Sal Falk, Editor-in-chief of the Lunenburg Barnacle, sat down with most of the mayoral candidates in Mahone Bay, Lunenburg and MODL to speak about some of the pressing issues in Lunenburg County.
Jesse Ward is the former Editor-in-chief and a founding member of The Lunenburg Barnacle. He currently works as a Director in the software industry.
The other mayoral candidate in Lunenburg, Jamie Myra, decline a request for interview. To learn more, there’s a Facebook page about his campaign.
The interview is available in full either in audio or the transcription below.
Time Stamps
0:00:55 Introduction
0:02:46 Coastal protection
0:06:42 Housing
0:11:38 Anti-racism coordinator and committee
0:17:15 Policing and community safety
0:20:35 Climate change
0:25:10 Public transit and transportation
0:30:42 Conclusion
This interview has been edited for style and clarity.
Barnacle: Okay, thanks for sitting down with me this afternoon, Jesse. I just want to start off with asking you what part of living in Lunenburg makes you most proud.
Jesse Ward: Most proud?
W: I’ve had the strongest sense of community pride before this election, through being the editor-in-chief of the Barnacle, and seeing our new issues come out, and people respond every month. After we got into the swing of things, publishing our newspaper, it became a regular ritual in town for the first Thursday of every month. People picking up copies at local cafes, supporting local businesses while they would grab our newspaper.
And the humorous articles, people would be repeating the jokes for weeks. The stories about Town Hall, people would be treating that as the independent narrative of what was happening with our town council. And seeing that people trusted and respected what we were doing, and were reaching out to me in confidence about issues that mattered to them in town.
For issues like the challenges with the Second Story Women’s Center, that were sensitive and important. People trusting on issues that were divisive in town, like potential development on Blockhouse Hill, where we performed a lot of in-depth reporting that gave perspective to people of multiple differing opinions and dug deep into the details. Seeing people treat us with respect and trust, and having people approach me in the street and congratulate me for writing stories that were sometimes brave to write and publish in a small town, gave me a real sense of pride.
I felt that this is a town of people who care, who are engaged, and even when we have differences, we can get along. And I was able to meaningfully contribute to that dialogue. So, if we’re talking about personal pride, that’s where I have a sense of personal pride.
It has since been scrapped. Surrounding municipalities, MODL has implemented their own coastal protection regulations through a bylaw and revising the municipal planning legislation. Extensive studies have been done about the threats of climate change to Lunenburg, specifically sea level rise, flooding, and storm surge.
How will you use the tools at your disposal in municipal government to ensure coastal protection in Lunenburg?
W: We certainly need to be planning more in advance for all of our infrastructure, especially to mitigate the effects of climate change as we experience a much higher frequency of special weather events every year now, and we all see that with our eyes. I was very disappointed that upon the province announcing that they weren’t going to pass the Coastal Protection Act, which I was disappointed by in the first place, Lunenburg had no plan, it seems. We didn’t announce anything at council.
One councillor asked, at a session of council after that happened, to the CAO, what is our response from here? Because we’ve been waiting for the province to pass this as legislation that we need for coastal protection. And the answer was that we are talking to MODL, that we’re talking to the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, consulting other municipalities in the county, and working on a response, and we haven’t heard anything yet since. Council has not addressed the issue once since for a town that depends on our working waterfront for our economy and our heritage and is poised to really suffer a lot of negative results from rising coastlines into the next century, as we’ve seen predicted under the mapping that we have now.
So the fact that we’ve had radio silence on this is deeply concerning. One part of my platform is that I really believe Lunenburg should hire a dedicated climate coordinator, environmental coordinator, as a role to have a mandate around securing funding and working with other municipalities for climate-related infrastructure projects. We’ve seen success of this in Mahone Bay, where having someone dedicated in this role is able to successfully work with partners and other levels of government for projects like their Living Shoreline project, which is protecting against coastal erosion.
You need to be proactive about things like this. Seeing MODL as an example where they actually had their plan B in case the province would not pass the Coastal Protection Act. They had their own plan that they’ve put in place since then.
What are we doing? Are we still talking to them? Are we still talking to anyone else? It’s just another one of those things that we’re kind of not talking about, that you can’t see reflected in any plan, that is critical, but we’re seeming to ignore it because it’s not immediately in our faces, and there’s far too much risk associated with not having a contingency plan here. We know that within the powers of municipal government, there’s only so much you can do to protect something like coastal protection, and the Coastal Protection Act had provincial powers behind it. Would you support a call or a push for the province to implement a Coastal Protection Act? Yes, they should have.
It’s too much for our small municipalities across the coast of Nova Scotia to be able to have an independent response to this. You can, if you have to. Then you need to.
But, I mean, the coast of Lunenburg is not uniquely independent from the coast of Queens County or the coast of Yarmouth. Nature is going to have its way with all of us, and we need to be cooperative as municipalities and as a province.
But municipalities still have many tools that they can use to improve affordability and build complete communities. Local politicians are being asked more and more what their local governments are going to do to support housing. We see there’s a push and pull between stakeholders in this issue, an example being the proposed foundry development, which has that developer building what they’re calling affordable housing, an assisted living facility, and micro-homes.
Despite this potentially feeling a high demand in town, constituents have voiced concerns about environmental impacts, parking, building size, the threat to UNESCO designation. First off, can you define what affordable housing means to you?
W: Well, there are different institutions out there that have different definitions. I don’t think you’ll find a definition that satisfies everyone.
I believe that housing is a human right, and what we need to have is a contingency plan for people who are unhoused or precariously housed, and we need to make sure that we’re able to use whatever powers we have as a municipality to encourage and incentivize more housing of all kinds. Attainable housing specifically, I mean, a common definition is that it would be 30% of the income of the median household in a municipality, but that’s not a great definition for Lunenburg. We have a really disproportionate amount of retirees who live alone, and 30% of what they make through their income in a month is not enough for something like what we’ve earmarked as possibly attainable housing under the metrics that the municipality or the lobby has used for development, like Blockhouse Hill.
So the question was, what is attainable housing to me? So what do you see as the main barriers to building affordable or attainable housing in complete communities? As a municipality, there are only so many options you have to encourage or incentivize housing. I think that Lunenburg has done good work with the adaptations to our municipal planning strategy and land use bylaw over the last four years.
It’s actually paved the way for new potential developments like the foundry developments through Lunenburg shipyard and through Solterre design, which is exactly what the town needs right now. Some of this is controversial. Some people complain about concerns around taking away our mandatory minimums for off-street parking.
People are concerned about potential threats to UNESCO through Blockhouse Hill development or through the foundry site. But the thing is, we need more housing at any cost, and we need more revenue through the growth of our tax base. The province’s last published reports on Lunenburg’s economic health indicate that we’re at a moderate risk for the growth of our tax base.
And we know that we have tens of millions of dollars in unbudgeted expenses in front of us for our electric utility, for town hall, which is critical to maintaining our UNESCO designation through our civic square, to our roads, wastewater. And we don’t have a financial plan for that right now. Increasing our tax base through growth in housing is something that we have to focus on.
So to get back to your question, when induced by law and municipal planning strategy, I’m happy that it’s enabled projects like the foundry project. The concerns about UNESCO, I think, are largely a red herring. There’s things you can do for Blockhouse Hill, for the foundry site.
If you needed to, you can have an independent heritage impact assessment. And I would suggest one for Blockhouse Hill. But ultimately, Parks Canada is a great liaison to UNESCO.
When the town wanted to explore selling the old fire hall, Parks Canada was quick on that one to say, no, you can’t do that. This needs to be maintained as a public site, a site with public use under your World Heritage Site designation. And, you know, we have to react to that.
So we do need to explore ways to become more friendly to developers. I think that Lunenberg has a very poor reputation for developers right now as a place to approach for housing. I’m really happy that Brad at the Shipyard and Jennifer at Soltaire are of the mind that they really want to invest in Lunenberg.
And they are people with really close, strong local connections. We need to see what we can do to attract more potential development from other partners as well in the sites of town that are underutilized right now.
The position was filled, but that employee did leave after less than two months, and the job has since been reposted. That job posting states, quote, the anti-racism and diversity coordinator will lead the development and implementation of proactive diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging initiatives. The coordinator will work with the Lunenberg County Anti-Racism and Anti-Discrimination Committee to develop and implement a strategic plan to address racism and discrimination within our communities.
What do you see as the major challenges in addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in Lunenberg?
W: That’s a great question. It’s something that we’ve completely swept under the rug. We haven’t addressed anything on the topic of anti-racism or cultural inclusivity at a town hall meeting for more than a year.
Could you repeat your question?
W: Yes, well, I think it’s very important to show leadership on this subject. You can’t wait for people in the community to tell you that they want to be included in planning or that they want to be better represented in the town’s cultural strategies, arts and cultural strategies. You need to be proactive about making sure that you are providing opportunities for people to be represented from all backgrounds.
The Comprehensive Community Plan that Lunenberg had, one of the actual subjects that it recognized was having a need for an anti-racism focus through council activities and to consider this lens. The town established its own committee, which has been absorbed into this new regional committee through that process. One thing that Lunenberg would want to do to make real steps towards inclusivity would be to re-examine the process by which we’ve renamed Cornwallis Street.
That’s an example of a way that we intended to address the Truth and Reconciliation Act and honor commitments to truth and reconciliation through re-examining the legacy of Cornwallis, just like other municipalities across Nova Scotia already have, and to rename that street in a way that would better honor Indigenous and Black communities in Nova Scotia. The way that that proceeded was really terrible. It was embarrassing for us.
There were only 45 people in town who responded to a survey that said that they wanted the name Queen Street and did not have a Mi’kmaq name as their second or third option. Everyone else who responded to the survey, more than 270 people, either had a Mi’kmaq name first or included that as one of their options. And a plurality of people chose one of seven Mi’kmaq options over Queen, which was the one stand-alone option against several Mi’kmaq names and reconciliation.
And then the current mayor hasn’t addressed why he says that he believes it represents the community when he’s standing by the decision to stay with the name Queen after multiple local Indigenous people in our community have publicly said in interviews with the Canadian press and APTN that they were very disappointed by that decision and that they’re open to consultation on that issue. That’s just one issue. Renaming a street is absolutely one small action towards truth and reconciliation and towards cultural inclusion.
But I do believe that we need to have an arts and culture strategy and a community planning strategy that do incorporate a focus on anti-racism and inclusion. Right now we have no strategy of any kind like that. Since we’ve gone completely off of the comprehensive community plan, the decisions that we see happening from council are kind of erratic and not something that you can track through any type of annual or quarterly work plan.
I’m looking forward to the revision period for the comprehensive community plan in 2025. I don’t think that we need to stick completely to that plan, but we absolutely do need a strategic plan because if you do not have a strategic plan, then you’re not going to focus on your actual values. If you have anti-racism as a value, inclusion as a value, or some of the issues we’ve already talked about in this interview, increasing housing options, which is also something that’s important for municipalities to do, to be more inclusive.
People actually need places to live. And protecting the climate. You need to have a holistic focus as you make decisions and as you plan towards the future.
You need to be guided by values. When you decide that these are your values, then they come into everything. For recreation programming, for the kinds of ceremonies that the town conducts, for the ways that we communicate and reach out to the people who live in town.
If you don’t have a holistic view towards your values influencing all of those decisions you’re making and record that in a plan, then you’re kind of shooting from the hip on all the decisions you make. And you’re not going to think about including everyone.
The 2024 budget has over $1 million earmarked for this RCMP contract, representing nearly 10% of Lunenburg’s total budget. Police advisory boards, of which it should be noted Lunenburg does not have one, were advised this summer that the province is currently going through a provincial policing review, that is, going to re-examine the policing model, as well as the recent Mass Casualty Commission report cites several ways in which the current contract and policing model in Nova Scotia is not adequately addressing community safety. Do you think the current policing model and police service agreement is best serving and keeping Lunenburg’s residents safe?
W: No. Yeah, the RCMP budget, in our operating budget, it’s more than 10% of our annual operating budget, $1.3 million. And, I mean, what do we get for that? Speeding and road safety are the biggest complaints and biggest challenges that I hear from everyone at the door right now. And how is it being enforced? I’m hearing from lots of people on Dufferin, Maple, Sandy Hollow, Kissing Bridge, Creighton, Pelham, who are saying that speeding is completely normalized in their neighborhood.
They’re scared to walk their pets, they’re scared to let their children play, they’re scared to walk their strollers, and it’s even worse in the winter, because then you’re walking on the shoulder of these roads that have no sidewalks, and you’re even more at risk of cars. And where’s the enforcement on this? The RCMP is actually supposed to present a quarterly report to Council every quarter, showing all of their observed offenses, everything that they have performed an arrest for, all the calls they’ve responded to, and to read a report on this, and to answer questions from Council. And now they haven’t since this February.
Now we’re in September, so I wonder why no one at Council has brought up the fact that this used to be something that we would experience every quarter, and now we haven’t. Recording data on actual observed offenses is really important for us to be able to determine enforcement. So looking ahead to the renewal of our contract, we do need to consider all options that are on the table.
This is something else where there’s no transparency or accountability on what we’re doing to prepare for that renewal. We heard our former CAO say that we were reviewing potential options to move away from the RCMP model the last time that our operating budget was presented back in April, but we haven’t heard any updates since on what we’re potentially doing. It’s critical that we plan ahead for these things, because whether we’re best served by the RCMP is a very complex issue that we have to get ahead of.
It means researching it well in advance of a renewal of the contract and keeping the public informed as you make progress, staying open to public input, and sharing updates with people as you’re performing research so that we can actually make decisions together as a community. I really hope that we’re not just going to arbitrarily react to this one and potentially renew a contract that we’re not best served under when the time is up. All levels of government are responsible for enacting adaptation and mitigation plans to address the risks of climate change.
W: That’s a great question.
I’ll reiterate that we are the only municipality in the province that has no climate strategy right now. Sorry, not in the province, in the county that has no climate strategy right now. We need to be identifying these threats.
If you look back to the 2015 climate strategy that the town had adopted, where did we ever record how we followed through on the threats that that report revealed? At the time, it revealed several threats. It revealed that we were going to be subject to increased flooding in some critical corridors on Victoria Road and Green Street, and we haven’t done anything to address that. We need to be exploring how prepared are we as a community for emergencies when it comes to corridors in and out of town.
We need to be predicting where we expect flooding to affect us the most, and implementing infrastructure to mitigate that. We need to be adopting an asset management plan to understand what infrastructure do we actually manage and are we responsible for, and what is the status of all of it, what is the depreciation per year, on what schedule will we need to replace this, and what is the estimated cost. Mahone Bay, MODL have adopted asset management plans through the Nova Scotia Federal Federation of Municipalities program, and it’s working out well for them.
Shelburne has done the same thing. We really need to get ahead of our infrastructure. If you look at our electric utility, that one is under major threat right now.
One bad storm could seriously, adversely affect our electric utility, where our poles, our actual electrical infrastructure is at risk right now. When we had consultants appear at Council last April and tell us that unless we would invest $15 million in upgrades to our electric utility, it’s not going to be viable within 10 years, they outlined all of the options that we could explore. They suggested that we would talk to neighbouring municipalities like Mahone Bay and Riverport to see how they’re managing their own utilities independently.
They said that we should do a cost-benefit analysis of privatizing the utility to see who might be interested in purchasing that and what our terms would be. They suggested that we also perform a cost-benefit analysis of maintaining our own staff, hiring new staff, and purchasing new equipment to be able to manage it ourselves like we used to. And what did we do? When I asked about this at Council in August, there was no answer.
I asked, what have we actually done? Because we saw the first electric utility budget in more than a year. What have we done to answer those consultants’ questions and follow up on their research that they suggested last April? And there were no answers available. It was determined that we had not reached out to other municipalities that maintain their own utilities to see if there could be cooperation or lessons learned.
There have been no updates on what kinds of grants, funding, or partnership we might be seeking or what research we’ve done towards privatization. The mayor’s words were that we haven’t presented this at Council, any of this research, because it’s a very complex issue and we didn’t want to make it an election issue, which made no sense at all to me. We really need to get ahead of our infrastructure to determine what potential risks we are under from climate change.
That needs to be in coordination with an asset management plan that helps us understand what infrastructure is at risk and how to prepare for that. The last thing we want is for deferred maintenance to result in very costly emergencies, because we’re also at a moderate risk with our operating reserves for a response to any emergencies we’d have to address financially.
Although this organization does receive significant funding from all levels of government, it also requires heavy lifting from dedicated volunteer community members and is not a complete solution to public transit. Is developing transit a priority for you? If so, how can we develop viable and sustainable transit options for our community? Yeah, absolutely. We really need to look at transportation, public transportation, private transportation, active transportation, traffic and parking, and developing a real strategy around this.
I attended our most recent two public sessions on the traffic and parking study that the town is conducting through a consultant, and I really trust the acumen and the skill of the consultants we’re working with, but I feel like we’re taking a very short-sighted approach to the entire problem of transportation. We know that densification for Lunenburg is a benefit in terms of being more inclusive, in terms of growing our tax revenue, and actually enabling more housing in a very small municipality, four square kilometers. But if we’re going to increase densification, we need to have a real transportation strategy to follow that.
This is one of the most challenging things for a municipality to balance, because it would be lovely to put in all of the infrastructure for transportation that you want to have for if your population grows by another 1,000 people, if you’re a small municipality like Lunenburg. But you can’t do that until you have the revenue that you need to be able to actually service that need. You can’t just anticipate it.
So a few things that we need to do, we need to work with other municipalities on a joint transportation strategy. Something like Lunenburg County Wheels is servicing an incredibly underserved niche, and their demand has been immense over the last year. And as they’ve expanded, the demand has continued to outgrow their expansion because of the need for dedicated community transportation options.
We need to be working with other municipalities on how we can promote Lunenburg County Wheels, but to actually offer public transportation through the future, we need to determine what is the criteria we would need to achieve for actual transportation, public transportation, between Lunenburg, Mahone Bay, Bridgewater, the municipality, and what would the path be to get there. It’s a challenge, but we need to work together as municipalities to ensure that we’re coordinated on our strategies here and help serve each other, because otherwise we are leaving it completely to the market. And this public transportation, while non-profits like Lunenburg County Wheels serve a majorly underserved niche, we can get a lot more done if we actually work together in the public interest.
W: Yes, we can start with small adaptations. One thing that I propose is looking to work with a private partner, and this is directly from our community plan that we stopped following, but I’d really like to look into exploring private partnerships for limited private transportation within Lunenburg, especially during our peak tourist season.
Right now we have a lot of people who work on our waterfront and it is a struggle for them to find parking. They’re competing with tourists, and this is a significant complaint from visitors that it’s challenging to find parking, that it makes traveling here unpleasant. We should really look at establishing a parking lot in town, possibly on Star Street, where we can have shuttle service going downtown, work with a private partner to take people through downtown, past the academy, looping through town, back to a shuttle state.
You shouldn’t need to go park in downtown Lunenburg to be able to access downtown Lunenburg if you have accessibility issues or if you have mobility issues. Small changes like that are things that we need to do as a starting point. But beyond that, I think we need to be looking at car share programs.
The developments at the Foundry and on Blockhouse Hill, they represent a ton of potential with these plans. There is not a dedicated one-to-one or two-to-one ratio for off-street parking to units, which is a benefit for densification and a benefit for enabling more housing. But as long as we are completely dislocated from the rest of the province for any type of efficient transportation, then that represents a risk that we need to get ahead of.
Looking at how we can work with private partners for a car sharing program as well, having spots dedicated for that is important, as well as introducing electric charging stations so that we can support electric vehicles going into the future. Those are the most common vehicles now being adopted by rentals and eventually car shares. We need to get ahead of that.
W: Yeah, back to the topic of housing. One item that I introduced in my platform in early July is restricting short-term rentals from residential zones, and that’s something that I would want to bring up with Council. That is a position that I’ve wholly endorsed since early July.
Another is I do want to establish an affordable housing committee and expand committee usage overall, because we have a lot of experts in our community when it comes to development, housing, heritage that we need to be making better use of. The town doesn’t use committees effectively, and affordable housing is an issue that we need to outsource community wisdom and experience to. Could you bring me back to your last question?
W: Yeah, well, when I started this campaign in early July, I set out with the goal of visiting every single household in Lunenburg and knocking on every single door to try and meet every person who lives in town and listen to everyone and to make myself as available as possible.
And at the door, I have had more than 700 conversations now. A lot of people haven’t been home over the summer, and I’m also learning the alarming number of completely vacant homes, actually, that exist in our community. I think it’s worthwhile to share the top responses that I hear from people at the door, because that’s what I want to focus on in my campaign.
Speeding and road safety. That’s the top issue that anyone raises. People are legitimately very concerned about this, and I think we just need to get ahead of it.
Speed humps, speed bumps, elongated curves, extended curves. We need to look at options for just directly addressing speeding. We need to eliminate speeding.
This is a clear one. The second issue that people bring up the most, which is surprising to me, is deer. I don’t initially consider this a top priority, but people tell me that they are very concerned about deer, from Lyme disease to being a road safety hazard to being a threat to our environment through eating our native vegetation, which is quickly overtaken by Japanese knotweed.
A deer strategy is worth our time. Proactive infrastructure management is a critical one. Again, we’re the only municipality in the county that doesn’t publish any kind of a plan for what our initiatives are, and people are concerned, and they want to know, how does this town prioritize roads, sidewalks for renewal or for being built? How does public input ever factor into that strategy? It’s critical that we establish new paths for feedback from people in town to make it to our municipal council.
When people have questions about road safety, questions about a sidewalk being built on their street, that needs to be funneled up into a reporting system we have internally, so council can actually see what are people asking for, what people from what neighborhoods are bringing up what concerns. We need to be collecting that feedback for flooding in people’s basements to inform a climate strategy, and looking for other ways to collect data to help us make better decisions, like installing more monitoring for speeding permanently to be able to collect statistics on this, so we can also match people’s reports to observe phenomenon. So proactive infrastructure management is a major one we need to be transparent.
I think a lot of people in town. I think everyone in town was surprised to learn if they have learned it yet, that we’re looking at a likely rate increase of an unknown amount for an expansion of our electric utility to serve Conical Road, which was announced in August, after there had been no preview of that and council also seemed surprised to learn this. The decisions around our infrastructure.
I really trust our public works team, but they’re not being made in a transparent way. And we need to make sure that we’re investing our money to real community need housing and industry to support a year round economy is the next major topic. Lots of people in their 20s and 30s and 40s are living with their parents here because there are literally no options for rental and purchasing a home is too expensive.
We seriously need more housing. Talking to the major industry in town, our specialized workforce, people would love to live in Lunenburg and, you know, join the team at Abco or a Highliner or Stellia and where are they going to live? There’s just really not an option. So we really need a place for our specialized workforce to support a thriving year round economy to live for the youth who are crowding the hallways at Blue Nose Academy and the daycare, which has more than 100 families on the wait list right now.
To have a place to actually live after we invest into their education and and their health care and we want to support them in our communities. We need to make actual opportunity for them to stay here. And I’m meeting so many seniors who need to downsize out of their homes.
They really want to. They’re living in large heritage homes, two story homes that they simply don’t need all of that space anymore. But there are no options for them to downsize into accessible, single level, senior friendly housing that they really need.
So we really need a housing strategy to support more of a year round economy. And transparency and communication. That is the other big one.
I think that this matters a lot to people. I think that the last by-election was really a referendum on communication and community engagement from council and people in town. And unfortunately, I think that the communication has only gotten worse over the last year.
We haven’t seen a newsletter published by the town since April for some reason. And if you just want updates on what is happening in town, you have to really monitor social media, which is very unfortunate. It’s not complicated to start a monthly email and print newsletter to reach as many people as possible in town to actually work on a communication strategy for the town.
So we understand how to collect feedback from people in advance. I keep hearing from people who are surprised when I’m telling them about something like attending the recent traffic and parking public input session that it was even happening at all. And the reason that it’s not happening at all, that they’re not aware, is because the calendar on the town website is completely empty.
It’s just not updated, but it exists. And you have to really just pay attention to Facebook and watch that for updates every day if you want to know what’s happening. And Facebook is not a happy or a healthy place.
We need to be having communication outside of social media through public events and through public newsletters and promoting and increasing transparency at all levels through our communication. So that’s another very important one. There is a sense of division in town when it comes to how decisions are being made.
And we’ve seen a fractured community as a result of that. So I am all for being accessible, transparent, maintaining a mayoral social feed that only has news about town events and no self-promotion of my own business, and having public engagement sessions when people are looking for them.
