It’s been a while since I played a good old-fashioned game of “Okay, stop” with a written document, but last Saturday’s Cape Breton Post article about the Port of Sydney AGM cries out for a talking to. I’m going to cut the author, “political reporter” Ian Nathanson, some slack, becauseRead More

I have now received almost all the port-related documents the Privacy Commissioner told the CBRM to release to me. All that seems to be missing are the documents the municipality has never produced, not even for the commissioner herself. On the one hand, this is great, full stop. The CBRMRead More

The feasibility of developing a terminal for the world’s largest container ships in Sydney harbor is something you’d think the proponents would probably want to determine relatively early on in the process and yet, by 2014 — after the $38 million dredging of the harbor — the port team hadRead More

I’ve been bellyaching for years about how little information we were ever given about Mayor Cecil Clarke’s travel in support of the port project. His expense reports were notoriously shy on detail, as illustrated by this 2018 entry in which he doesn’t even reveal the city in which his “PortRead More

Armored Car Reading about the acting chief of the Cape Breton Regional Police Services (CBRPS), Robert Walsh, ordering up a new, armored, emergency response SUV sparked so many questions for me, beginning with: where is the actual chief of police? The radio silence surrounding the status of Chief Peter McIsaac,Read More

Remember CBRM’s sister city, the Chinese port city of Dalian? I don’t blame you if you’ve forgotten, the relationship never really amounted to much and we basically stopped talking about it after our sister city (population: 6 million) sentenced a Canadian to death in 2019. But back in December 2015,Read More

By a strange confluence of events, I had already decided to cover the subject of rail this week before I read the Scotia Rail Development Society editorial in Saturday’s paper. The editorial simply served to spur me on (no pun intended). Barry Sheehy and Albert Barbusci of Sydney Harbour InvestmentRead More

There are few things more discouraging than directing all your journalistic efforts to separating fact from fiction, only to discover that a wide swath of the public prefers the fiction. How else to explain the opinion piece by Jim Guy and Mary C. MacPherson in the Saturday edition of theRead More

In putting a timeframe of 1 December 2013 to 29 June 2015 on my access to information request, I’d hoped to cast my net wide enough capture the earliest communications between port promoters Barry Sheehy and Albert Barbusci and CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke, and if I haven’t done so, I thinkRead More

The documents I received last week reveal some very interesting details about the 2015 McKeil deal, which saw the CBRM purchase land in the Sydport Marine Industrial Park to lease to Ontario-based marine services company McKeil Marine. The transaction was a very contentious piece of municipal legerdemain that troubled theRead More