Pathways to Employment community organization based in Sydney, is probably best known for its wood shop, laundry services and other programs that attempt to reintegrate disenfranchised people with addictions or restrictions due to mental health issues into the community. Certainly, that’s the aspect of Pathways I was most familiar with;Read More

Over the last two years, Nova Scotians of all ages have been impacted by unprecedented grief and loss. The COVID-19 pandemic and public health restrictions have prevented people from coming together, supporting one another, or participating in many traditional rituals of mourning and celebration. Individuals have suffered physical, emotional, orRead More

Just say no The local CBC is running a multi-part series on “street drugs” and if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect it was being sponsored by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, because the stance it takes on drugs — they’re bad and people who do them die — seemsRead More

A few years ago, one of my colleagues told me a funny story. One of his students had said to him, “It’s a good thing that someone invented universities. Otherwise, there would be no place in the world for people like you to fit in.” I was thinking about thisRead More

A couple of weeks ago, I reconnected (via Zoom) with an old friend in Brooklyn, NYC, and in between catching up and sharing gluten-free cinnamon bun recipes, we talked about our respective lives under COVID. She told me that she’d recently gone for drinks in her neighborhood with a smallRead More

Well, we’ve discovered at least two things since the COVID-19 cloud descended upon us, one being that we won’t be telling our grandchildren about the pandemic since they’re living through it with us and will have their own stories to tell. Secondly, a Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) is not onlyRead More

Daily briefing Dr. Robert Strang today announced an additional death at the Northwood long-term-care facility (LTCF) in Halifax, bringing total deaths there to 50. I haven’t done the math on this before but today I did and it is grim: the fatality rate among residents at Northwood has been roughlyRead 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

Earlier this year, acting on a tip that ambulances were being called quite frequently to what is now known as the Sydney Call Centre (although for most of the period for which I requested figures, it was the ServiCom call center), I FOIPOPed the Nova Scotia Department of Health toRead More

I am sitting in a board game café as I write this month’s column. I have my phone on the table in front of me, and I am surrounded by young people, most of whom are using computers and/or are holding phones in their hands. Our phones and our computersRead More