CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke wants to be the next leader of the provincial Progressive Conservative party and has been touring the province trying to determine whether anyone else wants to see him in that role. I’m guessing this means he is running. The alternative — that he will announce publiclyRead More

Editor’s Note: While looking for captions for the photos in this week’s Faces from the Cape Breton Highlander feature, I ran across these accounts of City of Sydney council meetings from 1967. I think you’ll see why they struck me as being à propos.   Cape Breton Highlander, 4 October 1967Read More

“Unconstitutional and illegal” So declared 2,000 passionate and angry Cape Bretoners, in their eighth bid to get the British government to reverse its decision to annex Cape Breton to Nova Scotia in 1820. In light of Senator Dan Christmas’ recent speech re-opening the issue of Cape Breton provincehood, I thinkRead More

“I‘ve been telling you for years your prices are too low!” My daughter was cross. I love her dearly but there are times when I wish she weren’t quite so adept at scolding me. Don’t know where she learned that skill. She wasn’t wrong. One of the downsides of beingRead More

The Catholic Church divides the liturgical year into six seasons, the first of which, Advent, lasts four weeks (this year only three full weeks) and has what the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops describes as a “twofold character”: a season during which Catholics prepare to celebrate the birth ofRead More

I’ve been going through old photos from the Cape Breton Highlander and decided to share some of them with you in this last Spectator issue of 2017. Many of them are the work of photographer Ray Doucet. I asked John Campbell, who was the editor of the Highlander (and isRead More

What to do this week This week, I would like to talk about taking care of your garden tools. This is a good week to do it. The best time to get your tools cleaned and in good working order for the next season, before you store them away, isRead More

Out of Order As an armchair political scientist (we’re almost indistinguishable from the real thing until we open our mouths), I was quite happy to read what an actual political scientist, CBU’s Tom Urbaniak, had to say about the go-ahead at last Tuesday’s CBRM council meeting. In case you went to BostonRead More

There were ructions at CBRM Council yesterday and I was there to witness some of them. It all started at a 4:00PM in camera session, held under Section 22 (2) e of the Municipal Government Act (MGA) which allows municipal councils to go behind closed doors to discuss “contract negotiations.”Read...

There has been something of a battle raging in the headlines lately over Net Neutrality. I could not guess how many internet users know what Net Neutrality is or have a sense of what it means to them personally but I feel fairly confident in saying not enough people areRead More