The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio had me pulling on so many different threads this week, there’s no way I can weave them all back into a coherent whole, so I’m going to divide the resulting article into two parts to give me more time to track down someRead More

Editor’s Note: When I realized I would be publishing this year on the 41st anniversary of the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, I decided to reprint this piece from 2022—the preface to Susan Dodd’s 2012 book, The Ocean Ranger: remaking the promise of oil, with permission from Fernwood Books.  Read More

Worker Ownership I’ve recently discovered  that “Lefty feminist economist” Angella MacEwen, a Broadbent Institute Fellow and senior economist with CUPE National, has a substack (Social Economics) on which she promises to do her best to: … put economic analysis into plain language, and and add feminist working class context toRead More

I was debating just launching into my CBRM council coverage a week late without explanation but decided that would be the coward’s way out so instead, I will confess that I missed the memo about the January 31 meeting. In my defence, the last Tuesday in January is not theRead More

Alyce MacLean, project manager for housing development with New Dawn Enterprises, appeared before CBRM council on January 31 to ask the municipality to transfer surplus municipal property to her organization for the construction of supportive housing for people struggling with mental health and addictions issues. (If you are wondering whyRead More

Dear Premier Houston: We would like to bring your attention to the West Mabou Beach Provincial Park controversy and our concerns in that regard. West Mabou Beach is an ecologically sensitive area that forms part of the mere 5% of Nova Scotian coastline that is legally protected. We are adamantlyRead More

Last week,  in Part I of my article on Canada’s healthcare system, I cited the Canadian Encyclopedia entry on “health policy” written by the late Toronto Star medical reporter Marilyn E. Dunlop. In my initial draft, I noted that the Canadian Encyclopedia is kind of wacky (see the “David Dingwall”Read More

This is, after all, the playbook of all privatization advocates everywhere: starve a public good, wait for it to malfunction, and then claim the free market is required to fix the problem—Mitchell Thompson, Jacobin, January 2023 The current health system does not have a ‘management’ problem; it has an ‘economics’Read More

Editor’s Note: I broke this article into two pieces (see Part I here) to allow you an opportunity to rest between decades but now it’s time to face the ’80s and ’90s.   Canada’s mania for deficit reduction, although it reached its peak in the ’90s, started in the ’80s.Read More

Words with Mayors In my coverage of CBRM council this week, I made a crack about the mayor—who was elected as Amanda McDougall and has been referred to for the past two years as Amanda McDougall—suddenly being referenced in the meeting agenda as Mayor Amanda T. McDougall-Merrill. I was actuallyRead More