I don’t know enough about golf to begin with an appropriate golf reference, so please insert whatever the golf equivalent of “catch-up football” is here, because that’s what I’m playing—I missed the Notice of Defence filed by the defendants in a lawsuit launched by the Atlantic Canadian Opportunities Agency (ACOA)Read More

Summer, I have decided, is a time for experimentation. When the thermometer hits 30 degrees Celsius, the only thing I want to dive deeply into is the Bras d’Or Lake, so this week, I’m going to try something a little different. Instead of covering one topic in depth, I’m goingRead More

There’s been a development in Ben Eoin and it’s a doozy: the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) is suing Ben Eoin Golf Club Limited and 3324714 Nova Scotia Limited, a company connected to Ben Eoin Development Group Inc (BEDGInc), for $3.5 million. Why? Well, according to ACOA’s Notice of Action,Read More

The Verschuren Centre, once part of Cape Breton University, now a standalone corporation, has received another injection of public money—$6.8 million, to be exact—from the federal and provincial governments. The funding includes: $2.5 million from the provincial government $2 million from ACOA via the Canada Coal Transition Initiative Infrastructure FundRead More

I went back and watched Cape Breton Partnership President and CEO Tyler Mattheis’ May 10 presentation to CBRM council and came away with the distinct impression that, like Destination Cape Breton, the Partnership has no real idea whether its work is producing the desired results—in this case, encouraging new businessesRead More

I’m going to keep picking away at the list of companies in which Innovacorp has invested to find out what happened to each of them, but I thought this week I’d show you how unnecessarily difficult this can be in some cases. My example is the first company in theRead...

There’s a passage in Lachlan MacKinnon’s book, Closing Sysco: Industrial Decline in Atlantic Canada’s Steel City, in which a former steelworker, Adrian Murphy, describes what it’s like to visit Open Hearth Park, the greenspace that’s replaced the plant in the heart of Sydney: I was there a couple of times withRead More

I‘ve been learning about Appalachia (beginning with how to pronounce it) through a variety of means lately and what keeps jumping out at me are the similarities between that region and our own (by which I mean, variously, Cape Breton, the Maritimes and the Atlantic Provinces). These similarities include theRead More

Ever since reading Linda McQuaig on Connaught Labs — the “public” lab that McQuaig argues, convincingly, could have helped Canada fight the COVID-19 pandemic had it not been privatized by the Mulroney government in the ’80s — I’ve been thinking about the value of publicly owned businesses and looking atRead More

Since 2015, when she was “seconded” from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) by means of an “interagency agreement” to serve as CEO of the Port of Sydney, I have been reporting that Marlene Usher’s salary was $200,000, half of that paid initially by the CBRM the other half byRead More