I did not weep, I turned to stone inside…Dante, Inferno   I rarely cry, but on the evening of 8 December 1987, glued to radio coverage of the signing of a nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Soviet Union, I wept with a relief I had neverRead More

“Excitement is building for what’s expected to be a multi-million dollar development along the Cabot Trail by a private firm with European connections.” — Cape Breton Post, 17 August 2019 That’s the opening to a Cape Breton Post article about Czech-born, New York-based developer Joseph Balaz (né Josef Baláž) andRead More

On 9 August 2019, the Nunavut sheriff’s office, acting on a statement of claim and warrant from the Federal Court in Halifax, “arrested” the Royal Canadian Geographic Society (RCGS) Resolute — a cruise ship operated by One Ocean Expeditions (OOE). The incident was made public on August 19, by CBCRead More

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles about the conclusions of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) inquiry. You can read the first one here, the second here, the third here and the fourth here.   How might reclaiming the rightful “power andRead More

Sea change A spectator (you know who you are) pointed me to this item from the tender for architectural and engineering services for the new Marconi Campus on the Sydney waterfront (before, I might add, it was also picked up on by the Cape Breton Post): Climate risks include increasedRead More

What to do this week Michelle Smith is busy weeding, so here are some of her mid- to late-summer tips from seasons past: On 23 August  2017 she had some advice on storing all that produce you’re harvesting at this point in summer, notably the root vegetables: If you plantedRead More

Air Inverness I read an interesting Inverness airport-related story in Friday’s Chronicle Herald (but not, inexplicably, in Friday’s Cape Breton Post — although as a Post subscriber explained to me, “It will probably be in tomorrow”). It seems the Province of Nova Scotia is continuing to evaluate an application toRead...

On numerous occasions in recent decades, Canadian governments have apologized for a host of egregious wrongdoings. While such words of contrition are too often unaccompanied by adequate actions, they can help make visible, as Trudeau argued in his 2017 apology, the “hard truths” Canadian society needs to confront. Yet theRead More

Amid the visions of airports and helipads, plus suggestions that Cape Breton should be a new province, a new territory or a partner with Membertou, and the publication of the financial position in which the CBRM finds itself, CBU Professor Tom Urbaniak’s notion that the seat of the Diocese ofRead More

Two aspects of my summers past are relevant to the story I’m about to share: first, as a kid, I used to devour Nancy Drew mysteries (hence the title of this article) and always had a hankering to solve mysteries. Second (and more recently), for what seemed like a veryRead More