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

A spectator (you know who you are) recently referenced my June 2019 article about the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club (RCBYC), the 113-year-old building that graced the Sydney waterfront until 3 May 2013, when it was destroyed by fire. This reminded me that I had never properly followed up onRead More

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