Looks like the provincial government is going to use our oil and gas royalty money to purchase more land to protect. Up to $75 Million dollars worth.
Too bad they wouldn't give the OHV associations some of that money to make trails.

http://www.thechronicleherald.ca/NovaScotia/1047014.html

Kind of a waste of our money, IMO.

I think a lot of people will agree with you, I do. In the mean time they raised user fees on everything from fishing licenses to birth certificates.

The gov't is going to have to find some kind of crazy way to meet the 12% goal, looks like this might be it. They adopted that figure from other regions, the problem is NS has a high % of private lands compared with other regions. Anybody who is concerned with this should read the Environmental Goals-and-whatever-the-rest-of-it-is Act. All about balancing economy with environment, yadd yadda. Sure. Then they have to go spending big bucks trying to meet the 12% thing they established. They can't meet the 12% without impacting the economy somehow. let alone hitting trail users. That's a lot of potential resources to lock up and throw away the key to. If anybody else has been talking to their MLAs about this, they should ask about the conditions in that Act, that specify annual review of things being done under it and goals being met etc., and periodic review of the Act itself. What they should do, is expand the definition of what counts as Protected under that Act. All the talk about beaches etc. needing to be part of the 12%, and existing Protected Beaches (of which there are already scores of across the province) don't count towards the 12%. This is all just going to cost all of us money and lose traditional use and access. What if the biggest natural gas reserve in the continent, is lying waiting to be discovered, under land they are going to lock up forever?

Have no problem with them protecting land, they just have to realize that sledding doesn't cause any damage. Province can buy up all they want, just don't revoke access to activities that have no effect.

Logging and what not.....sure go ahead and ban it, or at least control it!!

I agree with Protected Areas. However what I don't agree with is calling them a Wilderness Protected Area. There rules in this type of designation have been too restrictive in the past. Designating these big tracks of land and restricting all motorized use is wrong. What you have doen with that is setting out a piece of land for maybe 1% of the population. This would be the people that would hike more than 1 kilometer. The thing they are mssing is the corridors for motorized vehicles to get in to areas to make a reasonable walking distance.

Steve, I completely agree with you, but the sad fact is right now lands they are protecting come in the form of a WPA. I sure hope this comes up at the OHV conference, if everyone could agree and put forward a strong proposal/recommendation we would be in a much stronger position.