Editor’s Note: In light of Senator Dan Christmas’ recent speech re-opening the issue of Cape Breton provincehood, Spectator contributor Kenzie MacNeil re-offers material originally published in The Cape Bretoner in 1993 on the Annexation of 1820. (You can read Part I here and Part II here.)    In this, the thirdRead More

At times of heightened international tension the first duty of diplomacy is simple to define, harder to practice: providing a venue for the meeting of otherwise warring minds. In co-hosting, with the United States, the ‘Vancouver Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on Security and Stability on the Korean Peninsula’ on January 16,Read More

Editor’s Note: In light of Senator Dan Christmas’ recent speech re-opening the issue of Cape Breton provincehood, Spectator contributor Kenzie MacNeil re-offers material originally published in The Cape Bretoner in 1993 on the Annexation of 1820. You can read Part I here.   “[T]he annexation was not legal according to BritishRead More

In 1729, the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift made “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.” There was, Swift’s imperialist Protestant persona reasoned, a “fair, cheap and easy method”Read More

Editor’s Note: While looking for captions for the photos in this week’s Faces from the Cape Breton Highlander feature, I ran across these accounts of City of Sydney council meetings from 1967. I think you’ll see why they struck me as being à propos.   Cape Breton Highlander, 4 October 1967Read More

“Unconstitutional and illegal” So declared 2,000 passionate and angry Cape Bretoners, in their eighth bid to get the British government to reverse its decision to annex Cape Breton to Nova Scotia in 1820. In light of Senator Dan Christmas’ recent speech re-opening the issue of Cape Breton provincehood, I thinkRead More

Port secrecy CBRM Council met in secret camera on Thursday to discuss something related to the Port of Sydney. Under the Municipal Government Act (MGA), which our mayor sometimes worries about and sometimes doesn’t (see the 31 unannounced in camera meetings held over 22 months in 2014-15 in flagrant violationRead More

No Cape Bretoners, please Halifax regional council has created an eight-member committee to consider the commemoration of Edward Cornwallis in the municipality. I can’t tell you who the members are because council has yet to make the names public, but if it heeded the advice of Councilor David Hendsbee ofRead More

Catholics, especially those of us who’d like to see changes to much accepted as “Gospel” over the centuries, have always been informed that if changes in church doctrine or practice happened at all, they would not happen “in our lifetimes.” Of course, many changes followed Vatican II – altar railsRead More

  t. Augustine’s Confessions do not repeat DO NOT make for light summer reading but there are times when one must do what one must do, so the Confessions have been on my agenda for the past while. It all started with Stephen Greenblatt’s article in the June 19/2017 issueRead More