As I guess everybody here knows already, one should take what the media say with a grain of salt. They have an incentive to sensationalize stories to get readers to pay attention.
It also seems to me that the quality of Halifax's print media has gone down over the past few years. The Herald has been dealing with layoffs and even The Coast may have been better a few years ago. I could be wrong, but I remember it having more balanced and informative articles, whereas now those have been replaced by Tim Bousquet's dogmatic screeds.
Halifax has been doing really, really well lately. These are the hard numbers to look at:
http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/lfss04a-eng.htm
The unemployment rate is lower than Calgary's and employment went up by 3% last year. A couple of years ago Halifax had the
fastest growing economy in Canada. That is all far above what I would have expected, and it may get even better in the coming years. It is entirely possible that Halifax will become a wealthy, high-growth city for several decades.