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

I read recently of the antics of two American billionaires with a kind of horrified fascination. The first was Elon Musk, who seems to be morphing from “a brilliant visionary” (at least in the eyes of some) to a cartoon-like James Bond villain, who fires thousands of people without aRead More

Editor’s Note: This column last appeared on 17 January 2018.   What to do this week: It is still winter, and we are still holed up with our seed catalogs. In case you haven’t noticed, some catalogs are better than others. Some are pretty, and inspirational for that reason. OthersRead More

Golfing in the Park [Ben Cowan-Dewar] also cited golf courses in national parks — including Highlands Links in Cape Breton, Green Gables in P.E.I., Fundy National in New Brunswick and Banff Springs in Alberta — as other examples of competing land uses. “Is there a case where golf exists inRead More

Happy New Year, spectators! I have entered this year in possession of a wood stove and a drinks table, so you know things are looking up. Not that all I see is shiny and new—CBRM council, for instance, stuck with tradition and held its first meeting of 2023 in camera.Read More

On December 17, a fire broke out in the Ashby neighborhood of Sydney in a Park Street duplex that was home to eight people, all international students at Cape Breton University (CBU). One of the eight, identified by the CBC as 33-year-old business analytics student Rajesh Kumar Gollapudi, died inRead More

Author’s Note: On 3 May 2019, a Thanksgiving Service was held in Westminster Abbey, attended by senior members of the Government and Royal Family, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD)—charmingly known as ‘Operation Relentless’—of the Royal Navy’s nuclear-armed submarines. As you read this, one ofRead More

Author’s Note: In December, I interviewed Robert Forsyth and Robert Green, who served for many years in the Belly of a Beast—the British naval nuclear war machine—they now devoutly wish to see dismantled. I’ve told their stories in a separate article and you can find my entire email exchange withRead More

Editor’s Note: The subject line of this email was simply “Donkin Mine”   I am a retired psychiatrist who got to treat one of the men for PTSD who had brought out dead from the Westray mine disaster in ‘92. After the explosion the manager of that mine described itRead...

In December 1984, Ward Five Alderman Frank Starzomski put forth a motion calling for Sydney’s City Council to be reduced from 12 members to six. Trimming city council had long been advocated by Sydney’s Shadow Council, a group of citizens—many of them women—who monitored the actual council, although, as theRead More