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

In a rare instance of a local voice taking on Sydney's popular but incessantly negative mayor, a Cape Breton Post editorial criticized two recent tweets by His Worship:  It was typical Morgan stuff: ...

09 December, 2011

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

In a call to CBC-Cape Breton last week, North Shore resident David Papazian spoke a widely held but rarely voiced opinion about the $38 million project to dredge Sydney Harbor in hopes that someone will build container terminal here: The money could be much better spent fostering small business here in Cape Breton which is a much better engine of growth than these sort of mega-projects that require huge amounts of capital at the taxpayers' expense, with a whole lot of expectations and dreams and hopes that — maybe not, but very likely — will become another chapter in the probably fairly...

09 October, 2011
What's up with AllNovaScotia's curious blind spot for Cape Breton Regional Municipality Mayor John Morgan? Like many others, AllNS's editorialists took umbrage when the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society charged lawyer Morgan with professional misconduct for accusing Supreme Justice John Murphy, and Nova Scotia judges in general, of political bias in the performance of their duties. An AllNS editorial argued that it was dangerous and wrong to muzzle political speech by a politician who also happens to be a lawyer. So far, so reasonable. The odd thing is that the usually reliable news service seems to be letting its editorial passion slop over into its news columns. AllNS news stories have persistently misrepresented the comments that got Morgan in trouble. Instead of quoting or characterizing Morgan's original words, AllNS quotes only the sanitized version Morgan came up with after he got in hot water. The background is here, but in short, Morgan pretends he merely said Nova Scotia judges were not tree-shakers; in reality, he went on for paragraphs alleging political bias by the judge who first rejected his grandstanding constitutional claim for higher equalization payments — a lawsuit that was ultimately rejected by every judge who reviewed it, up to and including the Supreme Court of Canada.
13 February, 2010

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