Editor’s Note: This open letter from the Cape Breton West Chapter of the Council of Canadians to the prime minister is dated 11 May 2021.   Dear Prime Minister Trudeau, We are writing to implore the Government of Canada to ask the World Trade Organization (WTO) to hold an emergencyRead More

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

The third wave is here and I thought it might be a good idea to bring together all the information I’ve been tweeting out piecemeal about COVID these past few days. Given the admirable job Tim Bousquet at the Examiner does covering the briefings — and the daily press releasesRead 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

I’ve been meaning to discuss District 1 Councilor Gordon MacDonald’s attempt to get CBRM council to pass a motion in support of paid sick days since he first made it at the February 23 council meeting but I haven’t been able to do the necessary research until this week. MacDonaldRead More

Here are the important takeaways from this morning’s CBRM special council meeting on the proposed new CBRM Central Library:   Aurevoir, HRDL? Council took a major step toward ending the agreement that has given a private developer, Martin Chernin’s Harbour Royale Development Limited, control over the proposed new library. 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

Affordable housing I came across a for-sale listing for Sadler Court, the 36-unit apartment complex on Alexandra Street in Sydney owned by New Dawn Enterprises. Sadler Court, as the New Dawn site says, “brings together the convenience of downtown living, the serenity of a natural setting, and, best of all,Read More

I read with interest this past weekend Craig Boudreau’s “thoughts” — shared via Facebook but probably coming soon to an op-ed page near you — about the proposed new CBRM central library. Boudreau, who is vice chair of the Cape Breton Regional Chamber of Commerce, owns multiple office buildings andRead More