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

Courthouse Dreams We discovered during budget talks on Tuesday that CBRM is considering the possibility  of turning the former Cape Breton County courthouse in Wentworth Park into the new central library. I am trying not to get my hopes up too high as I write this because there are aRead More

While our community contemplates the merits of replacing the aging McConnell Library, perhaps an appreciation of the existing institution is not unwarranted.  Certainly a 70-year-old structure whose principal purpose, as an educational avenue, is the availability and accessibility of books, is still up to the job?  What defects exist, noRead More

Doggone generous CBC Cape Breton’s annual Light Up a Life campaign to raise money for Feed Nova Scotia makes me awfully uncomfortable. I know I sound like Scrooge, the Grinch and Donald Trump all rolled into one for saying it, but there it is. In fact, I get so uncomfortable,Read More

Reasonable Self-Esteem by Richard Keshen, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Cape Breton University (CBU), was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 1996 to critical acclaim, including laudatory reviews in major academic journals like Ethics and Mind. The book sold out, not a frequent occurrence with academic works, and thisRead More

Margaret Young of Sydney writes: Thank you, Dolores Campbell, for your article on the mission begun by the Congregation of Notre Dame in 1885, now to be carried on — much altered, of course — by New Dawn. At the official announcement made by the premier, I was disappointed, althoughRead More

Librarians, in my experience, are often bearers of good news. For example, last year, while spending a day in the country, I dropped into the local library just to have a look around. The librarian was friendly and helpful, and not only informed me that I could borrow items thereRead More

It’s still a wonder to me that I can, from home or anywhere with internet access, go to the Cape Breton Regional Library’s website and search all Nova Scotia public library catalogs for a particular book I want to borrow, or just browse the collections to find something interesting, makeRead More

Aussie Hemp Local businessman Parker Rudderham announced last week that his hemp oil company, Highland Hemp, had signed a $14 million deal to supply an unspecified amount of hemp oil to an unnamed Brazilian pharmaceutical company. When reading local business stories, I like to ask myself, “What would the Wall StreetRead More

Say Something if You See Something “Say Something if You See Something” is the name of a new human trafficking and sexual exploitation “education and awareness” program launched by the Halifax Police and the RCMP and targeted at workers in the hospitality and transport sectors. The name of the campaignRead More