Harbor Port Development Partners (HPDP), the firm established by Barry Sheehy and Albert Barbusci to market the Port of Sydney, has become Sydney Harbour Investment Partners Inc. (SHIP). The name change was registered with Corporations Canada on 19 October 2016. Mayor Cecil Clarke wants CBRM council to extend HPDP’s existingRead More

This is not the best moment to be erecting a wall of any sort but the time has come to put a paywall — neither huge nor beautiful — around new content on The Cape Breton Spectator. My stats show me that there are enough people reading the Spectator eachRead More

The numbers connected to our cruise industry are as slippery as a quarterdeck in a Nor’easter (okay, I promise, no more nautical similes). It starts as the season opens and the Port of Sydney trumpets (in the Cape Breton Post, which has never met an economic impact number it didn’tRead More

Don’t ever say I haven’t done my bit for transparency on the cruise file. I made an access to information (ATIP) request to Parks Canada to find out how much the Fortress of Louisbourg, the Alexander Graham Bell Museum and the Cape Breton Highlands National Park have made from cruiseRead More

The only thing more expensive than running a railway, apparently, is not running a railway. That’s the justification offered by Genesee & Wyoming (G&W) — owners of the Cape Breton & Central Nova Scotia Railway (CBNS) and its all-but-defunct Sydney Subdivision — for the high fees they charge landowners needingRead More

First, the good news. The cruise ship most seen in Sydney during the 2016 season, Holland America Line’s Veendam, got an A grade from the Friends of the Earth in their 2016 Cruise Ship Report Card. The bad news? Our second-most frequent visitor, the Veendam’s sister ship Rotterdam, got aRead More

Did you see that 28 October 2016 story by the CBC’s Paul Withers about the CBRM and its consultants? It was the oddest thing. The “news” was that the CBRM has no record of the work done for it by the first pair of consultants it hired to promote theRead More

I’ll say it again: we need to talk about the cruise industry. We need to talk about its actual impact on our local economy, its environmental impact on our coastal waters,  its questionable labor practices and its crime problem. And we have to do it right now, before we pumpRead More

My first reaction to the 2014 Sydney Cruise Market Assessment Report was: why are we talking about spending $20 million on a second berth and not talking about our ground transportation problem? (My second reaction was—how do people who cannot actually write get into the report-writing business? Why would youRead More

The Cape Breton Post sure does love a shipyard. And I mean that literally, it loves a shipyard —  the one run by Canadian Maritime Engineering (CME) in North Sydney. The one partially located on a former waterfront green space. Our paper of record never tires of visiting that shipyardRead More