Transparency 101 Amid the blowback from CBRM council’s rejection of a staff recommendation it fund a New Dawn/Ally Centre project with the $5 million it received under the federal government’s Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI), District 2 Councilor Earlene MacMullin took to Facebook to explain why she’d voted against the project,Read More

Words with Mayors In my coverage of CBRM council this week, I made a crack about the mayor—who was elected as Amanda McDougall and has been referred to for the past two years as Amanda McDougall—suddenly being referenced in the meeting agenda as Mayor Amanda T. McDougall-Merrill. I was actuallyRead More

Editor’s Note: I’m trying out my system of choosing items from the CBRM council agenda and doing some preliminary research on Tuesday afternoon, then watching the meeting and updating the article accordingly.   Item 6.2 (a) on last night’s CBRM council agenda was “business arising” from a January 17 inRead More

There’s a point I’ve been meaning to make regarding CBRM council’s in camera discussions of waterfront development, which Mayor Amanda McDougall defended to the CBC, telling reporter Tom Ayers: Discussions on the potential land deal have been held in camera for months, which is allowed under the Municipal Government Act,Read More

Novaporte’s new face Kathleen Yurchesyn has left her post as CEO of the Cape Breton Chamber of Commerce to become the vice-president of operations and corporate development for Novaporte, the name promoter Albert Barbusci has given to his Sydney harbor container terminal project. Six years in, Yurchesyn represents Novaporte’s firstRead More

Having listened to Mayor Amanda McDougall’s interview with the CBC’s Wendy Bergfeldt, I’ve come to the same conclusion I reached last week: those meetings in Ben Eoin should have been open to the public. But at a bare minimum, they should have been ANNOUNCED to the public. Former Municipal AffairsRead More

Editor’s Note: Mayor Cecil Clarke’s contention that discussing council remuneration in camera (and treating elected officials as “personnel”) is a longstanding CBRM practice sent me scuttling to the “CBRM Mayor and Council” clippings file at the McConnell library, to research some of the remuneration (and related) issues council has dealt withRead More

In camera The CBC’s Tom Ayers doesn’t seem to like closed doors any more than I do and this week he kicked one open (figuratively, not literally) at the Cape Breton Regional Municipality. Ayers reported on Thursday that the CBRM Council has discussed its own compensation in secret four timesRead More

Port secrecy CBRM Council met in secret camera on Thursday to discuss something related to the Port of Sydney. Under the Municipal Government Act (MGA), which our mayor sometimes worries about and sometimes doesn’t (see the 31 unannounced in camera meetings held over 22 months in 2014-15 in flagrant violationRead More

Regional Council and its Committees meet in the Council Chambers on the second floor of City Hall, 320 Esplanade, Sydney, NS. All regular meetings are open to the public. Council meetings are usually held on the third Tuesday of the month at 6:00 p.m. and are broadcast on the localRead More