Shipping News I have to start with the long-awaited arrival of a container ship at the Port of Sydney. It arrived under tow, carried only 4,200 containers and couldn’t have unloaded here if it had wanted to, but there was a container ship at the Port of Sydney. Port generalRead More

Once again, big thanks to a spectator for alerting me to the newly launched Cape Breton Capital Group website and for their useful comments and questions about this operation, some of which I will reproduce here today, being careful to give credit where credit is due. The Cape Breton CapitalRead More

Felicity Ace In mid-February, as noted at the time by Tim Bousquet, the Felicity Ace, a car carrier that sometimes calls at the Dartmouth Autoport, caught fire near the Azores. All 22 crew members were rescued from the 650-foot long vessel which was carrying about 4,000 Volkswagen Group cars, manyRead More

It’s time for Confessions of a Bad Reporter. In this week’s episode, I have to confess that I did not attend the Port of Sydney’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) on February 23. It was on a Wednesday night, a week before I publish, and I thought I would be ableRead More

Whirlwind Tours I signed up for emails from Entrée Destinations because they promised “stories” from all parts of Canada — including Nova Scotia — and I was curious to see how they’d portray us. (Okay, full disclosure: I wanted to see how trite and clichéd their portrayal would be whichRead More

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the sinking of the oil rig, Ocean Ranger, off the coast of Newfoundland with the loss of the entire crew—84 men, my brother Jim among them. The Spectator is marking this anniversary by republishing the preface to my 2012 book, The Ocean Ranger: remaking the promiseRead More

I received a press release yesterday from two groups, the Forest Protectors and Extinction Rebellion Mi’kmaki/Nova Scotia, with the subject line, “DNRR [Department of Natural Resources and Renewables] Survey finds more rare lichens in Last Hope forest.” The groups, as the CBC’s Michael Gorman reported this week, count about 50Read More

This week, I’m updating my Cabot Saint Lucia story with the reaction of critics of Ben Cowan-Dewar’s golf resort to the “unofficial” announcement that the Saint Lucian government planned to ensure beach access for locals and to cancel Cabot’s leases on coastal land known as the “Queen’s Chain.” As IRead More

The final episode (FINAL EPISODE) of Annette Verschuren’s Bet On Me podcast is called “Betting on Cape Breton Island with Annette Verschuren” and it features a conversation between Verschuren and what I will now forever think of as her “mini-mes” — a group of women, all of whom are partRead More

The people of the CBRM have spoken and they want the municipality to regulate temporary mobile signs. Planner Kristen Knudskov appeared before council last night with the results of a public survey that found 76% of respondents wanted the CBRM to regulate signs like these: CBRM’s planning department began workRead More