Why I apologize to my car
Road in Middle River destroying cars, businesses
The wheels of progress often turn slowly in rural Nova Scotia.
Nowhere is that more evident than on the West Side Road in Middle River. Councillor Perla MacLeod had barely settled into her new role when she started fielding complaints about the road. That led to a petition which you can find at businesses in Baddeck, Middle River and Wagmatcook. The last petition in 2010 garnered 500 signatures, which MacLeod says she is hoping to match before she presents it to Victoria County Council. This is the third petition to repair the 18 kilometres of road, which was last paved in 1990.
There are 85 houses and several businesses on the road. Bruce MacDonald, who lives on a lane off the West Side, also operates an accounting firm located near his home. He says the condition of the road is “hurting his business” because the local courier now refuses to drive on the road. MacDonald contacted MLA Pam Eyking recently who came to take a look at the road along with a representative from the Nova Scotia Department of Transportation, Infrastructure and Renewal.
Patrick Lanctot and his partner moved to the West Side in 2008 from Ontario because they loved it here. They opened a Motorcycle Bed and Breakfast which they had to shut down in 2013 because of the state of the road. Determined to stay, they now operate a home-based film production company but are growing increasingly frustrated with trying to operate a business here.
“We can’t get gear delivered from Toronto,” says Lanctot. “This is not something that just happened. The road is dangerous.”
Lanctot calls the situation “neglect” on the part of the province. He also says when the B and B was operating they had customers who had seen roads around the world and many of them said they had not seen a road anywhere that was as bad as The West Side.
As for me, I cringed when I realized I would need to take a drive on the road in order to take a picture. I spent the whole time apologizing to my car for the punishment I was inflicting on it. Workshop raising interest About 70 people turned out at the Wagmatcook Cultural Centre recently for the first “Raising The Villages” workshop. The event brought together people from Victoria and Inverness Counties, as well as Port Hawkesbury, Wagmatcook and We’kemoq in an attempt to engage communities with the goal of giving every child the great start they deserve. Participants from Baddeck, Inverness, Cheticamp and as far away as Mulgrave and Bay St. Lawrence spent the day brainstorming about ways to improve early childhood development through new community efforts.
Inverness Councillor Jim Mustard, the initial champion of the of the Roots Of Empathy program in Nova Scotia, told the crowd he hopes to see the initiative eventually recognized by the province as a response to The Ivany Report.
“We as municipalities have the opportunity to become leaders.”
The people attending ran the gamut from stakeholders in health care, education and social services to new mothers and retired people. Mustard said one quarter of children entering the school system in Nova Scotia are classified as vulnerable and that number is even higher in Inverness County. He then used the example of the small town of Revelstoke, BC, where the entire community came together to lower the number of children classified as vulnerable substantially in just a few short years. Some of the tools mentioned included building communities to promote the power of the parent and using a child centered intergenerational approach. The next workshop takes place March 9 and 10.