Editor’s Note: I thought I’d revisit a few stories I’ve covered this year to see how things have been coming along.   Blowin’ in the wind Capitalize Albany Corporation (which does not, sadly, exist purely to stamp out lowercase spellings of the New York State capital but is the city’sRead More

Water/Wastewater Commission Greg Campbell (no relation, a point I feel obliged to underline regularly for his sake), manager of technical services for the CBRM’s Water Utility, appeared before CBRM council last night and I realized that I had dropped the ball in my coverage of his issue, which is theRead More

Wildfires Working on CBRM council stories for the Wednesday edition as wildfires raged on the mainland—and not just on the mainland but in the provincial capital—was a strange experience. I knew I had nothing to add to the coverage of the fires, that’s not the kind of coverage I doRead...

Growth Back in 2021, the CBRM went looking for a consultant to: …complete a new Municipal Planning Strategy (MPS), Economic Development Strategy, Land Use By-law (LUB), and other related enabling by-laws including the Subdivision By-law. The contract, worth $217,391.30, was awarded to Dillon Consulting which subcontracted two additional consultants—David Campbell ofRead...

Optimism I was taken to task on Twitter for being old and pessimistic for my skeptical take on the CBRM delegation to Wind Europe 2023. The tweeter was responding to my headline without actually having read my story but I am always alive to the danger of becoming old andRead...

During the first era of Albert Barbusci’s “Novaporte” scheme, one I have come to think of as the “Sino” era, China was going to be key to everything: China was going to finance, build and operate a deep-water terminal for ultra-large container vessels (ULCVs) in Sydney Harbour. This gave certainRead More

I have found an excellent way to evaluate what port promoter Albert Barbusci told an audience at the Membertou Trade and Convention Centre last Thursday—namely, that he was on his way to Baltimore to convince “three or four” American wind developers to store the massive components for their offshore windRead More

A number of spectators have pointed me toward the latest Bridging Finance developments and, given the recent Novaporte announcement, this seems as good a time as any to do a check-in. Bridging, in case you’ve forgotten, was the Toronto-based private debt lender that loaned Membertou Corporate $6.8 million to investRead More

Who has seen the wind? I didn’t get the invite to Novaporte’s “transformational” announcement at Membertou on Thursday (note to self: ask Tim Bousquet if “transformational” and “transformative” have become the new “innovative”—applied to everything from sewage treatment plants to wind marshaling ports). Looking at this photo I have toRead More

McKenna & Co I was going to call Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) a many-headed hydra but that’s the wrong metaphor, it is decidedly more of an octopus, with tentacles everywhere in everything—railroads, ports, real estate, nuclear power—but just one head, as the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation reported back in 2013:Read More