The Municipality of the District of Lunenburg (MODL) has recently undertaken a number of planning reforms that have sparked backlash from some land and business owners.
MODL’s planning reforms include amendments to the Secondary Development plans for Osprey Village, a policy governing cluster developments, a neighbourhood nuisance bylaw, a Municipal Planning Strategy (MPS), and a Land Use Bylaw (LUB).
The planning reforms, while years in the making, have only recently faced opposition. This is because opposition seems to be emerging from the sudden and significant shifts in the political-economic conditions of the past year.
MODL expresses that these initiatives aim to shape development and growth in a way that is amenable to business interests, conserve important agriculture and ecological areas and advances the general interests of residents.
Tensions around these reforms highlighted deeper political conflicts within municipal governance and the local economy that have driven a bitter backlash from landowners and local economic elites.
These tensions culminated through a petition and event organized by a local business owner and landlord, speaking-out against what he views as an overly-restrictive policy.
Council responded by scrapping the first draft of the plan and opted instead to start from scratch beginning with the minimum planning standards. They have been hosting numerous public input sessions on this plan, which are scheduled to continue until the end of June.
Recent Planning Reforms at MODL
MODL has recently undertaken a series of planning reforms that range in scale from specific secondary planning strategy amendments to the ratification of a municipality-wide planning strategy.
Council first, on January 14, directed staff to prepare a set of proposed amendments to the Osprey Village Secondary Planning Strategy. The interest of numerous landowners to develop housing and commercial buildings, which were not accommodated under the area’s previous planning documents.
MODL indicated in their February 20 presentation that future deliberation on the Secondary Planning Strategy amendments at Osprey Village are to be determined.
Presumably, MODL was to provide more details about the process going forward at the scheduled March 27 meeting of the Planning Advisory Committee. This meeting, however, was cancelled for reasons relating to the Municipal Planning Strategy, discussed below.
MODL, simultaneous to the Secondary Planning Strategy amendments, initiated a separate Osprey Village Beautification and Enhancement Plan, which focuses, “on making it easier and more enjoyable to walk, drive, and move around, while also improving accessibility for everyone” in the area.
UPLAND Planning and Design Studio presented a What We Heard Report to the Planning and Strategy Meeting on February 18. The report demonstrated community demand for greater active and public transportation to the area, traffic calming measures and better traffic flow considerations in parking lots.
MODL introduced a motion to implement policy governing cluster developments on April 22, 2025. This is meant to expedite the process of developing new housing units amid the ongoing housing affordability crisis. It seeks to lessen the regulation on development by allowing the intensification of constructions on one property without having to go through the municipality’s subdivision process.
A public information session will be held on May 6, 2025 followed by a public hearing on May 13, 2025. MODL is accepting public feedback until May 7, 2025
The municipality also introduced a motion to introduce a neighbourhood nuisance bylaw at an April 15, 2025 Policy and Strategy Committee meeting. A nuisance, in the bylaw, is defined as an, “interference with the use and enjoyment of land belonging to another”, but it exempts most regular agricultural, fisheries, and timber extraction activities from complaints.
It allows two different residents from separate properties to make a complaint to the municipality about a potential nuisance. RCMP are then responsible for responding to a nuisance complaint and issuing tickets. The municipality then enforces the bylaw through a series of escalating fines depending on how many offences an individual has committed.
The first reading of the bylaw was passed at an April 22, 2025 Council Meeting. Second reading of the bylaw is scheduled for May 13, 2025.
The biggest part of the planning reforms involve the adoption of MODL2040, which includes a Municipal Planning Strategy (MPS), and a Land Use Bylaw (LUB). The purpose of MODL2040 is to implement a minimum planning standards, which became a provincial requirement in 2018.
While it would subject the entire municipality to a new planning strategy, it is hardly the first example of municipal planning in the area.
The Origins of Settlement Planning and Settler Sovereignty in Mi’kma’ki
Settlement planning of European settlers in so-called Lunenburg County dates back to the arrival of French settlers in Mi’kma’ki in the 1600s.
The French established a fortified settlement at Fort Sainte-Marie-de-Grâce (present-day LaHave), Merligueche (present-day Town of Lunenburg), and Petite Rivière.
These were short-lived settlements that the Mi’kmaq permitted on the basis of good trading relations and a military alliance against the encroachment of English settlers.
You can find more information about Acadian settlements in Lunenburg County James Laxer’s The Acadians: In Search of a Homeland.
France relinquished its claims over Acadian settlements in the area to Great Britain after a series of inter-imperial wars through the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. This resulted in a number of violent conflicts between British settlers, and Mi’kmaw communities and Acadian settlers.
British colonial authorities, amid these conflicts, asserted their claim to sovereignty over the area in the 1600s and 1700s through a ruthless process of military conquest and ethnic cleansing, which led to the negotiation of a series of Peace and Friendship Treaties with the Mi’kmaq and other allied nations between 1725 and 1779.
These Treaties serve as peace agreements in the context of international armed conflict and never resulted in the cessation or surrender of the territorial extent of Mi’kma’ki to the British.
They ultimately serve as an agreement about peaceful coexistence in the same territory and never gave consent to the British or later Canadian governments to claim absolute authority over the direction of settlement and land use in so-called Lunenburg County.
British settlers also expelled Acadian settlers throughout Mi’kma’ki in a process of ethnic cleansing called Le Grand Dérangement.
The British then used their military dominance and population growth to overwhelm Mi’kmaw communities in contravention to the Peace and Friendship Treaties. Mi’kmaw communities petitioned the British Crown to uphold the terms of the Treaties, but these were ignored.
The de facto proliferation of British settlement, however, led to the perception among settlers and the British Crown that they held absolute sovereignty over what they called Nova Scotia.
The British Crown, knowing that it was in a treaty relationship with the Mi’kmaq, granted land to settlers in fee simple titles and failed to mitigate squatter encroachments into Mi’kmaw communities.
The inconsistency between the Treaties and British settler grants have never been reconciled in law, but are accepted as valid based on the history and capacity of the settler state to enforce these de facto property rights.
The British Crown granted territorial sovereignty to the Dominion of Canada upon Confederation in 1867. The Dominion quickly drafted policies intended to ethnically cleanse Indigenous peoples throughout so-called Canada through the establishment of the Indian Act of 1876.
The most heartbreaking outcome of this Act was the establishment of Indian Residential Schools, which sought to remove First Nations communities from their traditional territories by forcing families to give up their children for a government program of assimilation.
The inconsistency in Canadian Law between settler obligations to honour the Peace and Friendship Treaties, and the continued claim by settler governments to hold absolute authority over Mi’kma’ki—especially considering Canada atrocities committed under the Indian Act—continue to be debated in academic and legal venues to this date.
This inconsistency manifests in the ambiguous position of provincial and municipal governments on what is essentially stolen land. It has resulted in a galling contradiction between governments who claim absolute powers over property rights, land use, development and resource extraction while still attempting to claim a moral license to operate under the promise of reconciliation primarily through land acknowledgements recognizing the “traditional territories of the Mi’kmaq”.
The Government of Canada under Section 32 of the 1982 Constitution of Canada formally recognizes historical treaties in Canadian law.
The 1999 Marshall Decision of the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed provisions of the Peace and Friendship Treaties in Canadian Law, particularly with relations to First Nations fisheries.
The Supreme Court of Canada furthermore recognized the title, sovereignty and inherent law-making authority of First Nations prior to contact and European settlement through a series of decisions following the Marshall Decision.
Canadian law, in other words, recognizes that Mi’kmaw law is the original law of the land and Canadian governments must recognize it as equal to their own.
The effective recognition of this ruling, however, is proving to be a slow and painful process in the way the Canadian and Nova Scotian relate to Mi’kmaw government.
Mi’kmaw communities continue to face misrecognition of treaty rights and even violence from settler governments and communities, most recently in disputes over lobster and eel fisheries and the production and sale of cannabis products on reserves.
Recognition of Mi’kmaw title has also been absent in processes among municipalities across so-called Nova Scotia to implement planning strategies and land use bylaws.
MODL, however, continues to begin every meeting recognizing that they are in Mi’kma’ki.
More information about the Mi’kmaq experience of British settlement in Mi’kma’ki can be found in Daniel Paul’s seminal book We Were Not The Savages: Collision Between European and Native American Civilizations.
The Misconception of Property Rights in a Settler-Colonial Context and the Tyranny of Petty Lords
Property rights and land ownership have, since colonization, taken on a mythology far beyond what the law actually grants people when they own land.
Geographer Nicolas Blomley in his 2004 book Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property clarifies that property rights in Canada have taken on a life of their own due to folk-theories about property law.
The everyday settler owner of private property seems to understand land ownership as a kind of simple possession, something like owning an object that can be physically taken, moved and withheld from others in absolute terms.
This folk-theory fails to recognize that private property are abstract “bundles” of limited property rights that are granted by the state with specific conditions.
These rights, in Canada, are most often granted in the form of fee simple title, which is a relic of feudal land ownership system simply meaning that the state allows an owner to exercise a limited set of rights in a defined area.
They are only different from other feudal forms of land ownership, for instance, in that they can be bought and sold, and do not oblige the property owner to raise an army from its population of serfs or tenants on the land to come to fight for a lord to defend the realm.
A property owner gets the freedom to be the only one who is allowed to live on a property and benefit financially from property ownership, and that’s about it.
Fee simple ownership of a property right ultimately obliges the owner to pay a fee to purchase the right, pay property taxes and submit to regulations from the state about what is and is not allowed on the property.
Property rights, in other words, are not an absolute form of ownership. They are a set of social relations surrounding land occupancy that are backed up by the state’s ability to enforce it.
There are also provisions to fee simple titles that limit that abstract property right, such as requirements to allow people to pass through land to access a waterway or fishing spot.
Property owners, unlike some areas of the United States, cannot enforce their rights directly. In the case of an incident of trespassing, they are required to contact the government who will then dispatch the police to enforce the property right.
Absolute title, in fact, does not exist in Canadian law. The Crown reserves the “radical title” to all land in so-called Canada with private rights existing subordinate to it.
Property rights, in other words, does nothing but grant the “landowner” the political status of a petty lord subservient to the Government of Canada.
This differs tremendously from the “common sense” understanding of property ownership as some kind of absolute sovereignty that gives the owner political and economic freedom.
The influence, however, of thinkers from the British Enlightenment in the 1600s and 1700s as well as the ideology behind the American Revolution produced a mythology of private property as a form of liberty, which must be defended from the abuses of government or else society descends into tyranny.
Recent right-wing populist ideology has taken this folk-theory of property rights and put it at the head of a broader project of asserting their liberty. Some advocates, most radically, have even invented novel legal theories about property law to argue that they are “sovereign citizens” that are not subject to Canadian law.
This kind of liberty does not exist in Canadian law.
Liberty from the Canadian state, however, does exist in struggles by First Nations communities exercising their own political and economic sovereignty. This effort, however, does not afford settler landowners any liberties—in fact, it threatens the petty lord status of settler landowners—therefore remaining ignored and dismissed by the majority settler community.
Private property rights also do little to better the social wellbeing of settler communities. Becoming a petty lord by purchasing private property rights is inaccessibly expensive to most people in Lunenburg County due to the financialization of home-ownership and the speculative real estate market in private property.
The struggle to assert and protect private property has nothing to do with liberty or prosperity and is ultimately a political dead-end.
Settler communities, therefore, have far more to gain to better their social wellbeing by challenging private property ownership and advocating for more democratic alternatives such as non-profit land trusts and cooperatives.
Most importantly, settler communities have much to gain by taking direction and engaging in solidarity with Mi’kmaw struggles over political and economic sovereignty.
In the context of recent disputes over the development of a municipal planning strategy in MODL it is important to keep in mind that these are the specific misconceptions about property rights and the perceived importance of land ownership in the face of social insecurity when they express outrage over provincial and municipal attempts at land use planning.
The Establishment of Minimum Planning Regulations in Nova Scotia
The British Crown granted the Province of Nova Scotia the powers to establish counties through the division of powers detailed in the Constitution of Canada (A.K.A. British North America Act of 1867).
Nova Scotia legislated the County Incorporation Act in 1879, which resulted in the incorporation of Lunenburg County as a District Municipality.
Mather Des Brisay gives a richer account of Lunenburg County’s settlement history in his 1895 History of the County of Lunenburg.
MODL’s draft Municipal Planning Strategy document offers more recent details about the planning history of Lunenburg County. It is available through the Engage MODL portal.
The Municipality of the District of Lunenburg exercised little of its powers to exercise planning until the arrival of a branch plant manufacturing rubber tires owned by the French multinational corporation Michelin Tires in 1971.
Population growth in MODL increased in the 1970s due to the opening of the factory in Bridgewater. The municipality considered implementing a municipal planning strategy due to public concern surrounding industrial expansion into residential areas, but this was rejected due to pushback from landowners.
Some residents petitioned the municipality to implement planning regulations in the 1980s, which resulted in the establishment of planning regulations for municipal properties.
Specific planning regulations were then implemented for some communities, with a Municipal Planning Strategy established in 1993 to handle secondary planning strategies for eight different districts and a subdivision bylaw to manage development.
The Province of Nova Scotia consolidated its planning laws into the Municipal Government Act (MGA) in 1998. The original version of the Act made municipal planning optional for municipal governments to adopt.
Municipal planning became mandatory, however, in 2018 with the passage of Bill-58. The bill amended the MGA requiring municipal governments to “implement one or more planning strategies”. It also detailed a minimum set of minimum requirements for municipal plans, which include: a municipal planning strategy and land use bylaw, as well as policies specifying studies that are required before undertaking any development.
The amended MGA furthermore provides consequences for municipalities that do not implement minimum planning requirements. The province, if a municipality does not implement the minimum requirements, is required to impose a “special planning area” that includes the minimum planning requirements directly-administered by the province. The province may then charge the municipality for the costs of implementing the special planning area and withhold funding until they ratify a planning strategy.
The motivations for the legislation of Bill-58 are unclear in the public record or related news coverage. The bill’s passage, however, did come on the heels of a series of federal and provincial expert panels aimed at promoting economic development, especially for poorer regions in Canada.
The Government of Canada drafted a 2016 Advisory Council on Economic Growth (A.K.A. The Barton Report) and the Province of Nova Scotia’s produced a report entitled Now or Never: An Urgent Call to Action for Nova Scotians (A.K.A. The Ivany Report).
These commissions both recommended implementing aggressively pro-business policy reforms, which included slashing international trade barriers and economic regulations, as well as implementing policies that protect free market access, intellectual property rights and financial investment.
A detailed account of these pro-business reforms in Canada can be found in Nora Loreto’s upcoming book Corporate Control: Canada in Decline Book Two.
The pro-business orthodoxy of the pre-pandemic period likely contributed to Nova Scotia’s adoption of minimum planning requirements to ensure that commercial interests would be protected as businesses expanded and developed in an orderly, efficient, and predictable manner.
The tensions between urban expansion and rural interests in agriculture and resource extraction is one example of the reason to implement land use planning to broker conflicting commercial interests. The Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture, for instance, mobilized its membership to support Bil-58 specifically for its protections of agricultural lands from urban development.
The Polycrisis, Population Growth, and Right-Wing Populism
Changes made to the MGA anticipated greater commercial development from trade-oriented commercial growth. Nova Scotia, following the recommendations of the Ivany Report, even set ambitious targets to reverse population aging and out-migration.
The province, however, did not anticipate the sharp spike in population growth and urbanization caused by the developing polycrisis.
The Polycrisis began roughly around 2019 as a result of a combination of challenges resulting from: the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, environmental change, war and political instability, the collapse of critical journalism, and declining economic growth resulting from monopoly consolidation around major players in the finance sector.
See Astra Taylors recent book and lecture series titled The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart for a deeper explanation of these currently unfolding series of crises.
Nova Scotia and its municipal governments, in addition to its agenda of prioritizing business-class interests, now had to intervene in the economy to keep the social fabric of the province from falling apart.
The Polycrisis shifted government focus away, briefly-if-incompletely, from its general pro-business tendencies. Governments were required to engage in public policy for the first time in a generation to address mass-illness, housing shortages, food insecurity, climate disasters, and violence against women and 2SLGBTQ+ people.
Nova Scotia’s economy, at the same time, started seeing the labour force shrinking as an aging population increasingly began to exit the labour market. Historically, such conditions lead workers to leverage their relative shortage to bargain for higher wages and benefits. But not in this case.
Canadian businesses sidestepped increasing wages by increasingly hiring migrant workers to work for lower wages, with fewer benefits and little job security.
The growth of a necessarily-large population of migrant workers at the same time as overall worker pay continued to decline, came at the same time as housing became increasingly controlled by rentier financial firms.
This combination created levels of inflation and a drop in consumer activity that cut into the profits of local small and medium businesses and created a historically-unprecedented housing affordability crisis that left governments scrambling to develop more housing.
Governments, still committed to the free enterprise orthodoxy of the pre-pandemic period, refused to engage in public housing development, which led them to establish programs like the Government of Canada’s Housing Accelerator Fund and similar programs to subsidize the profits of private developers and landlords to construct new housing units.
Canada’s largest private developers and resource extraction companies, in this new position of leverage, were able to effectively capture local and provincial government regulatory institutions out-competing local businesses and pushing back on attempts to implement public-interest regulations on land use planning and housing development.
What was once a unified business class, singing from the same free market book of hymns and wielding regulatory capture of government, seems to be fragmenting along the lines of different economic sectors and scales of operation, informed by a floating constellation of increasingly outrageous conspiracy theories.
You can read more about the business-class fragmentation in Historian Quinn Slobodian’s book Crack-up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.
The Polycrisis also served as an ideologically destabilizing moment for many citizens. People who held views that private enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit could solve any problem found themselves disappointed to witness markets utterly fail and the excesses of capitalism undermine its own success.
This is a development that Naomi Klein observed in her recent book Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.
Individualist worldviews glorifying the autonomy of the consumer choice and property rights were confronted with calls from government and society to exercise solidarity and discipline in the face of a global public health emergency and climate crisis. These contradictions violated the “common sense” of the time and resulted in a feeling of dissonance where people did not seem to know what reality was anymore.
This frustration was, of course, egged on by the prominence of social media and the proliferation of dubious media organizations making unverifiable claims about the supposed causes of the Polycrisis.
Moral panics sprang up as right-wing populist movements and social-media-based conspiracy communities cast doubt on what was previously seen as irrefutable scientific consensus on things such as the escalation of the climate emergency and the effectiveness of vaccines.
Municipalities such as MODL, all of a sudden, saw confused residents accusing them of “globalist” plots by the United Nations to use the climate emergency as a reason to threaten their property rights and impose supposedly authoritarian measures to continue COVID-19 lockdown measures indefinitely for no clearly theorized purpose, often invoking anti-Semitic tropes along the way.
Right-wing populists of this nature seemed to emerge from sections of the medium-sized and local business-class, often from the logistics and secondary automotive service sectors. This manifested most prominently in the Canadian Convoy Protests of 2022.
Compounding the political anxieties of right-wing populists is the recent economic backlash against the Trump Regime’s tariff policies. Anti-vaccine and anti-climate action activists have tended to align with the Trump-led MAGA movement and its Canadian counterparts.
Trump-sympathizers in Canada found themselves suddenly in the political minority as popular opinion lurched suddenly away from the anti-Trudeau rhetoric of right-wing populist leaders like Pierre Poilievre towards the corporate nationalism of the Liberal Party.
This dissonance, informed by conspiracy theories and misconceptions of property rights, led some land and business owners to find something to direct their frustration towards.
This new condition of business class fragmentation and moral panic seems to be what has primed the recent political conflicts over municipal planning and land use regulations at MODL.
The Struggle to Implement MODL2040
MODL has been working towards a draft version of MODL2040 since 2020. Planning strategies closely linked to MODL2040 have been in development over the years, such as the ongoing Osprey Village Secondary Plan amendment, Cluster Development Bylaw and Land Conservation Policy.
MODL 2040 was introduced as a first draft on March 13, 2025 at a Planning Advisory Committee Meeting. The draft contained planning provisions that reflect the best planning practices from other municipalities based on the need to address the polycrisis of the past six years.
The plan, to the outrage of some land and business owners, included provisions limiting the number of farm animals that can be held on a non-commercial farm. It also imposed development standards that limited the kinds of informal housing that have become prolific as a result of the affordability crisis.
This led local business owner and landlord Andrew Himmelman to post on his 2024 Municipal Candidate Facebook page that he was organizing a petition and had booked the conference room at the Best Western Hotel in Cookville for an event on March 24, 2025 to speak out against MODL2040.
Himmelman claims on Facebook that over 300 people attended the event, including the Mayor and some staff and councillors.
He has been outspoken at previous Council meetings about conspiracy theories he holds related to municipal climate action.
The Barnacle reached out to Himmelman to better understand his motivations behind organizing the event and if the initiative was informed by the conspiracy theories he has shared on Facebook and in public input sessions to Council.
He did not respond to our questions by email or Facebook Messenger by the time of publication.
Council, the next day at a March 25 Council meeting, passed a motion to re-write the first draft of MODL 2040 at the next day’s Council Meeting. They also resolved that the planning strategy would be re-drafted starting from the minimal planning requirements.
Council also cancelled a public input session on the original draft strategy scheduled later that week on March 27.
MODL has since hosted public input sessions in communities throughout the municipality based on building on the minimum planning standards.
These public input sessions are to proceed throughout May and June. MODL has not announced the dates of any events related to MODL2040 beyond these consultations.
It remains unknown what the future of the planning strategy in MODL will be, but it will likely continue to face strong headwinds directed by the anxieties of local economic elites convinced that the government is trying to impose an authoritarian agenda on them.
Dr. Christy Kelly-Bisson is a political economist and garlic farmer living in Sulieweykitk (New Germany), Lunenburg County. You can follow them on Bluesky at @garlicbreath644.bsky.social
