On today’s CHMA daily news:
The Atlantic bubble is happening;
No new cases of COVID in New Brunswick;
An uncertain future for the Sackville Tribune Post;
Reactions to Mount Allison layoffs;
Economic recovery in Sackville;
Riverview springs a leak;
and the Emerald Ash Borer continues to destroy New Brunswick trees.
TRANSCRIPT:
The Atlantic bubble is happening.
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“Beginning next Friday, July 3, residents of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador will be able to travel within the four Atlantic provinces.”
The bubble means that residents of the Atlantic provinces can, as of next Friday, cross provincial borders without the requirement for 14 days of self-isolation.
The new rule applies to anyone not experiencing two or more COVID symptoms, or waiting for test results.
Anyone who travels outside the Atlantic provinces will still be asked to complete 14 days of self-isolation.
Premier Blaine Higgs says that travellers will be required to show proof of residence when they cross the border, and that traveler information will be collected at borders for the purposes of potential contact tracing.
Higgs says he is expecting busier than normal traffic at the border in weeks to come.
Higgs also says the plan to further open borders to the rest of Canada is still on the table for later in July.
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“We’ll gauge the… I guess, the success of this and yes, looking further into mid to late July as an opportunity to move further through the rest of Canada is certainly a discussion point and certainly in the realm of possibility.“
No new cases of COVID in New Brunswick
The province reported no new cases of COVID-19 today.
More people have recovered from the disease, leaving 16 active cases in New Brunswick.
Two people are still in hospital, with one in intensive care.
New Brunswick has conducted 2642 tests over the past 7 days, with 524 new results reported Wednesday.
This Friday, the Campbellton region will join the rest of the province in the yellow phase of restrictions.
And as of Friday, all businesses in New Brunswick are permitted to open provided they follow WorkSafeNB and public health guidelines.
Uncertain future for the Sackville Tribune Post
The future still looks uncertain for the weekly newspapers in Sackville and Amherst.
The Sackville Tribune-Post and the Amherst News stopped publishing in March after a sharp decline in advertising revenues because of the COVID-19 pandemic when many businesses were forced to close.
Now, the company that owns the weeklies, along with many other newspapers in Atlantic Canada, says it’s still losing millions of dollars.
The Saltwire Network announced earlier this week that it’s laying off one hundred and nine of its workers permanently.
The company’s chief operating officer says he’s still hoping that some weekly papers will return, but that will depend on market conditions.
Ian Scott adds the company will assess advertising and circulation levels before deciding when or if the papers in Sackville and Amherst can start up again.
Reactions to Mount Allison Layoffs
CBC reports that a total of 52 Mount Allison employees received layoff or reduced work notices.
36 employees have been laid off and of those, 25 have been given an expected date of return.
Another 16 have had their hours reduced.
As reported yesterday, the layoffs were announced in a June 17th letter from Mount Allison president Jean-Paul Boudreau to staff and faculty at the university.
The Mount Allison Students’ Union says it is disappointed with the announcement, but that it is waiting to gather facts before making a statement.
Student union president Jonathan Ferguson says that the union supports students expressing their opinions directly to the university’s decision makers.
Mount Allison student Emily Shaw has created an online event to protest the staff cuts.
Shaw created a Facebook event called “Students and Alumni Against Mount Allison Layoffs” to encourage people to email their thoughts to Mount Allison senior administrators and the Board of Regents.
Matthew Litvak, president of the Mount Allison Faculty Association, says that the layoffs will hurt the university’s ability to deliver academic programs to students.
The university says that combined factors of increased COVID-related expenses and reduced enrolment leave the university with projected budget deficits of $7 million to $9 million.
Some professors have questioned how the projected deficit numbers were calculated.
Matt Litvak says financial transparency has long been an issue at the university.
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“The reality is that, we’ve been concerned about how the budgets have been reported for quite a lot of years, and we would love to see greater transparency with regard to the budget itself… We are at an institution that has no deficit, and that’s rather impressive, when you looked at it with universities across Canada.”
The Faculty association president says he is hoping the administration will find another way to weather the projected financial storm, which he says may not be as bad as currently predicted.
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“Enrollment today is… From what we can see from enrollments and classes, it looks quite good. So our hope is that if that will turn out to be the case in September, then the hit financially will not be as big as has been reported.”
Litvak says the faculty association will be working with its CUPE colleagues to help prevent the layoffs.
The staff affected include people from facilities management and secretarial, clerical, and technical union locals, as well as non-unionized workers.
Town will not fund economic recovery in Sackville, for now
CAO Jamie Burke says staff will not be presenting a plan for an economic recovery fund to council at their July meeting.
On Monday evening, councillors heard reports from staff that there is a projected surplus of just over $130,000 in the town’s current budget year.
CAO Jamie Burke presented council with a list of options to pursue that could provide support for COVID-related expenses being taken on by local businesses.
But after a 30-minute discussion, no clear leadership on the question emerged, and Mayor John Higham asked Burke to figure out what to do.
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“I think what we’re doing is turning it back to staff for any ideas on what you think you might be able to distill from this. And we’ll see whether you come back with something or whether you say no, I don’t think council’s ready for this.”
Jamie Burke confirmed in an email that economic recovery funding will not be further discussed at July’s council meeting.
Burke instead is taking direction coming from Councillor Mike Tower, who had suggested a survey to find out the specific need of local businesses.
Burke says the town will revisit things after that.
One local businessman says he is disappointed in council’s handling of the question, and worries that councillors don’t understand how severely the pandemic is affecting small businesses.
Alan Barbour recently opened Fridgee, an online grocery store, after closing his cafe, The Black Duck, due to the pandemic shutdown.
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“It was really–from a business owner’s perspective, and the small business owner’s perspective–it was super disappointing. You have a group of councillors who seem oblivious to the fact that small businesses in a small town are suffering worse than they have in anyone’s lifetime.”
Barbour says town staff have recently started to become engaged with local businesspeople, but points out that Monday’s discussion was the first consideration of economic recovery in the three months since the shutdown.
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“It’s amazing that this pandemic is going on for as long as it has, and this is the first time economic recovery has been brought up in a town council setting. Like this has been going on, on a federal level and on a provincial level, in most provinces. New Brunswick has done, I would say, as close to zero as possible for small businesses. Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia have done a lot more. And on a municipal level, we haven’t really even… we just started having the conversation yesterday and the conversation was shut down at the first meeting.”
Barbour says that concerns raised by councillors over being on the hook for choosing which businesses receive support are unfounded.
He points out that two existing Sackville organizations, Renaissance Sackville and Mainstreet Sackville, already exist to support local organizations and businesses.
Though the town’s surplus is projected at $130,000, on Monday Jamie Burke gave numbers in the neighbourhood of $25 or $50,000 as possible fund envelopes.
Some of the ideas for the fund included supporting the purchase of PPE equipment, setting up online commerce, or pandemic related renovations.
Barbour hopes councillors will consider any type of support for local businesses suffering from the new pandemic reality.
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“Just if they did anything it would be better than doing absolutely nothing. But, you know, what I think would be helpful at this point in time would be to set up a fund. The town could seed the fund and then an organization around that could be used to try to find other money for the fund, to give out micro grants and micro loans to small businesses to help them pivot. So this is being done in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island through sort of like restart grants, restart loans, to help, you know, with if you need to put in barriers or if you need to hire someone to build you a Shopify store, or if you need to put a takeout window in where your door used to be. Like just these small things that are unique to every business. But it’s hard right now for people to access the funds to do that, especially on the small business side, because a lot of small businesses are, the owners are actually working way harder than they have been in the past way longer hours to make way less money, if not to lose money.”
That was local Sackville businessperson Al Barbour.
Sackville Town Council meets next on July 6th.
The town of Riverview has sprung a leak.
Water usage in the town has climbed to unsustainable levels over recent weeks, and it’s slowed water pressure for many residents to a trickle.
Mayor Ann Seamans says officials believe there’s a major leak somewhere that is not surfacing, and therefore hard to locate.
Riverview council has asked residents to limit their water use until the leak can be found and repaired.
Emerald Ash Borer in New Brunswick
The Emerald Ash Borer is the culprit behind the destruction of ten 30-year-old trees in Edmundston.
The highly destructive invasive beetle was first found in Edmundston in 2018, and last year was found in Moncton.
The metallic blue-green bug attacks and kills all species of ash, and has already killed millions of trees in North America, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Billions more trees are at risk. Trees infested with the emerald ash borer usually die within two to three years.
Emerald ash borer spreads most commonly through people moving infested wood in the form of firewood, logs, branches, nursery stock, or chips.
The adult insects can also fly up to 10 kilometres, but generally do not stray from their immediate area.
Westmoreland county is part of a regulated zone to attempt to control the spread of the Emerald Ash Borer.
All ash tree materials and firewood of all species cannot be removed from these areas without prior permission from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
CHMA Daily News is hosted Mahalia Thompson-Onichino, and produced by Erica Butler, with contributions from Bruce Wark, Geoff de Gannes, and James Anderson.
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