Two things inspired this week’s feature story: the first was an Agence France-Presse article about a Michigan township that is trying to fight a deal under which the Swiss-based food conglomerate Nestlé may be allowed to pump 400 gallons of water per minute from a local wellhead for an annualRead More

On Monday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal dismissed the Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s bid to reverse a UARB ruling overturning a CBRM Council decision that green lighted the development of a 211-site, lakeside RV park in Big Pond Centre. That was a lot to pack into a single sentence,Read More

Like a Netflix reboot of a canceled TV series, Mother Canada has reappeared on my screen this summer. I’d all but forgotten the plan to build the 24-meter-high sad lady in Green Cove in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park — a plan that simultaneously flouted both the Parks CanadaRead More

Kudos to the Nova Scotia Department of Lands and Forestry for providing information from the March 2019 moose population survey to the public in a timely manner, through stories in the media.  The 2019 survey in Cape Breton included participants from the Lands and Forestry, Parks Canada, the Unama’ki InstituteRead More

I FOIPOPed all correspondence between the CBRM planning department and Chris Skidmore — the Calgary-based developer who wants to establish an RV Park in Big Pond Centre — because I thought the planning department seemed to be rather decidedly in Skidmore’s corner on this project and I wanted to knowRead More

“Our dream is to work WITH the community to bring a new vibrancy to the area and to support the economy in a way that respects the land and the people,” — 22 February 2019 post on the Ceilidh on the Lakes Facebook page.   Here are some other interesting thingsRead More

Dear Spectator Readers, Mayday! Mayday! I send up this distress call from the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey (a Celtic-knot of history, myth, magic and legend; a place of long-lost glory) in a ‘United’ Kingdom rapidly losing structural and social integrity. In much of the world, today — May Day —Read More

As part of my coverage of the ructions in Ben Eoin, I submitted an access to information request to the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) for a copy of the contract between Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation (ECBC) and Ben Eoin Golf Club Limited. I also asked for any correspondence concerningRead More

Caveat emptor So, this happened:   Ian Scott elaborated on the lawsuit in an interview with Ryan Ross of Charlottetown’s Guardian newspaper (also part of the SaltWire empire) saying: “If your counterparty is not being honest or is hiding things, there’s a lot of stuff that you can’t really determineRead More

Note:  Climate change is freaking me out. More to the point: our general refusal to acknowledge the threat of climate change is freaking me out. This province is cutting down trees and digging up coal and threatening the health of rivers like it was 1819, not 2019, so I’ve decidedRead More