During the period covering the offences, the accused filed false GST returns claiming a combined refund of $20,628,805. Of that amount, the CRA paid $275,960 in refunds and allocated an additional $81,399 as a credit to other amounts owing to the agency, meaning the family and their companies were paidRead More

It’s been just over two years since Canada’s biggest grocery store chains declared the pandemic over and canceled the premium they’d been paying their front-line staff for all of three months. On 13 June 2020, according to the Financial Post: …Canada’s top three grocery chains simultaneously cancelled their $2-per-hour “heroRead More

I made my thoughts on the potential re-opening of the Donkin Mine pretty clear in last week’s Fast & Curious but I feel the need to return to the topic, thanks to a Cape Breton Post story under the headline: Coal’s last chance: It may be now or never forRead More

Coal Dreams Did you know that fluctuations in the market price of coal have a direct impact on the geological conditions in coal mines? When the price of coal rises, these conditions magically improve. It’s an economic-geologic phenomenon begging for further study, in place of which I am simply offeringRead More

The Verschuren Centre, once part of Cape Breton University, now a standalone corporation, has received another injection of public money—$6.8 million, to be exact—from the federal and provincial governments. The funding includes: $2.5 million from the provincial government $2 million from ACOA via the Canada Coal Transition Initiative Infrastructure FundRead More

I last updated my Vice-Admiral Mark Norman/National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS) timeline back in 2019, but developments these past two weeks have motivated me to revisit it. Norman, you will recall, was the Canadian naval officer charged with one count of breach of trust for: …leaking cabinet secrets in relation toRead More

Editor’s Note: I’ve added new items to the timeline below, but my real update can be found in this new article, for which I’ve written a new introduction. Rather than repeat myself, I thought I’d let the old intro stand because it still serves a purpose: it explains why IRead More

It’s been roughly a year since I wrote about two Nova Scotia housing reports, one by the Nova Scotia Affordable Housing Commission, the other by the Housing for All Working Group of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), NS Office, and after a flurry of “affordable housing” announcements fromRead More

There have been some developments—none that could be considered good—in the Bridging Finance story. As you will recall, the local angle on this tale of a Toronto-based private debt lender in receivership is that Membertou Corporate borrowed $6.8 million from Bridging to invest in Albert Barbusci’s Sydney harbor container terminalRead More

Buy buy Writing about Destination Cape Breton and the Cape Breton Partnership these past couple of weeks has been like returning to earlier, simpler times when publicly funded agencies and their dubious achievements occupied a lot of my brain space. But it all feels a little darker these days. TourismRead More