Johnny ‘No Comment’ During the 2021 provincial election, when he was running as the (ultimately successful) Progressive Conservative candidate in the riding of Glace Bay, John White (aka Johnny White aka Johnny Bubba) declined to answer the Spectator‘s questions. I had forgotten that until yesterday, when I read about WhiteRead More

“The world really is impossible to manage as long as we have nuclear weapons. It really is a terrible way to have to live in this world.” President John F. Kennedy to British Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, 21 October 1962   Over 200 blood-soaked days into Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,Read More

My problem this week, as I got back to my regular publication schedule, was that my story ideas were all too big to turn around in time for this week’s edition. I don’t like scratching the surface of things, but while I dust off my shovel and get ready toRead More

Pick a lane? I live in the North End of Sydney and on a day a week or so ago when there were three cruise ships in port, I had a sudden vision of the area as a pedestrian-only district. It sounds crazy, I know, because at the moment, theRead 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

Author’s Note This month’s ‘War & Peace’ column is dedicated to the memory of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022), the last leader of the Soviet Union, who grasped—as he told the United Nations in 1988—that in the nuclear age, “disarmament” is “the most important thing of all, without which no other issueRead More

As the temperature hit 41° C (with the humidex) on Sunday, I found myself thinking of CBU poli-sci Prof Tom Urbaniak’s recent Post opinion piece about our municipality’s woefully inadequate preparations for extreme heat: Severe, extended heat waves were previously rare around here. But our changing climate is changing ourRead More

One hears the word and wants to know more, but one also wants to forget it. One has heard both too much and not enough about Hiroshima. For the city evokes our entire nuclear nightmare…  Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967) Return to Hiroshima on AugustRead More

UPDATE: Council met on August 23 and revealed that the second of these meetings involved the awarding of the food and beverage contract at the Miner’s Forum. It went to Scott Morrison, who owns Sydney’s Flavor Downtown, Flavor 19 and Flavor on the Water. (Although Morrison wasn’t mentioned by name;Read More

  1 Witch. When shall we three met again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? 2 Witch. When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won. Shakespeare, Macbeth   Shakespeare’s Macbeth opens in the “fog and filthy air” of an “open place,” a no-man’s-land where three witches – theRead More