My snapshot of the current cruise industry (see part one here) would be sadly wanting if I failed to note that Princess Cruise Lines, fined a record $40 million in 2017 for what the US Department of Justice called “environmental crimes,” has failed to mend its wicked ways. The 2017Read More

Bridging burning There’s a big update this week on Bridging Finance, the private debt lender that extended Membertou a $6.8 million loan in January 2020 to invest in Novaporte, promoter Albert Barbusci’s proposed Sydney harbor container terminal project (and that took what Barbusci termed a small equity stake of itsRead 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

Barry Sheehy did something in Monday’s Chronicle Herald that I would not have believed possible: he wrote an opinion piece (“Atlantic Canada missing the boat on U.S. port-expansion frenzy“) about congestion at US ports without mentioning COVID. Sheehy — described as an author, historian businessman, veteran and part-time Gabarus residentRead More

During this week’s federal leaders’ debates, all participants verified they had worked together in a non-partisan way to battle COVID-19. COVID and its variants do not discriminate — everyone is vulnerable to some degree. And Canadians, because we were all at risk, pulled together in a way that mirrored whatRead 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

It’s been a while since I wrote anything about the pandemic with which we have all been living since March of 2020, but more ink and more airtime has been spent on COVID-19 than on any other topic I can recall over the past few years. Daily reports on caseRead More

The third wave is here and I thought it might be a good idea to bring together all the information I’ve been tweeting out piecemeal about COVID these past few days. Given the admirable job Tim Bousquet at the Examiner does covering the briefings — and the daily press releasesRead More

Shots! I’m betting when you read that you knew I was talking about COVID vaccine and not tequila. That is a sad but I hope not enduring effect of the ongoing pandemic. I got my first AstraZeneca shot on Monday. On Tuesday, I had a sore arm and fatigue serious…Read...

Statistics Canada says that 309,893 Canadians died in 2020, which means annual deaths surpassed 300,000 for the first time in the country’s history. As for the contribution of COVID, Stats Canada says: The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) reported that 15,651 or 5.1% of deaths in 2020 were causedRead More