Hunger and homelessness are urban problems being tackled in interesting ways in cities on both sides of the Atlantic. In Edinburgh, for example, “social entrepreneurs” Josh Littlejohn and Alice Thomson have launched Social Bite, a chain of soup and sandwich shops where customers can pay “for a coffee or a sandwichRead More

B’Spoke Apparel: Addendum In this week’s edition, I reviewed some recently awarded CBRM tenders, including one for clothing for Transit Authority employees that was won by B’Spoke Apparel of Halifax. I noted that B’Spoke is owned by 180 Moda which is owned by Taura Lee (aka Taura Publicover). Here’s theRead More

Back in March of this year, the United Way of Cape Breton, together with the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, sponsored the Community Impact Summit at Centre 200, a coming together of “business, government and non-profit sector leaders…to commit to specific, positive actions to help citizens living in poverty,” or asRead More

In 2009, Richard Keshen, now professor emeritus at Cape Breton University, interviewed Father Greg MacLeod as part of a series of interviews with key figures in the history of the university. Keshen and MacLeod, who was 73 at the time, had a wide-ranging discussion which Keshen later divided into five sections.Read More

Elections are dangerous times. Don’t sit on your front yard or you may get skewered by a campaign sign. Don’t let your family pets near the street, lest they be spray-painted or asphalted over by zealous provincial road workers.  Fortunately for you, you are not alone during this perilous period: Dr. StrangeJobRead More

Dear Editor, It seems less and less frequent that we receive knocks on the door with people on the other side who want to have face-to-face conversations. Rare is the opportunity to look someone in the eye rather than through a screen and talk about things that matter. It’s electionRead More

As kids, we weren’t very impressed by our mother’s “war stories” of walking six miles to school after feeding the chickens and having a big bowl of porridge (she hated it so much we were never forced to eat it). She didn’t talk too much about her life as aRead More

The Cape Breton Regional Municipality has more police officers than it can afford. Don’t look at me, I’m not the one who said it—it’s the considered opinion of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality Task Force, or The Mayor’s Task Force, a group formed in 2013 to “make recommendations regarding theRead More

In July 2011, Elaine Power wrote a scathing account of food banks in The Globe and Mail, declaring “they have become a serious obstacle in the fight against poverty” and “it was time to close them down.” Power, at the time an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology andRead More

It just isn’t funny anymore Dr StrangeJob is angry! Every level of government—federal, provincial and municipal—is currently under scrutiny for questionable spending of taxpayer dollars: the recent federal staff relocation reimbursements, the latest provincial MLA frivolous self-promotional kitsch, the Guysborough County expense scandal and the ombudsman’s Richmond County expense claimRead More