Sean Howard, the Spectator‘s war and peace commentator, asked this question of federal candidates in Cape Breton-Canso and Sydney Victoria: In the 1990s Canada was a leader on international disarmament, receiving plaudits for its role in negotiating the ‘Ottawa Convention’ banning landmines, and earning the nickname ‘the nuclear nag’ forRead More

Rachel Haliburton, the Spectator’s Ethicist, who has written frequently about the necessity of taxes, asked this question of federal candidates in Cape Breton-Canso and Sydney Victoria: Given deficits are rising and healthcare in trouble, would you (or your party) consider raising the GST back to where it was before formerRead More

Mary Campbell (me), the editor/publisher of the Spectator, who has complained frequently about the state of the country’s access to information (ATI) system, asked this question of federal candidates in Cape Breton-Canso and Sydney Victoria: A 2017 audit of the federal access to information system (led by Fred Vallance-Jones ofRead More

Fact Box On September 18, the Cape Breton Post carried a short article under the headline, “Payroll rebates for Cape Breton metal fabrication company.” The story — a reprint of a Nova Scotia Business Inc (NSBI) press release — explained that East Coast Metal Fabrication (2015) Inc (ECMF) had receivedRead 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

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles about the conclusions of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) inquiry. You can read the first one here, the second here, the third here and the fourth here.   How might reclaiming the rightful “power andRead More

Sea change A spectator (you know who you are) pointed me to this item from the tender for architectural and engineering services for the new Marconi Campus on the Sydney waterfront (before, I might add, it was also picked up on by the Cape Breton Post): Climate risks include increasedRead 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

Dear Editor, For the record, on June 17 the Town of Port Hawkesbury registered an Ottawa-addressed Greg Maceachern as a consultant lobbyist with respect to the Allan J. MacEachen Port Hawkesbury Airport regarding infrastructure and transportation matters concerning regional development. In essence, the mayor of Port Hawkesbury is using localRead More

Like a Netflix reboot of a canceled TV series, Mother Canada has reappeared on my screen this summer. I’d all but forgotten the plan to build the 24-meter-high sad lady in Green Cove in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park — a plan that simultaneously flouted both the Parks CanadaRead More