Art imitating life In my research for this week’s article on the East Palestine train derailment, I ran across a piece on rail safety post-Lac Mégantic (a good piece, worth reading) that begins like this: An unmanned, half-mile-long train carrying tank cars full of highly flammable petroleum products barrels outRead More

Golfing in the Park [Ben Cowan-Dewar] also cited golf courses in national parks — including Highlands Links in Cape Breton, Green Gables in P.E.I., Fundy National in New Brunswick and Banff Springs in Alberta — as other examples of competing land uses. “Is there a case where golf exists inRead More

I have never had the time to focus as much as I’d like to on local arts and culture and if I make any New Year’s resolutions for 2022, this might be it. But I am, in my personal life, an enthusiastic consumer of movies and TV and podcasts andRead More

This is an article about two things you may not have realized CBRM once had: an American Consul and a a film industry. From 1911 to 1924, the US State Department operated an American Consulate in Sydney (prior to this, Sydney was home to a lesser, Consular Agency). Very detailedRead More

Nearly 100 years after the Maritime Motion Picture Company (MMPC) was making movies in Sydney, local filmmakers are achieving great success. Locally shot with homegrown actors, Werewolf (Grassfire Films: Nelson MacDonald, producer, Ashley McKenzie, director) was shown at many film festivals, featured in numerous reviews, including the Globe and MailRead More

Yoga Mats Galore! Reading about the MV Zim Kingston shedding over 100 containers into the ocean off the coast of British Columbia put me in mind of the 1941 sinking that inspired Compton MacKenzie’s novel Whiskey Galore!  No, wait, that’s not strictly true — it put me in mind ofRead More

As I write this month’s column, Ontario, where I live, is still in the grip of the COVID pandemic. The government issued a stay-at-home order on Boxing Day, which closed restaurants for in-person dining, university classes remain virtual, and we have been told that we should only leave the houseRead More

Low-rent Davos Last week found me feeling hopeful about our municipal government, reporting on CBU Prof. Tom Urbaniak’s suggestions for streamlining agendas and shortening meetings and involving the community on committees. And then, this happened: The Cape Breton Regional Municipality is readying a new strategic plan for the next fourRead More

Have you read latest CBRM Central Library study? Anyone outside CBRM reading about the private developer who has been given control over the project would probably write it off as fiction, but we know better, don’t we? The study in question is the service, programs and operational plan commissioned fromRead More

Stealing time Rubina Ahmed-Haq and I had an argument that devolved into shouting and foot-stamping on Monday morning, although the shouting and foot-stamping were all on my side and she has yet to realize we had a disagreement. Ahmed-Haq is the CBC radio workplace columnist who, according to her website,Read More