Dear Premier Houston: We would like to bring your attention to the West Mabou Beach Provincial Park controversy and our concerns in that regard. West Mabou Beach is an ecologically sensitive area that forms part of the mere 5% of Nova Scotian coastline that is legally protected. We are adamantlyRead 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

Last week,  in Part I of my article on Canada’s healthcare system, I cited the Canadian Encyclopedia entry on “health policy” written by the late Toronto Star medical reporter Marilyn E. Dunlop. In my initial draft, I noted that the Canadian Encyclopedia is kind of wacky (see the “David Dingwall”Read 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

I (Not) Robot First of all, neither this paragraph nor any subsequent paragraphs will be generated by ChatGPT the artificial intelligence tool that can mimic human speech and write well enough that the Guardian believes “[p]rofessors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a fewRead 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

Cape Breton University President and Vice-Chancellor David Dingwall has written to his “fellow Cape Bretoners” AGAIN. What are we? His pen-pals? This time it’s a two-page advertisement (once again in the Saturday edition of the Cape Breton Post, not the cheapest medium) telling us why CBU should get a MedicalRead More

Editor’s Note: I’m trying out my system of choosing items from the CBRM council agenda and doing some preliminary research on Tuesday afternoon, then watching the meeting and updating the article accordingly.   Item 6.2 (a) on last night’s CBRM council agenda was “business arising” from a January 17 inRead More

CBU President and Vice-Chancellor David Dingwall has issued ANOTHER open letter “to the Cape Breton Community,” this one occupying three full (expensive) pages in last Saturday’s Cape Breton Post, and it is another absolute dud of a PR exercise. It states: I want to assure you that I, as PresidentRead More