Delivered November 17, 2025
Good afternoon, and welcome.
It is wonderful to see so many familiar faces, along with many new ones.
Thank you to the Honourable Brian Wong. In your work as an educator and in government, you’ve devoted much of your career to supporting the students and educational institutions of our province. Thank you for being here to support King’s and the Southeast Corner Project today.
On behalf of the community of the University of King’s College, I’d like to extend our gratitude to all of you for being here—for your time and your interest in the future of King’s.
This is what today is all about: the future at King’s.
Currently, we face immediate financial challenges in a difficult postsecondary environment.
And yet, I say the future of King’s is bright. It is full of promise.
I say this with confidence… thanks to the support of the many people who have become trusted partners of King’s and of the Southeast Corner Project (SEC).
Today, we share with you our progress on a project that is “infrastructure renewal” of a different kind. A building that is not just created for—but envisioned by—the communities it will serve and that will expand our definition of community to embrace those who have not always felt welcomed. A building that is conceived of and designed not just with input from, but in union with, Mi’kmaw and African Nova Scotian partners through meaningful and inclusive conversations.
So yes… at its foundation, this is a much-needed ‘infrastructure renewal’ project.
We need updated and purpose-built spaces for our School of Journalism, Writing & Publishing.
We need new residences.
We need updated athletic and wellness facilities.
We need a gathering space that will honour our history and celebrate our future.
But this project has become so much more than just these practical needs. It’s the manifestation of what we can do when we work together to make our world a better place. When we put our brilliant and different ideas, our collaboration and our ambition into action for a greater good.
We arrive at this phase in the SEC Project after many rich and varied conversations… a few impassioned debates… and periods of quiet reflection. The result is a conceptual design for a new building that I am proud to say achieved strong endorsement from our “coming together circle,” our forum for working on reconciliation with our Mi’kmaw partners; from focus groups held at the Delmore Buddy Daye Learning Institute and from the advisory committee to our partnership with the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia; from King’s faculty; and from our Board of Governors.
Together, we have moved past our doubts about what may be possible, to seize our confidence in what could be accomplished by working together.
As I was thinking about how far we’ve come, a line from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure came to my attention.
This is what we do at King’s—we learn from the past, to understand the present and shape the future.
In that play, the character of Lucio says:
“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
He says this to embolden the character of Isabella when she is doubting her own power to act—such is the strength we have to help one another past self-doubt. This passage made me think of all the people whose collaborative spirit and determined efforts have brought the Southeast Corner Project to this day.
In Canada—and here at King’s—it is time to come together, to cast off self-doubts, to be bold about building the future we want and need.
Here, at King’s, we need a place that plays an active role in how our story as the little university that can, will unfold.
A place where storytellers will gather to be inspired and to inspire.
A place where stories are told from many perspectives to help shape more comprehensive and inclusive understandings of Canada.
A place that welcomes and gathers the range of voices and perspective we need for deeply transformative education that shapes public dialogue and enables an informed citizenry.
A place to educate and nurture the journalistic, literary and storytelling talent essential to the richness of our culture, the strength of sectors of our economy, and the vibrancy of our democracy.
For this, we conceived of a building that is as bold in design as it is ambitious in purpose.
This is something we can only do by tapping into the power of community from within and beyond our beloved Quad.
Today’s event opened with a land acknowledgement. I want to note that we are gathered just a short distance from where the first Peace and Friendship Treaty was signed in 1725, 300 years ago. That proximity is central to the story of this project. We began by acknowledging we could not do this properly or honourably on unceded land without the blessing, guidance and collaboration of our friends in the Mi’kmaw nation. This is what it can mean to say, “we are all Treaty People.”
We also knew this project was an opportunity to work in unity, in accordance with values of Ubuntu, with our African Nova Scotian partners, including to honour their ancestors who helped build every corner of this city and have been an integral part of its fabric from its very beginnings. The contribution of our African Nova Scotian partners is also essential to this project.
Ongoing collaboration—from these communities and so many others—will continue to be a driving force in the success of the SEC Project and the success of King’s. The design we unveil today incorporates features that will make our campus more welcoming to Indigenous people and Black people, including with spaces and supports dedicated to them and their well-being and success.
The generosity of our partners, of our friends from these communities has been humbling. Their confidence in what they can contribute to the future of journalism and storytelling more widely, is inspiring.
The building this project will become will be a home worthy of what will happen in it. It will continue and expand the role of King’s as a unique higher education leader in Canada.
The SEC is an investment in excellence because it will be a home for the following:
Our outstanding journalism program that has alumni reporting for every major news outlet in Canada—and many around the world, as well as in local journalism and the innovative start-ups that are the future of the profession. They—and our students—continue to impress with a lengthy list of the country’s most prestigious industry awards and with the support they attract, including from Peter Mansbridge, who has invested in King’s because of his admiration for how we prepare our students for investigative journalism. And just let me declare this before going any further—King’s is in journalism for the long haul. This is the commitment at the heart of the SEC Project, which will, with its state-of-the-art central newsroom design, become a hub for a media renaissance in Halifax and beyond, including with the Podcasting Centre of Excellence we are creating.
Our Writing & Publishing programs have grown exponentially, becoming engines for literary creativity, the publishing end of the creative economy, and a cornerstone of Halifax’s growing recognition as a literary city. Alumni from these programs have penned more than 80 published books—with more on the way—including many that have garnered coveted literary awards and been optioned for podcasts, film and television. Soon, we will add scriptwriting to our portfolio of writing and publishing programming to become a dynamic part of Nova Scotia’s thriving film industry.
Our celebrated King’s Co-op Bookstore, is beloved by book lovers far and wide. It does much, with the Foundation Year Program and our upper years humanities programs, our iconic library, and our MFA programs, to make King’s a centre of book culture and economy in Halifax and beyond. In the SEC, the King’s bookstore will have the visibility and space its brilliance and potential demand.
Our Blue Devils athletics program is the epitome of small but mighty and punching above one’s weight. The SEC will give our Blue Devils a home that is worthy of the banners that hang in this gymnasium, and of the role varsity athletics has long played at King’s in forming character and producing leaders. Like King’s itself, our scholar athletes defy the odds of our tiny size and heavy emphasis on academic success, in winning often. Win or lose, they always compete with honour as they represent their university with distinction across the region and country. In the SEC Project, they will have modern facilities with enough room for them and their fans. Go Blue Devils!
And of course, the SEC will be a place to live on campus for students who will benefit from the King’s conviction that an extraordinary undergraduate experience is a residential one. Our new residence will expand the kinds of accommodation we provide on campus and therefore the kinds of students we can accommodate—students with disabilities, graduate students, students with children and mature students. It will give more students the opportunity to live together, learn together and grow together in a campus community that feels like home.
We have come this far because of a generous donation from King’s Chancellor Debra Deane Little, and her husband Bob Little. This allowed us to engage the perfect architects for this project, Martin Davidson of Diamond Schmitt, Jane Abbott of Abbott Brown, and their team of astonishingly talented colleagues. We thank Debra and Bob for their generosity and even more so, for their faith and confidence in the future of King’s.
This project is also about something else that’s core to King’s: our association with Dalhousie University. I am delighted to have my colleague, Dr. Kim Brooks, and many other Dalhousie colleagues, here today. Some of you have heard me say that, with the building we are in, it can sometimes feel like King’s has its back turned to Dalhousie. The building we envisage will instead be a portal between the two universities that share a campus and an integrated academic mission. It will therefore be a building worthy of the progress King’s and Dalhousie are making as we take this partnership to greater heights and new frontiers.
I invite you to spend some time with the design concepts from Diamond Schmitt and Abbott Brown and read the quotes from our many supporters on the boards around the room.
Together, they tell a rich story of how this project brings the King’s community together, promises to enrich the King’s/Dalhousie association, and strengthens growing partnerships with the communities with whom we share the land on which we will build and the history that has shaped us.
The team of Diamond Schmitt and Abbott Brown have done an outstanding job of capturing the vision of this project in a design that combines beauty and functionality, as did Andrew Cobb in designing the Quad’s original buildings and the plan for the Quad’s continuing development. The design we unveil today is equally wonderful in anticipating chapters in the history of King’s and Nova Scotia that are yet to be written. Take a look…
I hope you’re as inspired by what you’ve just seen as we are. Diamond Schmitt and Abbott Brown have created a uniquely striking design—highlighted by a stunning galleria that will capture sunlight during the day and emit a welcoming glow at night. In time, it may come to be thought of as a campfire for the Quad that calls us to gather to learn, think, create, live, play and imagine together.
The architectural renderings we share today allow us to see the SEC Project as a conceivable future. They give form to vision. They fuel our ambition to bring the project to fruition.
For today, let’s celebrate this huge milestone by giving the architects and all who have contributed to their work, a huge round of applause.
We live in a foreboding time in history: AI, the retreat from liberal democracy and human rights, economic turmoil and the failure to address existential environmental threats. It is also a time when too many of us are looking inward—into our phones and echo chambers—and too often, away from each other. Strong opinions drown out hard facts, polarization overwhelms empathy and analysis, and individualism and selfishness elbow out caring and our shared humanity.
We cannot be governed by our doubts. We must be governed by our confidence in what we can accomplish and achieve together—through collaboration, leadership and shared ambition.
Today—236 years after the founding of King’s—I believe the world needs what the Southeast Corner Project offers—a place that builds on the past so that we may shape the future together.
To everyone who has been part of this project so far: THANK YOU.
To those of you who’ve now seen the beautiful beacon we are building for generations of students who will live and learn in community here, embrace the tradition of liberal education that molds the mind, body and soul here and become the storytellers our world needs here, we ask for your support and bid you—WELCOME TO THE FUTURE OF KING’S.
Thank you.