Well, that’s all she wrote, folks. CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke’s pursuit of the provincial Progressive Conservative Party leadership ended after the first ballot on Saturday, when rival Tim Houston came within 54 points of winning and Clarke bowed out. It was an abrupt ending to a campaign that seemed likeRead More

Donald (Donnie) Calabrese is working on a graphic novel about Moses Coady and the Antigonish movement. That’s a complete oversimplification of the theme — I’ll get back to that in a moment — but when I spoke to Calabrese the other night about the project (which has been excerpted inRead More

(With apologies to Joe Flaherty and any reader unfamiliar with SCTV’s Count Floyd. Or maybe any reader familiar with SCTV’s Count Floyd.) I wasn’t planning to do anything special for Halloween this year, even though I’m actually publishing ON HALLOWEEN, but then I received the latest Nova Scotia Business IncRead More

My gardeners are on hiatus until January and this was not a week during which I had a submission from one of my regular contributors (Sean Howard, Rachel Haliburton or Dolores Campbell) so the Spectator is a little light in terms of the number of articles this week. I apologizeRead More

OK, Stop Councilor! After reading Thursday morning’s Cape Breton Post, I have an overwhelming urge to speak directly to District 4 Councilor Steve Gillespie (In fact, I was speaking to him but I don’t think he heard me). I don’t think he’ll read this either, but for the sake ofRead More

Cecil Clarke is not the only anti-carbon tax politician in the current landscape; in fact, he’s arguably just the homegrown version of a familiar figure on the political scene — the “Canadian conservative” who, as Dalhousie economist Lars Osberg puts it, has “successfully framed” the federal government’s carbon-pricing system as aRead More

Consider this a postscript to my story about the flurry of real estate activity I dubbed the Ben Eoin shuffle back in September. It seems yet another property in the neighborhood of the ski hill and marina is about to change hands. This time, it’s the 1.6 hectare lot atRead More

boondoggle: (noun) an unnecessary and expensive piece of work, especially one that is paid for by the public (Cambridge Dictionary)   I think the Cape Breton Highlands National Park (CBHNP) moose cull meets the definition of a boondoggle. As a Parks Canada undertaking, it is definitely paid for by the public.Read More

Welcome to the penultimate installment of “Where’s Cecil?” For eight months, I’ve attempted to track our peripatetic CBRM mayor as he was “criss-crossing the province” and “burning up the phone lines” in pursuit of the job he really wants: leader of the provincial Progressive Conservatives. I started this feature because,Read More

For-profit prisons This has to be the most unfortunate story pairing of the month — the journalistic equivalent of steak and white wine. Or Dr. Pepper. Or motor oil. First, on 11 October, the Chronicle Herald‘s John DeMont (whose writing I frequently enjoy) wrote a puff-piece about Geoffrey Rubin, theRead More