Michelle Smith, the Spectator‘s resident gardener and expert on all things agricultural, asked this question of federal candidates in Cape Breton Canso and Sydney-Victoria: Increasingly extreme weather events due to climate change are challenging agricultural producers. Clearly, decisive action needs to be taken to slow or stop the process ofRead...

I’ve been paying pretty close attention to this drama I think of as the The Albert Barbusci Show, but I must have missed the episode where we asked Barbusci, our port promoter and the CEO of Sydney Harbour Investment Partners (SHIP), to identify a company with an untested method ofRead More

Do you ever hear about a subject for the first time and think it must be a brand new thing and then do some googling and realize that, actually, people have been on about it for years? That’s what happened to me with port promoter Albert Barbusci’s scheme to establishRead More

A more telling or ironic snapshot of endangered Mother Earth in the 21st century could scarcely be imagined: a naval war game by a nuclear-armed alliance delayed by a storm that drew its force from the human-caused warming of the oceans. The hurricane, of course, was Dorian, and the warRead More

CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke was “not in the building” on September 27 when students (and others) from his community gathered in front of the Civic Centre to demand action on climate change. (His spokesperson tells me he “had meetings scheduled” in the morning and “a funeral” in the afternoon.) ButRead More

Dorian I begin with a shout-out to those of you who have yet to get your power back and are…unable to read this. Yeah, that didn’t really make much sense, did it? I want to be very cautious writing about Nova Scotia’s Dorian experience, given the Bahamas’ Dorian experience, whichRead More

To set the tone for their recent article on Twenty-First Century Nuclear Deterrence , four senior American nuclear war-planners approvingly quote from Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling’s classic 1966 defense of ‘coercive diplomacy’ in the atomic age: The power to hurt – the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy thingsRead More

On numerous occasions in recent decades, Canadian governments have apologized for a host of egregious wrongdoings. While such words of contrition are too often unaccompanied by adequate actions, they can help make visible, as Trudeau argued in his 2017 apology, the “hard truths” Canadian society needs to confront. Yet theRead More

Donkin The Donkin Mine saga took an unexpected turn last week with the sudden death of coal baron (and Kameron Collieries owner) Chris Cline in a helicopter crash. Weirdly, this was followed almost immediately by (yet another) rock fall in the mine itself. Fortunately — yet again — nobody wasRead More

Complex systems Former Nova Scotia health minister Maureen MacDonald took to Facebook this week to express frustration with some of the recent criticism she’s seen leveled at the province’s healthcare system. She took particular issue with a speech given at a healthcare rally in Halifax by Paula Minnikin, a formerRead More