Estragon: I can’t go on like this. Vladimir: That’s what you think. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot   Part II: Four Ways to Change the Local World   Proposal #1: A CBRM Citizens’ Assembly on COVID-19 & Post-Pandemic Recovery “Watershed periods in history,” Mikhail Gorbachev declared in 1992, “mayRead 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

Editor’s Note: I asked Spectator contributor Don Clarke to write something about what’s happening in his neck of the CBRM these days and here’s what he had to say.   Making music Last week, I spoke to Glace Bay musician Aaron Turnbull about the local music scene and his personalRead More

Editor’s Note: I received my copy of this open letter, released by the Health for All Network on 12 October 2022, from Dr. Monika Dutt, a public health physician in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland & Labrador whom I’ve interviewed in these pages previously and who stated, in an accompanying pressRead More

On March 3, Canada announced new emergency measures to support Ukrainian refugees. We have opened a special pathway for Ukrainians which waives all fees and normal visa requirements, we have established a special family reunification and sponsorship pathway for extended family members of Canadian citizens and permanent residents, we areRead More

There’s a passage in Lachlan MacKinnon’s book, Closing Sysco: Industrial Decline in Atlantic Canada’s Steel City, in which a former steelworker, Adrian Murphy, describes what it’s like to visit Open Hearth Park, the greenspace that’s replaced the plant in the heart of Sydney: I was there a couple of times withRead More

Statistics Canada says that 309,893 Canadians died in 2020, which means annual deaths surpassed 300,000 for the first time in the country’s history. As for the contribution of COVID, Stats Canada says: The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) reported that 15,651 or 5.1% of deaths in 2020 were causedRead More

I just paid €1 to subscribe to Der Spiegel for a month so I could read that Martin Doerry article about “right-wing conspiracy ideologists” luring “like-minded” Germans to Cape Breton, an island, as Doerry helpfully explains, connected to mainland Nova Scotia by “a dam with a swing bridge.” (I usedRead More