Working from home I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about this week and then I discovered that Craig Boudreau, head of  J. Francis Investments, vice chair of the Cape Breton Regional Chamber of Commerce, Sage of Charlotte Street, had once again taken pen in hand to shareRead More

Editor’s Note: I caught myself looking rather bleakly at the snow yesterday and decided I needed a timely reminder about embracing winter, so I re-read Paul MacDougall’s 25 November 2020 piece on coping with the cold and I thought you might like to too.   There is probably as muchRead More

Talkin’ ’bout my generator I read Henry Maxwell’s letter to the editor of the Cape Breton Post about the apparently over-sized backup generator recently purchased by the CBRM for the Myles F. Burke Police Headquarters in Sydney with great interest. That particular item has bugged me since it appeared inRead More

Last week, I took a cooking class run by New Dawn Enterprise’s A Better Bite Community Kitchen. Called “Tomato Sauce Five Ways,” the class was held in A Better Bite’s facilities in the New Dawn Centre on Nepean Street in Sydney and led by dietician Jessica MacNeil. She taught usRead More

The Spectator‘s coverage this spring was varied, to say the least. From Albert Barbusci’s nuclear waste deal, to the workings of the Verschuren Centre to the province’s third wave of COVID with a variety of stops in between, including a feature I count among my all-time favorites — the oneRead More

Cruise news And now, from the “counterintuitive” department, I’d like to suggest that there are ways in which COVID may actually prove a boon to the cruise industry. It’s a theory I developed watching a “recovery of cruise” presentation from a November 2020 conference on “post-COVID” tourism in Cape BretonRead More

The new board chair of the Port of Sydney Development Corporation (PSDC), James Kerr, presented to CBRM council during its regular November meeting last week, a topic I touched on briefly in last week’s Fast & Curious, because Kerr announced the board had decided to make its minutes public andRead More

Did you catch local restaurateur Danny Ellis’ bellyaching tour of local media outlets this summer? Ellis, who operates four CBRM eateries (two of which — the Portside on the Sydney waterfront and the Boardwalk Tap Room & Eatery in what used to be the meeting room in the Civic CentreRead More

Tax Sales If the list of 104 properties — including 38 buildings  — up for tax sale in the CBRM has you wondering why CBRM doesn’t look into sourcing government funding for affordable housing and refurbishing some of them, you are not alone. I have long wondered about this too.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