In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear William Blake   Was the June 12 Singapore Summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a breakthrough or a let-down, a successRead...

“No leasing land to China even for one day” I heard this story on Democracy Now as I was drifting off to sleep the other night and woke up the next morning thinking I’d dreamt it, but I looked it up and it was real. Here’s the Voice of AmericaRead More

I absolutely detest the lack of compassion the media have during tragic times. On 2 November 2014, my 20-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident in St. John’s, Newfoundland. It was awful for us to repeatedly see my daughter’s overturned car posted and used in story after story. YesterdayRead More

(Wide) Open data I’m still trying to digest all I’ve read about the great hacking-that-wasn’t of Nova Scotia’s freedom-of-information portal. There is a lot to digest. The story has legs and has bounded all over the planet, a textbook case of — take your pick — lax data protection, policeRead More

Team Meucci I’m filing this one under, “Better Late Than Never.” It’s a Tom Ayers story that appeared in the Chronicle Herald on March 22 and about which I keep meaning to say something. On the surface, it’s a story about the descendants of Alexander Graham Bell disputing the $885,200Read More

Eating (some) crow I received a detailed response to last week’s Fast & Curious from CBC Cape Breton Information Morning panelist Stephen Tobin of the Horizon Achievement Centre. He took issue (see what I did there?) with my critique of his list of Nova Scotia mayors who remained in office whileRead More

Nova Scotia Represent I ran across references to Nova Scotia in two unexpected places this past week, which is always fun and makes me think, “The world DOES know we exist!” The first came as I was listening to the latest episode of The Zero Hour, a TV  and radioRead More

The Cape Breton Post was very good to CBRM Mayor (and potential provincial Tory leadership candidate) Cecil Clarke this Christmas. It allowed him to “open up” about his publicly funded trip to China in back-to-back articles on December 19 and 20. It helped puzzled Cape Bretoners decide what they should buyRead More

I’ve been going through old photos from the Cape Breton Highlander and decided to share some of them with you in this last Spectator issue of 2017. Many of them are the work of photographer Ray Doucet. I asked John Campbell, who was the editor of the Highlander (and isRead More

Thursday night’s Cinema Politica screening of Shadows of Liberty and the subsequent panel discussion were always going to be interesting but events this week just cranked that “interesting” level up to 11. The 2013 documentary, which screens at 6:00PM at the McConnell Library in Sydney, is directed by Canada’s Jean-Philippe TremblayRead More