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

CBU President and Vice-Chancellor David Dingwall has issued ANOTHER open letter “to the Cape Breton Community,” this one occupying three full (expensive) pages in last Saturday’s Cape Breton Post, and it is another absolute dud of a PR exercise. It states: I want to assure you that I, as PresidentRead More

Golfing in the Park [Ben Cowan-Dewar] also cited golf courses in national parks — including Highlands Links in Cape Breton, Green Gables in P.E.I., Fundy National in New Brunswick and Banff Springs in Alberta — as other examples of competing land uses. “Is there a case where golf exists inRead More

The CBRM is one of 41 Canadian municipalities “pre-determined” to receive funding (worth $5 million)  under the third round of the federal government’s Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI), one component of its National Housing Strategy. The announcement, which I completely missed, was made on November 10, but council didn’t get aroundRead More

Really, we should have seen it coming. Former Glace Bay MLA Geoff MacLellan has never disguised his feelings for the Donkin Mine. When the Cline Group, which had bought a 75% stake in the mine from Glencore Xstrata the previous December, announced in 2015 that it had begun hiring, then-MinisterRead More

Raymond Plourde, senior wilderness coordinator with Nova Scotia’s Ecology Action Centre (EAC), has, as you might imagine, some thoughts on the advisability of situating golf courses in protected areas of ecological importance. We spoke by phone last week about Ben Cowan-Dewar and his partner Mike Keiser’s plans to turn partRead More

Richard Starr had already got me thinking about how centralized power is in Nova Scotia before Auditor General Kim Adair drove the point home for me on Tuesday. Starr has been tracking this province’s anti-democratic tendencies for some time now via his Starr’s Point blog, and back in early November,Read More

On Monday night, I attended the information session for residents of Sydney’s North End still waiting for answers about the leak at the Imperial Oil tank farm at 1 George Street on July 8. The leak occurred when a front-end loader rolled down a containment wall and punctured a largeRead More