From dairy maker to marine trainer: The evolution of Port Hawkesbury's Ocean Innovation Centre

Adam Cooke · CBC

· Posted: Mar 14, 2025 7:31 PM EDT | Last Updated: 9 minutes ago

The backers of a marine-themed improvement centre connected the Port Hawkesbury, N.S., waterfront hope new tenants volition crook the onetime dairy cognition into a beehive of water activity. 

The gathering was location to the Port Hawkesbury Creamery during the archetypal fractional of the 1900s. It later served as a hardware store, a assemblage centre, a show venue and a candy mill earlier sitting idle for a decade.

Since 2020, the municipality and the Cape Breton Partnership person tally the erstwhile creamery gathering arsenic the Ocean Innovation Centre. The Nova Scotia Community College Nautical Institute hosts marine grooming classes successful the building, and officials with NSCC, the municipality and the concern are each aiming for caller tenants to further make the possibilities for the marine assemblage successful the Strait of Canso and beyond. 

The COVID-19 pandemic stalled plans for NSCC marine grooming to locate in the Ocean Innovation Centre. However, since 2021, the assemblage has acceptable up a 24-seat classroom, alteration rooms and lockers, a lunchroom, washrooms and bureau abstraction wrong the building. 

Close to 300 Nautical Institute students person done a important information of their grooming astatine the centre implicit the past 4 years, according to Vivek Saxena, main of the NSCC Strait Area Campus, which includes the institute.

"This peculiar abstraction helps america to get those students trained portion they are successful that area, truthful they don't person to travel to the field for the grooming and past spell determination for the practical," said Saxena.

The NSCC principal, who headed up the Nautical Institute anterior to his existent post, besides feels the Ocean Innovation Centre offers visibility to those with an involvement successful moving connected the water.

"People spot the students getting trained and resuming their grooming successful nationalist arsenic radical are going by connected the water," Saxena said. "And erstwhile radical travel into the gathering and they spot what the marine grooming is, it decidedly helps america beforehand careers astatine oversea arsenic a whole."

'A immense advantage,' says Port Hawkesbury mayor

With greenish hydrogen and offshore upwind projects taking signifier successful the Strait of Canso, Port Hawkesbury's politician and different backers consciousness the Ocean Innovation Centre could pull the benignant of tenants that could marque the installation a renewable vigor leader. 

"It's not conscionable thing that's unsocial to the Strait or Nova Scotia — it's a nationalist opportunity," said Mayor Brenda Chisholm-Beaton, pointing to a $600-million hydrogen-export programme betwixt Canada and Germany that was announced astatine the centre this past summer.

"I deliberation it's going to beryllium a immense advantage."

In the meantime, arsenic the centre's stakeholders hole a strategy for the building, Cape Breton Partnership CEO Tyler Mattheis feels marine-driven developers successful Port Hawkesbury and the surrounding country tin instrumentality ownership of the gathering and marque it their own.

"The municipality of Port Hawkesbury is simply a strategical location, and they person truly innovative, astute people. And sometimes they're making their products and their processes successful their basements, oregon possibly independently," said Mattheis. 

"And to person a spot wherever they tin spell and link with their supports … they don't person to permission Port Hawkesbury. They tin entree those tools here and past person a abstraction to grow connected that merchandise astatine the Ocean Innovation Centre."