My first reaction to the 2014 Sydney Cruise Market Assessment Report was: why are we talking about spending $20 million on a second berth and not talking about our ground transportation problem? (My second reaction was—how do people who cannot actually write get into the report-writing business? Why would youRead More

The Cape Breton Post sure does love a shipyard. And I mean that literally, it loves a shipyard —  the one run by Canadian Maritime Engineering (CME) in North Sydney. The one partially located on a former waterfront green space. Our paper of record never tires of visiting that shipyardRead More

Port of Sydney Development Corporation CEO Marlene Usher began her “port update” to the Sydney and Area Chamber of Commerce on Monday by assuring the roughly 85 people in attendance that the timing of the talk — smack in the middle of a municipal election campaign — was “purely byRead More

On 6 September 2016, I sent Albert Barbusci of Harbor Port Development Partners (HPDP) an email asking him two questions about his bio on the Novaporte website. Specifically, I asked him about this statement: “Barbusci merged Events International with Grey Healthcare Group, a global pharmaceutical marketing and advertising agency, toRead More

Port of Sydney CEO Marlene Usher will speak on Monday, September 26, at a Sydney and Area Chamber of Commerce luncheon (tickets $35). Her subject? What else, the Port of Sydney Project. Here’s the description from the chamber’s web site: The newly dredged harbour for the Port of Sydney isRead More

The great $37 million Sydney harbor dredge was completed between October 2011 and January 2012. Over 4 million cubic meters of sedimentary material was removed from a 9-kilometer stretch of harbor channel in less than four months using trailing suction hopper dredge technology as opposed to traditional “clam bucket” dredgeRead More

I have never bought into the notion of Barry Sheehy and Albert Barbusci as port “developers.” I remain sternly old school in these matters, insisting that to be considered a port developer you must, at least once in your career, have developed a port. But I’ve also been doubtful aboutRead More

Albert Barbusci of Harbor Port Development Partners (HPDP) likes to write his name. More specifically, he likes to write his name on documents, preferably with some attendant ceremony. That those documents should be meaningful or open to public scrutiny or of some use in court would be nice, but notRead More

Did anyone else search Page 3 of the Saturday 27 August edition of the Cape Breton Post for the notice, “This message has been approved by the campaign to re-elect Cecil Clarke?” I searched in vain, assuming there could be no other explanation for the non-story that occupied most ofRead More

Sydney Harbour Ports Day 2016 was held in a large, windowless auditorium in the Joan Harriss Cruise Pavilion on Thursday, May 19. In nautical terms, it was the equivalent of traveling steerage. This year’s theme was “Thinking Big: A New Home on the East Coast for Ultra Large Container Vessels,”Read More