The Spectator’s Ethicist, Rachel Haliburton, provides convincing — and sometimes counter-intuitive — arguments as to why making the rich pay their fair share of taxes benefits us all.(Read Reason #1 and Reason #2)   As faithful readers of the Ethicist column in the Cape Breton Spectator will know, for theRead More

This week, I decided to focus my attention on two (luckily related) stories I’m interested in. Stories I’ve been following for years (eight years for one, one year for the other) but following in a kind of hit-and-miss way. Like I was watching Game of Thrones, but only when IRead More

Nobody denies anymore the culture of secrecy and cover-up in the Catholic Church, but what if it is simply part and parcel of an even worse culture, one of pedophilia? How else to explain what has been revealed again and again as common practice among clergy? Especially as, hard onRead More

Summer is considered the best time for light reading, not for serious books that could actually destroy a beautiful sunny day on the beach or the deck, but I recently dove into Crimes of the Father, the 2015 novel by the prolific Irish-Australian author Thomas Keneally. Right off the bat,Read More

Constance Backhouse spoke during a brunch sponsored by the Ally Centre of Cape Breton and the Cape Breton Inter-Agency on Family Violence on Friday. Backhouse is a legal scholar, historian, author, professor, activist and the sort of feminist I remember from my ’70s childhood — that is, an unabashed one.Read More

Highlights of this article: • Provincial government employees who were made aware of the security failure with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FOIPOP) website told Halifax police that the site had been “hacked” and that nearly 10,000 files “were taken” — which clearly overstated the nature ofRead More

Here’s how we obtained the documents. First, a quick primer on search warrants. To get a search warrant, police have to go to a judge or Justice of the Peace and submit a document called an “Information To Obtain a Search Warrant,” or ITO. The ITO lays out the policeRead More

Maureen Googoo’s Ku’ku’kwes News, an “independent indigenous” online news organization, has been providing extensive coverage of the hearings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Membertou, Cape Breton, this week. In addition to live-blogging the sessions, which took place on Monday and Tuesday andRead More

DNA Fail I grew interested in the subject of DNA evidence after a number of men convicted during the “John-Be-Gone” sting operation in Sydney were ordered to supply samples to the National DNA Data Bank. I wrote about some of the issues surrounding the collection and retention of DNA evidenceRead More

Archbishop Anthony Mancini of Halifax, seems an amiable and reasonable (though serious) type of guy, who recently led the bishops of the Atlantic Canadian dioceses to the eternal city for an “ad lumina” visit with Pope Francis. The purpose of these visits—which, as Mancini told Steve Murphy of CTV AtlanticRead More