McKenna & Co I was going to call Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) a many-headed hydra but that’s the wrong metaphor, it is decidedly more of an octopus, with tentacles everywhere in everything—railroads, ports, real estate, nuclear power—but just one head, as the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation reported back in 2013:Read More

Genesee & Wyoming (G&W) Canada Inc, owner of the Cape Breton & Central Nova Railway (CBNS), is restructuring its Nova Scotia holdings. In September, G&W Canada established a wholly-owned subsidiary called the Nova Scotia & Eastern Railway (NSERL). On October 17, G&W Canada President Rick McLellan—who also serves as presidentRead...

Before we look at Tourism Nova Scotia’s “influencer” program—which involves paying social media personalities to visit and write about us—I thought I’d have a look at some tourism statistics and, as it happens, Tourism Nova Scotia provides stats going back to 2010 on its website. I focused on just threeRead...

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) has done a survey right here in the little old CBRM. The CBRM Business Environment Survey was conducted between December 2021 and February 2022 and published in April 2022. I missed it but a reader was kind enough to send it along, knowingRead More

Sydney, a “resilient and proud community with a history of hosting major curling events” will host the 2024 World Women’s Curling Championships (WWCC). I have bones to pick with that sentence (which opened a Curling Canada press release I received on Friday). First, Sydney hosted the 2019 Scotties Tournament ofRead More

Editor’s Note: We’re reaching into Michelle’s Smith’s archives for posts as useful now as when they were first published and this week, we’re revisiting one of her lovely long-form essays, last published in November 2020.   The cat and I huddled under the blankets in the dark as the windRead More

Medicare-less As I noted in my unburied power lines story on Wednesday, I managed to stay better focused in my research this week, but I cannot spend hours reading old newspapers without occasionally getting distracted. Fortunately, I have Fast & Curious as a sort of catch-all drawer; a place forRead More

This time last year, I was writing multiple articles (see here and here and here) about golf magnate Ben Cowan-Dewar’s controversial new course on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia. Cowan-Dewar and partner Mike Keiser have not even completed that course (Sports Illustrated says Cabot Saint Lucia is scheduled toRead More

Food for thought Let’s start with a little game of “Okay, stop” with Sylvain Charlebois—professor in food distribution and policy and senior director of the AgriFood Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University and all-round media darling. Here he is on the question of whether Canada’s three leading grocers have been price-gougingRead More

Pick a lane? I live in the North End of Sydney and on a day a week or so ago when there were three cruise ships in port, I had a sudden vision of the area as a pedestrian-only district. It sounds crazy, I know, because at the moment, theRead More