The Third Way I’ve had to print a correction with regard to a June item I wrote about The Third, a new weekly listings paper I had somehow understood to be a production of the CBRM. The Third, it turns out, is a free, local, 16-page print weekly, published andRead More

Vienna Ikea Big box stores are designed for cars. I was going to say “for people with cars” but more and more I’m coming to the conclusion that our world is designed more for the vehicles themselves (and the companies that produce them, and the companies that provide their fuel)Read...

Wildfires Working on CBRM council stories for the Wednesday edition as wildfires raged on the mainland—and not just on the mainland but in the provincial capital—was a strange experience. I knew I had nothing to add to the coverage of the fires, that’s not the kind of coverage I doRead...

While writing this week’s admittedly not very cheerful story about how Kameron Coal has co-opted our governments as its communications department, I ran across a 2017 Forbes article about the late Chris Cline’s decision to buy the Donkin Mine and realized just what we’re missing when our coal barons won’tRead More

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...

Editor’s Note: I have discovered a Spotify playlist called “Songs About Trains” which I recommend you listen to while reading this article. Also, Part I of this series is here.   In the second part of this brief series on rail safety, we’re going to talk about rail tank cars,Read More

The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio had me pulling on so many different threads this week, there’s no way I can weave them all back into a coherent whole, so I’m going to divide the resulting article into two parts to give me more time to track down someRead More

Really, we should have seen it coming. Former Glace Bay MLA Geoff MacLellan has never disguised his feelings for the Donkin Mine. When the Cline Group, which had bought a 75% stake in the mine from Glencore Xstrata the previous December, announced in 2015 that it had begun hiring, then-MinisterRead More

On Monday night, I attended the information session for residents of Sydney’s North End still waiting for answers about the leak at the Imperial Oil tank farm at 1 George Street on July 8. The leak occurred when a front-end loader rolled down a containment wall and punctured a largeRead More

In the wake of an accident that saw 600,000 liters of gasoline leak from a storage tank in Imperial Oil’s North End Sydney tank farm, the oil giant has been rather stingy with its compensation to residents, tossing nickels around like the proverbial manhole covers. It doesn’t require a veryRead More