STRAIT AREA - Along with recapping the biggest headlines of 2021, the year-end edition of TELILE 24/7 also updates some of the year's biggest stories. 

Politics took centre stage in the summer of 2021, with back-to-back election campaigns in Nova Scotia and across Canada. Liberal Leader Iain Rankin lost his bid to be re-elected as Premier when the Progressive Conservatives under Tim Houston ended a 12-year exile from government benches, with the party also sweeping all four seats in the Strait of Canso.

As this episode of TELILE 24/7 went into the final production stages, Rankin held a virtual press conference to announce he would step down from the Liberal leadership role he had won less than a year earlier. Rankin will stay on as leader until his replacement is chosen by Nova Scotia Liberals, and he plans to run again in the riding of Timberlea-Prospect, which he has held since 2013. 

Interviewed by TELILE 24/7 host Adam Cooke in April (and also interviewed in French for Telile's half-hour weekly series NOTRE COTE), Port Hawkesbury pharmacist recently received several accolades for his mobile vaccination clinic, a used ambulance that has doled out thousands of shots to counter influenza and COVID-19 alike. In December, as Hatt crossed the 10,000-vaccination mark in terms of COVID-19 doses, Hatt was named the winner of the Vital Pandemic Leadership Award at the 2021 Vital Cape Breton Excellence Awards, co-sponsored by the Cape Breton Partnership and NextGen Cape Breton. He also received the Making Health Your Business Award from the 2021 Community of Care Awards, presented by the Cape Breton South: Recruiting For Health Committee. 

In 2020, Hatt was given a Dr. Robert Strang Community Hero Award from Doctors Nova Scotia for helping people cope during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

TELILE 24/7 has also confirmed that, shortly after an interview with newly re-elected Cape Breton-Canso Liberal MP Mike Kelloway in which he insisted that the government's approach to the Mi'kmaq moderate livelihood fishery was sound and prudent, 400 lobster traps belonging to fishers registered under the Potlotek First Nation moderate livelihood fishery contract were seized by the local office of the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Close to 440 Potlotek traps were seized overall by DFO officials over the past 12 months.