Sean Howard, the Spectator‘s war and peace commentator, asked this question of federal candidates in Cape Breton-Canso and Sydney Victoria: In the 1990s Canada was a leader on international disarmament, receiving plaudits for its role in negotiating the ‘Ottawa Convention’ banning landmines, and earning the nickname ‘the nuclear nag’ forRead More

A more telling or ironic snapshot of endangered Mother Earth in the 21st century could scarcely be imagined: a naval war game by a nuclear-armed alliance delayed by a storm that drew its force from the human-caused warming of the oceans. The hurricane, of course, was Dorian, and the warRead More

In my most recent Fast & Curious column, I mused about my preference for non-meat burgers that don’t masquerade as meat and a spectator pointed out that what I was actually saying was that I preferred whole foods to processed foods and that we happen to have an expert onRead More

During last night’s regular monthly meeting of the Cape Breton Regional Council, District 5 Councilor Eldon MacDonald moved that the week of September 23 to 29 be declared “Right to Know” Week in the CBRM. I laughed. I cried. And I thought of all the things I would like toRead More

To set the tone for their recent article on Twenty-First Century Nuclear Deterrence , four senior American nuclear war-planners approvingly quote from Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling’s classic 1966 defense of ‘coercive diplomacy’ in the atomic age: The power to hurt – the sheer unacquisitive, unproductive power to destroy thingsRead More

I did not weep, I turned to stone inside…Dante, Inferno   I rarely cry, but on the evening of 8 December 1987, glued to radio coverage of the signing of a nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Soviet Union, I wept with a relief I had neverRead More

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles about the conclusions of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) inquiry. You can read the first one here, the second here, the third here and the fourth here.   How might reclaiming the rightful “power andRead More

On numerous occasions in recent decades, Canadian governments have apologized for a host of egregious wrongdoings. While such words of contrition are too often unaccompanied by adequate actions, they can help make visible, as Trudeau argued in his 2017 apology, the “hard truths” Canadian society needs to confront. Yet theRead More

Amid the visions of airports and helipads, plus suggestions that Cape Breton should be a new province, a new territory or a partner with Membertou, and the publication of the financial position in which the CBRM finds itself, CBU Professor Tom Urbaniak’s notion that the seat of the Diocese ofRead More

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of articles about the conclusions of Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) inquiry. You can read the first one here, the second here and the third here.)   To show how Canada—and we in it—perpetrate genocide against Indigenous womenRead More