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.
Tony Sampson, owner of Salty Dogs Sea Tours, put his name forward for mayor of Mahone Bay on the final day of nominations. Sampson has a background in emergency services (police and ambulance), diving and offshore survival instruction, and being a charter boat skipper.
Our interview with the other mayoral candidate in Mahone Bay, Suzanne Lohnes-Croft, is available here.
The interview is available in full either in audio or the transcription below.
Time Stamps
0:00:52 Introduction
0:02:17 Coastal Protection
0:06:47 Housing
0:12:22 Anti-racism coordinator and committee
0:15:38 Policing and community safety
0:19:19 Climate change
0:23:15 Public transit and transportation
0:26:17 Conclusion
This interview has been edited for style and clarity.
Barnacle: Thanks for sitting down with me this morning, Tony. I’ve been starting off these interviews just by asking candidates a part of what makes them proud. What makes you proud about living in Mahone Bay?
Tony Sampson: Basically, it’s not just the aesthetics, but we live pretty much in a postage stamp.
In fact, it is a postage stamp. It’s one of Betty Meredith’s ones. One of her photos is on a Canadian photo.
But why we came here, me and my wife, she’s from Nova Scotia. We moved here in 2006, and when we saw the house, when we bought the house, I said to her, and the real estate agent, take me out in a box. And it was everything I wanted.
It ticked all my boxes. So from my business point of view, it had the deep water mooring that I could put my boats on. It was a beautiful old house.
We actually like older constructions. It was in a beautiful community, and it actually felt like a community. And so that’s why we were coming here.
I don’t like big cities. I’ve worked and lived in big cities, and so that was the draw to coming here. And so that’s what brought me here.
That’s what I’m proud of is not only the culture and the beauty here, but that small town feel to it as well. I love the fact that my daughter can go up around the shops, and everybody knows who she is. I don’t have to worry about her like I would in Toronto or Vancouver.
: Well, that segues perfectly into my first topic I want to talk about, which is coastal protection. Five years ago, the provincial legislature passed the Coastal Protection Act, and it had sort of two purposes. One, to protect our coast and ecosystems by preventing certain development, but also by protecting new development from coastal threats like sea level rise and storm surge.
S: I would say Mahone Bay seems like it’s leading in certain areas of coastal protection along the South Shore and forward-thinking projects like the Living Shoreline. Can you talk a bit about your perspective on coastal protection and how you think the municipal government can play a role in it? Coastal protection is obviously very important. My whole life is on the ocean, so I see it every day, probably more than most people.
My daughter actually, with my help and Zach’s, obviously from Mahone Marine, was on the vanishing islands of Mahone Bay. What you’re seeing is with the changing weather patterns as well, we’re looking at a different erosion model. It’s not just the rising sea levels, but it’s the changing wind directions that are caused by the rising water temperatures as well.
The Living Shoreline is a marvellous project. It’s only one project, and again, it focuses on one area, and that’s outside the three churches. That high in the bay, the damage is important because when we have an easterly storm that does come in, but with those easterly storms, we’re actually seeing more erosion and more dangerous erosion from the Maders Cove side down.
My lament is nothing has been done to fix that. If you go to West Havers Beach, you can see that whole roadway caved in there, and also the erosion of the beach area. You might have seen on Queensland Beach the other year, the whole beach was taken away.
Right outside my house, people can’t walk from there to town because that is being eroded away, and again, nothing has been done to fix that. That’s as far as the coastal erosion. The other point is, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the Ghost Gear Fund.
That was from an abandoned mussel farm. Those things exist out in the ocean. Back in the day, people didn’t care.
The ocean was a dumping ground. When we look at fishing and the lack of fish stocks, a lot of those nets, those lines, that’s what’s killing the whales and the dolphins and the porpoises and the seals out there. That stuff needs to be brought off the bottom of the ocean.
So the Ghost Gear Recovery Project, which was funded federally, addressed a lot of that, but there’s no budget in the future for that continuing, unless we have the hurricanes like Dorian and Fiona, which ended up turning up a lot of those abandoned and lost lobster pots in the Bay of Fundy as well. There’s so many facets to this coastal protection. It’s not just the shoreline itself, but it’s also what’s in the ocean that needs to come out, same as the abandoned vessels as well.
: You alluded to a point there with the Ghost Gear Project that it’s usually in collaboration with other levels of government who have funding for those projects. Would you push the province to implement a Coastal Protection Act or something similar, since they’ve repealed it or scrapped what they have?
S: I would like to see that. Again, things at high level, like with government involvement or provincial or federal even, what happened as far as the Ghost Gear Program is they had a group called NRC, which was brought up out of the States, National Recall Resource Consultants.
They came up from the States to teach Canadians how to recover lost and abandoned fishing gear. We ended up running it ourselves up here. And so the East Coast version of it, we actually ran out of relying on New Tech, a survival company in Halifax.
So again, you don’t have to outsource this stuff when we have the ability here ourselves to do it. So some sort of federal funding, provincial funding, I would love to see that because we are really just scraping the surface. And again, as a diver, I see this stuff on a daily basis.
: So talking a little bit more about collaborations between different levels of government, housing is the responsibility primarily of provincial governments and municipal planners are restricted heavily by the Municipal Government Act. But there are still tools at the disposal of different municipalities about how they can improve affordability and help build their sort of complete communities. I’ve heard it from every candidate.
They’re hearing that housing is the number one issue that’s coming up at the doorstep. And there are innovative models for things like non-market housing, especially in Mahone Bay. The Mahone Bay Community Land Cooperative entered into an MOU with the town to grow co-op housing specifically in the area.
First off, can you talk a bit about your idea or how you would define affordable or attainable housing? Honestly, that’s a really hard one.
S: The whole thing is chicken and egg, really. Everybody wants sustainable housing or cheap housing or net zero housing and affordable housing.
But you can’t magic a subdivision. Wherever this has to go, there has to be infrastructure. And it’s got to be infrastructure that’s future-proofed.
And that’s what we’re seeing here. We’re seeing a failing infrastructure in the town of Mahone Bay. And a lot of these pipes that have been here since the 1950s, the sewer, the power and the water, that has to be addressed before we can even start looking at housing.
And so there’s some marvellous things. I just saw that $6.1 million coming down for low-cost rentals. And so if you first have the infrastructure in place that you can actually build some sort of community there.
I know what the town’s been looking at also is a Y Street development up there. I’m not privy to what the council has on their plate, but I would love to look at that harder because that site was actually turned down by McLeod’s for the nursing home. And I believe it was turned down because of the black rock, the acidic rock in there.
So once you start developing that, it’s like, okay, are you creating an environmental disaster on the idea of affordable housing or affordable community? And so if you look at the tax base here and the tax rate, in the MODL you’re looking at $0.82 per $100 valuation. Here we’re $1.32, almost a 50% difference. So when you talk about affordable housing, how are we going to get developers to do that when we have a crazy tax rate here in Mahone Bay? Another deterrent, I think, for developers that I’ve heard about most recently with the Blockhouse Cornwall Road development, if you followed that, is that you have to balance the voices of the current community and their calls for, as you’re saying, updated infrastructure or infrastructure at all with this call for a need for housing.
How do you think the role of the mayor plays in balancing hearing those voices and determining the right way forward for a town? Well, with the Blockhouse development, I think the end of the day plan, you’re looking at approximately 1,000 people. So that is the same size as the town of Mahone Bay. So you’re looking at a town the size of Mahone Bay as a satellite.
And again, back to infrastructure, you can’t do that unless you have that infrastructure in place, the sewer, the power and the water. Again, if you look at the Hawthorne Hill development here in Mahone Bay, they have the exact same problem. They have one way in, one way out.
And when we saw the disastrous fires here, the wildfires the other year, and obviously Hammonds Plains, the lack of a ring main system or a fire suppression system, and alternate entrance egress as well, it’s just foolishness. So you have to start again with infrastructure. And my background is not only obviously military and policing, but I was a professional firefighter.
So when we were looking at a community and future-proofing it, it was like, okay, you can’t start a development there, a housing development, until we had a ring main system. And the ring main system was basically a town supply system with fire hydrants that would actually provide that safety for that community. And so looking at it from a high level, if you’ve got that development proposed, I don’t think it’s right to sneak under the barriers and say, oh, we’re only building two multi-dwelling properties, and we’re going to have dug well, dug sewer.
Because then you can end up in the same position that Chester’s in at the moment. When they have a falling water table, and they are so, well, we look at it two ways. They’re either fortunate or unfortunate.
They’re fortunate in the fact that most of the population is transient and not there full-time, because otherwise that water table would drop drastically if people were using their well system on a constant basis. And again, I don’t have a crystal ball cell. I don’t know how to magic those funds up, but that’s back to your point before.
It’s got to be a collaboration, not only federally and provincially, but municipally as well.
: That leads perfectly into my next question, then, about collaboration within the other municipalities in the area. You know, last year, five of the municipal units agreed to come together to unify their anti-racism and discrimination efforts, and they have a shared coordinator position in the joint committee.
The position for the coordinator was filled, but that person left after six weeks. The posting has been reposted, and part of the job description states, I 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 Lunenburg County Anti-Racism and Anti-Discrimination Committee to develop and implement a strategic plan to address racism and discrimination within our communities, end quote.
What do you see as some of the major challenges in diversity and inclusion in Mahone Bay?
S: Again, a very good point. I think Mahone Bay is actually going down the right path at the moment. I mean, not only is the community becoming more inclusive, I mean, that is probably a part of the new nursing home as well.
I mean, we have different people of ethnic backgrounds coming in to actually add vibrancy to the community as well, and so when you talk diversity, it’s great. It’s not just ethnicity as well, but to be inclusive, we want an environment here where everybody can grow and thrive. And a position like this, as far as I would love to see municipalities work together to have something like this, and even with our business, we try and be completely inclusive to everyone, and so even when we look at purchasing boats, we do it so we can have wheelchair access.
So I think we are the only charter boat down here that can do that, but it’s also where everybody feels inclusive, and so if it’s your sexual orientation or your religious beliefs or your ethnicity, everybody needs to feel not only safe, but welcome and included, and included in discussion and growth in the community as well.
: So the fact that this position, this one person’s role is shared between five municipal units, you know, they might have competing priorities as to what those municipalities are trying to achieve. How do you see Mojombe engaging with this person’s work to make sure their voice and vision are fairly supported sort of across the county?
S: Well, from the sounds of it, this sounds like this is going to be a very busy person.
Again, either a member of council would liaise with, in my vision anyway, would liaise with this person, or this person would present to council on ideas on how to foster this in the community. If they’re seeing something that’s like, well, hang on a minute, you know, this could be better, then it’s obviously taking that into account.
: Moving on, my next questions are about community safety. You know, Mahone Bay, like most of the municipalities apart from Bridgewater, received their policing services through the Provincial Police Service Agreement, and that’s with the RCMP. It was signed in 2012 as a 20-year agreement.
It does have a cost-sharing agreement for the municipalities, but right now, Mojombe has earmarked over $400,000 for that contract. I believe that represents about 15% of the budget, according to the town charts. This summer, police advisory boards were advised that the province is going through a policing services review, and they’re examining specifically the policing model, and if you’ve read any of the Mass Casualty Commission reports, you know, it points to many ways in which this current model and contract is not serving necessarily the needs of communities, especially in rural Nova Scotia.
Last year here in Mahone Bay, they convened a special meeting to speak with the RCMP and find out exactly what services they’re being provided for that substantial amount. Do you think that the current policing model and service agreement is serving and keeping Mahone Bay residents safe?
S: Where do I go with this? I would love to see it go back to a community-oriented policing model, and my experience there, obviously, is I was 12 years as a police officer, and so I saw it taken away from rural communities and smaller communities, and so it became centralisation. So everything was taken away from the small communities, moved out to the central community, and those cities, like HRM and that, they sucked in all those small assets, and that also happened with EHS, with the ambulance service when I was paramedic here as well.
So you find that Mahone Bay and the small communities, Lunenburg, don’t actually have an ambulance or a police officer there because they’re pulled into the larger centres. So to be honest, I don’t know how I would try and go about that, but I would love to see it go back to when I joined the police, when you had to do your first two years on the street, walking around, getting to know the community. You knew who all the bad apples were in the community, but you knew who the good people were, and that presence on the street of seeing the local bobby out there, and I know it sounds antiquated, but it did make a difference.
And if you want a great example of positive change, just grab your computer and go on down to Annapolis Royal, and you’ll see what they have there is a lot of British X-Men and New Zealand and Australian coppers walking the street every day, and that’s their retirement gig, but the presence in the community is marvellous. And if you’re seeing somebody here on a regular basis, I think it makes people feel safer as well, but if they have an office where they know somebody is to go and get, maybe it’s just to report a car stolen or broken into, or maybe it’s if you’ve got a problem with somebody in the community, it’s that communication, rather than going through a 911 or a 111 phone number, to talk to somebody that’s not in your area, that isn’t a central control, that has no sweet clue of what’s going on in your community.
: You certainly bring a different perspective, given your professional background to that.
We talked about coastal protection, but I do want to talk a bit more about climate change in general. That’s a responsibility of all levels of government, depending on their jurisdictions, what to enact. Effective municipal climate change policy must address certainly significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions that are generated either through the activities of the municipal government itself, or things within the control of municipal governments.
Is that updating building codes? I’m not sure. In 2019, Mahone Bay Town Council recognised a climate change emergency, which is a quite strong resolution. It amended its strategic plan.
How do you see climate change influencing your policy decisions, or how you govern and lead in Mahone Bay? Is that a lens you’d apply to your work?
S: I see climate change every day on the ocean. I see the water temperatures rising. I see new species coming here that we haven’t seen before.
In the process of the last couple of years, if you just Google discovery, there’s a show called Great White North about that Great White Shark population now that’s coming in with the seas. We’re seeing a whole ecosystem change here as well. When you look at that greenhouse gas, obviously very important.
The hard part with any rural community, Nova Scotia especially, or even if you look at Canada compared to some other countries, it’s a vehicle-based system. The climate here doesn’t allow us to grow year round. What are we doing? We’re importing strawberries from Mexico.
Everything is freighted up. There’s a cost to that, and there’s a climate cost and a pollution cost to that. Even the projects that we’ve seen go ahead here, doing projects for projects’ sake or to pat yourself on the back and say, look, I’ve done a great job, I’m not for that.
If you’re going to go forward with a project, it’s got to have longer insight than 10 years or 15 years. The planning, again, has to be good and it has to be future-proofed. If you’re looking at renewable energy, obviously EV alternatives are marvellous, but then it’s back to that infrastructure as well.
You’ve seen some horrific results of lithium-ion fires as far as batteries go. If you’re looking at implementing changes in the building code, if you’ve got EV charges in buildings or high-rise buildings especially, what are you going to do to put those lithium fires out? It’s like, where are you going to strategically put charging units like that? How much draw is there going to be on the grid in the future? If you want to take a long look and say, okay, everybody’s going to have an EV, what’s the draw on the grid for that? With the solar power plant, obviously I can talk about that all day because me and my family are still suffering from that development. It’s three years on and our house and our property is being destroyed because of poor planning and horrible mismanagement of that project.
If something like that is to be enlarged or implemented in other communities, it has to be looked at and planned properly for the future and a longer range than 10 to 20 years.
: The last thing I want to talk about is public transportation or active transportation. There’s currently a major gap in public transportation that’s being filled by a community non-profit, Lunenburg County Wheels.
They’re providing an incredible accessible service that’s door-to-door. It fills a certain niche but it also requires an immense amount of volunteer effort from people. It’s not really a complete solution to transit or to transportation.
Is developing transit or working with other municipalities to look at transportation a priority for you?
S: Definitely. You can’t go backwards in time either. I love the rails, the trails, I use them all the time.
But the railway lines were taken out and you can’t go back and put them back now. If you look at a lot of countries that have either electric or diesel electric railway systems and mass transport systems, if you look at MTRs, Hong Kong, Singapore, UK, France, Netherlands, they’re all working with an MTR system. We now don’t have that ability here and we definitely don’t have the finances to run a structure like that.
Can you look at something that’s eco-friendly, maybe hydrogen propulsion as far as the buses? If you look at Glasgow in Scotland, they’ve been doing that for four years now as far as hydrogen for their buses. With that, the travel culture here is increasing every year as well and there is no transport. So we’re seeing that every day, especially as I mentioned this time of year as well.
Yesterday we had five or six full large buses coming down from Halifax from the cruise ships to the town of Lunenburg. There’s no option for people to come down. So I think it’s not just municipal, it’s a provincial wide problem.
As far as a transport system, does it have to be provincially funded? I think so. Part of changing transportation usage is not just then having the systems in place, it’s also about changing habits. Do you think the municipality has a role in convincing people that there’s a need to change their habits in transportation if there’s new systems for them to use? Definitely.
If you look at incentives, at the moment, as I said, it’s a car-based culture here or a vehicle-based culture. With the harsh winter environment as well, you’ve got to look at something that is practical. With the changing weather patterns, you don’t know what the future is going to bring.
I would love to see more investigation into hydrogen propulsion as well. If it’s working in other places, it can work here. In fact, one of my friends was involved with seven solar power plant projects down in the US.
Those solar power plant projects are actually providing power for hydrogen generation plants.
: I want to thank you for sitting down with me this morning, Tony. I do want to give you the last word.
What else would you want to share about your platform or about why you’re running for mayor in Mahone Bay?
S: What I want to see or would love to see is, obviously, more communication and transparency. These last few years here, I’ve just been seeing it getting more insular and closed and closed and closed, especially with council and with the administration in the town of Mahone Bay. Decisions are made.
There’s no dissemination of information. It’s like with the in-camera meetings. Without having paper in front of me to back it up, I think HRM had 75 in-camera meetings in the same period that the town of Mahone Bay had 92.
We had seven motions come from those 92 closed in-camera meetings. I think that it doesn’t make the community feel included in decision-making procedure if they see this closed echo chamber. That’s probably the biggest thing that I would like to see.
Talking to people on the street as well, it’s like all these decisions are getting made and we feel excluded. Again, it’s that communication. The other one, obviously, a big one for me, I would love to see, when we talk about inclusivity of everybody in the community, is that the lack of communication that we’ve seen in the last six years hasn’t been inclusive of everybody.
Again, it’s nice to go out there and wave a flag every once a month or every time a holiday comes up, but it should be day-to-day work, not once a month or once a term.
