The CBRM has published its latest travel expense data for council and senior staff and, as you might expect, given the pandemic, people weren’t traveling much. Council had begun meeting by video/teleconference in March 2020, the Atlantic Bubble was instituted on 3 July and popped on 26 November 2020, andRead More

District 12 covers part of Sydney (chiefly the Whitney Pier area) and all or part of South Bar, Lingan Road, Grand Lake Road and Victoria Mines. It is totally shaped like a bat: Since time immemorial, by which I mean, since amalgamation, the district has been represented chiefly by JimRead More

CBRM Council approved the appointment of Deputy Chief Robert Walsh as acting police chief last night, during its regular monthly council meeting. The Spectator reported in September 2019 that McIsaac was on medical leave but that CBRPS spokesperson Desiree Magnus had declined to say how long he’d been off. McIsaacRead More

Snowing on our parade The fall-out over the CBRM’s decision to cancel night parades continues to land — most recently on the editorial pages of the Cape Breton Post where District 12 Councilor Jim MacLeod published a mea culpa on Wednesday for remarks he’d made to CTV news in November.Read More

During last night’s CBRM council meeting, Jim Mountain and Robert Pajot of the National Trust for Canada reported on the results of a two-year pilot program to regenerate Sydney’s downtown. Mountain described the Trust to council as a “small charity based in Ottawa” that has been involved with main streetRead More

I needed three electronic devices and one notebook to follow last night’s CBRM council proceedings from home. I tuned into the livestream on my phone and cast it to my television, but the image was flickering so badly I was afraid it might trigger a light-induced seizure, so I openedRead 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

CBRM Council approved a raise for itself last night in response to the federal government’s decision to end a tax break that allowed elected municipal officials to collect one-third of their salaries tax free. Councilors did it without a word of debate or discussion, presumably because they’d already debated andRead More

Excuse the clickbait headline. I was sitting here trying to decide how to structure a report on last night’s public consultation session on a Cape Breton Regional Municipal (CBRM) Charter and it struck me that limiting myself to five notable items might help me focus on what matters. So hereRead More

I have a confession to make: I did not watch the full CBRM council meeting last night. I watched (with interest) the discussion of the proposed RV Park in Big Pond. (I spend my summers in Irish Cove, just a little further west along Route 4, so anything that happensRead More