I missed it the first time I looked at the front page of the today’s Cape Breton Post, but then again, it wasn’t exactly given big play: just a sidebar next to the headline stories about flood mitigation and recovering policemen. Eventually, though, I saw it: Yes, the mayor’s “political”Read More

Back in January, I wrote about the town of Bar Harbor, Maine, and its plans to purchase and develop its disused ferry terminal. I was struck by the story, which I first read in the New York Times, because the approach Bar Harbor is taking to the project contrasts so sharplyRead More

The deadline for bids for the construction of a second cruise ship berth in Sydney harbor has been pushed back from 29 March 2018 to 26 April 2018, according to an addendum to the original tender (the fourth such addendum) posted on the Nova Scotia government website. That is just the latestRead...

A friend drew my attention to this New York Times article about the cruise industry in Bar Harbor. The gist of the story is that Bar Harbor — a town of 5,200 on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine — has been too successful in attracting cruise ships.Read More

It’s a conundrum that’s puzzled me since I first began looking into the cruise industry in Atlantic Canada: why do we rely solely on numbers from the cruise lines for our economic impact calculations? Having read the work of cruise-skeptic Ross Klein, a professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, IRead More

As I read Mary’s article on the consideration of a second berth for cruise ships in the Sydney Harbour, I asked myself this question: If this proposal was taken to a bank, other than the bank of tax payers, what answer would CBRM get? The Executive Summary [of the CPCSRead More

Nancy King at the Cape Breton Post has been trying to pin down the component costs for the CBRM’s second cruise ship berth. King FOIPOPed the NS Department of Municipal Affairs asking for the breakdown of costs submitted by the CBRM in its request for provincial funding. The answer toRead More

I begin with a caveat: I watched the CBRM Council livestream from 4:35 yesterday afternoon to 9 PM last night, at which point, I surrendered and switched to Netflix. I consider this a sign of weakness on my part — but I also blame whoever scheduled the economic planning andRead More

I wrote last week that dealing with international waste (IW) at the Sydney Marine Terminal will involve more than simply getting in a stash of orange garbage bags. You can read the details here, but the gist is that international waste coming off vessels must be segregated from domestic wasteRead More

The CBRM has an environmental assessment of a property owned by local businessman Jerry Nickerson on which it hopes to construct a second cruise ship berth. We know the assessment exists, as Nancy King points out in the Cape Breton Post, because Mayor Cecil Clarke has referred to it, asRead More