Category: Community News

When Terry Greene opened his tax bill this year, he was disappointed, but not surprised. Greene knew his assessment was hiked again for the third year in a row, but he had expected something else to change: his tax rate.

Greene lives on Queens Road in Frosty Hollow, on the outskirts of the former town of Sackville, and now part of Ward 2 in the town of Tantramar. “We knew what our assessment was going to be,” says Greene. “But we were under the assumption that because we voted in Ward 2, and we were divided off into Ward 2 of the Tantramar region, we expected our tax bill to be as an LSD [Local Service District] of Ward 2.”

“We got our tax bill and our tax bill still has us as part of Ward 3, which is not an LSD, it’s a fully serviced district,” says Greene. “And the tax rate difference is 40-some percent… And I don’t feel that’s right.”

Greene says his property became part of the town of Sackville in the mid 70’s, during an expansion of the town boundaries. Since he can remember, he’s been paying town of Sackville tax rates, but Greene feels the level of service he receives in Frosty Hollow is closer to what is available in the former local service districts just down the road from him, where property owners pay much less in property tax.… Continue

The drive across the Tantramar marshes between Sackville and Amherst certainly looked different before March 2014. Back then, the marsh was populated with a group of tall radio towers, home to the CBC international short wave service, RCI International.

Harper-era budget cuts led to the CBC’s decision to scrap the towers, and the short wave broadcasts they sent out across the Atlantic. But luckily, filmmaker Amanda Dawn Christie was there when the towers fell, and the images she captured are part of Spectres of Shortwave, her 2016 film which is screening this Thursday at the Vogue Cinema as part of the Sackville Film Society winter series.

Christie’s film didn’t start out to document the demise of the radio towers. Now based in Moncton, the artist lived in Sackville for many years, during which time she became more acutely aware of the RCI site, after learning to build her own radio receiver in a workshop at Struts Gallery.

“We made radio receivers out of toilet paper tubes,” recalls Christie, “and my radio picked up Italian radio. I thought that I did a great job!” But Christie later learned people in houses near, in and around Sackville had reported picking up radio signals in their sinks and refrigerators. “So it wasn’t that I did a good job building a radio,” says Christie,” it was that I was near an international shortwave site.”… Continue

Every year, tens of thousands of tiny sandpipers arrive in the Bay of Fundy mudflats at Johnsons Mills after having left their breeding grounds in the Arctic. When they arrive they weigh about as much as a strawberry, and proceed to feast in the Fundy mudflats until they’ve doubled their weight and can make the rest of their journey down to South America.

But there’s one sandpiper that doesn’t make the trip. Or at least there was. For about 20 years, a wooden statue of Shep the Sandpiper—the world’s biggest, they say—stood in Dorchester Village square, an homage to the natural wonder the birds create, and an attraction to passersby. But in recent years Shep has been missing, having fallen victim to wood rot and been taken down for repair.

A group of residents from the village are determined to bring Shep back to Dorchester, and they presented to Tantramar Council on Tuesday to make their case.

“As the undisputed world’s largest Sandpiper, Shep has always received a lot of attention,” Kara Becker told council, noting that Shep is still featured on the Tourism New Brunswick website and tripadvisor.com. “Unfortunately, this has turned to disappointment when visitors go to see her,” said Becker, quoting from a Trip Advisor review that rated the attraction just one out of five. “Shep the Sandpiper is missing,” reads the review.… Continue

Residents of Tantramar will likely be voting as part of a new riding in the next provincial election.

The commission to adjust New Brunswick’s electoral boundaries has submitted its final report and it recommends the riding of Memramcook-Tantramar be split up. The Memramcook portion will move over to a Memramcook-Dieppe riding, and the remaining portion will become Tantramar, including the municipalities of Tantramar, Strait Shores, parts of the southeast rural district, and a small area of Cap-Acadie.

The redistribution means that Tantramar (the riding) will have the fewest electors out of all the ridings in the province. The average electoral population for all 49 ridings in the province is 11,667, but the new riding of Tantramar clocks in at 9058, 22.36% below average. It’s one of only four ridings in the province to have less than 10,000 eligible electors, and it borders on two ridings with over 12,000 electors, and one with over 13,000.

Dr. Mario Leveseque is head of political science at Mount Allison University. He says he’s disappointed in the commission recommendation. “They missed a real opportunity here to better integrate the region,” says Levesque, who favours not splitting up Memramcook-Tantramar, but rather adding some more Francophone voters to the riding, in order to balance out linguistic representation.

One of the reasons the commission considered changes to Memramcook-Tantramar is complaints from Memramcook and the Societé des Acadiens de Nouveau Brunswick about the minority language and cultural representation in the riding.… Continue

Sackville’s Sarah Evans joined the morning show on CHMA this week to talk all things gardening, including springtime preparations, what goes into becoming a Master Gardener, and what’s going on with the Sackville Community Garden.

Sarah Evans is a Master Gardener and co-owner of Sackville’s garden-to-table restaurant, Ducks Aren’t Real. She loves growing plants and learning from them, and she can talk about gardening all day. 

Evans will join the CHMA morning show again in a few weeks to talk more about the upcoming growing season.… Continue

Memramcook-Tantramar MLA Megan Mitton was on the Mount Allison campus on Wednesday for a meet and greet with students organized by the Mount Allison Students’ Union.  A small group of students gathered to ask about public funding for post secondary institutions, bilingualism in New Brunswick, and climate change policies, including the future of energy production in the province.

CHMA caught up with Mitton just before the session to ask her about some recent issues getting provincial attention:

Transcript of audio:

CHMA: So, Megan, you’re a member of the Standing Committee on Climate Change and Environmental Stewardship. Last month, there were two days of hearings about small modular nuclear reactors with lots of radically different perspectives. Some say SMRs will be part of efforts to get greenhouse gases under control. Others say they expose New Brunswick to risk in terms of environmental issues coming from the nuclear waste they create. What was your takeaway from those hearings?

Megan Mitton: So we definitely heard about some of the risks, whether that be with the waste, nuclear proliferation. And we heard that this technology doesn’t exist yet. Specifically, the small modular nuclear reactors, is this even going to be viable? Is it going to be ready in time to really help us meet our climate change goals, to reduce emissions as fast as possible? And what’s the cost going to be?… Continue