Readers! I know I promised Part II of my series on Cabot Saint Lucia — Mike Keiser and Ben Cowan-Dewar’s Caribbean golf and real estate resort — this week, but I’ve had the opportunity to speak to more people than I’d expected to, and while I’m delighted with this, itRead More

This morning, I am going to take on some of the hot takes I’ve seen on CBRM council’s recent waterfront development decision. As you probably know by now, during last Tuesday’s meeting, council, rather than entertaining a new proposal from Martin Chernin’s Harbour Royale Development Ltd (HRDL), opted to issueRead More

Ben Cowan-Dewar and Mike Keiser, owners of Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs, are building a luxury golf resort and real estate development on the island nation of Saint Lucia and the site they’ve chosen, in addition to abutting some of St. Lucia’s best beaches, sits atop an ancient Indigenous burialRead More

One of the great fears of St. Lucians critical of Cabot Saint Lucia — Ben Cowan-Dewar’s newest golf, resort and real estate development — is that they will lose access to some of the island nation’s best beaches. Finola Jennings Clark, a sustainable travel writer and and vice-chair of theRead More

Backroom deals During Tuesday’s CBRM council meeting, CAO Marie Walsh revealed — very matter-of-factly — that she and regional solicitor Demetri Kachafanas had met with developer Martin Chernin after the expiration of Chernin’s waterfront pre-development contract to discuss a new proposal. She even admitted that she and Kachafanas had presentedRead More

Last night’s council discussion regarding Harbour Royale Development Limited’s new Sydney waterfront proposal was fascinating in many ways but the most interesting aspect to me (besides the outcome, which was council refusing to entertain it and voting instead to issue a new request for proposals for CBRM-owned land on theRead More

Editor’s Note: I had to read the book, conduct and transcribe an interview and write the story about Maxwell Hartt’s Quietly Shrinking Cities this week, which left me very little time for other reporting but I would like to note a couple of interesting items that popped up in myRead More

Tim Bousquet of the Halifax Examiner has been making the point that the $104 million Innovacorp made on its META exit could be used to fund affordable housing in Nova Scotia. He even did the math: For the record, $104 million would pay for 80 apartments at $1,000/month rent forRead More

This week, I’m going to continue my examination of Innovacorp’s “unicorn” investment, spurred, in part, by the Cape Breton Post’s take, which appeared in Monday’s print edition wrapped in a piece of puffery about Bob Pelley, Innovacorp’s regional manager in Cape Breton. The Post — like the CBC before itRead More

Innovacorp, the province’s venture capital crown corporation, has won the VC lottery — it bet $3 million on a Dartmouth firm that makes “high-performance materials used in the defense and aerospace industries” and collected $104 million when that firm went public in the US (it’s Meta Materials NASDAQ:MMAT). How pleasedRead More