A ridiculous article appeared in the Cape Breton Post on 20 May 2021. It might have been entitled “Man Yells at Cloud.” The protagonist, a Mr. Jerry Gillis, was astonished at the gall of the CBRM in following procedure in the handling of its committees and not just rubber stampingRead More

Bait and Switch? How, exactly, did we go from discussing a new Central Library to discussing a sports facility attached to Centre 200? I ask on behalf of the general CBRM public because obviously there are a few people who know exactly how this happened — they’ve been maneuvering toRead More

It’s been “over a year” since CBRM council has had an opportunity to speak directly to port promoter Albert Barbusci of Sydney Harbour Investment Partners (SHIP) and over five years since his “company” (it consists of two people, Barbusci and Barry Sheehy) officially began leading the campaign to establish aRead 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

The feasibility of developing a terminal for the world’s largest container ships in Sydney harbor is something you’d think the proponents would probably want to determine relatively early on in the process and yet, by 2014 — after the $38 million dredging of the harbor — the port team hadRead 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

Trainspotter Looking for illustrations for my rail-related articles this week, I ran across something great: a trove of train photos by a photographer named Roger Puta. I didn’t have time to learn anything more about him on Wednesday, I just snaffled up those lovely photos of a CN engine inRead 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

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

Operating on the “better late than never” principle, I thought I’d discuss the Nova Scotia government’s decision to continue subsidizing the disused Cape Breton portion of the Cape Breton and Central Nova Scotia (CBNS) short-line railway. In case you’ve just tuned in to this soap opera, the province has beenRead More