Having been publishing bi-weekly — or, as I like to think of it, working at half-speed — all summer, I’ve been building up a store of opinions on a variety of subjects. In fact, my “two-cents’ worth” on such disparate issues as Annette Verschuren’s induction into the Business & PhilanthropyRead More

Northside-Westmount — formerly Cape Breton North — has mostly gone back and forth between the Liberals and Tories with the exception of the 1978 general election when Len Arsenault briefly turned it NDP orange. The riding produced a Liberal Premier, Russell MacLellan, before turning into what I think I canRead More

In 2012, the provincial electoral boundaries commission took 79% of Cape Breton Nova and 59% of Cape Breton South and created Sydney-Whitney Pier. The 2019 commission lopped off the Pier and added some Sydney River-Mira-Louisbourg territory and — voila! — Sydney-Membertou was born. I’m going to do some electoral genealogyRead More

I could not understand why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant. I thought it might have been something which had nothing to do with the war, the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world, and which IRead More

I spent so much time on The Codfathers this week, I didn’t really have much left over to cover other issues but there are a few things I’d like to touch on, however briefly:   Affordable Housing I heard Catherine Leviten-Reid on CBC Information Morning Cape Breton today discussing aRead More

Author’s Note: In this series of columns (see the first one here and the second here) I am using various works of science fiction and fantasy to consider some of the ethical issues generated by our current situation.   As I write this, the weather is warming and the pandemicRead More

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about the pandemic with which we have all been living since March of 2020, but more ink and more airtime has been spent on COVID-19 than on any other topic I can recall over the past few years. Daily reports on caseRead...

Editor’s Note: This open letter from the Cape Breton West Chapter of the Council of Canadians to the prime minister is dated 11 May 2021.   Dear Prime Minister Trudeau, We are writing to implore the Government of Canada to ask the World Trade Organization (WTO) to hold an emergencyRead More

During today’s COVID-19 Update, Dr. Robert Strang and Premier Iain Rankin announced a province-wide shutdown or circuit breaker that will go into effect as of 8:00 AM tomorrow (Wednesday, April 28) and remain in place until at least May 12. “We are in a race between the variant and theRead More

The third wave is here and I thought it might be a good idea to bring together all the information I’ve been tweeting out piecemeal about COVID these past few days. Given the admirable job Tim Bousquet at the Examiner does covering the briefings — and the daily press releasesRead More