I am rarely rendered speechless, but I am gobsmacked by the answers I just received from John Phalen, the economic development manager for the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM). Phalen, you’ll recall, organized last week’s secret meeting between port promoter Albert Barbusci, CBRM councilors (nine of whom attended), Mayor CecilRead More

Mayor Cecil Clarke and the CBRM council will meet port promoter Albert Barbusci on Wednesday afternoon in what was supposed to have been a secret session between 1:30 PM and 3:30 PM at the Holiday Inn. Barbusci, of Sydney Harbour Investment Partners (SHIP), flew into Sydney Monday night, according toRead More

One of the (many) messed up aspects of our access to information system here in Nova Scotia is that responses to municipal FOIPOP inquiries are not made public, unlike federal and provincial responses, which are published online. Fortunately, some civic-minded Cape Bretoners share the results of their municipal FOIPOPs withRead More

Rail Schmail Do my eyes deceive me, or has even the Cape Breton Post become a bit skeptical about the great Sydney container port project? All it took was port developer Albert Barbusci suddenly playing down the importance of a functioning railway to their project. As the paper reported Thursday:Read More

In my story last week on Sydney’s potential as a transshipment hub, I treated the Port of Sydney container terminal project and the Melford container terminal project in the Strait of Canso as though they were interchangeable. Richie Mann, the former provincial cabinet minister and Richmond MLA who now servesRead More

I have to thank a Spectator reader (he knows who he is) for pointing me toward port development issues in the province of Quebec (and my sister for reminding me that such issues are also discussed in that province’s French-language media). Things began bubbling there last December when the port ofRead More

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

Whatever else our port promoters Sydney Harbour Investment Partners (SHIP) have been up to these past few months, they’ve finally cleaned up their internet presence. These quotes, for example, have been removed from their revamped web page: They’ve also changed their logo. From this: To this: I could say moreRead More

Editor’s Note: I feel the need to warn you, dear readers, that this article is really long. That’s what happens when you start writing about a company with annual revenue of US$55 billion and 100,000 employees. But since it’s also a company that has been cited in reference to notRead 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