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

Editor’s Note: When I realized I would be publishing this year on the 41st anniversary of the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, I decided to reprint this piece from 2022—the preface to Susan Dodd’s 2012 book, The Ocean Ranger: remaking the promise of oil, with permission from Fernwood Books.  Read More

I was debating just launching into my CBRM council coverage a week late without explanation but decided that would be the coward’s way out so instead, I will confess that I missed the memo about the January 31 meeting. In my defence, the last Tuesday in January is not theRead More

The year before I started school in 1960, there was a field at the bottom of Matilda Street in Sydney with a path that led to the back door of an old house on the next street over, Dominion. One of my earliest memories is of escaping the backyard ofRead More

Editor’s Note: What follows is one of the earliest compositions attributed to the legendary Cape Breton labor leader of a century ago, J.B. McLachlan. Published in December 1906 as a letter to the editor in the Halifax Herald, it was sent along to the Spectator by David Frank, author ofRead More

Eureka! I have been trying for some time now to articulate the problem with venture capital, especially as it was practiced in this province by Innovacorp—and now by Invest Nova Scotia, under the possibly capable but definitely expensive ($1,500 a day up to $18,000 a month) leadership of our premier’sRead More

“War is not the only thing that, to occur, must be waged.” —Judith Lipton and David Barash, Strength Through Peace   It now seems like a bygone age, but it was only on December 15 last year that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs presented a draft Treaty on ‘SecurityRead More

In early April 1974, on an unusually pleasant morning that promised to help deliver a big voter turnout, Pat and Roy and I, young volunteers all, began working Polling Station 16 in Cape Breton Nova. The poll was at the bottom of Matilda Street in Whitney Pier, where I hadRead More

Comfort and Joy I have to tie up two loose ends from my coverage of Tuesday morning’s council meeting. After listening to—and approving—Destination Cape Breton’s funding request (which I covered in detail because opaque organizations spending oodles of public money are catnip to me— or would be, if I wereRead More

Coal Face “There’s no stone left unturned when it comes to safety with this company”—CBRM District 8 Councilor James Edwards on Kameron Collieries’ decision to reopen the Donkin Mine, CTV Atlantic News, 14 September 2022 The unfortunate reference to stones—the man is, after all, talking about a coal mine proneRead More