Editor’s Note: I’m trying out my system of choosing items from the CBRM council agenda and doing some preliminary research on Tuesday afternoon, then watching the meeting and updating the article accordingly.   Item 6.2 (a) on last night’s CBRM council agenda was “business arising” from a January 17 inRead More

Editor’s Note: This is Part II of a series that will continue until I find some answers or give up, whichever comes first. You’ll find Part I here and Part III here.)   When last we met, it was August 1984, and Zutphen Brothers of Port Hood was sitting onRead More

I could barely listen to consultant Aileen Murray as she shared her Economic Development Strategy with CBRM council on Tuesday because I’d read the presentation as I drank my morning coffee and spent the next few hours in a slough of despond over having chosen the wrong career. Why didRead More

As noted elsewhere this week, I’ve been curious about the appointment of Carla Arsenault as principal of the Marconi Campus of the NSCC, but I found I couldn’t think about Arsenault, the former president and CEO of the Cape Breton Partnership, without thinking about the organization she headed for threeRead More

Full disclosure: I thought 2021 was going to be vastly different from 2020 but instead, it unfolded like we’d given 2020 a 12-month extension on its contract. The COVID pandemic continued to loom large in everyone’s lives although, as you’ll see, I modified my response to it. I spent muchRead More

What happened to Cape Breton Island? In particular, North Sydney? It  used to  be a booming town. Fish plants, steel plant, coalmines, Marine Railway and CN workers in the thousands. Retail businesses all along Commercial Street. Thousands of workers making good money, cashing their checks on a Friday at theRead More

This morning, I am going to take on some of the hot takes I’ve seen on CBRM council’s recent waterfront development decision. As you probably know by now, during last Tuesday’s meeting, council, rather than entertaining a new proposal from Martin Chernin’s Harbour Royale Development Ltd (HRDL), opted to issueRead More

Last night’s council discussion regarding Harbour Royale Development Limited’s new Sydney waterfront proposal was fascinating in many ways but the most interesting aspect to me (besides the outcome, which was council refusing to entertain it and voting instead to issue a new request for proposals for CBRM-owned land on theRead More

Maxwell Hartt’s book, Quietly Shrinking Cities: Canadian Urban Population Loss in an Age of Growth really made me think. Hartt, an assistant professor in the department of geography and planning at Queen’s University, makes the case for cities accepting rather than fighting population decline and uses the Cape Breton Regional MunicipalityRead More

CBRM council met this morning to discuss the results of its March 2021 closed-door, strategy-setting “workshops” at the Lakes Golf Club and Resort in Ben Eoin. Apparently, during the sessions, council articulated our vision: (I can’t wait until Tim Bousquet sees that — “vibrant” and “innovation” are two of hisRead More