TEASER (for reading earlier in the show, at your discretion):
Coming up shortly on CHMA, the daily news roundup, with your local stories:
- Mount Allison gets a new VP academic,
- Sackville’s town council is reprimanding one of its own,
- And the daily COVID 19 update
That’s coming up on the CHMA daily news roundup in _________ minutes.
NEWS:
And now for the CHMA daily news roundup:
Sackville Town Councillor Bruce Phinney will receive a formal reprimand for violating the town’s new Code of Conduct.
During an online meeting held on Wednesday night, town council authorized Mayor Higham to send Phinney a letter reprimanding him for disclosing confidential information.
The motion was read by Councillor Andrew Black and approved unanimously.
AUDIO CLIP: ends with, “and sent to Councillor Phinney from the Mayor.”
Council also called on Phinney to admit publicly that he violated the Code and to sign a statement promising to abide by its conditions in future.
Most of Wednesday’s town council meeting was held behind closed doors, so it’s not clear exactly how Councillor Phinney breached the Code of Conduct.
But, it appears he may have disclosed confidential information about at least one of the candidates who applied to become Sackville’s new Chief Administrative Officer.
Council appointed town manager Jamie Burke to the post last month.
Phinney opposed Burke’s appointment saying there were better candidates.
Phinney made his comments during a special council meeting in April held by telephone because of the COVID-19 emergency.
The town later released a recording of the meeting with more than thirty seconds deleted.
Councillor Phinney has been given seven days to sign the new Code of Conduct that was approved in March.
Phinney himself voted against it saying the Code was an attempt to silence Sackville’s town councillors.
Mount Allison University has hired a new provost and vice-president academic.
Dr. Jeffrey Hennessy will begin his five-year term on July 1st.
Hennessy will become Mount Allison’s senior academic officer, responsible for planning and managing the University’s academic affairs.
Hennessy will oversee teaching, research, and libraries, as well as administrative and general services.
Hennessy is a musician, musicologist and music professor, most recently teaching at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.
At Acadia, Hennessy served as director of the School of Music and later Dean of Arts.
Hennessy is also a musician in his own right, with an active career writing, recording and performing up until about 2014, when he took over as Dean of Arts at Acadia.
Hennessy says he is excited to join Mount Allison, where he was once briefly a student.
Mount Allison University President Dr. Jean-Paul Boudreau says that Hennessy is “well equipped to help advance Mount Allison’s strategic planning, initiated by the University last year.”
The Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture will be funding online artistic and cultural performances during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 Special Projects Fund will give artists up to $2000 for an artistic presentation on social media. Arts organizations and cultural businesses can also apply, and get funded to expand digital promotions and offerings.
All proposals must respect any physical distancing and self-isolation directives issued by the provincial government.
A Mount Allison professor has secured a quarter million dollar grant for a project to bring more diverse perspectives to traditional Western studies of arts, literature, and history.
Dr. Lauren Beck will work on the two-year project with a 12-person team of scholars from across Canada, the United States, and the U.K. Beck says the team is made up of Indigenous and Settler academics, and that students will participate in the research.
Beck is the Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter and a professor of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Mount Allison.
In COVID-19 news, the province reported no new cases of the virus today in New Brunswick.
The government added 373 new test results to its tally, with 108 of those coming from the South East region.
Chief Medical Officer of Health has stressed repeatedly at daily briefings that testing is a key part of New Brunswick’s strategy for controlling the virus.
AUDIO CLIP…
Don’t be discouraged. The best measure of success is not an absence of new cases, but how effectively we respond when new cases emerge. And the only way we can find new cases is for as many people as possible to get tested. So if you have two symptoms that are on the long list that we have now, call 811, and get tested or go to your primary care provider, until a vaccine or other treatment for COVID-19 becomes widely available. This is how it must be.
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That was the CHMA daily news roundup.
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