Dear ABMInsider,
If you’re receiving this newsletter, you are most likely already a subscriber to Atlantic Business Magazine. But in the event that you’re one of those who signed up for the newsletter, but haven’t yet subscribed – or if you’d really like proof of your subscriber bragging rights so you can show your family and friends what they’re missing – I thought I’d share an excerpt from an extensive story about Peggys Cove development woes that was published in our January issue. Our content is copyrighted, but consider this your official permission to share this excerpt around.
Trouble in paradise
Clashing personalities, a community in transition and competing developments… a perfect storm is brewing in picture-perfect Peggys Cove
By Stephen KimberWe’ll begin our tour of Peggys Cove—Nova Scotia’s combination postcard-perfect lighthouse, traditional fishing village and world-renowned tourist attraction—at the spot where such tours often begin: the tip of the recently completed $3.1-million public boardwalk and viewing deck.
The view is spectacular—iconic Peggys Point lighthouse, “maybe the most photographed in the world,” thrusting skyward out of gigantic heaving granite boulders. Beyond them, the ominous blue-black of the Atlantic Ocean stretching out to forever beneath a hovering slate grey sky.
On this relatively calm late September day, gaggles of tourists, some from cruise-ship bus tours, cavort on the rocks, heedless of the red and orange DANGER signs—“Death Has Occurred Here… Don’t Take Risks… Leave Here Alive”—taking selfies and/or simply staring into the crashing waves, pondering the always capricious, ever-dangerous whims of Mother Nature. Mother Nature, some residents will tell you, isn’t the only capricious force at work in this cove.
Turn back to your left, and you’ll see the almost as iconic Sou’Wester Restaurant and Gift Shop at 178 Peggys Point Road. What began nearly 60 years ago as a five-table tearoom is now a 180-seat restaurant featuring a sea-caught menu of Maritime delights from fish chowder to boiled lobster. The elongated, two-storey, dormer-roofed, grey-like-the-sky building that houses the restaurant also boasts a two-level gift shop with “one of the Maritimes' largest selections of giftware.” Many of this year’s nearly three-quarters-of-a-million tourists to the Cove will almost certainly begin or end their visit with a stop at the Sou’Wester.
The Sou’Wester, unusual for such a venerable tourism business, is still run by the family of its founder, Jack Campbell. Remember the Campbell name. It won’t be the last time you hear it.
If you turn even further to your left, you’ll see two large houses on opposite sides of the circular drive that leads past the Sou’Wester and the entrance to the huge car and tour bus parking lot behind it. The bright aqua building to your left is Amos Pewter, a jewelry and gift shop. To your right, the purple building houses Tom’s Lobster Shack, a more recent addition to Cove culinary commerce. Above the restaurant, there is a bed and breakfast called Cozy Cove Studio. Its Airbnb host is listed as Nicole Campbell. The building that houses both those businesses is owned by John Campbell, son of Jack, father of Nicole, who is also the current president and operator of the Sou’wester. Until recently, John also owned the building where Amos Pewter operates. What is interesting about all these businesses is that they don’t appear to be operating in accordance with existing official local zoning bylaws that govern home-based businesses.
Non-compliant? Existing bylaws? The Peggys Cove Land Use Bylaw dates back to 1993. Under its rules, only certain home-based businesses are allowed in the residential zone, which occupy most of the land area in Peggys Cove. While the allowable home businesses include craft workshops, fishing-related home businesses, tailoring and dressmaking, restaurants are not one of those legal home-based businesses. No home-based business is supposed to occupy more than 25 per cent of the total floor space either. Bed and breakfasts are allowed in the residential zone, but they’re limited to four units and are required to operate out of a residence occupied by the operator of the B&B.
Let’s continue our tour. We’ll head down the road to the left of Amos Pewter. On the water side of the street, you’ll see a 17,000-square-foot oceanfront clump of rock, grass and scrub bush on which sits a weathered, down-at-the-heels, paint-peeling building and shed. At one point, 173 Peggys Point Road—which some claim boasts the oldest building in the Cove—was registered as a guest house. More recently, it was home to an artist co-op called Hags on the Hill. But that moved a few years back, and no one has lived here for 25 years.
The property is now owned by Kelly Westhaver and her husband, Brian Cottam. They inherited it after Kelly’s mother died in 2021. In the spring of 2023, Kelly and Brian, who are both disabled and living on investments, “reluctantly” decided to sell the property, despite their “sentimental attachment” to it, so they could have “enough to retire on.” They hired a real estate agent.
On April 12, 2023, he put the property on the market for $1.2 million.
Let’s pause here. Because it’s going to get complicated, and there’s some context you need to understand so you can understand the rest.
In 2019, Develop Nova Scotia, a provincial agency, set about creating a comprehensive master plan for the future of Peggys Cove, the unique coastal district on Nova Scotia’s St. Margarets Bay that “exemplifies the quintessential Nova Scotia that visitors love, and residents cherish.” But as the master planners also noted in setting out their task: “Peggys Cove is a living community first—an active fishing village and home to year-round residents.”
The challenge, it said, was to balance the needs and desires of that real-life community—which now actually numbers fewer than 40 full-time residents, fewer than half a dozen of whom fish for a living—with the needs and expectations of the 700,000-plus tourists a year from all over the world who spill on to its narrow roadways, overfill its limited facilities and stress its infrastructure.
While the community-consulted master plan did offer some important direction (such as road improvements, extra parking, accessible public washrooms and that new marquee boardwalk), it couldn’t come to grips with one of the key issues residents themselves had identified. How should future land use in the Cove be governed “to support continued community sustainability and opportunities for inclusive economic growth and participation?”
That’s because Develop Nova Scotia wasn’t in charge of that aspect of Peggys Cove’s future. The loftily named provincial Department of Inclusive Economic Growth is. Predicted the ever-optimistic master plan, that department was “expected to carry out a formal review [of Peggys Cove governance] in 2021.”
But now—which is to say, at the end of 2023¬—what still governs development in and around the 2,000-acre preservation zone surrounding the village of Peggys Cove is the bedrock Peggys Cove Commission Act of 1962. It established the Peggys Cove Commission, which, according to its website, “makes planning and development decisions according to land use bylaws… The individuals who make up the commission,” its self-description adds, “are experienced leaders of this unique area, and will strike a balance between preserving our heritage and creating a welcoming place for residents and visitors alike.”
More prosaically, the act says the commission will be made up of three ex-officio members (the district’s municipal councillor and representatives from the province’s development and planning departments) and four provincially-appointed public members, “three of whom shall be residents of the area.”
But wait a minute. There are, as we noted earlier, fewer than 40 full-time residents in Peggys Cove. How—in a tiny, traditional Nova Scotia community where everyone seems to be related to everyone else—do you find three commissioners who don’t have some conflict of interest when it comes to figuring out who gets to do what with their land?
The short answer is, you don’t.
In May 2023, in fact, Pamela Lovelace, the ex-officio municipal councillor on the commission, became so frustrated with the situation—and the commission’s lack of transparency—that she resigned. “The commission is intentionally designed by the province in a way that creates conflict in this small community,” she argued, “because the individuals who are on the commission, who live in the community, are making decisions about their neighbours’ properties.” To make matters worse, she added, the locals on the commission “know absolutely nothing about land use planning.”
The provincial deputy minister responsible for the Peggys Cove Commission responded in a public letter to its chair, declaring that the province was not investigating the operations of the commission and adding, “I would like to extend our sincere appreciation for your continuing leadership…”
The minister in charge said it was up to the community to figure things out. To do otherwise, she said, would constitute “ministerial overreach.”
But let’s take a closer look at the three local resident members of the commission. The chair is Nicole Campbell, who is, as we mentioned, John Campbell’s daughter. You may remember that she operates a bylaw-non-conforming bed and breakfast in a building owned by her father. Her official bio notes that “she has worked at the family business, The Sou’Wester Gift & Restaurant, since her early teens and currently works as the dining room manager.” (I tried to reach Campbell, but she didn’t respond to numerous requests for an interview.)
Commissioner Judy Dauphinee is John Campbell’s stepmother. She too works at the Sou’wester. The third local commissioner, Maria Bartholomew, is a registered counselling therapist who has run her own bed and breakfast from her property in the Cove, though she doesn’t live there full-time, meaning it too is non-compliant with the existing bylaw.
The commission’s role—always critical to setting the parameters of what other residents can and can’t do with their land—became even more crucial in the fall of 2022. That’s when the commission embarked on a review of the existing 20-year-old land use bylaw and began fiddling with which zones—residential, core (commercial), fishing, conservation and service—fit where in the Cove.
Over the past year, the commission has held several public hearings during which everyone could make their “public comments and objections” about the latest version of the land use plan to the commissioners. The commissioners invariably listened politely but generally didn’t respond. Later, the commission met behind closed doors and made decisions. Although their meeting minutes were later published, and any conflicts of interest noted—“Commissioners Campbell and Dauphinee declare a conflict with any discussion on 154 Peggy’s Point Road [Tom’s Lobster Shack]”—the minutes didn’t explain the why of what was decided. Or re-decided. And re-decided again.
Since the latest review began a little over a year ago, in fact, there have been five different iterations of the zoning map, with properties once designated residential suddenly showing up on the map as core with no detailed explanation of why, only to be changed back to residential in the next version with even fewer reasons given. And vice versa.
And that brings us all the way back to the Westhaver/Cottam property at 173 Peggys Point Road. In the first version of the land use map in October 2022, the small section where the dilapidated buildings were standing had been designated core while the rest of the property was zoned residential.
Residential?
“To put it into perspective,” the couple’s real estate agent, Tim Harris, would tell one public hearing, “there is only one way in to view the lighthouse and that is directly past the front door of this property. Eight hundred thousand people staring in your windows! Living at this address would be intolerable. Who in their right mind wants to live in the middle of a theme park?”
When the map was revised in April 2023, however, the commissioners had, without explanation, re-designated the Westhaver/Cottam property as core, which was when the couple put it up for sale.
In June, it sold for $1.8 million, $600,000 over the initial asking price. Though the names of the actual buyers weren’t publicly revealed at the time, they included Scott Linkletter, the owner of Prince Edward Island-based COWS Ice Cream, which has outlets across Canada, and Chris Cudmore, the co-owner of Coastal Culture, which bills itself as Prince Edward Island’s “#1 Souvenir Store.”
Officially, Kelly Westhaver recalls, the two bought the property under the name of Stamper Inc., Cudmore’s commercial real estate company. “And ‘assigns,’” she adds. “What we figured out after is that ‘assigns’ meant they could assign any buyers after that.”
Such as John Campbell? According to Cottam, John Campbell had already offered to buy the property for $800,000, but that had been rejected.
“My mother always said she would never sell the property to John Campbell,” Kelly Westhaver tells me.
Why not?
“Because he was king of Peggys Cove. He bought up everything else. So, she just didn't want him to own the property.”
We’ll come back to that too.
As of June 14, 2023, Westhaver and Cottam had what they thought was a signed-and-sealed agreement to sell their property, contingent, of course, on the property continuing to be designated core so the buyers could launch commercial businesses on it.
Signed, sealed, but not, it turned out, quite delivered.
In early September, Cottam and Westhaver learned from their real estate agent that the commission had suddenly re-reversed course and decided their property, including the dwellings, should be re-designated back to residential.
The sale was on hold. The value of their property tumbled.
What happened? There was no explanation. But there was a lot of speculation. And consternation. And not just about 173 Peggys Point Road.
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