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

Thursday night’s Cinema Politica screening of Shadows of Liberty and the subsequent panel discussion were always going to be interesting but events this week just cranked that “interesting” level up to 11. The 2013 documentary, which screens at 6:00PM at the McConnell Library in Sydney, is directed by Canada’s Jean-Philippe TremblayRead More

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration (CIMM) has digested months of hearings, testimony from 55 witnesses and briefs from 11 individuals or organizations into a final report on Atlantic Canadian immigration. The report itself has 24 recommendations but there is also a “dissenting opinion” from the Conservative membersRead More

Marconi Campus I’m not sure when announcing that you’re going to do a feasibility study into the possibility of doing something became as good as actually doing something in this province, but that seems to be where we’re at. The latest example is Premier Stephen McNeil traveling all the wayRead More

Okay, here’s what we’re going to do: you’re going to give me your cell phones and I’m going to lock you in this room and let you read this article. You can take notes, but I’m going to take them away from you when you’re done and burn them becauseRead More

Jody Dukart is the Auditor/Teller for Canada of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), a position he took up in October 2017, following the retirement of Cape Breton’s Bobby Burchell. Although the Donkin coal mine re-opened by Kameron Coal Management is famously non-union (it’s owned by the Cline GroupRead More

Port secrecy CBRM Council met in secret camera on Thursday to discuss something related to the Port of Sydney. Under the Municipal Government Act (MGA), which our mayor sometimes worries about and sometimes doesn’t (see the 31 unannounced in camera meetings held over 22 months in 2014-15 in flagrant violationRead More

As regular readers of the Spectator know, I have an affinity for document-based research — emails, letters, court records, consultants’ reports, council minutes, issue papers, doctoral theses — I am never happier than when up to my elbows in print. But sometimes when you have an issue that you want veryRead More

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of articles on immigration and Cape Breton. Erika Shea, vice president of development for New Dawn Enterprises, says the community development organization plays two roles when it comes to immigration in Cape Breton. The first is as the home of theRead More