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

Here’s an item from last week’s CBRM council session on affordable housing that I really wanted to follow up on:  Deputy Mayor (and District 2 Councilor) Earlene MacMullin proposed the municipality look into the possibility of turning the Northside General Hospital, scheduled for closure and demolition, into affordable housing —Read More

This week, I thought I’d give myself a bit of a break, research-wise, by focusing on Innovacorp’s exits between 2011-2012 and 2020-2021. If you’re wondering why I keep choosing that timeframe, it’s basically, as I should have explained earlier, because Innovacorp did. The agency, which was founded in 1995, changedRead...

This week has found me unable to focus entirely on any one story, so no deep dives. Instead, I’m going to touch briefly on some issues I’ve been following and which I hope to write about in more detail soon.   Labor relations First, give me credit, please, for notRead More

Monday’s special CBRM council session on affordable housing was so full of information that I find myself forced to choose one part to write about today, for fear of overwhelming you with facts and figures. It started with a presentation by Paul LaFleche, the deputy minister of Municipal Affairs andRead More

I didn’t really expect the 2021 Child and Family Poverty report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) to cheer me on a grey day, but I also didn’t expect it to be quite as bleak as it is. The report, by Dr. Lesley Frank, Laura Fisher and Dr.Read More

Last week, as I was entering data on Innovacorp’s investments from 2011 to the present into a table, I was struck by the imbalance between men and women in the “people” section. This is a tricky subject for me. I’m no fan of the government gambling public money on ventureRead...

Looking into Innovacorp’s “unicorn” investment earlier this year got me to wondering how many successful exits our provincial venture capital fund has managed over the years compared to the number and value of its investments, so I submitted an access-to-information request asking for a list of its investments since 2011.Read...

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) in Nova Scotia has performed its annual public service of crunching the numbers to determine how much a worker must actually earn to live with some modicum of dignity in this province and the answer this year, for Cape Breton, is $18.45/hour. That’sRead More

Tuesday morning’s special session of council was dedicated to environmental issues of all descriptions and included a presentation by CBRM Solid Waste Manager Francis Campbell. Campbell’s presentation touched on three issues: Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging and Printed Paper (EPR for PPP), the Trashformers program and illegal dumping. Let’s takeRead More