CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke wants to be the next leader of the provincial Progressive Conservative party and has been touring the province trying to determine whether anyone else wants to see him in that role. I’m guessing this means he is running. The alternative — that he will announce publiclyRead More

I’ve been going through old photos from the Cape Breton Highlander and decided to share some of them with you in this last Spectator issue of 2017. Many of them are the work of photographer Ray Doucet. I asked John Campbell, who was the editor of the Highlander (and isRead More

Out of Order As an armchair political scientist (we’re almost indistinguishable from the real thing until we open our mouths), I was quite happy to read what an actual political scientist, CBU’s Tom Urbaniak, had to say about the go-ahead at last Tuesday’s CBRM council meeting. In case you went to BostonRead More

There were ructions at CBRM Council yesterday and I was there to witness some of them. It all started at a 4:00PM in camera session, held under Section 22 (2) e of the Municipal Government Act (MGA) which allows municipal councils to go behind closed doors to discuss “contract negotiations.”Read...

What is it about CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke and December? Does he hear that John Lennon song — And so this is Christmas/And what have you done? — and panic? Does he look at his lists of 200 “positive changes” for the municipality and scream? Because at a time whenRead More

Whatever else our port promoters Sydney Harbour Investment Partners (SHIP) have been up to these past few months, they’ve finally cleaned up their internet presence. These quotes, for example, have been removed from their revamped web page: They’ve also changed their logo. From this: To this: I could say moreRead More

Resign to Run? Resign to run laws are pretty self-explanatory: if you hold public office and wish to run for another public office, you must first resign the office you hold.  Five US states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii and Texas) and several cities (including Dallas, Philadelphia and Phoenix) have them.Read More

Nova Scotia, in case you missed the memo, is now in year two of a five-year “strategy” to boost trade with China. That it’s a strategy with “no budget, target or goal,” as the CBC reported in April 2016, has the advantage, from Premier Stephen McNeil’s perspective, of allowing him toRead More

Editor’s Note: I feel the need to warn you, dear readers, that this article is really long. That’s what happens when you start writing about a company with annual revenue of US$55 billion and 100,000 employees. But since it’s also a company that has been cited in reference to notRead More

Draft Cecil A “grassroots” campaign to draft CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke to run for the leadership of the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservatives has begun. The web domain “draftcecil.ca” was registered on November 14, even as the CBRM council was meeting in camera, at Clarke’s behest, to discuss the option andRead More