Editor’s Note: I broke this article into two pieces (see Part I here) to allow you an opportunity to rest between decades but now it’s time to face the ’80s and ’90s.   Canada’s mania for deficit reduction, although it reached its peak in the ’90s, started in the ’80s.Read More

Kameron Coal Management Ltd, owner of the Donkin coal mine, has received 14 warnings, 19 compliance orders and eight administrative penalties or fines since re-starting operations in September 2022. The CBC published a full list of the violations and it is impressive: Orders:  Sept. 21 – Failure to designate qualifiedRead More

Cape Breton University President and Vice-Chancellor David Dingwall has written to his “fellow Cape Bretoners” AGAIN. What are we? His pen-pals? This time it’s a two-page advertisement (once again in the Saturday edition of the Cape Breton Post, not the cheapest medium) telling us why CBU should get a MedicalRead More

Words with Mayors In my coverage of CBRM council this week, I made a crack about the mayor—who was elected as Amanda McDougall and has been referred to for the past two years as Amanda McDougall—suddenly being referenced in the meeting agenda as Mayor Amanda T. McDougall-Merrill. I was actuallyRead 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: I’m trying out my system of choosing items from the CBRM council agenda and doing some preliminary research on Tuesday afternoon, then watching the meeting and updating the article accordingly.   Item 6.2 (a) on last night’s CBRM council agenda was “business arising” from a January 17 inRead More

CBU President and Vice-Chancellor David Dingwall has issued ANOTHER open letter “to the Cape Breton Community,” this one occupying three full (expensive) pages in last Saturday’s Cape Breton Post, and it is another absolute dud of a PR exercise. It states: I want to assure you that I, as PresidentRead More

Golfing in the Park [Ben Cowan-Dewar] also cited golf courses in national parks — including Highlands Links in Cape Breton, Green Gables in P.E.I., Fundy National in New Brunswick and Banff Springs in Alberta — as other examples of competing land uses. “Is there a case where golf exists inRead More

Happy New Year, spectators! I have entered this year in possession of a wood stove and a drinks table, so you know things are looking up. Not that all I see is shiny and new—CBRM council, for instance, stuck with tradition and held its first meeting of 2023 in camera.Read More

On December 17, a fire broke out in the Ashby neighborhood of Sydney in a Park Street duplex that was home to eight people, all international students at Cape Breton University (CBU). One of the eight, identified by the CBC as 33-year-old business analytics student Rajesh Kumar Gollapudi, died inRead More