This, I have decided, is a story about how difficult it can be for citizens to have their voices heard in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. It begins in August 2019, when the province announced its intention to move the NSCC Marconi Campus to the Sydney waterfront. The land earmarkedRead More

In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada decriminalized the prohibition on assisted suicide, a decision which led to the legalization of assisted suicide (when an individual ends her own life with the help of another, usually a physician) and voluntary active euthanasia (when someone gives permission to another person –Read More

Once more to the polls! I have yet to decide how to cover this fall’s municipal elections in the CBRM. Back in 2016 — the year I launched the Spectator  — I chose to focus on the women running for office in part because I am one person and couldRead More

I just paid €1 to subscribe to Der Spiegel for a month so I could read that Martin Doerry article about “right-wing conspiracy ideologists” luring “like-minded” Germans to Cape Breton, an island, as Doerry helpfully explains, connected to mainland Nova Scotia by “a dam with a swing bridge.” (I usedRead More

The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ recently reported how, in the depths of the Big Apple’s COVID-19 lockdown, musician David Mansfield discovered a rusted hatch in his overgrown backyard. Prizing it open, he descended a ladder to a nuclear fall-out shelter, a claustrophobic capsule – or “David Bowie tinRead More

As predicted, the Nova Scotia Department of Education and Early Childhood Development’s long-awaited plan for getting students back to school in September has been met with push-back and “yeah-buts” from both opposition parties, the NSTU and CUPE Nova Scotia, who feel it is short on details about how, exactly, it’sRead More