Recent NewsNew Dawn wants council to review ECBC
By Erin Pottie, Cape Breton Post, December 19, 2011
New Dawn Enterprises will ask the Cape Breton Regional Municipality mayor and council to lead a community-based review of Enterprise Cape Breton Corp. as the battle over Sydney port governance continues.
After twice asking ECBC chief executive officer John Lynn to meet for a roundtable discussion on port development, New Dawn appealed to Paul LeBlanc, chairman of the ECBC board of directors and president of the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, to intervene and call a meeting with ECBC senior management.
According to an ECBC spokesperson, it’s the federal Crown corporation’s position that the local Sydney Ports Corp. is responsible for the adoption of a new port governance model and that their presence at a discussion isn’t required or appropriate.
New Dawn president Rankin MacSween said ECBC has advised that concerns raised throughout the community about ECBC’s management of the Sydney Port project have been referred to the corporation’s board of directors for consideration and direction.
New Dawn, a non-profit community development corporation, has also requested its representatives appear before the ECBC board of directors when it assembles to consider the corporation’s management of the Sydney project.
“One of the things that’s gotta be a bedrock of this issue, of the process here, is the whole business of transparency, the whole process of being open, the whole process of being explicit,” said MacSween.
This isn’t the first time New Dawn has fought with ECBC regarding its actions on port development. New Dawn requested a meeting with ECBC last fall, but months passed and no meeting was held. It wasn’t until New Dawn pleaded its case to ECBC’s board of directors that a meeting with Lynn was arranged.
The two parties also brought their differences to arbitration after both put forward competing proposals to Laurentian Energy, which owns land along the harbour, including the greenfield site where it is hoped a container terminal could be located.
It was decided that an earlier decision by Laurentian to accept ECBC’s proposal was void becuase it didn’t include the support of 75 per cent of Laurentian stakeholders.
“There’s every sense, there’s all kinds of signals, that ECBC has no interest and is very discouraging in terms of mounting a marketing effort in relation to the development of a container port,” said MacSween. “You sense that it’s not polite to bring that up or something.”
MacSween said ECBC is an important player, delivering $19 million to harbour dredging and $1 million to developing a port governance structure. He said the community needs “some understanding of where is ECBC at on this issue.”
Doug Lionais, chairman of the board of New Dawn, said the fundamental problem is lack of co-operation.
“I think the problem is the leadership, the current leadership in particular, has absolutely no accountability to this community and therefore the direction that the leadership takes tends to serve other interests,” Lionais said. “What those interests are, whether it’s simply their own personal interests or other grander political machinations going on, you know, there’s no proof of. But it’s certainly quite clear they’re not taking the community’s interests.”
CBRM mayor John Morgan said he’s concerned with ECBC’s role in evolving the ports governance model, which he says must remain at the community level. He said council would be willing to hear New Dawn’s proposal to conduct a community review of the Crown corporation.
“The challenge though with that model right now is the federal government has really begun to dominate its processes,” Morgan said. “For example, it is, in a de facto way, hiring some of its staff and it had really begun developing its very core structure by inserting that million-dollar amount to develop that second port corporation.”
Morgan said it’s important that the community controls the ability to set priorities and communicate on behalf of the local harbour.
Failing that, the Sydney Ports will be vulnerable to the federal or the provincial governments, who might put the interests of other ports ahead of the local interest, he said.
A phone call to an ECBC spokesperson was unreturned on Monday. Earlier requests to interview Lynn were declined.