RICHARD BELL: Groups Unite to Oppose Owls Head Park Sale

Eastern Shore Cooperator
Posted on March 12, 2020
By Richard Bell

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In a show of province-wide opposition to the government’s controversial decision to sell Owls Head Provincial Park, 23 groups submitted a joint letter to Premier McNeil on Tuesday, March 10 calling on the government to do three things:

  1. “Stop the sale of publicly-owned lands at Owls Head
  2. Protect Owls Head as a legally-designated protected area
  3. Fully implement the Nova Scotia Parks and Protected Areas Plan”
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Opposition to Owls Head Sale Growing Fast

Richard Bell
Eastern Shore Cooperator
February 18, 2020

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The controversy over Owls Head Provincial Park began on December 18, 2019, when CBC reporter Michael Gorman reported the province had secretly decided on March 13, 2019 to sell Owls Head Provincial Park to a wealthy American who planned to build three golf courses on the site (Lighthouse Links). The decision put in jeopardy hundreds of other parcels of Crown land that the public had previously believed were protected lands that could not be removed from protection without a public hearing.

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RICHARD BELL: Eastern Shore rallies behind Owls Head parklands

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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NDP’s Gary Burrill on Owls Head

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Posted by Richard Bell
January 15, 2020, 11:50 AM
Eastern Shore Cooperator

Gary Burrill, head of the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party, told the Cooperator in a phone interview that the NDP intended to challenge the province’s decision to delist Owls Head Provincial Park and sell the land to a golf-course developer, particularly the use of secrecy.

Burrill also dismissed the province’s defense that the land had never actually been protected. “The public in general had a reasonable understanding that these were lands held by province in some kind of special category,” Burrilll said. “ Rankin decided to make a change, from whatever category the land was really in, a change he made without the kind of consultation, of discussion, of sharing information, that a decision of this magnitude always calls for.”

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MLA Kevin Murphy on Delisting Owls Head

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Posted by Richard Bell
January 14, 2020, 3:36 PM
Eastern Shore Cooperator

In a January 3 2020 email to the Cooperator, MLA Kevin Murphy said that he first heard about the golf courses about two years, and that he had had two phone calls from the golf course lobbyist, Michael Samson. He wrote that he had not talked about the project with any other lobbyists, nor had he discussed the project with anyone from the Owls Head community (within 50 miles of Owls Head.)

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