Welcome to the Cape Breton Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia’s second largest municipality with a population of 98,722 and home to the Port of Sydney. The Port of Sydney is the first port-of-call on mainland North America for vessels transiting the Suez Canal and acts as a gateway to the GreatRead More

I was confused from the moment I read the subject line (which you can click to enlarge):   My best guess was that “Portege” was a typo and what Business Cape Breton had actually launched was an Entrepreneurial PORTAGE/Vanguard Program. This, I decided, would either involve entrepreneurs carrying canoes on their headsRead More

Double vision? I promised to ask when and how Dennis Campbell of Ambassatours Gray Line got the nod to develop the property formerly occupied by the Royal Cape Breton Yacht Club on Sydney’s harborfront and let you know what I found out. As you may recall, Campbell, whose firm operatesRead More

Economic development is the word on the street in the CBRM these days — CBRM Mayor Cecil Clarke popped up on CBC Cape Breton’s Information Morning on May 4 to speak to host Steve Sutherland about it and CBRM Regional Council has vowed to meet once a month to discussRead More

BCB Board Business Cape Breton (BCB), the Cape Breton Regional Municipality’s “economic development entity” has finally gotten around to updating its listing with the Nova Scotia Registry of Joint Stock Companies. It now has nine directors, having added Jim Kehoe and Darren McFadgen and lost Alastair MacLeod. Parker Rudderham isRead More

Remember the $40,000 FOIPOP? Actually, the price tag the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) slapped on a local man’s freedom of information/protection of privacy request was $42,804.50 — a calculation of the value of CBRM employee time that seems to be worked out to the last fraction of a second. SydneyRead More

It’s Wednesday and you know what that means — time to beat the Business Cape Breton (BCB) drum! This week we’ve learned that BCB is both an outside organization immune to the rules governing departments of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality AND the CBRM’s “economic development entity,” immune to theRead More

CBRM Council last week approved a budget that nixed the 2017/18 heavy garbage pickup while re-upping the CBRM Blossoming Program. The reason given for canceling heavy garbage — i.e. Cape Breton Christmas — was that the CBRM already provided such a service following the Thanksgiving floods, never mind that the post-flood collection onlyRead More

Some organizations are like cats, not in the sense that they hunt and kill mice (although with the level of transparency we have in the CBRM, who knows?) but in the sense that they have nine lives — end one and they start another. Business Cape Breton Association (BCB) isRead More

On 8 June 2016, at a “special” CBRM Council meeting, Mayor Cecil Clarke surprised councilors with the announcement that the CBRM had withdrawn from Regional Enterprise Network (REN) 6, an economic development organization incorporated in October 2014 and including the CBRM, Richmond County, Victoria County and Inverness County. CBRM councilors,Read More