One hears the word and wants to know more, but one also wants to forget it. One has heard both too much and not enough about Hiroshima. For the city evokes our entire nuclear nightmare…  Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967) Return to Hiroshima on AugustRead More

UPDATE: Council met on August 23 and revealed that the second of these meetings involved the awarding of the food and beverage contract at the Miner’s Forum. It went to Scott Morrison, who owns Sydney’s Flavor Downtown, Flavor 19 and Flavor on the Water. (Although Morrison wasn’t mentioned by name;Read More

Right-sizing? I missed Monday’s public meeting regarding CBRM electoral district boundaries and council size but was interested to read that, according to John Heseltine, the Stantec consultant hired by the municipality to make recommendations, 21.4% of the 400 people who responded to an online survey think CBRM should have six,Read More

On the same day last week—July 8—600,000 liters of gasoline spilled out of a storage tank in Sydney’s North End and Rogers Communications showed us why Canada needs not more “competition” in the telecoms sector but a publicly owned internet provider (yes, I went there). I say this off theRead More

District 4 Councilor Steve Gillespie knows the electrification of CBRM’s transit fleet is inevitable as federal funding for diesel buses dries up, but he wants us to understand that he is adamantly opposed to it because it will be expensive and people in his district, who do not have busRead More

As noted in my earlier article about CBRM transit, the study that will guide the electrification of our system will consider the examples of other, comparable, municipalities. During their discussion of the matter earlier this month, some councilors expressed the concern that comparing us to Halifax—which ordered 60 electric busesRead More

It’s been roughly a year since I wrote about two Nova Scotia housing reports, one by the Nova Scotia Affordable Housing Commission, the other by the Housing for All Working Group of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), NS Office, and after a flurry of “affordable housing” announcements fromRead More

I went back and watched Cape Breton Partnership President and CEO Tyler Mattheis’ May 10 presentation to CBRM council and came away with the distinct impression that, like Destination Cape Breton, the Partnership has no real idea whether its work is producing the desired results—in this case, encouraging new businessesRead More

Talkin’ ’bout my generator I read Henry Maxwell’s letter to the editor of the Cape Breton Post about the apparently over-sized backup generator recently purchased by the CBRM for the Myles F. Burke Police Headquarters in Sydney with great interest. That particular item has bugged me since it appeared inRead More

District 8 Councilor James Edwards placed an item on Tuesday’s CBRM council meeting agenda calling for a staff Issue Paper on the pros and cons of selling Centre 200. Opened in 1987, the 5,000-plus seat arena in downtown Sydney was built to mark the city’s 1985 bicentennial. It was homeRead More