That was a peculiar performance by Cape Breton Regional Municipality Mayor Cecil Clarke Friday. At a hastily called, 3:30 p.m. news conference, the mayor denounced municipal affairs bureaucrats for piling $4-5 million in new charges onto the financially strapped municipality, while rejecting his reasoned pleas for help coping with CBRM's fiscal mess. Since his election in the fall of 2012, Clarke has quietly led CBRM officials and citizens through a deliberate process to identify efficiencies in the municipality's far flung operations. They pared capital spending, and made what appeared to be an honest effort to come to provincial (and federal) negotiations...

23 March, 2014

CBRM Mayor John Morgan, facing serious opposition* for the first time in 12 years, is scrambling to justify his cash-strapped municipality's snap decision to spend $6 million in tax money to block a private sector development that promised immediate jobs. On just two days' notice last month, CBRM outbid a private sector developer to buy the Greenfield Site, a 400-acre parcel on Sydney's freshly dredged harbour. At the time, Morgan said the so-called mystery developer planned to use the site for a bulk terminal that would permanently preclude its use as a container pier, the Great Big Project Morgan continually upholds as...

05 June, 2012

Headline: CBRM to seek control of Laurentian Energy's greenfield site Headline: CBRM warns harbour site suitor Let me see if I have this straight: The Cape Breton Regional Municipality, which is $102.9 million in debt, and which constantly complains that it can't afford to provide basic services, is going to borrow $6 million to buy 400 acres of harbour-front land, or a lesser amount to buy a controlling interest in the company that is selling the land, all to block — yes, block! — a proposed industrial development, so it can "save" the land for a fantasy container pier that will never, ever happen. CBRM can afford to...

17 May, 2012

Grad student, cultural activist, and entrepreneur Mike Targett writes: I appreciate a lot of Jay Macneil's general complaint. I've made similar ones about decision-makers not trying hard enough to make this place more livable, and even actively trying to make it less livable. I can even be pretty cynical about council at times. Maybe that cynicism is what made me think twice about this vote, since Morgan the populist voted with Kim Deveaux the radical. Curious. Did Morgan vote for what he knew would be the popular sentiment ("All he wanted to do was dance!") despite testimony from the Chief of Police...

09 December, 2011

Sydney radio newsman Jay MacNeil is attracting hundreds of comments, "likes," and shares on his Facebook video denouncing CBRM council's 10-2 vote to ban teen dances from civic facilities. You're making it hard. You're just making it hard. There are people in this community who spend their entire day trying to find ways to inspire and engage the youth of their community, and around your council table there are a bunch people who find ways—on a shockingly recurring basis—to disengage youth. View the whole rant here. H/T: Jancie Fuller via Leah Noble...

08 December, 2011

I don't know which is more disturbing: The NDP Government's success in persuading a Supreme Court justice to impose a $5,725 fine on a man found innocent of the crime with which he had been charged; or Finance Minister Graham Steele's crowing about this 'victory" in a news release. [caption id="attachment_8539" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Acting Justice Minister Graham Steele [not exactly as illustrated"]"][/caption]CBRM's finest didn't have the goods on John Joseph Reynolds.They raided his Sydney Mines apartment last February, seized a bit of pot and and some hidden cash, but they couldn't prove he was selling marijuana, and they knew it. So they withdrew...

22 September, 2011

At long last, someone on the Cape Breton Regional Municipal Council has delivered a stinging rebuke to Mayor John Morgan's portrayal of Cape Bretoners as helpless victims of Halifax. Council is scrambling to meet a March 31 deadline for producing a sustainability plan, without which it stands to lose $7 million per year in federal gas tax rebates for four years. It has to scramble because senior governments rightly rejected an earlier grandiose plan proposing virtual provincehood for CBRM, with Comintern-like powers for its  "legislature." That nutty document, cobbled together with mayoral encouragement by CBRM's Gyro Gearloose development director, was submitted to...

12 January, 2010

Each year, the Province of Nova Scotia provides equalization grants to municipalities with less-than-average fiscal capacity. The unconditional transfer is based on a formula that compares a municipality's needs and ability to pay. In the current fiscal year, the Cape Breton Regional Municipality received $16.7 million, which amounted to 52 percent of all the equalization money given out in the entire province. The next largest recipients were Amherst at $1.2 million, and New Glasgow at $1.0 million. Put another way, CBRM got 14 times as much money as the next largest recipient. The numbers for 2009-2010 are expected to be similar....

18 December, 2009
The Supreme Court of Canada refusal to hear the Cape Breton Regional Municipality's equalization lawsuit was not as predictable as the rising of the sun this morning. But it was close. The lawsuit was cynical ploy by a mayor who likes to posture as a scrapper for the little guy, but refuses to do the hard work needed to reach political solutions to the little guy's problems.
  • Contrary to popular belief, even a total victory for CBRM would not have brought the municipality a single dime. It didn't even ask for money.
  • In any case, the lawsuit had no chance of success. Aside from Mayor John Morgan and his pricey Toronto constitutional lawyer, Contrarian has been unable to find a single lawyer who thought it had any chance of success.
  • Although the case suffered a mercifully early death—it was thrown out before trial—the mayor's insistence on appealing to the highest court in the land frittered away at least $500,000 in legal bills, and wasted three five years that could better have been spent seeking a political solution. During that time, CBRM ran up another $60 million $100 million in debt its citizens cannot afford.
  • The mayor now says he will seek a political solution, but he is playing a weaker hand, having demonstrated that his constitutional claims lack legal validity.
I believe the municipality has a case for greater provincial assistance in meeting basic service needs. I hope the Dexter Government, financially strapped as it is, gives the problem a fair hearing. But the mayor's legal adventure not only delayed a solution, it encouraged the worst impulses of Cape Breton's culture of dependency, and it reinforced the rest of the world's weary stereotype of Cape Bretoners as people with their hands out. In all these respects, it did a disservice to the very citizens Morgan claims to champion. Elaboration after the jump.

18 December, 2009

Contrarian reader Kirby McVicar offers an interesting take on Mayor John Morgan's problems with the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society: "The mainlanders are out to screw us all!" This is what I call Mayor Morgan's race card. Morgan says the Halifax/Ottawa bunch are keeping Cape Breton down with unfair distribution of wealth, with judges who are political appointees, and by using ECBC as a political tool that lets "outsiders" and "mainlanders" have it all. Cries of "Go, John, go!" can be heard from 80% of the kitchens in CBRM. And when the mainland media take on Johnny-Boy's opinions, you'll hear this same group say,...

17 November, 2009