I‘m not even going to pretend that I pay serious attention to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is held annually in Davos, Switzerland and which attracts thousands of the world’s rich and famous — including political, business and cultural leaders — to the tiny ski resort to carry outRead...

The Spectator’s Ethicist, Rachel Haliburton, provides convincing — and sometimes counter-intuitive — arguments as to why making the rich pay their fair share of taxes benefits us all. (Read Reason #1, Reason #2,Reason #3 and Reason #4. For proof the Ethicist is in tune with the current Zeitgeist, read about US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’sRead More

Welcome to 2019! As I write, I’ve already used up 19 days of a brand new year, and by the time anyone reads this, there will be 342 days left in which to accomplish anything, whether of real value or not. Glancing back at the topics that grabbed my interestRead More

The signs of Christmas are everywhere and I’m not referring to the lights, the decorations or the concerts. No, actually, I’m thinking more along the lines of the Salvation Army Christmas Kettle Campaign, the CBC’s Light Up A Life Campaign for Feed Nova Scotia, the Christmas Daddies Telethon — thoseRead More

The Spectator’s Ethicist, Rachel Haliburton, provides convincing — and sometimes counter-intuitive — arguments as to why making the rich pay their fair share of taxes benefits us all.(Read Reason #1 and Reason #2)   As faithful readers of the Ethicist column in the Cape Breton Spectator will know, for theRead More

Last month. I wrote about taxation, and observed that determining what levels of taxation are fair – and deciding who should pay the most taxes and who should pay the least – will always be substantially ethical decisions, and can never be solely economic or practical ones. While voices onRead More

Susan Leblanc, the NDP MLA for Dartmouth North, has introduced a bill that would see the provincial government guarantee personal, short-term, “micro-loans” for amounts up to $2,000 from credit unions. I spoke to Leblanc briefly, by phone, on Friday and she told me the guarantee would be similar to theRead More

Buying Ben Eoin I started to write about the recent sale of the land under the Ben Eoin Yacht Club to a group of “businessmen and doctors” as the CBC’s Tom Ayers put it, but as I hit the 1,000 word mark I realized I was writing an article forRead More

I’ve been trying to think of an analogy for Nova Scotia’s Employment Support and Income Assistance (ESIA) program and so far this is the best I’ve come up with: The government decides that while 13 years of public school is optimal for Nova Scotian students, it is only going toRead More

Sydney-Victoria figured in a Canadian Top-10 list this week but it’s nothing to celebrate: we’re one of the 10 federal ridings with the highest levels of child poverty in the country. The list is found in the latest report from Campaign 2000, a Canadian anti-poverty group that takes its nameRead More