Although the Residential Schools have come under attack over the years, the discovery of the graves of children in and around the former schools in May of 2021 resulted in a new and urgent call for apologies from the various churches involved in them. Almost immediately after the graves wereRead More

Awards season (I) I first met Rob Csernyik in April 2019. We had coffee at Dr. Luke’s and he interviewed me for a J-Source article he was writing about the Cape Breton journalism scene. We went back and forth by email for months afterward because J-Source is serious to the…Read...

Were it not for the long-dead woman at its center, this story, about a researcher being denied access to items by Quebec’s Musée de la civilisation, might not have been an obvious Spectator story. But the items Jamie Jelinski, “an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on the history of Canadian visualRead More

It’s Tuesday morning as I write and the digital “front page” of our local daily contains the following stories: Cape Breton Regional Police investigating stolen vehicle in Sydney Mines Police investigating two separate property damage incidents at hospice site in Membertou Cape Breton police asking for help in solving NeedsRead More

A spectator (you know who you are) recently referenced my June 2019 article about the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club (RCBYC), the 113-year-old building that graced the Sydney waterfront until 3 May 2013, when it was destroyed by fire. This reminded me that I had never properly followed up onRead More

The news that Jean Vanier, who died in May 2019, sexually abused six women surely devastated his followers and admirers around the world, including, one assumes, the L’Arche community in Iron Mines, Cape Breton. (I made an effort to contact them but heard nothing back after leaving a message.) TheRead More

Over a year ago, I began creating this timeline, intending to track two separate but connected stories: Canada’s National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS) and more particularly, the large-vessel component of the NSS. The criminal case against Vice-Admiral Mark Norman. The impetus was the upcoming trial — scheduled for August 2019 —Read 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

Editor’s Note: This is the second 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.)   Why does the MMIWG inquiry declare a “Canadian genocide”? Why raise such a storm of controversy overRead More

‘Many or several’ A Tuesday night CTV news report about the cruise industry in Cape Breton (opening line: “It seems their ship has come in, once again, for the cruise industry in Cape Breton”), sent me scrambling for my secondary sources. First, because it seemed to contain confirmation that theRead More