N.S. government ‘dishonest’ about delays in enforcing Coastal Protection Act, EAC staffer says

The coastal adaptation co-ordinator with the Ecology Action Centre says the Nova Scotia government is being “dishonest” about regulation delays preventing proclamation of the Coastal Protection Act.

The legislation, intended to ensure that new construction in coastal areas doesn’t happen in locations where it is going to be vulnerable to sea level rise, coastal flooding and coastal erosion, was passed April 11, 2019, by the then-Liberal government, and received royal assent the next day. 

It has never been proclaimed, pending the development of regulations.

“From my conversations with Nova Scotia Environment staff, including the deputy minister and the minister, they are not interested in reopening the regs (regulations) or, as I put it, putting them back on the cutting table,” Will Balser of EAC said.

“We knew and have had suggestions since the inception of the Coastal Protection Act of gaps that we are seeing or things that we would like to see regulated under it, but they are not interested.”

Yet, it is the pending bill regulations and the government’s contention that more consultation is required before those regulations can be finalized that has been blamed for holding up proclamation of the bill.

“The consultations are an important part of the process,” Premier Tim Houston said Thursday in a post-cabinet meeting briefing.

“Our focus (is) on protecting people and protecting property, certainly in the face of the types of crises we experienced and the types of storms we will see in the future.”

The premier said Nova Scotia is a diverse province with 13,000 kilometres of diverse coastline ranging from rocky cliffs to beaches.

Diverse coastline

“There is a significant diversity in the makeup of our coastline and I think that it’s important that we respect that and have consultations around different areas about what the impacts could be, what the risks are,” Houston said. “I personally don’t think that this can be or should be a one size fits all.”

Houston said he has not been lobbied by anyone not to proclaim the legislation.

“I understand how near and dear our coastline is to Nova Scotians,” he said. “We love our coastlines, we love our water views, we love our access, we love all those things. I know that in Nova Scotia when you start to take steps that could impact somebody’s ability to enjoy our coastline in any way shape or form, you should listen to them before you take those steps.”

The premier said there are other ways to protect people and property, including municipal zoning and planning.

“They (municipalities) can obviously move forward on zoning should they see fit,” Houston said. “That Act will continue to move forward with the consultation process.”

Balser said it’s both unfair and inefficient to dump the responsibility for protecting the coast on “understaffed and overloaded” municipal planning departments.

The provincial government’s duty is to Nova Scotians and to the municipalities that exist within the province, Balser said.

“It’s clear that municipalities are not capable of bringing together consolidated, high-quality coastal regulation across the 49 municipal units we have in this province,” he said. “Very few of them have good coastal regulations. More than half of them are unzoned in the rural areas. It’s pretty foolish and extremely inefficient for the premier to be putting it back on municipalities when that was the whole point behind the Coastal Protection Act, to recognize that the coastline is a provincial asset and it shouldn’t be cut up into 49 separate pieces and regulated separately.” 

Fallen behind

Balser said the province has really fallen behind in the last couple of years on furthering any information and material about the regulations or furthering its education plans. 

“They focused a lot on consultation but part of the whole process of the rollout of the regulations is supposed to be education and we haven’t got any significant updates from the province since 2021 on what the regulations are going to look like, how they are considering different coastal environments, what it’s going to look like on the ground for different regions in terms of elevation or what erosion rates are,” Balser said.

Balser said the Environment Department announced another delay in the release of the regulations on March 29 but up until two weeks prior to that date, no additional delay was contemplated.

“They were getting ready to roll these regulations out and there was no conversation about not being ready,” he said.

“If there is no intention to change the regulations, no interest in any significant consultations, then really what they are doing is just an education campaign. They keep using this language of consultation instead of education, which is frustrating because it doesn’t seem like they have any intention of doing anything with the suggestions that they are going to hear as part of this consultation. On the flip side, if it is strictly an education campaign, let’s call it an education campaign.”

He said educating Nova Scotians about what the legislation will mean should have been happening continually over the past four years.

“They (department) still don’t have a plan or a timeline for what that education process is and it’s been more than two months since the delay was announced. It very much feels cobbled together at the last minute and dishonest.”

‘Phased rollout’

Even if the regulations were finally ready and the legislation proclaimed, Balser said it could be years before it is completely implemented.

“There’s a phased rollout program that they are proposing which could last years past the actual implementation of the regulations,” he said.

In the meantime, developers and property owners are taking advantage of the delays to get in under the wire before the legislation is enforced.

“It’s (legislation) still not an iron wall kind of moment,” Balser said. “It’s still going to have all of these exemptions for projects that have even just pulled permits, never mind if they have done any ground work.”

Balser said Freedom of Information requests and other digging did not reveal a “smoking gun” for what is behind the many delays.

“I certainly don’t see consolidated pushback or opposition from coastal property owners like they’ve talked about but I also don’t see any large development corporation or large coastal landowners mentioned in there,” he said “There is no one I can directly point to for being responsible in terms of an external influence and the premier has said himself he hasn’t been lobbied on this.”

Balser said the Houston government is “gun shy” about any kind of land regulation.

“I think at the end of it, they don’t want to own this,” he said. “It was not the conservative party that brought this to the legislature in the first place, it was not the conservative party that led the development of most of the Act throughout all of the consultation periods with stakeholders, municipalities and residents. I don’t think they feel any responsibility toward this at all.

“We’re seeing this with no progress on Crown-use regulations, very little commitment to even maintaining provincial parks as was the case of West Mabou Beach. … You can be worried about telling people what to do in certain cases but if it is in the context of recognizing and protecting people from known risk areas, like coastal areas that are already flooding and are on hurricane paths and are already eroding over a foot a year, it’s just being dishonest.”