It may not look like much on a cold February day (see below) but the Hawks Field in Dominion is undergoing a serious make-over – from field to Dream Field. Having noticed the construction and wondered about the project, I contacted Councilor Darren Bruckschwaiger, whose District 10 includes Dominion. HeRead More

I’m going to keep picking away at the list of companies in which Innovacorp has invested to find out what happened to each of them, but I thought this week I’d show you how unnecessarily difficult this can be in some cases. My example is the first company in theRead...

What happened to Cape Breton Island? In particular, North Sydney? It  used to  be a booming town. Fish plants, steel plant, coalmines, Marine Railway and CN workers in the thousands. Retail businesses all along Commercial Street. Thousands of workers making good money, cashing their checks on a Friday at theRead More

Here’s an item from last week’s CBRM council session on affordable housing that I really wanted to follow up on:  Deputy Mayor (and District 2 Councilor) Earlene MacMullin proposed the municipality look into the possibility of turning the Northside General Hospital, scheduled for closure and demolition, into affordable housing —Read More

We have committed the fatal sin in public policy of becoming cynical and arrogant with respect to decisions affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. We have trivialized the likelihood that deterrence might fail, thus providing easy moral cover for ignoring the consequences. We have learned to liveRead More

Monday’s special CBRM council session on affordable housing was so full of information that I find myself forced to choose one part to write about today, for fear of overwhelming you with facts and figures. It started with a presentation by Paul LaFleche, the deputy minister of Municipal Affairs andRead More

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) in Nova Scotia has performed its annual public service of crunching the numbers to determine how much a worker must actually earn to live with some modicum of dignity in this province and the answer this year, for Cape Breton, is $18.45/hour. That’sRead More

Does anyone go shopping for groceries these days without having at least one conversation with another shopper about the rising cost of what we are putting in our carts? Assuming, that is, we are among those who can continue to purchase the same items we have been using for years.Read More

Although the Residential Schools have come under attack over the years, the discovery of the graves of children in and around the former schools in May of 2021 resulted in a new and urgent call for apologies from the various churches involved in them. Almost immediately after the graves wereRead More

The Known World how can something known become unknown in so little time Mi’kmaw poet Shalan Joudry   Which is in worse shape, the form or content of Canadian federal democracy? The shape it takes is doubly deformed, for while all ‘first-past-the-post’ systems are unfair, guaranteed to deliver only disproportionateRead More