An anonymous person who had pledged $1 million towards building a pedestrian bridge across the Trans Canada highway has withdrawn the funding promise in the wake of what a local volunteer calls a lack of action from the town of Tantramar. The citizens group that had been proponents of the project have also resigned.
Retired doctor Ross Thomas was one of those working on the pedway project on and off for fifteen years. He first presented the news of the potential $1 million donation to Sackville town council in December 2021.
Thomas says he doesn’t know the identity of the potential donor, but knows they first started expressing concerns about the future of the project about six months ago, shortly after Tantramar Pedway Group members Christina DeHaas and Jeff MacKinnon presented to the new Tantramar council in June 2023.
DeHaas and McKinnon requested that the new council commit to pursuing further capital funding for the project, and enter into an agreement with the province’s Department of Natural Resources to take over control of the Trans Canada Trail within town of Tantramar boundaries. DeHaas urged council to take swift action to make use of the $1 million donation, because “the window of opportunity is running out,” she said at the time.
Six months later, in December, council took a first step in that direction, and unanimously approved a motion put forward by Councillor Josh Goguen to “request staff to engage with the provincial government to discuss a land use agreement for the existing Rails to Trails system within the Tantramar boundary, and explore capital funding for a proposed new pedway over the Trans Canada Highway, leveraging the $1 million donation.”
But Thomas says the message the group got from council was mixed. “We were getting sort of vibes that they weren’t all that interested,” says Thomas. “It was going to cause controversy because some people wanted it as an ATV route.” But the pedway group wasn’t “interested in a shared trail,” says Thomas, “at least within much of the old town limits.”
“Whether it’s a controversy that scared them off or not,” says Thomas, “there was never any real ‘we’re going to do this’.” And so the potential donor “decided that this was never going to happen, and they wanted to try and find some other place to send their money,” says Thomas.
This is the second time Sackville has lost out on a potential million dollar donation to the pedway project, says Thomas. Fifteen years ago there was talk of another donor, who ended up supporting trail initiatives in PEI.
“It didn’t happen 15 years ago when there was a million bucks on the table, and it didn’t seem to be happening this time,” says Thomas, noting that over two years is “a long time to go with very little progress.”
‘Very limited discussion’
At a committee of the whole meeting on February 26, just two days after the committee announced the withdrawal of funding, Active Living Director Matt Pryde included a small update about the pedway project in his report to council. When asked for more detail at the end of the meeting, Pryde said there had been, “very limited discussion at this point. We did meet with a member of the Department of Tourism, to talk about what kind of information they might need to move forward with a pedway. But that’s about it at this point.”
CAO Jennifer Borne responded to a further question about the loss of potential private funding to say, “at this point staff are operating under the motion of council. Mr. Pryde has reached out to the province, working with DTI. Any other questions as far as any funding or anything to do with the pedway group should really be directed back to the pedway group.”
Councillor Josh Goguen, who put forward the motion in December, says the loss of private funding presents some challenges, but he is waiting to hear what staff have to say when they report back to council before ruling out the future of the pedway.
In an email to CHMA, Goguen writes, “While I’m disappointed the group has disbanded and I thank them for their tireless work on getting this file to council. Their main goal was to get someone to action the request and I feel like that’s been accomplished.”
Active transportation plan needed
Ross Thomas says his original reason for backing the pedway proposal was to re-connect the trail that was cut in half by the twinned highway, leaving trail users to make a major detour to Main street, or risk the crossing of the four lane highway.
“I think it’s a natural, non-motorized corridor that’s been disrupted by the highway,” says Thomas. “If we’d been on the ball when they twinned the highway, we could have said, okay, you can’t twin this without putting in a pedway.”
“If you’re looking at trying to encourage people to 1) exercise and 2) use active transportation–cycling or walking to go from A to B, then you need to provide safe places to do that,” says Thomas. He’d like to see the town develop an active transportation plan, so that better bike and pedestrian infrastructure could be included alongside more car-centric work.
“A lot of this can happen as redevelopment occurs, which it inevitably does,” says Thomas. “The roads need to be repaved or whatever, and as part of that process you put in a bike lane.”
“It might be a little more expensive in the short term, but in the long run, it provides you with a better society, better infrastructure to live in, and push toward a greener society, a healthier society, a happier society,” says Thomas.
