Toll Road Hypocrisy alert: I literally just read an email from Amazon telling me I can expect delivery of my order on December 17. I try really hard to avoid using Amazon — I just checked my order history and this is the first time I’ve placed one since 2019Read More

Green Hydrogen Remember when I took you on that guided tour of the new Novaporte website? (Honestly, I don’t blame you if you’ve suppressed the memory.) We spent some time pondering the claim that the adjacent Novazone logistics park will be a “green energy hub” with “planned hydrogen facilities” thatRead More

Cruise news And now, from the “counterintuitive” department, I’d like to suggest that there are ways in which COVID may actually prove a boon to the cruise industry. It’s a theory I developed watching a “recovery of cruise” presentation from a November 2020 conference on “post-COVID” tourism in Cape BretonRead More

Munger Games Everywhere I look these days I see vanity projects — from billionaires propelling themselves into almost-space to local businesswomen producing 13-episode podcasts — but the story of Warren Buffet’s partner designing a dorm for the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) takes the proverbial vanity cake. AccordingRead More

Yoga Mats Galore! Reading about the MV Zim Kingston shedding over 100 containers into the ocean off the coast of British Columbia put me in mind of the 1941 sinking that inspired Compton MacKenzie’s novel Whiskey Galore!  No, wait, that’s not strictly true — it put me in mind ofRead More

Home Matters So, this happened: .@HomeMattersCB asks @TimHoustonNS if he supports a container pier for CBRM. Premier says he’s willing to see a business case. #nspoli — michael gorman (@MichaelTGorman) October 21, 2021 “@HomeMattersCB” is Sydney-Membertou MLA Derek Mombourquette and I groaned out loud when I read this. Mombourquette’s ownRead More

Backroom deals During Tuesday’s CBRM council meeting, CAO Marie Walsh revealed — very matter-of-factly — that she and regional solicitor Demetri Kachafanas had met with developer Martin Chernin after the expiration of Chernin’s waterfront pre-development contract to discuss a new proposal. She even admitted that she and Kachafanas had presentedRead More

Having been publishing bi-weekly — or, as I like to think of it, working at half-speed — all summer, I’ve been building up a store of opinions on a variety of subjects. In fact, my “two-cents’ worth” on such disparate issues as Annette Verschuren’s induction into the Business & PhilanthropyRead More

Tattoo news This week’s story about Mildred Brown’s tattoos raised many questions for me, but one of the first that occurred was: how unusual was it for a working-class woman to have tattoos in 1929? Brown had not one but five, all professionally done. It’s a subject I hope toRead More

Ever since reading Linda McQuaig on Connaught Labs — the “public” lab that McQuaig argues, convincingly, could have helped Canada fight the COVID-19 pandemic had it not been privatized by the Mulroney government in the ’80s — I’ve been thinking about the value of publicly owned businesses and looking atRead More