Voting season CBRM council has cleared the way for online and telephone voting in October’s municipal elections, which the provincial government has declared will take place despite fears of a second wave of COVID-19 this fall. No particular concerns were raised during the council debate on the issue — havingRead More

Editor’s Note: This space was supposed to be occupied by a “deep dive” into the Ekistics (sorry, Fathom Studio) report into the relocation of the NSCC Marconi Campus to downtown Sydney, but after a week of (politely) hassling the spokesperson for the Department of Education and Higher Learning for aRead More

Snowing on our parade The fall-out over the CBRM’s decision to cancel night parades continues to land — most recently on the editorial pages of the Cape Breton Post where District 12 Councilor Jim MacLeod published a mea culpa on Wednesday for remarks he’d made to CTV news in November.Read More

I was listening to Intercepted, a podcast from The Intercept news outlet, on Wednesday and heard an interview with Emily Guendelsberger, a Philadelphia-based journalist who has written a book called  On the Clock, What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane. The interviewer, Jeremy Scahill, explainedRead...

Fact Box On September 18, the Cape Breton Post carried a short article under the headline, “Payroll rebates for Cape Breton metal fabrication company.” The story — a reprint of a Nova Scotia Business Inc (NSBI) press release — explained that East Coast Metal Fabrication (2015) Inc (ECMF) had receivedRead More

I was listening to an interview with businessman Andrew Yang, one of the many Democratic presidential candidates in the US, during which he listed the jobs he felt were most vulnerable to automation in the near future (it was part the case he was making for a basic annual income).Read More

Grandstanding Okay, so on Tuesday, as I was burrowing through the documents I’d received from the feds relating to the 2012 sale of the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club, I thought I might try to follow the CBRM Council meeting about the library at the same time. (You know howRead More

On 13 May 2016, I submitted an access to information and privacy (ATIP) request to ACOA asking for information pertaining to the 2012 sale of the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club (RCBYC) and adjacent lands to Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation (ECBC). The request was transferred to Public Services and ProcurementRead More

I just watched last week’s CBRM general committee debate over funding for the new central library and heard Mayor Cecil Clarke declare the project “dead” because the federal government has not come through with its share of the funding (either for a programming and internal operations study or for theRead More

During the recent CBRM general committee meeting about the current state of the new central library project, the subject of the new library in Truro was raised a number of times. I thought it would be worth looking at how the Town of Truro (population 12,000) managed to do whatRead More