parcel of the autocratic mission. It’s to confuse us. We don’t know what’s real, what’s not real…the billionaires will become trillionaires and the rest of us will lose our jobs.”

EverWind apology

Meantime, EverWind told CBC that the Halifax Examiner reporters were asked to leave because they had not notified the company they would attend the event and “did not meet the legislated security protocols for being on site,” an apparent reference to Transport Canada regulations about sites where fuels are stored. (EverWind has a $60 million fossil fuel terminal and storage facility at Point Tupper that it bought in 2022 when it first came to Nova Scotia.)

The company told CBC that the reporters’ “interaction with an EverWind employee…fell short of our expectations. We apologize for the incident and will review our procedures to ensure that similar situations are handled appropriately in the future.”

“We never saw an apology,” Baxter says.

“Yes, it was one employee who really screwed up, but the buck stops with the billionaire and he was there and she was texting with somebody and she did not do that on her own,” she adds, referring to New York-based billionaire Trent Vichie who founded the company.

Baxter says it’s no accident that the Halifax Examiner was not invited to the data centre announcement.

For the last four years, its reporting and commentary have featured many stories about EverWind including ones about Vichie’s support for Donald Trump, his friendship with Premier Houston and Houston’s sudden “flip flop” on data centres as well as the millions of dollars in government subsidies EverWind has received.

Baxter’s latest report, which points out that the proposed data centre will not require an environmental assessment, includes links to the many other stories the Examiner has published since 2022.

Bruce Wark worked in broadcasting and journalism education for more than 35 years. He was at CBC Radio for nearly 20 years as senior editor of network programs such as The World at Six and World Report. He currently writes for The New Wark Times, where this story first appeared on October 25, 2026.