What happened to Cape Breton Island? In particular, North Sydney? It  used to  be a booming town. Fish plants, steel plant, coalmines, Marine Railway and CN workers in the thousands. Retail businesses all along Commercial Street. Thousands of workers making good money, cashing their checks on a Friday at theRead More

Credit where credit is due: Tim Houston’s Tory government has followed through on an election promise and doubled funding to Nova Scotia’s municipalities, an increase of $32 million. The increase is for one year only but Municipal Affairs and Housing Minister John Lohr, who made the announcement last Friday, saysRead More

Cape Breton East was formerly known as Sydney River-Mira-Louisbourg and before that as Cape Breton West (seriously — West has become East, please don’t ask me how). The district has gone back and forth between the Liberals and Progressive Conservatives but has been held by the Tories since 2006, whenRead More

Wikipedia informs me that in 1933, “the district of Cape Breton was divided into five electoral districts, one of which was named Cape Breton East. In 2001, the district name was changed to Glace Bay. In 2003, the district lost a small area at its southern tip to Cape BretonRead More

Northside-Westmount — formerly Cape Breton North — has mostly gone back and forth between the Liberals and Tories with the exception of the 1978 general election when Len Arsenault briefly turned it NDP orange. The riding produced a Liberal Premier, Russell MacLellan, before turning into what I think I canRead More

In 2012, the provincial electoral boundaries commission took 79% of Cape Breton Nova and 59% of Cape Breton South and created Sydney-Whitney Pier. The 2019 commission lopped off the Pier and added some Sydney River-Mira-Louisbourg territory and — voila! — Sydney-Membertou was born. I’m going to do some electoral genealogyRead More

The mayor of the CBRM is, on the one hand, just one vote out of 13 on all matters that come before council, and as I’ve noted before in these pages, the position is barely defined in the province’s Municipal Government Act (MGA) which states: “mayor” means the council memberRead More

District 4 encompasses part or all of Coxheath, Westmount, Prime Brook, Sydney River and Edwardsville. It is shaped like a hand writing with a rather blunt pen. The district is home to 7,215 registered electors, 3,813 of whom cast ballots in 2016. Steve Gillespie captured 1,325 of them to winRead More

Equality I have three things I want to link together here and I have to do it quickly before I forget one (or more) of them: 1. During his “fireside” chat at the Cape Breton Regional Chamber of Commerce this week, Premier Stephen McNeil declared that he had no interestRead More

Editor’s Note: John Whalley, the former Economic Development Manager of the Cape Breton Regional Municipality (CBRM) is suing the CBRM for constructive dismissal. The case finally came to trial from 20-24 August 2018 and the Spectator was there. We’re presenting our coverage in a series of articles because the trialRead More