There was a wonderfully wonky — yet important — item on the agenda of last night’s CBRM council meeting, and I am not talking about the CBRM declaring Paul’s Pizza Burgers the official food of the municipality for 2021. I am talking about an item that pleased me personally first,Read More

During this week’s federal leaders’ debates, all participants verified they had worked together in a non-partisan way to battle COVID-19. COVID and its variants do not discriminate — everyone is vulnerable to some degree. And Canadians, because we were all at risk, pulled together in a way that mirrored whatRead More

Shore Road Sessions I wrote last year about The Shore Road Sessions, Shauna Walters’ summer series of mini-concerts in her Whitney Pier backyard. The sessions returned this year with a whole new lineup of performers, and I was lucky enough to catch the final show on Tuesday night. I amRead More

In the days leading up to the provincial election, all the usual suspects sharpened their pencils, marshaled their tired little troop of “facts” and wrote the editor of the Cape Breton Post in support of Albert Barbusci’s Novaporte project. Port Fest ’21 was kicked off at the end of JulyRead More

In 2018, Nova Scotia appointed a committee which created a commission to review the province’s electoral boundaries — a process that must, by law, take place every 10 years. The electoral boundaries commission, chaired by Dr. J Colin Dodds submitted its final report to Attorney General Mark Furey in AprilRead More

Cape Breton East was formerly known as Sydney River-Mira-Louisbourg and before that as Cape Breton West (seriously — West has become East, please don’t ask me how). The district has gone back and forth between the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives but has been held by the Tories since 2006, whenRead More

Cape Breton Centre-Whitney Pier was previously just Cape Breton Centre and, you will no doubt be surprised to learn, contained much less of the Sydney neighborhood known as Whitney Pier than it now does. Cape Breton Centre has been all over the map, politically, having elected New Democrats, Liberals, ToriesRead More

Wikipedia informs me that in 1933, “the district of Cape Breton was divided into five electoral districts, one of which was named Cape Breton East. In 2001, the district name was changed to Glace Bay. In 2003, the district lost a small area at its southern tip to Cape BretonRead More

Northside-Westmount — formerly Cape Breton North — has mostly gone back and forth between the Liberals and Tories with the exception of the 1978 general election when Len Arsenault briefly turned it NDP orange. The riding produced a Liberal Premier, Russell MacLellan, before turning into what I think I canRead More

In 2012, the provincial electoral boundaries commission took 79% of Cape Breton Nova and 59% of Cape Breton South and created Sydney-Whitney Pier. The 2019 commission lopped off the Pier and added some Sydney River-Mira-Louisbourg territory and — voila! — Sydney-Membertou was born. I’m going to do some electoral genealogyRead More