Editor’s Note: Mayor Cecil Clarke’s contention that discussing council remuneration in camera (and treating elected officials as “personnel”) is a longstanding CBRM practice sent me scuttling to the “CBRM Mayor and Council” clippings file at the McConnell library, to research some of the remuneration (and related) issues council has dealt withRead More

Tourism Nova Scotia announced visitor traffic numbers to the end of September 2018 this week and it’s not happy news for Cape Breton: licensed room nights sold between January and September this year totaled 367,000 — down 6% over 2017 — and the occupancy rate stood at 53% — downRead More

CBRM Council approved a raise for itself last night in response to the federal government’s decision to end a tax break that allowed elected municipal officials to collect one-third of their salaries tax free. Councilors did it without a word of debate or discussion, presumably because they’d already debated andRead More

CBRM Council has declared its support for the Blue Dot movement. Launched in 2014 with the backing of the David Suzuki Foundation, Blue Dot is a “national campaign to advance the legal recognition of every Canadian’s right to a healthy environment.” In passing its resolution of support last night, theRead More

In recent published comments, Mayor Cecil Clarke suggested that because the Municipal Government Act (MGA) was ignored in the past it is perfectly acceptable for our current elected representatives to continue thumbing a collective nose at a statutory mandate to follow the rules. What the Mayor and Council repeatedly didRead...

In camera The CBC’s Tom Ayers doesn’t seem to like closed doors any more than I do and this week he kicked one open (figuratively, not literally) at the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. Ayers reported on Thursday that the CBRM Council has discussed its own compensation in secret four timesRead More

In the wake of the federal government’s decision to legalize cannabis (which happened on October 17), CBRM Council asked staff to produce an Issue Paper considering “the implications of the CBRM introducing more stringent provisions regulating the consumption of cannabis in public places than the Province imposed with its amendmentsRead More

There are two ways to look at CBRM Council’s decision, taken during Monday’s General Committee meeting, to increase the mayor and councilors’ salaries to compensate for the federal government’s decision (contained in that gripping bestseller Budget 2017: Building a Strong Middle Class) to eliminate a tax break that allowed themRead More

Well, that’s all she wrote, folks. CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke’s pursuit of the provincial Progressive Conservative Party leadership ended after the first ballot on Saturday, when rival Tim Houston came within 54 points of winning and Clarke bowed out. It was an abrupt ending to a campaign that seemed likeRead More

(With apologies to Joe Flaherty and any reader unfamiliar with SCTV’s Count Floyd. Or maybe any reader familiar with SCTV’s Count Floyd.) I wasn’t planning to do anything special for Halloween this year, even though I’m actually publishing ON HALLOWEEN, but then I received the latest Nova Scotia Business IncRead More