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

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

I lost track of how many times participants in Tuesday’s “CBRM Forward” discussion used the words “excited” or “exciting.” Literally everyone who spoke was either excited to be there or excited at the prospect of overhauling the municipality’s planning strategy and land-use by-law or excited to be drafting an economicRead 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

I have now received almost all the port-related documents the Privacy Commissioner told the CBRM to release to me. All that seems to be missing are the documents the municipality has never produced, not even for the commissioner herself. On the one hand, this is great, full stop. The CBRMRead More

Have you read latest CBRM Central Library study? Anyone outside CBRM reading about the private developer who has been given control over the project would probably write it off as fiction, but we know better, don’t we? The study in question is the service, programs and operational plan commissioned fromRead More

Remember CBRM’s sister city, the Chinese port city of Dalian? I don’t blame you if you’ve forgotten, the relationship never really amounted to much and we basically stopped talking about it after our sister city (population: 6 million) sentenced a Canadian to death in 2019. But back in December 2015,Read More

By a strange confluence of events, I had already decided to cover the subject of rail this week before I read the Scotia Rail Development Society editorial in Saturday’s paper. The editorial simply served to spur me on (no pun intended). Barry Sheehy and Albert Barbusci of Sydney Harbour InvestmentRead More

You know the story: back in July 2015 I submitted an access to information request to the Cape Breton Regional Municipality asking for all port-related communications between Mayor Cecil Clarke, CAO Michael Merritt, the mayor’s communications staff (basically, Christina Lamey) and port promoters Albert Barbusci and Barry Sheehy from 1Read More

In putting a timeframe of 1 December 2013 to 29 June 2015 on my access to information request, I’d hoped to cast my net wide enough capture the earliest communications between port promoters Barry Sheehy and Albert Barbusci and CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke, and if I haven’t done so, I thinkRead More