First, the good news. The cruise ship most seen in Sydney during the 2016 season, Holland America Line’s Veendam, got an A grade from the Friends of the Earth in their 2016 Cruise Ship Report Card. The bad news? Our second-most frequent visitor, the Veendam’s sister ship Rotterdam, got aRead More

I happened to be in Quebec last week as I was reading about the cruise ship industry in general and the incidence of “mysterious disappearances” in particular. One case really caught my eye because the woman in question—a 70-year-old from Baton Rouge, Louisiana named Sarah Tessier Powell—was last seen onRead More

I’ll say it again: we need to talk about the cruise industry. We need to talk about its actual impact on our local economy, its environmental impact on our coastal waters,  its questionable labor practices and its crime problem. And we have to do it right now, before we pumpRead More

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

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

  Halifax Examiner publisher Tim Bousquet and CBC Newfoundland commentator Drew Brown are both saying things of interest to Cape Bretoners today. Bousquet’s Morning File responds to the Cape Breton Post‘s front-page love letter to our “one millionth” cruise ship passenger (an apparently nice lady from Florida who seems to haveRead More

Budget Hack is a recurring series in which the author takes money from one part of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality Budget and puts it where she feels it can do more good. All attendant flak should be directed at the author, not the people whose causes she supports. InRead 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

Big news, fellow citizens of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality – no, Rodney MacDonald has not been re-elected premier, although you could be forgiven for thinking that, given the front page of today’s Cape Breton Post (11 February 2016):   The real news is tucked into the lower left handRead More