The provincial government is looking at how often motor vehicle inspections should be held.  Right now it’s annually for all  vehicles in the province. 

In some places like Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, inspections happen every two years.

Minister of Transportation Ernie Hudson says a review is underway but there are some things to consider such as insurance rates.

Some motor vehicle repair places believe the annual inspection should be kept which keeps older vehicles safe for PEI highways.

A motor vehicle inspection costs $30 each year.

Islanders can have their say on the 2024-25 operating budget by taking part in pre-budget consultations.  You can submit your ideas by emailing [email protected]; or by taking part in an online survey; or by registering for virtual consultations.

  Finance Minister Jill Burridge says it’s an opportunity to share your thoughts and potential solutions, whether it’s about housing, healthcare, education, our economy, or anything else you think that government should be prioritizing.  The deadline for submissions is December 22nd.

To show support for ending gender-based violence, Islanders are encouraged to wear purple during the 16 Days of Activism from today until December 10th. Purple ribbons are worn in honour and remembrance of the 14 women murdered in Montreal on December 6, 1989, and the 10 women murdered in PEI since 1989 by someone who knew them. The ribbons are also a call for justice for the tragic number of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in Canada. 

Chief Coroner Dr. Brandon Webber says there will be an inquest into the death of Kenneth Hoddinott while in custody at the Sleepy Hollow Provincial Correctional Centre on December 21st, 2021.

The inquest is scheduled for Monday and Tuesday next week.

It will be held at the Law Courts  on Water Street starting at 9.30 each morning.

The facts and circumstances of the death will be examined during the inquest.

The Holiday Season has begun in Charlottetown with the annual Christmas Tree Lighting at Confederation Centre last night and the Christmas Parade this evening.

The Christmas Parade will start at 5.00 at the UPEI entrance on University Ave. and traveling south toward Great George, turning west Grafton St. and finishing at the Provincial Government Parking Lot on Kent St.

Streets along the route will be closed from 3 this afternoon until 7 tonight.  Any vehicles parked on the closed streets could be given a ticket or towed.

Raider’s Road between Burns Ave. and Enman Crescent will be closing this afternoon between 2.30 and 4.30 to accommodate parade staging.

The Victorian Christmas Market on Victoria Row, Queen and Sydney Streets  continues today and tomorrow with some streets closed and there is no parking in that area until 9.00 Sunday night. 

Many people showed up to pitch in during the UPEI Faculty Association's food drive to help fill up the campus food bank right before exam season. Here's how the two-day event went and why it matters to students and professors this time of year.

A real estate company says it wants to make P.E.I. housing even more affordable through an innovative business model. But some housing advocates are questioning why the province is leaving it to the private sector to address the Island's housing woes.

Premier Dennis King is facing questions about what the province will do to help the community of North Rustico after construction of a still-unfinished rink came in at double the projected cost. 

Rental costs on P.E.I. are rising at one of the fastest rates in the country despite the fact that the provincial government has implemented rent controls to try to limit those increases.

Right now, cars on P.E.I. need to be inspected every year. In other provinces like Nova Scotia inspections are done every two years.

Public transit in eastern P.E.I. is set to expand with more routes on Saturdays between Dec. 2 and 23. 

The P.E.I. government is looking at all opportunities in the housing market in its efforts to get Islanders into affordable homes, says Housing Minister Rob Lantz, and non-profit groups are next up in that conversation.

After the final buzzer sounded, teammates piled on veteran Amy Burk, the joy evident in their celebration. Burk scored once while Emma Reinke added a hat trick as Canada's women's goalball team beat the U.S. 4-3 to win the Parapan Am Games gold medal — and qualify for the Paris Paralympics in the process.

The Charlottetown facility is still about a year out from opening, but crews are making a lot of headway in getting it built. It will include an NHL-sized ice surface, space for 600 spectators, an upstairs walking track and an outdoor six-lane swimming pool.

Some city officials got a sneak peak at the new Simmons Sports Centre in Charlottetown this week — a project they say is on track to open next year despite delays and cost overruns.

The expansion of P.E.I.'s medical residency program, from five seats to seven, is the culmination of a lot of hard work and co-ordination, says the Island's site director for Dalhousie's medical school.

Drivers in eastern P.E.I. could find themselves suddenly in difficult weather conditions overnight Friday.

The inpatient unit at Kings County Memorial Hospital has declared an outbreak of COVID-19.

For the time being, patients on the inpatient unit are restricted to three partners-in-care, with only one partner-in-care present at a time. Visitor restrictions will remain in place until the outbreak is declared over.

All visitors and staff at the hospital, including the emergency department, will be asked to follow the current infection control measures, which include wearing a mask at all times.

Work will begin Friday to replace the water line on Grafton Street from Cumberland Street to the Hillsborough Bridge.  As a result, Grafton Street will be temporarily modified to a one-way street, westbound into the city, and a detour will be in place. The changes will be in effect 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until further notice. All local businesses on the street will remain open. 

It’s expected the initial water line replacement will take three to four weeks, with two-way traffic restored once the work is complete.  

The Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission has approved a slight increase in the price of gasoline of 1.0 cent per litre,  The price of furnace oil went up by 2.0 cents per litre.  There’s no change in the price of diesel.  Including taxes, pump prices for regular self-serve gasoline now range from 162.6 to 163.8 cents per litre and prices for diesel are between 207.5 and 208.6 cents per litre.  The maximum price for furnace oil is 148.1 cents per litre.

An independent consultant brought in by the P.E.I. government has found North Rustico’s new rink has cost twice as much as expected, coming in at more than $22 million — and some major suppliers still have not been paid.

A COVID-19 outbreak in the in-patient unit of Kings County Memorial Hospital in Montague will mean some restrictions for visitors.

P.E.I.'s minister of economic development says it's a 'major issue' right across the province, adding that government officials have met with phone companies and the Canadian Telecommunications Association about the problem.

Christmas events will mean a variety of street closures starting at 5 a.m. AT Friday and lasting until 9 p.m. Sunday, and water line replacement work will begin Friday on busy Grafton Street.

Canada needs to move more quickly in response to the housing crisis, says housing researcher Steve Pomeroy, who has worked extensively with Prince Edward Island data.

Summerside Electric is trying to determine the reason power went out across the city mid-morning Thursday.

Just after midnight on Thursday morning, Kings District RCMP responded to a report of a car fire. The Montague Fire Department also responded to the vehicle fire that was in the driveway of a home in Brudenell, and extinguished the blaze.  No one was injured in the fire, which the investigation determined was set on purpose.  The investigation quickly led to the arrest of a 56 year-old Brudenell man who has been charged with one count of arson and one count of uttering threats. 

Associate physicians are a new idea for Prince Edward Island, but Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kathie McNally says they could soon be having an impact on the province’s health-care system.

Due to weather conditions on the Northumberland Strait, the 7:00am crossing from Wood Islands and the 8:30am crossing from Caribou have been cancelled for Thursday. 

In the PEI legislature on Wednesday, the PC government, with its majority, voted down two pieces of legislation put forward by the Third Party Greens.  The PC government voted against the Green bill that would have provided 5 paid sick days to Island workers. It also voted against the Green bill that would extend the moratorium on renovictions.  

The first two ferry crossings Thursday between Wood Islands, P.E.I., and Caribou, N.S., have been cancelled due to poor weather conditions.

Colville Manor in Souris has declared a facility-wide outbreak of COVID-19

Visitors to Colville Manor will be limited to 3 partners-in-care, with one visitor at a time. All partners-in-care will be asked to follow the current infection control measures. 

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, including the emergency department, is currently overcapacity due to increased patient volumes. As a result, anyone going to the emergency department with less severe illnesses should expect longer waits to see a doctor. 

The increased volumes also mean more patients are waiting in the emergency department for a hospital bed.   Officials say measures are being taken to increase the number of beds available across the system and to move patients in hospital back to their community hospitals, long-term care or community care where possible.

Those people with a serious illness or injury should continue to seek emergency care at the emergency department.

P.E.I.'s Ukrainian community will mark one of the darkest periods in their country's history this weekend, called Holodomor, a Ukrainian word that means 'death inflicted by starvation.' The genocide was recognized by the P.E.I. legislature in a bill passed unanimously this week.

P.E.I.'s minister of housing says his department is working on a plan to open another 10-bed emergency shelter this winter, this time in Summerside.

New funding from the province will let the Charlottetown school, which its principal says is currently over capacity by about 30 students, grow by roughly 10,000 square feet.

P.E.I.'s health minister took the brunt of questions at the legislature Wednesday as MLAs brought up concern after concern about the state of the Island's ailing health-care system.

The amount of money daycares get from the province is based mostly on the number of educators and their qualification levels — leaving out support staff, which some daycares say they'll need to hire in larger numbers in order to take on more kids.

The P.E.I. government releases two big budgets in any given year: the operating budget and the capital budget. We walk you through the difference between the two, and some of the announcements in this year's capital budget.

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown, including the emergency department, is over capacity and patients can expect a longer than average wait to see a doctor, Health P.E.I. said in a news release Wednesday afternoon.

Speaking to reporters about P.E.I.’s capital budget on Tuesday, Finance Minister Jill Burridge defended the government’s reliance on private industry to build housing.

Wednesday saw the release of a new report called A Proposal for a Guaranteed Basic Income Benefit in Prince Edward Island. The report was written by a team of public servants, politicians, and advocates from PEI and across the country.  It presents a basic income model for a fully-funded 5-to-7 year demonstration program in PEI, which it says would considerably reduce poverty for Islanders while being more cost-effective than previously presented models. 

The report estimates that the proposed Guaranteed Basic Income benefit would put PEI on a path to meet its poverty reduction targets by considerably reducing the poverty rate for Islanders aged 18 to 64 from almost 10% to nearly 2%. It says the poverty rate for families with children would be reduced from 5.4% to 1.8% and that of single adults aged 18 to 64 would fall considerably from almost 27% to about 3%. 

A detailed report on guaranteed basic income released Wednesday morning says it would mean 65 per cent fewer P.E.I. children would be living in poverty, along with 90 per cent fewer people who live alone — and poverty could be virtually eliminated for people with disabilities.

Colville Manor in Souris has declared an outbreak of COVID-19 on its Lupin household.

Visitors on Lupin household will be limited to 3 Partners-In-Care with one visiting at a time. All partners-in-care will be asked to follow the current infection control measures that are in place.

On Tuesday, the Official Trustee of the Rural Municipality of Murray River passed a resolution supporting a study into the possibility of forming a new municipality in the Southern Kings area. The same resolution was adopted by the Rural Municipality of Murray Harbour on Saturday.  The area would encompass the two rural municipalities and the fire districts of the Murray River and Murray Harbour fire departments. The resolution states that both municipalities are concerned about their ongoing viability, and interested in exploring the funding, economic development and tourism opportunities that a larger municipality could bring to the area. They’re also interested in studying the costs and benefits of incorporating the two communities and their two fire districts into one new sustainable municipality of approximately 3000 residents in the Southern Kings area.  

Charlottetown Police have released a couple of pictures as part of their investigation into a home break-in last month.  It was about 7:00 pm on Oct 28th when a home on Forest Drive was broken into, with the culprit getting in through a basement window. Police are looking for the public’s assistance, and ask anyone with information regarding the individual in these photos to contact them or PEI Crime Stoppers.

The southeastern P.E.I. rural municipalities of Murray River and Murray Harbour have taken the first step in a process to explore the possibility of amalgamating.

P.E.I. Minister of Health Mark McLane says some new nurses have been caught in clerical limbo when it comes to receiving a recent recruitment incentive, but the province is committing to getting them their money.

As the group plans new builds in Tyne Valley, O'Leary and Three Rivers, it's working to change a commonly held perception that its homes are a form of poverty relief.

The number of bats on the Island has dropped drastically in the last decade, and there is little indication that they will recover.