Nova Scotia needs better coastal beach access, expert says

Around 87% of the province’s coastline is privately owned, and it’s only getting harder for the public to enjoy the ocean due to climate change

HALIFAXtoday \  Chris Stoodley

An Ecology Action Centre coastal adaption expert says Nova Scotia needs better coastline accessibility after quarrels between members of the public and private property owners continue occurring.

“It’s a really complex issue,” Nancy Anningson, EAC’s coastal adaptation senior coordinator, says. “I’ve been learning about it over the last number of years. It’s something that emerges, largely, every summer because people are trying to get to the coast and are finding, sometimes, barriers that didn’t exist in places they used to go.”

Nova Scotia’s coastline is more than 13,000 km long, and around 87 per cent of that is privately owned.

Anningson tells NEWS 95.7’s The Rick Howe Show that Nova Scotia doesn’t have “a terrific plan” on how people can access the province’s coastline.

She says places like Florida have greater coastline accessibility. In that state, people can drive along the coast and find public washrooms, parking spaces and beach access points every few kilometres.

“We don’t have that here,” she says. “So, it’s getting harder and harder for citizens to get to the coast and enjoy the coast if they are not people who’ve had the luxury of purchasing coastal property.

“This is becoming a bigger problem, now, as we experience coastal climate change.”

For instance, some pathways and access points that existed in prior years might’ve vanished due to accelerated coastal erosion, coastal flooding or other coastline changes.

“In a community where people have been walking to the coast on a certain path for 150 years, as that path erodes and they start to move farther inland onto someone’s property, we’re getting some really ugly clashes in Nova Scotia,” she says. “It’s tearing communities apart in several cases.”

In Nova Scotia’s Cumberland County, a group of community members is suing a property owner over access to Clarke Head Beach.

That beach is located at the southeastern tip of a peninsula that juts out into the Minas Basin near Parrsboro.

Community members have said they’ve accessed the beach for generations by using Old Farm Road. However, that road runs through private property.

In 2016, the owners of that property tried to block public usage of the road.

Moreover, Justice Ann Smith issued a summary judgment last month that states the road hadn’t been dedicated to public use. However, the ruling didn’t state whether the public has prescriptive rights to use it.

The community members unsuccessfully tried negotiating with the property owners and now nearly three dozen people are suing for access.

This dispute comes after other court cases and conflicts over beach access have occurred in other parts of Nova Scotia.

Anningson says there’s no straightforward answer to dealing with this issue; most of the time, community members scrounge up funds to take property owners to court.

“In a perfect world, I think we would all be welcoming and community-minded,” she says. “But with that said, I have heard both sides of the story.”

On one side, she understands the issues property owners face. Most have spent a lot of money purchasing coastal property while some community members freely vandalize property, destroy the environment and litter.

“I don’t really know that there is one perfect solution,” she says. “But it’s something that our government hasn’t done a lot about.”

In the 2000s, the NDP government drafted a Sustainable Coastal Development Strategy which touched on public coastal access.

The document brought the province close to a solution; it set objectives such as increasing the number and quality of public access points to the coast.

The strategy was expected to be completed in 2012, but it was abandoned when the Liberals won the 2013 provincial election over the NDP.

“There does need to be some focus on coastal access,” she says. “How do we make sure that citizens who don’t own coastal property or who don’t own vehicles have easy access to our coast?

“It’s not right that people who have more money than other people are able to stop them from accessing Nova Scotia’s amazing ocean playground.”