Press Release: Filing of a Lawsuit to Stop the Sale of Owls Head Provincial Park

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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Weasel Awards

The starting point for this group was a CBC article by Michael Gorman. That article, on December 18, revealed that a secretive process was underway to remove Owls Head Provincial Park from the list of protected lands in the Nova Scotia Parks and Protected Areas Plan, and sell it to a private developer… reportedly for the development of three golf courses. It was revealed in that story that there was absolutely no public consultation nor scientific basis for removing the 661 acres of pristine coastal barrens from the protection and public ownership it had enjoyed for 45 years.

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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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