Poker Face I haven’t enjoyed a TV series as much as I enjoyed Natasha Lyonne’s Poker Face in a very long time. It’s not a “Golden Age of TV”-style show like Deadwood or The Sopranos or Mad Men (all of which I also enjoyed very much), it’s a throwback toRead...

Working from home I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about this week and then I discovered that Craig Boudreau, head of  J. Francis Investments, vice chair of the Cape Breton Regional Chamber of Commerce, Sage of Charlotte Street, had once again taken pen in hand to shareRead More

Food for thought Let’s start with a little game of “Okay, stop” with Sylvain Charlebois—professor in food distribution and policy and senior director of the AgriFood Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and all-round media darling. Here he is on the question of whether Canada’s three leading grocers have been price-gougingRead More

Summer, I have decided, is a time for experimentation. When the thermometer hits 30 degrees Celsius, the only thing I want to dive deeply into is the Bras d’Or Lake, so this week, I’m going to try something a little different. Instead of covering one topic in depth, I’m goingRead More

It’s been just over two years since Canada’s biggest grocery store chains declared the pandemic over and canceled the premium they’d been paying their front-line staff for all of three months. On 13 June 2020, according to the Financial Post: …Canada’s top three grocery chains simultaneously cancelled their $2-per-hour “heroRead More

Buy buy Writing about Destination Cape Breton and the Cape Breton Partnership these past couple of weeks has been like returning to earlier, simpler times when publicly funded agencies and their dubious achievements occupied a lot of my brain space. But it all feels a little darker these days. TourismRead More

Lord have Percy I don’t even know where to start with this baffling story. Freshii, the Canadian-based fast-food chain, is experimenting with a “virtual cashier” system called “Percy” that allows it to hire cashiers in Nicaragua and pay them US$3.75/hour instead of minimum wage in Ontario which is $15 (US$11.70)Read More

Talk of big box retailers benefiting from CBRM’s recently announced 5% tax cut got me to googling and I discovered that these corporations have been getting quite creative in their attempts to reduce their assessments south of the border. I will preface this by saying that my “research” (which I’veRead More

Pet sounds Episode 12 of Annette Verschuren’s Bet On Me podcast (“Prioritizing Purpose with Profits: Getting to know Ikdeep Singh, Regional President of Mars Pet Nutrition“) would have put me to sleep entirely had it not, at times, managed to annoy me so deeply. Her guest’s connection to Cape BretonRead More

A recent celebrant on CTV’s local Mass for Shut-ins began his homily with this line: If you go out into the garage and stay there all day, it doesn’t make you a car. Similarly if you go to church every Sunday, it doesn’t make you a Christian. That statement threwRead More