Bait and Switch? How it started: Excitement is building for what’s expected to be a multi-million dollar development along the Cabot Trail by a private firm with European connections. Just two days after the sale of a beleaguered Ingonish ski hill, the facility’s new owners are hosting a public meeting.Read More

I (Not) Robot First of all, neither this paragraph nor any subsequent paragraphs will be generated by ChatGPT the artificial intelligence tool that can mimic human speech and write well enough that the Guardian believes “[p]rofessors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a fewRead More

Cape Breton University President and Vice-Chancellor David Dingwall has written to his “fellow Cape Bretoners” AGAIN. What are we? His pen-pals? This time it’s a two-page advertisement (once again in the Saturday edition of the Cape Breton Post, not the cheapest medium) telling us why CBU should get a MedicalRead 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

On December 17, a fire broke out in the Ashby neighborhood of Sydney in a Park Street duplex that was home to eight people, all international students at Cape Breton University (CBU). One of the eight, identified by the CBC as 33-year-old business analytics student Rajesh Kumar Gollapudi, died inRead More

One evening, years ago, I had had it after a day of argumentative and wailing kids and decided I was heading out as soon as supper was over. The bus arrived and I was aboard before I suddenly thought, “Where will I go?” After a few minutes, it hit me.Read More

Last week, I took a cooking class run by New Dawn Enterprise’s A Better Bite Community Kitchen. Called “Tomato Sauce Five Ways,” the class was held in A Better Bite’s facilities in the New Dawn Centre on Nepean Street in Sydney and led by dietician Jessica MacNeil. She taught usRead More

You’ll think me mean spirited, no doubt, but I really found the choice of former Cape Breton Partnership President and CEO Carla Arsenault as principal of the Marconi Campus of the NSCC to be a head-scratcher. So much so that I asked the NSCC (via email) some questions about theRead More

Communications Writing about Island Employment’s travails this week, I had reason to visit the website of the Nova Scotia Career Development Association (NSCDA) and found myself perusing their catalog of training courses for their employees — or “practitioners” as they’re called. I ended up down a rather deep rabbit holeRead More

In late August The New Yorker featured a fascinating, slightly awestruck examination of “the Costa Rica Model” of “health care that understands its community,” by American surgeon and professor of public health Atul Gawande. Gawande, nominated by President Biden to serve as assistant administrator of the US Aid and DevelopmentRead More