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

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

I just read “Sustainable Prosperity,” the provincial government’s recently dropped 2022 Progress Report on the Environmental Goals and Climate Change Reduction Act (EGCCRA) that, frankly,  lost me at the title. We need a new definition of “prosperity” before we can start talking about it in terms of “sustainability” because ourRead 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

Maxwell Hartt’s book, Quietly Shrinking Cities: Canadian Urban Population Loss in an Age of Growth really made me think. Hartt, an assistant professor in the department of geography and planning at Queen’s University, makes the case for cities accepting rather than fighting population decline and uses the Cape Breton Regional MunicipalityRead More