So you have to stay home from work. What that will look like for you, financially, depends on a number of factors. As I write this, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just announced a whopping $82 billion aid package — $27 billion in emergency aid and $55 billion inRead More

Nova Scotia’s long-term care facilities are closed to visitors, casinos are closed, public schools are closed and as of tomorrow restaurants will be restricted to take-out only and “drinking establishments” will also close. Why? To try to stop the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndromeRead More

The second day of self-isolation seems to be going well so far, although it was at the bequest of worried family members that we decided to go this route. Let’s face it, we haven’t been to any exotic places recently, other than a quick round-trip to Irish Cove about aRead More

Mayor’s Notebook Did you know Mayor Cecil Clarke sends out a handful of pages from his “notebook” quarterly to a mailing list I didn’t know existed and probably won’t be permitted to join? (I’ll try, but his spokesperson has stopped answering my emails.) Luckily, I have a source who sharedRead More

I’ve speculated about it going over budget and falling behind schedule, but it never occurred to me that a virus — more specifically, a novel coronavirus called COVID-19 — would pose the biggest threat to the timely opening of the CBRM’s $20 million second cruise ship berth, but here weRead More

I called Dr. Mike Milburn this Monday for our regular monthly conversation, and after trading observations about the length of the days (longer) and the activity of the birds (heightened), we had a wide-ranging discussion about the benefits of healthy eating. We touched on a few things we’d covered beforeRead More

Imagine you’re watching US cable television and a commercial comes on for a new prescription medication. It’s a typical drug ad, featuring shots of older people gardening and biking and bowling and parasailing and tossing basketballs effortlessly through hoops as a narrator explains the benefits of this new miracle pill:Read More

On December 23, amidst all the busyness leading up to Christmas Day, I was privileged to hear an outstanding interview broadcast on the national radio network of the CBC. The program was the public affairs daily The Current and the guest was the president of the Cape Breton Medical StaffRead More

“Our approach has been very different than previous approaches,” says Bradley Johnston, PhD, an author on all six papers and a co-founder of NutriRECS. “We’ve taken the individual approach rather than societal. We believe that people should be fully informed when they make health care decisions based on best estimatesRead More

I was listening to Intercepted, a podcast from The Intercept news outlet, on Wednesday and heard an interview with Emily Guendelsberger, a Philadelphia-based journalist who has written a book called  On the Clock, What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. The interviewer, Jeremy Scahill, explainedRead More