What a night. Full disclosure: I went to bed at midnight, before everything was done and dusted but as the less interesting option — another Liberal majority — was looking very  likely. I say “less interesting” because the Danish television show Borgen has convinced me the only interesting governments areRead More

B’Spoke Apparel The most interesting “recently awarded” tender I ran across in my recent plunge into the Nova Scotia tenders page is one I almost didn’t write about, it seemed so anodyne. The CBRM has awarded a two-year contract to B’Spoke Apparel for Transit employee clothing. To be more precise, itRead More

Over the last few columns, I have been making the case that ethics is as much a work of the imagination as it is of the intellect — we need to be able to imagine what a better world might look like before we can identify ways that might allowRead More

This past week I was lucky enough to participate in a Statistics Canada webinar. (I write that in complete sincerity — Stats Canada invited me to participate in a webinar and I accepted the invitation as happily as if I’d thought there’d be cake. Full disclosure: I thought there’d be cake.)Read More

Double vision? I promised to ask when and how Dennis Campbell of Ambassatours Gray Line got the nod to develop the property formerly occupied by the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club on Sydney’s harborfront and let you know what I found out. As you may recall, Campbell, whose firm operatesRead More

It all started with a sentence in a story about one of the men charged in the Cape Breton Regional Police’s “John Be Gone” undercover sting operation. You remember John Be Gone — initiated after complaints from downtown Sydney businesses about sex workers on Charlotte Street, it saw two femaleRead More

Back in March of this year, the United Way of Cape Breton, together with the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, sponsored the Community Impact Summit at Centre 200, a coming together of “business, government and non-profit sector leaders…to commit to specific, positive actions to help citizens living in poverty,” or asRead More

On May 22, Ambassador Elayne White of Costa Rica, president of a UN disarmament panel, released a ‘Draft Convention on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.’ The draft treaty, while certain to be subject to scrutiny and revision, faithfully reflects the determination of the 130 states attending the panel’s March sessionRead More

Not all political parties are equal, but it appears that candidates from each of the three main provincial parties are equal in their use of social media. The Liberal party dropped a candidate over inappropriate Twitter comments. An NDP candidate was forced to resign because of inappropriate online statements, andRead More

What to do this week Soon we will be getting very itchy to plant, but how do you tell for sure that your soil is ready? One of the most common questions I get this time of year is if it is time to plant yet, and I always say,Read More