Women’s Wellness Within is a non-profit organization that provides volunteer support to criminalized women and trans individuals who are pregnant or parenting young children. We advocate for access to housing, income, resources and healthcare. We are a collective of doulas, healthcare providers, lawyers, students, researchers and mentors. We have clearanceRead More

We are a…province? Organizers of the Father Greg MacLeod lecture series promised the talks would explore “radical,” “daring” and “out-of-the-box” ideas and I have to say Senator Dan Christmas, who gave the inaugural lecture last night, delivered. His daring idea? Cape Breton should be a province. Oh, I know, IRead More

Were you aware that St. Francis of Assisi was a deacon? He had never wanted to be ordained to the priesthood, and when he explained to those in charge exactly what he wanted to do, which was simply to serve the poor, he was advised that he should be ordainedRead More

Maureen Googoo’s Ku’ku’kwes News, an “independent indigenous” online news organization, has been providing extensive coverage of the hearings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) in Membertou, Cape Breton, this week. In addition to live-blogging the sessions, which took place on Monday and Tuesday andRead More

Exporting our ‘expertise’ So, this happened:   According to the article in the 23 October 2017 Cape Breton Post: Officials from the Cape Breton Partnership and the Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities completed their first mission to Vietnam in June. The officials will be providing their expertise to counterparts in VietnamRead More

Quebec’s “religious neutrality” Bill 62 has passed the Quebec legislature and will come into effect immediately, although there are no specific guidelines for those who will have to enforce or administer said law, which, strangely enough, has neither penalties nor fines attached to it. Critics see the bill as aRead More

The invitation I received from New Dawn for the inaugural Father Greg MacLeod Lecture says the series, named for the late community advocate, will invite us to “love an idea — especially a distinct, hopeful, outside-the box, radical idea” about “the life we know in Cape Breton.” I have toRead...

Kudos to the Post? Oh yeah, you read that correctly: this week, the cranky ol’ Spectator is congratulating the Cape Breton Post on its new website, which is crisp and clean and mercifully free of the clickbait ads that used to cover its home page like measles on the faces ofRead More

Earlier this year, the idea of a guaranteed annual income (GAI) was in the news, including in The Cape Breton Spectator where yours truly wrote about Ontario’s plan to “launch a pilot project to assess whether a basic income can better support vulnerable workers, improve health and education outcomes forRead More

Dear Minister Furey, Re: The Race to Restrict our Human Rights Yesterday, the Nova Scotia Law Amendments Committee heard from seven different presenters about the issues, problems, and limits of the Adult Capacity and Decision-making Act (Bill 16). The new Act is meant to replace the outdated and especially restrictiveRead More