Editor’s Note: This campaign has now been fully funded. Concerned citizens, raised the requisite funds in just 6 days, which shows how passionate people are about saving Owls Head Park Reserve.
Go Fund Me Campaign: https://ca.gofundme.com/f/lets-go-to-court-to-save-owls-head
Press Release Announcing the Filing of a Lawsuit to Stop the Sale of Owls Head Provincial Park. Includes profiles of participants and links of resource sources.
Opponents of the provincial government’s decision to sell Owls Head Provincial Park to a wealthy American investor to build 3 golf courses has launched a lawsuit at the end of January in the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia in an effort to stop the sale. The applicants are the Eastern Shore Forest Watch Association (ESFWA) and Robert Bancroft.
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“Few people have actually walked the land and the shore other than locals gathering berries in the many bogs. The aerial photos on Google Earth show a gently rolling landscape where the last glacier raked its fingers across the exposed granite, leaving long rows of furrowed granite with boggy areas in between the rows.”
(more…)Posted by Richard Bell
January 31, 2020, 5:08 PM
Eastern Shore Cooperator
Fraser published an explanation of his thoughts on the matter on the Save Little Harbour/Owls Head Facebook site on January 26. The Cooperator was able to get a short phone interview with Fraser on January 30 about the proposed land sale.
(more…)January 30th, 2020 Halifax — The NDP Caucus will table legislation this upcoming session to strengthen the Provincial Parks Act to ensure pending protected land cannot be delisted without public consultation. The Wilderness Areas Protection Act already requires public consultation when changing designation of significant areas. “As we’ve seen with Owl’s Read more…
A behind-the-scenes move by the province to sell the land has the community pushing back.
Originally published here
Richard Bell
January 30, 2020
The Coast
More than 200 people packed into the Ship Harbour Community Centre in the afternoon on Sunday, January 26 in the latest escalation of a land-use dispute over the selling of protected Crown land to a private developer to build three golf courses—a dispute that also jeopardizes the province’s reputation as a safe place to invest.
… The reaction to Gorman’s revelation has been explosive. Opponents formed the Facebook group, Save Little Harbour/Owls Head from Becoming a Golf Course, on December 19, and it had garnered 2,219 members by January 29. The Nova Scotia branch of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) started an online letter-writing campaign calling on Premier McNeil to cancel the sale of Owls Head. That campaign produced more than 1,000 letters in a few days.
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Thank you to Gail Lethbridge for raising the Owls Head park issue in her Jan. 25 column. We should all be howling about the secretive way the province delisted Owls Head from a group of lands needing protection in hope of letting Lighthouse Links build golf courses.
(more…)To: Sean Fraser, Member of Parliament
From: Martin Willison, retired Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University
Re: Public lands at Owl’s Head, Nova Scotia
Date: 28th January 2020
Dear Mr. Fraser (Sean)
You posted to the relevant Facebook page that you are interested to hear from Nova Scotians regarding the proposed sale of public land at Owl’s Head. I am sure you were sincere when you stated that you want to protect the environment while also fostering appropriate economic development. I wrote to Iain Rankin, Minister of Natural Resources and Forestry (NS) two weeks ago and my letter to him is attached here.
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