Editor’s Note: We’re reaching into Michelle’s Smith’s archives for posts as useful now as when they were first published and this week, we’re revisiting one of her lovely long-form essays, last published in November 2020.   The cat and I huddled under the blankets in the dark as the windRead More

Medicare-less As I noted in my unburied power lines story on Wednesday, I managed to stay better focused in my research this week, but I cannot spend hours reading old newspapers without occasionally getting distracted. Fortunately, I have Fast & Curious as a sort of catch-all drawer; a place forRead More

Editor’s Note: This is Part II of a series that will continue until I find some answers or give up, whichever comes first. You’ll find Part I here and Part III here.)   When last we met, it was August 1984, and Zutphen Brothers of Port Hood was sitting onRead More

CBRM Council held a relatively brief meeting on Tuesday morning that included a presentation from the municipal Water Utility on a proposed water rate hike. CBRM’s Water Utility, according to this handy description provided by the Utility and Review Board (UARB) back in 2017, is: …comprised of seven distinct areas,Read More

I don’t know enough about golf to begin with an appropriate golf reference, so please insert whatever the golf equivalent of “catch-up football” is here, because that’s what I’m playing—I missed the Notice of Defence filed by the defendants in a lawsuit launched by the Atlantic Canadian Opportunities Agency (ACOA)Read More

This time last year, I was writing multiple articles (see here and here and here) about golf magnate Ben Cowan-Dewar’s controversial new course on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. Cowan-Dewar and partner Mike Keiser have not even completed that course (Sports Illustrated says Cabot Saint Lucia is scheduled toRead More

Editor’s Note: I’ve been enjoying my favorite apples — Gravensteins — this season and they reminded me of this great Michelle Smith column about apples which first appeared on 15 February 2017.   I have something to confess. For someone in my position it is, well, more than a littleRead More

Food for thought Let’s start with a little game of “Okay, stop” with Sylvain Charlebois—professor in food distribution and policy and senior director of the AgriFood Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and all-round media darling. Here he is on the question of whether Canada’s three leading grocers have been price-gougingRead More

Editor’s Note: This is Part I of a series that will continue until I find some answers or give up, whichever comes first. You’ll find Part II here and Part III here.   Since I began the Spectator in 2016—long before this most recent controversy over the utility poles onRead More

As I noted in my main article this week (if you haven’t read it yet, you really must), spending a couple of days reading newspapers from 1984 was a trip. While the political spat at the heart of my story seemed entirely familiar, the world in which it was takingRead More