Town Mayor Welcomes Pitch To Establish Early-Childhood Centre

PORT HAWKESBURY - A pitch from an early-childhood development group hoping to set up a welcoming center for young mothers and children in the Strait Area was among the highlights of a busy agenda at the latest regular meeting of Port Hawkesbury Town Council. 

We begin this week's edition of TELILE 24/7 at 1:45 with an update on the Destination Reeves Street project. Port Hawkesbury councillors have voted 3-1 in favour of cost-sharing a survey on the three-year-old road realignment initiative with the provincial Department of Public Works (DPW), and the survey - costing a total of $25,000 - is slated to get under way later this month. Port Hawkesbury Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Terry Doyle has also confirmed that the province will follow town council's wishes and conduct one final traffic-data study this summer, to give the town updated figures before council submits its final report on Destination Reeves Street to the province this coming fall. 

At 7:22. Mayor Brenda Chisholm-Beaton explains the thinking behind a recently-approved amendment to Port Hawkesbury's Taxi By-Law, to allow the town's cab operators to adjust their rates in the wake of unplanned circumstances such as rising fuel costs. The move at last week's town council comes just a few weeks after local cab companies applied for, and received, the town's permission to raise their in-town fares from $6.50 to $7.00.

We shift to Nova Scotia's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic at 10:36 with footage from a media availability held last week with Nova Scotia's Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Robert Strang, and the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Shelley Deeks. This includes a question from TELILE 24/7 host Adam Cooke about the impact of the March 21 lifting of pandemic restrictions on auto-immune, immunocompromised and immunosuppressed Nova Scotians. 

At 23:36, Mayor Brenda Chisholm-Beaton discusses Port Hawkesbury's newly-approved accessibility strategy and the many ways she hope it will improve life for town residents. 

Then, at 29:44, the coordinator of the Raising The Villages early-childhood-development strategy, Jim Mustard, explains why Port Hawkesbury would be a perfect addition to the communities of Baddeck and Bay St. Lawrence for setting up a welcome center for new mothers and their young children. 

Farewells to a pair of local leaders follow at 50:29, as we pay tribute to former Inverness District School Board and Strait Regional School Board chair Mary Jess MacDonald, who passed away hours before last week's Port Hawkesbury Town Council meeting, as well as sitting Inverness County Warden Laurie Cranton, who left our world in mid-March. 

And we end TELILE 24/7 on a lighter note with the latest edition of "The Fast Five," this time featuring Natalie Stevens, the support coordinator for the Strait Area chapter of Autism Nova Scotia.