Last month, I considered the surprising popularity of the KonMari method of organizing our homes, and argued that the attractiveness of this approach to decluttering results, at least in part, from our recognition of our disordered relationship with our stuff, and that this disordered relationship negatively affects our lives. WhatRead...

What to do this week The garden is just about done for the year, but already I want to keep the taste of something fresh in my kitchen. Fortunately this year it is not too late to bring some of the garden indoors, or to extend the picking season. LastRead...

The cat and I huddled under the blankets in the dark as the wind outside made the whole house shudder. The power had been out for eight hours and would stay out for several days or longer for over 80% of the province, according to my battery-operated radio. “It’s okay,”Read More

It’s not open by much, and it might shut soon, but the diminished return of the Trudeau Liberals has created a ‘window’ to review The Incredible Shrinking Issue of the 2019 election: Canada’s foreign and defense priorities in an age of grave and growing nuclear peril. Though domestic politics naturallyRead More

Bad bidness Remember the business owner who accused me of breaking into their office and stealing their credit card? The one I chose not to name? Well, the story has taken an even stranger twist: I have now been accused of fabricating the whole thing to make business owners inRead More

I’m going to keep this short because a) the Canadian landscape is flooded with election analysis at the moment and b) I’m not good at it. But I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t want to say something about the election results so here are my thoughts:   Voter TurnoutRead More

What to do this week Michelle Smith is away this week. She’ll be back at her regularly scheduled time next issue, but in the meantime, feel free to peruse her now quite substantial archive of past columns for some season-appropriate gardening advice. This time last year, for instance, she wasRead...

First of all, thank you to the candidates who took the time to respond to our questions — Michelle Dockrill, Lois Foster, Jodi McDavid and Kenzie MacNeil. As promised, we extended the deadline to Thursday at 5:00 PM for those candidates who had not yet replied, and here are theRead More

For the last regular edition of the Cape Breton Spectator before Monday’s federal election, I decided to ask each of my regular contributors to submit a question I could pose — along with one of my own — to all the candidates in the Sydney-Victoria and Cape Breton-Canso ridings. SomeRead More

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...