Editor’s note: As you may have noticed, Fast & Curious is being published on a Friday. It’s an experiment to see if it a) works for my readers and b) works for me. Feel free to send me your thoughts.   Port Hawkesbury Man Does it really make sense toRead More

I do not own a car, so I have a rather cavalier attitude toward downtown Sydney parking — I’m that person, striding purposefully toward my destination, chuckling at you as you circle the block, looking for a place to park (unless, of course, it’s raining, in which case there will beRead More

On 9 April 2007, after a $20 million, two-year restoration project, the Vimy Monument, the centerpiece of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France, was reopened to the public. In an elaborate ceremony also marking the 90th anniversary of the assault on Vimy Ridge, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told aRead More

I had CBC radio playing in the background on Monday and an item about property tax assessments in New Brunswick came on and the next thing I knew, I was listening to Kevin Lacey of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF). I didn’t actually catch what he said but I can guess withRead More

In last month’s column, I argued, first, that ethics is concerned not with the world that we actually live in, but with the world that we ought to construct together–with, that is to say, the imaginary world that does not yet exist, but which we might yet create if weRead More

“Tartan and coal” proclaimed the front page of the Cape Breton Post, rather cryptically, on Saturday and I couldn’t resist trying to guess what the headline referred to before I actually read the article: the world’s worst ice cream flavor? Sydney Academy’s Class of ’57 prom theme? Alexander Graham Bell’s terriers?  Read More

Remember that brief swirl of controversy around the mysterious renaming of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s Civic Centre to “City Hall?” A front-page story in the Cape Breton Post on March 6 saying the issue would be on the agenda of that day’s General Committee Meeting (placed there by District 6Read More

Bernie in coal country McDowell County, West Virginia is coal country. Although they got into the game a little later than we did here in Cape Breton — their first large-scale mines were developed in the mid-1800s — they made up for lost time and by the 1950s were regularlyRead More

CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke’s term as Speaker of the Nova Scotia Legislature ran from June 2006 to October 2007 but in his head, I think it never ended. How else to explain an agenda item like this one, from the 7 March 2017 meeting of the CBRM General Committee:    Read More

Pope Francis marked the fourth anniversary of his election to the papacy on Monday of this week, and the debate is on as to what he has or has not accomplished in those four years. Aside from this important anniversary for Francis, it would appear that March 2017 arrived at theRead More