Editor’s Note: This is Part III in a series of articles on rail safety even if it doesn’t seem like it. Here are Part I and Part II.   On 1 May 2015, Canada and the United States announced “a harmonized set of tank-car regulations” that aimed, as the FinancialRead More

Port of Sydney CEO Marlene Usher and Port board chair James Kerr proposed to CBRM council last night that the Port move from the governance structure on the left (a not-for-profit company with the CBRM as its sole shareholder) to the one on the right: When I read this priorRead More

Editor’s Note: On April 28, The CBC’s Tom Ayers reported that the CBRM will actually pay $3.8 million for the Nickerson property. The $2.5 million budgeted for 2022-23 represents the outstanding balance. The Spectator apologizes for the error.   Did you happen to catch the price tag on the land theRead More

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

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

Novaporte’s new face Kathleen Yurchesyn has left her post as CEO of the Cape Breton Chamber of Commerce to become the vice-president of operations and corporate development for Novaporte, the name promoter Albert Barbusci has given to his Sydney harbor container terminal project. Six years in, Yurchesyn represents Novaporte’s firstRead More

The new board chair of the Port of Sydney Development Corporation (PSDC), James Kerr, presented to CBRM council during its regular November meeting last week, a topic I touched on briefly in last week’s Fast & Curious, because Kerr announced the board had decided to make its minutes public andRead More

Yoga Mats Galore! Reading about the MV Zim Kingston shedding over 100 containers into the ocean off the coast of British Columbia put me in mind of the 1941 sinking that inspired Compton MacKenzie’s novel Whiskey Galore!  No, wait, that’s not strictly true — it put me in mind ofRead More

Barry Sheehy did something in Monday’s Chronicle Herald that I would not have believed possible: he wrote an opinion piece (“Atlantic Canada missing the boat on U.S. port-expansion frenzy“) about congestion at US ports without mentioning COVID. Sheehy — described as an author, historian businessman, veteran and part-time Gabarus residentRead More