Chinese itineraries CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke has yet to publish an itinerary for his November 30-December 6 trip to China on which he was accompanied by CAO Marie Walsh, Economic Development Manager John Phalen and his executive assistant Mark Bettens. As it happens, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was inRead More

A friend drew my attention to this New York Times article about the cruise industry in Bar Harbor. The gist of the story is that Bar Harbor — a town of 5,200 on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine — has been too successful in attracting cruise ships.Read More

I have a confession to make: I did not watch the full CBRM council meeting last night. I watched (with interest) the discussion of the proposed RV Park in Big Pond. (I spend my summers in Irish Cove, just a little further west along Route 4, so anything that happensRead More

It’s a conundrum that’s puzzled me since I first began looking into the cruise industry in Atlantic Canada: why do we rely solely on numbers from the cruise lines for our economic impact calculations? Having read the work of cruise-skeptic Ross Klein, a professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, IRead More

As I was poking around that old CPCS due diligence report on Sydney’s second cruise ship berth for an earlier story, I got interested in the question of motor coaches — defined as  “47-58 passenger vehicle[s] which ha[ve] three axles and a washroom.” I know what you’re thinking, “Be stillRead More

As I read Mary’s article on the consideration of a second berth for cruise ships in the Sydney Harbour, I asked myself this question: If this proposal was taken to a bank, other than the bank of tax payers, what answer would CBRM get? The Executive Summary [of the CPCSRead More

Nancy King at the Cape Breton Post has been trying to pin down the component costs for the CBRM’s second cruise ship berth. King FOIPOPed the NS Department of Municipal Affairs asking for the breakdown of costs submitted by the CBRM in its request for provincial funding. The answer toRead More

Kudos to the Post? Oh yeah, you read that correctly: this week, the cranky ol’ Spectator is congratulating the Cape Breton Post on its new website, which is crisp and clean and mercifully free of the clickbait ads that used to cover its home page like measles on the faces ofRead More

Sydney businessman Danny Ellis’ harborfront beer garden, the Portside, about which he’s apparently received “mostly positive feedback,” according to the Cape Breton Post (which has been providing a lot of that positive feedback) will not be opening until next spring. In what must be considered the public relations coup ofRead...

Today, we’re going to talk about the Canadian federal government’s Wastewater System Effluent Regulations (WSER), soon to be a major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. (That’s not true but it gave you hope for a moment, didn’t it? You thought, “Great, I’ll just wait for the movie.”Read More