OPINION: Is CBRM council gambling with Cape Breton’s future?

Cape Breton Regional Municipality is living through a cautionary tale — one that should give every citizen, investor and policymaker pause. It began with garbage.

Cape Breton Regional Municipality is living through a cautionary tale — one that should give every citizen, investor and policymaker pause. It began with garbage. CBRM council abandoned private garbage collection in favour of expanded municipal delivery by unionized civic employees.

The employees are working all hours to ensure garbage is picked up, kudos to them, don’t blame the guys on the trucks, they’re doing the job that they were tasked with. Whatever the theory behind the decision, the result has been disorder: disrupted service, mounting public anger and a garbage collection crisis serious enough that the municipality is now reconsidering private-sector involvement. The whole episode has earned an appropriate local nickname: garbage-gate after the infamous Watergate scandal.

That would be troubling enough if garbage collection were the limit of council’s ambitions. Unfortunately, some members of the same council now appear convinced municipal government can do a better job directing the future of Novaporte than the First Nations partners, private developers and global commercial interests that have spent years positioning Sydney Harbour for major development. The stakes could hardly be higher.

WIND WEST Nova Scotia’s Wind West initiative represents one of the largest economic opportunities in the province’s history, with a projected scale in the tens of billions of dollars. For Cape Breton, inclusion of Sydney Bight could mean a new industrial era — offshore wind construction, marine services, fabrication and assembly, logistics, operations and maintenance, supply chain development, and thousands of direct and indirect jobs. Novaporte and the broader Sydney Harbour industrial strategy are central to that opportunity.

Yet instead of presenting a united, investment-ready front, CBRM has become embroiled in an internal political struggle over the direction and control of port development. A tawdry spectacle. Other regions and ports will compete for investment, fabrication work, marine operations and energy infrastructure.

Governments and international developers will favour jurisdictions demonstrating stable governance, clear commercial relationships and the ability to make and honour long-term decisions. Cape Breton will be left behind, again. Sydney Bight may possess excellent wind resources.

Sydney Harbour offers deep water, industrial land and a strategic location. Membertou and its partners have assembled a credible development proposition. But those advantages can be squandered...and are about to be.

RAIL OPPORTUNITY? The risk extends beyond offshore wind. After years of stalled efforts, Cape Breton may finally be close to restoring vital rail service to the Port of Sydney.

Emerging alignment among Membertou, Sydney Harbour Investment Partners and others has revived a long-standing reality: a major industrial port requires modern rail. That progress is now at risk. Wind West and Sydney Bight could provide exactly the scale needed to make rail viable.

That is what makes the comparison with garbage-gate so unsettling. In the garbage file, council disrupted an established service model, believing municipal government could do better. The result was service breakdown, public frustration and a likely return to private sector involvement.

Now imagine that same pattern applied to a generational industrial opportunity. A missed garbage pickup can eventually be collected. A lost investment cycle would be gone for decades.

Major infrastructure and energy projects depend on confidence and stability. Investors need clarity: who has authority, who speaks for the project, whether agreements will survive political cycles, and whether years of negotiation can be undone by shifting political priorities. Cape Breton already carries a long history of stalled projects and unrealized promises.

It cannot afford to gain a reputation as a place unable to manage success when opportunity arrives. The province’s reported intervention should be taken seriously. If Sydney Bight is pushed aside while the rest of Wind West proceeds, the economic consequences would be severe.

Cape Breton continues to grapple with the legacy of industrial decline and decades of underinvestment. Opportunities of this scale cannot be squandered. What makes the current moment different is alignment.

For the first time in decades, Indigenous leadership, private investment, port development, offshore energy and rail restoration are converging around a shared economic vision for Cape Breton. To disrupt that alignment now would be an extraordinary act of self-inflicted damage. Council members are temporary custodians of public office.

They have no mandate to gamble Cape Breton’s economic future on political ambitions, institutional turf wars or untested theories of municipal competence. Claims that city council can do better than private investors should be treated with alarm. Where have you seen this competence in action?

Garbage-gate demonstrated what happens when municipal ambition outruns municipal competence. But garbage collection can be fixed. If political interference contributes to losing Wind West investment, undermines Novaporte and derails rail restoration, the consequences will last for generations.

Josephine Kennedy Bateston