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For Greg Puncher, the Fisherman’s Life Museum in Musquodoboit Harbour, N.S., is more than just a building or a collection of mementos.
It represents his heritage.
“It’s the roots of my family in Nova Scotia on the eastern shore,” he said.
Puncher’s great-great-grandfather built the homestead and his grandmother grew up in it.
So, news that the province was closing the museum came as a shock.
More than that, Puncher says he’s frustrated with the decision because heritage throughout the province is being left vulnerable.
“We’re suffering on so many different levels, and I don’t think that our heritage should be paying the price for their mismanagement and corruption,” he said.
The Fisherman’s Life Museum is one of 12 provincial museums slated for closure across the province as part of Nova Scotia’s 2026-27 budget.
The highly controversial budget also reduced or eliminated more than 280 grants across multiple government departments in a bid to save about $130 million while projecting a deficit of roughly $1.2 billion.
On Tuesday, Premier Tim Houston walked back on some of those cuts to funding and grants. He announced his government was reinstating $53.6 million in funding for seniors and people with disabilities, and for programs that assist African Nova Scotian and Indigenous people to access education.
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However, the arts sector and local museums didn’t see their cuts reversed.
“When I put my hand on my heart and I said, ‘What will the impact be on people with disabilities?’ I couldn’t live with that. When I put my hand on my heart on some of the other sectors I said, ‘I wish we could do more.’ But I have to live with that,” Houston told reporters Wednesday.
On top of the museum closures, other institutions have had their funding cut by 20 per cent as a result of reductions to community grants.
It’s hit the Joggins Fossil Institute hard. The institute works to conserve and promote the Joggins Fossil Cliffs, which are a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Jade Atkins, the institute’s curator, says the institute will be losing $55,000 in funding — meaning it will receive less money than it did in 2008 when it first received the UNESCO designation.
She says the cuts mean programs, outreach work, and jobs are on the line.
“We’ve had to cancel our March break camp. Our summer camp will be next,” she said.
“We visit schools around the Municipality of Cumberland. It’s going to be very hard to do these things. Our outreach events will go from 10 or 15 in the summer to maybe one or two.”
Atkins says she’s particularly upset for the youth and children in rural communities, who will miss out on the chance to learn from these programs.
“I grew up in a rural community. I’m from Pictou County. I didn’t meet a scientist that wasn’t a medical professional until my first day at university at 18,” she said.
“And so my goal has always been that every child in Cumberland County should meet a scientist before they finish school. So we say yes to everything we can. Even when it’s inconvenient, even when it is very difficult, we say yes to everything because that’s my personal goal is for every child to meet me, a paleontologist, and to see that you can do these highly-skilled jobs in a rural setting. So I’m heartbroken that I will no longer be able to do that.”
Devin Casario with the Association of Nova Scotia Museums agrees these cuts and closures are going to be especially difficult for rural parts of the province.
“The impacts right now are incalculable; we’re in the early stages of assessing what they could be,” he said.
“There will obviously be job losses and other issues within the community because of the nature of what these museums do and how they serve their communities.”
For Puncher, he’s hopeful something can be done to save the Fisherman’s Life Museum, which means so much to his family.
But he wishes they weren’t put in this position.
“Ideally, I would like to see the government reconsider their budget. I think they need to go back to the drawing board and start all over again, as many MLAs have been asking them to do,” he said.
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
