In anticipation of the desperate ghosting of the Novaporte project during this municipal election campaign, I contacted Mayor Cecil Clarke and asked him for a written response on the current status of his transformative vision for a container terminal on Sydney Harbour. I also asked if he would be makingRead More

Editor’s Note: In January 2019, the federal government announced a plan to end the Cape Breton Development Corporation’s (Devco) coal operations — Phelan Mine was to close in late 2000 and Prince Mine to be sold. The original scheme, as reported by the Globe & Mail’s Kevin Cox, would seeRead More

In a letter to the editor dated 16 July 2002 I carefully set out some historic evidence on the long-predicted conversion of coal transportation from rail to road on Cape Breton Island. Given the pending government pronouncement on rail abandonment (or wink, wink “preservation”), I thought some factual background mightRead...

Is there no editor at the Cape Breton Post? Has the Saltwire Network, which owns the paper, instituted some sort of buggy, beta, artificial intelligence app to vet its stories? How else to explain a front-page Father’s Day feature that began like this: Just in time for Father’s Day, five setsRead More

Ban the Bomb If Spectator contributor Sean Howard has raised your awareness (and the hairs on the back of your neck) about nuclear weapons and the need for disarmament, you may well be wondering, “But what can I do?” (Other, of course, than dismantling your own stock of intercontinental ballisticRead More

“Tartan and coal” proclaimed the front page of the Cape Breton Post, rather cryptically, on Saturday and I couldn’t resist trying to guess what the headline referred to before I actually read the article: the world’s worst ice cream flavor? Sydney Academy’s Class of ’57 prom theme? Alexander Graham Bell’s terriers?  Read More