In 2021, a special committee of the Senate of Canada issued its report on the country’s charitable sector. I am not going to pretend to a deep knowledge of this committee’s work, given I just discovered its existence on Monday, but I will say that the question the committee setRead More

My name is Rhonda, and this is the story (so far) of my wonky heart valve. I found out that I had a problem with my mitral valve—one of four valves and that open and close to let blood flow through the heart—when I was in my early 20s. IRead More

Working from home I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about this week and then I discovered that Craig Boudreau, head of  J. Francis Investments, vice chair of the Cape Breton Regional Chamber of Commerce, Sage of Charlotte Street, had once again taken pen in hand to shareRead More

If the dull hum of a nuclear warhead ever mutates to a deafening and life-ending roar of a nuclear explosion, humanity will be extinguished—Tom Unterrainer, END Info 30, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, March 2022   In 1935, retired US Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler (1880-1941), a veteran of AmericanRead More

This is, after all, the playbook of all privatization advocates everywhere: starve a public good, wait for it to malfunction, and then claim the free market is required to fix the problem—Mitchell Thompson, Jacobin, January 2023 The current health system does not have a ‘management’ problem; it has an ‘economics’Read More

Editor’s Note: I broke this article into two pieces (see Part I here) to allow you an opportunity to rest between decades but now it’s time to face the ’80s and ’90s.   Canada’s mania for deficit reduction, although it reached its peak in the ’90s, started in the ’80s.Read More

Editor’s Note: I caught myself looking rather bleakly at the snow yesterday and decided I needed a timely reminder about embracing winter, so I re-read Paul MacDougall’s 25 November 2020 piece on coping with the cold and I thought you might like to too.   There is probably as muchRead More

Pick a lane? I live in the North End of Sydney and on a day a week or so ago when there were three cruise ships in port, I had a sudden vision of the area as a pedestrian-only district. It sounds crazy, I know, because at the moment, theRead More

My snapshot of the current cruise industry (see part one here) would be sadly wanting if I failed to note that Princess Cruise Lines, fined a record $40 million in 2017 for what the US Department of Justice called “environmental crimes,” has failed to mend its wicked ways. The 2017Read More

I love Dominion Beach. It’s not one of the world’s greatest beaches with endless, white (or even red) sand but it’s mine. I have often walked or jogged along the shore or the boardwalk, which has been built and rebuilt over the years after the waves have washed it away,Read More