In the wake of an accident that saw 600,000 liters of gasoline leak from a storage tank in Imperial Oil’s North End Sydney tank farm, the oil giant has been rather stingy with its compensation to residents, tossing nickels around like the proverbial manhole covers. It doesn’t require a veryRead More

Pennsylvania Pain I decided to write about the first thing that popped into my head this morning (that wasn’t war in Ukraine) and it was the TV series I just watched, Mare of Easttown, starring Kate Winslet. (Warning: there will be spoilers. If you haven’t watched it and plan to,Read More

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) in Nova Scotia has performed its annual public service of crunching the numbers to determine how much a worker must actually earn to live with some modicum of dignity in this province and the answer this year, for Cape Breton, is $18.45/hour. That’sRead More

Christmas is nigh and the good and the generous have been hard at work throughout our communities, making sure that each and every family awakens to everything it takes to make the day a joyful one. They’ll have food and toys and clothing and all will be fine — forRead More

So you have to stay home from work. What that will look like for you, financially, depends on a number of factors. As I write this, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just announced a whopping $82 billion aid package — $27 billion in emergency aid and $55 billion inRead More

I was listening to a breakdown of Liberal election promises (pre-election) and the reporter doing the breaking down said they included a tax cut for middle-income families and it got me to thinking about the value of tax cuts versus the cost of tax cuts. Luckily for me, someone muchRead 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

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

First, some numbers: according to Statistics Canada, in 2016, Canadian households spent, on average, $8,784.00 on food, 26% of that on restaurant meals. In Nova Scotia last year, a single woman on social assistance received $532.00 for housing, $275.00 as a personal allowance and $36.00 for drugs, medical and transportation.Read 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