Lord have Percy I don’t even know where to start with this baffling story. Freshii, the Canadian-based fast-food chain, is experimenting with a “virtual cashier” system called “Percy” that allows it to hire cashiers in Nicaragua and pay them US$3.75/hour instead of minimum wage in Ontario which is $15 (US$11.70)Read More

Had I read Gordon Pitts’ The Codfathers: Lessons from the Atlantic Business Elite when it first came out in 2005, I think it would have annoyed me — it’s just a collection of fawning portraits of wealthy Atlantic Canadian business types. But in 2021, post-financial crisis, mid-plague, as the worldRead More

I lost track of how many times participants in Tuesday’s “CBRM Forward” discussion used the words “excited” or “exciting.” Literally everyone who spoke was either excited to be there or excited at the prospect of overhauling the municipality’s planning strategy and land-use by-law or excited to be drafting an economicRead More

Old Don Cameron Donald Cameron became premier of Nova Scotia in 1991 the same way Iain Rankin is poised to become premier next Tuesday: by winning the leadership of his party (the Tories) after the elected premier (John Buchanan) stepped down. When Cameron did lead the party to the polls,Read More

A complaint has been filed with the Labour Standards Division of Nova Scotia against the Sydney Call Centre for breaching provincial labor laws. I should know. I filed it. I sent my four-page complaint with more than 40 supporting documents on October 2, alleging the center, which employs over 600Read More

It’s toady time! I confess: I find Anthony Marlowe — CEO of MCI, savior of the Sydney Call Centre — fascinating. So much so that whenever things are slow, or I’m in need of distraction, I tune in to his Twitter stream to see what he’s been getting up to.Read More

MAGAA So, this happened: “Make America Great Again, Again?” In case you’ve forgotten, that’s Anthony Marlowe, the Iowa businessman who bought the Sydney Call Centre in 2019. Julia Marlowe is his wife, who has been appointed deputy White House liaison in the US General Services Administration (GSA). Here’s a description…Read...

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

As you have probably divined, the item of greatest interest to me on yesterday’s council agenda was the request to extend Harbour Royale Development Ltd’s waterfront development agreement and thereby, its role in developing the proposed new CBRM central library, but there were other items on the agenda that IRead More

Snowing on our parade The fall-out over the CBRM’s decision to cancel night parades continues to land — most recently on the editorial pages of the Cape Breton Post where District 12 Councilor Jim MacLeod published a mea culpa on Wednesday for remarks he’d made to CTV news in November.Read More