Medical Clinic Once Again Seeks Emergency Funds From County

STRAIT AREA - The only portion of this week's edition of TELILE 24/7 not featuring an interview format puts the focus on a local medical clinic that is seeking emergency municipal funding for the second consecutive year. 

At 2:04, we zero in on a presentation made by the Dr. William B. Kingston Memorial Health Centre to the latest Committee of the Whole meeting for Richmond Municipal Council. The clinic's board chair, Juanita Mombourquette, has confirmed that a recent budgetary shortfall will make it impossible for the L'Ardoise medical centre to maintain its current two-physician complement. As a result, the Kingston centre is now seeking for help from three levels of government, only a year after it successfully secured $3,000 in emergency funding from the municipality to head off a similar budgetary issue. 

Nova Scotia's Minister of Community Services, Karla MacFarlane, joins us at 13:15 to explain a new program launched by her department last Thursday to provide temporary housing for homeless Nova Scotians. The department will provide grants of $20,000 to eight different organizations across the province - including the Cape Breton Community Housing Association, which oversees both the Town of Port Hawkesbury and the city of Sydney - with the money to be spent on temporary shelters and hotel rooms for those who are struggling to put a roof over their heads. 

Staying with provincial politics at the 27:01 mark, the first declared candidate for Nova Scotia's New Democratic Party leadership, Dartmouth South MLA Claudia Chender, speaks to TELILE 24/7 host Adam Cooke about her decision to run for the leadership post recently vacated by Halifax Chebucto MLA Gary Burill, who announced he was stepping down this past fall after leading the NDP to third-place finishes in the 2017 and 2021 provincial elections.

And the final interview of the show, at 44:35, features Ashley Taylor, a Port Hawkesbury hair salon owner who has been pushing for provincial support for an industry that has been hard hit by the latest restrictions at this stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Nova Scotia's Department of Economic Development has agreed to provide members of the Cosmetology Association of Nova Scotia with a one-time grant of $2,500, this does not include hair salons, leaving Taylor and her fellow hair-care specialists struggling to maintain their bottom lines as they make their way through the first of three month-long phases of the province's re-opening strategy.