Dartmouth wetland fight still stagnant

Proceedings to prevent siltation remain secret.

by Antoni Zwissler w/ files from Jenn Waugh

It’s been over four years since the province designated Eisner Cove Wetland a Special Planning Area (SPA). Bill Zebedee lives next to what’s left of the wetland and has not given up the fight to preserve it. The undeveloped area is wooded, lined with constellations of rocks and invigorated by a stream. The official provincial and municipal name for the wetland area is the Southdale/Mount Hope lands. The SPA designation that doomed it to development happened in March 2022.

Zebedee is on his third court appearance in six months on behalf of the wetland, which can’t go to court itself, because it’s, well, a wetland (and court is for humans). Zebedee went to court once last year, on Nov. 27, and twice this year, on April 18 and May 14. He also had a court date on Jan. 19 that was rescheduled due to a power outage. All the appearances have been in camera (or closed to the public.

Zebedee and his lawyer, Jamie Simpson of Juniper Law, are working towards a private prosecution against the developers of the wetland. A private prosecution is a way for regular citizens to bring broken laws to the courts’ attention when police or other regulatory top guns don’t notice violations.

As reported by Grand Parade on Dec. 1 2025, Zebedee is arguing that the part of the wetland that was meant to be protected as Clayton Developments Ltd. develops on other parts of it, is being assailed by siltation. Runoff from the surrounding earth that was razed and made bare by/for the development is muddying the wetland’s waters. Simpson and Zebedee are still not allowed to comment on what’s been discussed in court, or whether it seems like they’re going to be allowed to move forward with the prosecution.

Clayton undertook a similar construction project in 2006, infilling part of the wetland across Highway 111 from Eisner Cove wetland. The development was called Russell Lake West, and like the development at Eisner, it required permission from the province to infill parts of the wetland. The province gave this permission in 2005.

While Grand Parade could not find record of any legal proceedings against Clayton at that time, a 2009 article from the CBC reported that residents on the opposite side of the lake from the construction complained of contamination to Russell Lake at that time.

In the current legal proceedings Zebedee launched against Clayton, he argues that Clayton has breached section 158 (e) of the Environment Act.

A breach of this section is a summary offence (less serious than a criminal offence). Simpson said private prosecutions for summary offences are much less common. This might be why the preliminary proceedings are taking longer than expected, they might be setting a new precedent.

If it’s successful, Zebedee’s private prosecution on behalf of Eisner Cove will only be the second time this approach has ever been used in Nova Scotia to uphold the Environment Act. The first time was in 2017, when Harrietsfield resident Marlene Brown filed a private prosecution against a numbered company called 3076525 Nova Scotia Ltd. that was responsible for contaminating drinking water in the Harrietsfield area. Jamie Simpson was also a lawyer in that case, which was won in favour of Brown.

In Chapter 19 of the book Environment in the Courtroom, J. Swaigen, A. Koehl, and C. Hatt write about The Continuing Importance of Private Prosecutions in Protecting the Environment. While these prosecutions are important to uphold environmental laws, the authors write that “in the best of all worlds, private prosecutions would not be necessary,” because a citizen’s complaint about a violated law would be investigated thoroughly enough by the police or relevant regulatory agency to reliably uncover crimes or dismiss false accusations.

But “in the real world, law enforcement agencies are often understaffed, under-resourced, untrained, and reluctant to prosecute or employ other enforcement tools such as orders—particularly where the alleged offender is another government body or even their own department,” write Swaigen, Koehl, and Hatt.
So even though Zebedee tried to go through minister Tim Halman’s department of Environment and Climate Change, and even though Peter Lund (his hydrogeologist partner in the environmental defence) has presented the case for better protection of groundwater during developments to city council, no regulatory agency has investigated Clayton to Zebedee’s standards.

In the words of Swaigen, Koehl, and Hatt, private prosecutions “help the state to enforce its laws when it has insufficient resources for vigorous enforcement.”

The step Zebedee has just completed in court is called a “pre-enquete hearing.” Now, he and his legal advisors have to wait for the judge to decide if their case is strong enough to warrant Clayton Developments being compelled into the courthouse.

HRM makes process on strategic plans

by Matt Stickland

The city of Halifax has released two surveys which reveal that council is not serious about affordable housing or preventing extremely preventable deaths. But since council was elected to solve these problems, it’s important to look like they’re doing something, so council is making process designed to look like progress.

The first survey is about missing middle housing. This has been top of mind because of the housing crisis. In 2017, the city of Halifax passed the Centre Plan. And in 2023 the city passed sweeping zoning reforms to conform to and secure funding from Katy Perry’s boyfriend’s Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF) scheme. Both have been wildly successful by upzoning most of the city. Between these two policies, Halifax has approved and seen construction start on over 13,000 new units since October 2025.

But these policy changes have also been wildly unsuccessful, because as transformational policy changes, they are changing the character of many Halifax neighbourhoods, which is unpopular with a small number of vocal residents. In October 2023, 170 of them wrote angry emails and got council to axe zoning changes that would have created affordable student housing next to downtown universities.

The Centre Plan policies need a refresh, and the 13k units under construction are well shy of the 40k or so currently needed to alleviate the housing crisis. Council wanted to do more, so they instructed staff to “review common space, living space or non-habitable room requirements within a small-scale multiunit dwelling use in the ER [Established Residential] zones and return to the Council for consideration.” Staff recommended doing public engagement.

However, instead of focusing on living space as council instructed, according to a city comms staffer, planning staff “focused on refining urban design requirements so new development can be delivered in a way that supports both increased housing supply and compatibility with existing neighbourhoods.”
The problem here is that design requirements that are compatible with our expensive neighbourhoods are design requirements that keep housing construction costs high, which restricts how much housing can be built.

That and the fact that council didn’t instruct staff to look at design standards, just living space standards.

You can weigh in on your favourite way to make housing less affordable until May 31, in the Missing Middle Housing survey on engagehalifax.ca.

The other online survey is at halifax.ca/surveys, and it’s about Road Safety. This is a survey Halifax is doing, according to a comms staffer, to get “measurable data on how safe all types of road users feel, which is tracked alongside collision statistics, enforcement data and infrastructure delivery.” Which is valuable information.

For example, if everyone in the city assumed no drivers ever exceed the speed limit, but when surveyed everyone felt speeding was a huge problem, the city could use it to justify spending money on public education campaigns letting everyone know they solved speeding. (Spoiler alert: they didn’t, but could by narrowing streets and adding bike lanes. Which council is empowered to do thanks to clause 318 of the Municipal Charter.)

However, staff use the survey results in combination with real world data to make policy because “these inputs are used to monitor performance and identify priority issues.”

For the past nine years, the 2018 Road Safety Framework and the 2024 Road Safety Strategy are the two documents that have been instructing staff how to make roads safer.

Unfortunately, injecting public perception of safety into our process has perverted our understanding of the road safety data used to make these documents.
In the years before the Road Safety Framework was passed, 14 people being killed by drivers was considered too many, and it’s why the framework was written. The first two years of that new safety plan were a bit rough as the engineering of our streets caused an increase in the unacceptable number of road deaths. But then we had a pandemic, and everyone stopped driving.

According to the city’s data from 2020 to 2024, when people weren’t driving as much due to the quarantine and then the increase of people working from home, there were far fewer people being killed by drivers, because there were far fewer drivers.

But instead of extrapolating “driving is dangerous” from that data, staff sought public input. And since most Haligonians drive and most Haligonians are ignorant to the inherent dangers of driving, we label select factors like speeding, intoxication, distraction, and age–instead of driving itself–as the dangers in our road network. Which in turn means the city’s “systems level approach” to road safety will never be successful because it is willfully blind to the source of the systemic danger in our road system.