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

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...

I could barely listen to consultant Aileen Murray as she shared her Economic Development Strategy with CBRM council on Tuesday because I’d read the presentation as I drank my morning coffee and spent the next few hours in a slough of despond over having chosen the wrong career. Why didRead More

Buy buy Writing about Destination Cape Breton and the Cape Breton Partnership these past couple of weeks has been like returning to earlier, simpler times when publicly funded agencies and their dubious achievements occupied a lot of my brain space. But it all feels a little darker these days. TourismRead More

I went back and watched Cape Breton Partnership President and CEO Tyler Mattheis’ May 10 presentation to CBRM council and came away with the distinct impression that, like Destination Cape Breton, the Partnership has no real idea whether its work is producing the desired results—in this case, encouraging new businessesRead More

I know, I know — enough with the District Energy already. But I can’t let go of it because it’s an infrastructure project worth $38 million (as in, the cost of a new central library); it’s being pushed by the province, which means it’s likely to happen; and we haveRead More

Having watched CBRM council discuss a proposed district energy project for Downtown Sydney last night, I would say regular readers of the Spectator know more about this project than councilors do. I’ve been following it, as best I can, since it first appeared on my radar in January 2020 —Read More

You’ll think me mean spirited, no doubt, but I really found the choice of former Cape Breton Partnership President and CEO Carla Arsenault as principal of the Marconi Campus of the NSCC to be a head-scratcher. So much so that I asked the NSCC (via email) some questions about theRead More

As noted elsewhere this week, I’ve been curious about the appointment of Carla Arsenault as principal of the Marconi Campus of the NSCC, but I found I couldn’t think about Arsenault, the former president and CEO of the Cape Breton Partnership, without thinking about the organization she headed for threeRead More

Sometimes, in the midst of researching a mind-boggling dull subject, you dig up pure, unadulterated comedic gold. That’s what happened to me this week while I was trying to find out who was on the board of the Cape Breton Partnership (I still haven’t found out — I was toldRead More