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

I was listening to Intercepted, a podcast from The Intercept news outlet, on Wednesday and heard an interview with Emily Guendelsberger, a Philadelphia-based journalist who has written a book called  On the Clock, What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. The interviewer, Jeremy Scahill, explainedRead More

Earlier this year, acting on a tip that ambulances were being called quite frequently to what is now known as the Sydney Call Centre (although for most of the period for which I requested figures, it was the ServiCom call center), I FOIPOPed the Nova Scotia Department of Health toRead 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

I was listening to a breakdown of Liberal election promises (pre-election) and the reporter doing the breaking down said they included a tax cut for middle-income families and it got me to thinking about the value of tax cuts versus the cost of tax cuts. Luckily for me, someone muchRead More

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

Dolores Campbell, the Spectator‘s commentator on social justice issues, asked this question of federal candidates in Cape Breton-Canso and Sydney Victoria: Would your party or, in the case of the independents, you consider establishing a Guaranteed Annual Income for all Canadians that would provide them with at least the basicsRead 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...