Where is this place – The Nature Park – in the newly released Park & Recreation Master Plan? The BurdReport has posted on this topic in the past – three times in fact: 

• January 11th 2025 – “An opportunity for Local Democracy”
• May 12th 2025 – “How to Bury Activism“
• August 9th 2025 – “Failure for Local Democracy“

Each of these posts demonstrates two things; one is the persistence of local Citizens determined to establish a “Nature Park” on the West Harbour Headlands and the other is the bureaucratic resistance to such an idea. The August 9th post reveals that the move by Council to merge a proposed Task Force on the subject to the newly to-be Parks And Recreation Master Plan Committee. The post opined that such a move would be tragic to the idea of a West Harbour Headland Park, it has been proven to be a fact.

This is reprehensible on the part of either the Council who should have provided terms of reference to the Master Planners or by the consultants who have failed to understand the total Cobourg experience. That lack of experience is understandable when one looks at the way consultants work. By pulling the last master plan off their shelves and adopting the boiler plate approach, substuting the last Municipalities name for Cobourg one can pull the wool over the eyes of most Councils in the Province.

Look at the image below taken from the Appendices of the report page 14 – Consultation with User Groups. The two major groups with huge interests in the West Harbour Headlands; The Willow Beach Naturalists and the Cobourg Ecology Garden are listed. But their concerns about the area don’t even register as a concern for the study. WHY? were they not consulted and if so how much consultation was given?

It is a Municipal scandal that the topic of the “Nature Park” is not listed in the Plan considering how much effort has gone into the proposal over thirty years by well-respected Citizens. One could say that it is mentioned as a sidebar to another concern about land in the same area – the former  West High School playing fields, which reads “The northern portion of the lands (1.29 hectares/3.18 acres) have significant development potential, while the southern boardwalk and waterfront lands could be severed for preservation as parkland” (the BR emphasis). Parkland not a “Nature Park” how condescending of the authors.

Speaking to the lead consultant, Danielle Lenarcic Biss of Thinc, about the history and integration of the Task Force for the “Nature Park” she was in total ignorance of the process. Something wrong here – who has failed to hand on this information. The Master Planning committee did not even have time to talk about it as the complete report was released after the regular meeting of the committee – again something wrong here. If the BR were a conspiracy theorists we would think that all of this was intentional, but it could just be put down to faulty communications!

Hopefully the Citizens pushing the “Nature Park” will be vocal at the public meeting and make their points! However with only three days study of the Master Plan any comments may be brief and inadequate.