08 Jan Our habit of casual calumny

Cape Breton Post columnist Mary Campbell has written a crowd-pleasing column that purports to recite the history of efforts to develop a container pier in Sydney Harbour. Her thrust is that public money has been squandered on unscrupulous local business people while failing to ensure public ownership of the port.

Today’s Post carries a letter to the editor from me in response.

Mary Campbell’s article on port development (‘Whose port is it, anyway?‘, Cape Breton Post, Jan. 2) has been getting a lot of traction on social media. It combines a smart-alecky tone with the assumption that all the business people she mentions are crooks with no care for the community where they live and create jobs.

Her piece is also riddled with errors, especially her 2012 recapitulation of CBRM’s outrageous decision to buy–not the industrial park at the centre of her article–but an adjacent piece of land some believe will someday be the site of a container pier (a questionable assumption).

At the time of the sale, CBRM was massively in debt and a group of private business people had specific plans to develop part of the site as a bulk shipping pier. They had actual clients, ready to go, and there was no government money in their bid for this land. But CBRM stepped in on two day’s notice and spent money it did not have to “save” the site for a future container pier. It was a crazy thing to do, but it kept alive the dream of a container pier on which a generation of mayoral candidates have sought and won office.

At the time, I attempted to unpack the details in two posts at Contrarian.ca: here and here.

Campbell’s inaccuracies are bad enough, but, really, it’s the knee-jerk sneering at business people she doesn’t know that’s truly offensive. I know most of the people she slags personally, and all of them by reputation. I have done business with some of them. They are good people who grew up in our community and built lasting businesses that have been good for Sydney.

Along the way they have had a few failures, too. That sometimes happens when you actually try to build a business. It doesn’t make them knaves or swindlers. It means they tried things that were hard. CBRM could use 100 more like them.

Parker Donham
Kempt Head