Sackville United Church & commercial-residential bldg that replaced it at 112 Main
Tantramar’s three mayoralty candidates — Terry Jones, Debbie Wiggins-Colwell and Sabine Dietz — discussed how they would support steps to protect the town’s built heritage and especially its streetscapes during a radio forum earlier this month.
Sackville repealed its heritage bylaw and dissolved its Heritage Board in 2018 leaving property owners free to demolish or alter the look of downtown buildings without having to apply for a permit.
Getting rid of the bylaw cleared the way for Lafford Realty Inc. to build upscale, seniors’ apartments near its commercial-residential building on the site of the Sackville United Church that was demolished in 2015.
Now, Lafford Realty is building a seven-storey, mixed-use building on York Street where the three older buildings shown below once stood.
To listen to the mayoralty candidates’ responses on support for the protection of built heritage, click on the media player.
A lightly edited transcript of their conversation appears below it and then, a link to the full, one-hour radio forum.
Tantramar Mayoralty Candidates Radio Forum, April 17, 2026 at CHMA 106.9 FM.
Question on heritage protection.
Carol Cooke: Question seven, it’s Terry’s start off. Here it is. To what extent would you support the establishment of a revised, flexible, and creative regime of protection for Tantramar’s built heritage, especially with respect to our streetscapes? Terry.
Terry Jones: I would definitely support and endorse, however you want to put it, looking after our heritage. Sackville’s unique. The downtown core of Sackville is unique. It’s changing. It needs to be updated, yes, but it needs to be updated in a way that we can keep our small-town charm. I think a committee needs to be formed, if we don’t already have one, because I couldn’t find one, in regards to heritage, so that we can look at the buildings that are slated for demolition, the lots, and maybe put a limit on our downtown as far as new development and be more proactive in keeping that unique flavour. I am so saddened when I see big buildings going down, those lovely Victorians and things coming. I understand that we have to move forward and we have to grow, but I wonder if there’s a way that we can make sure that unique special properties have more protection so that they’re limited on how fast they change or how fast they’re torn down.
Carol Cooke: Thanks for that, Terry. Debbie Wiggins-Colwell, you’re up next. And how do you feel about protecting Tantamar’s built heritage, especially our streetscapes?
Debbie Wiggins-Colwell: Well, there are many heritage properties and iconic structures throughout all of Tantramar. These are deserving of preservations. For example, now, this is one we’re working on right now. It’s the Wheaton’s Covered Bridge. It’s the last covered bridge in all of Tantramar. It’s DTI [Department of Transportation and Infrastructure] has that on their scope. It could be torn down. So we had an ad-hoc committee put together. so we’re going to try to either, we can’t, we can’t save it as uh as uh vehicles or transportation, there’s going to be another bridge built beside it, but if we could take part of that, pieces and parts of that, and move it to the side, keep it out where our iconic barns used to be out on the marshes. We were known for that. Now I think you can count on one hand how many barns we have out there.
Carol Cooke: And Debbie, if I may, you mentioned DTI, and I wonder if this is a similar issue to the gas plant. How much jurisdiction municipally do your councils have to weigh in and to change these things that maybe are decided in Fredericton?
Debbie Wiggins-Colwell: Yes, well, actually, we have been working with our MLA, Megan Mitton is working with us on this ad-hoc committee. And so she’s our voice when it comes to DTI and to bringing it back. So we have a great group of people that are working to try to save this important structure for future generations because covered bridges are going to be a thing of the past. How it’s going to look, I can’t say, but if we have part of it, partials of it, whatever we can do to save pieces, I think that’s very important.
Carol Cooke: Okay. Sabine, it’s your turn to weigh in on how to protect our heritage in this town and this community.
Sabine Dietz: Yeah, so there are two different issues, actually. So Debbie touched on one is working with our provincial government and with our MLA. And I think that is definitely the role of a mayor and the role of municipal council when it comes to streetscapes, because that’s what you were asking about.
We used to have a heritage bylaw for Sackville, way, way back. That was abolished at some point with a lot of hurt. But again, I mentioned the municipal plan because there’s a lot of misunderstanding about the role of a municipal planning process and a municipal plan, which guides the community in all of its development and developments in all of its priorities. It’s way more important than a strategic plan.
The municipal plan is being renewed. Like I mentioned, this is going to be on the council’s plate. A perfect opportunity to have community conversations about how do we actually make statements about our heritage? How do we make statements about what our downtown should look like, including Dorchester, including Sackville, so the old Sackville, old Dorchester. And that can be done through the municipal planning process. I think that’s the best way.
And then whether there are bylaws that come out of it, because that’s usually what happens. You have your municipal plan, your zoning is done. You identify, we have a BIA, a business improvement area. You identify the areas that are important to the community for whatever reason. And you set bylaws accordingly. And that is a super good opportunity coming around in the next couple of years, actually fairly soon, to give the community actually the voice that it needs to identify what is important for us in terms of local heritage.
To listen to the complete, one-hour radio forum on the CHMA website, click here.
I’m glad to hear the mayoralty candidates speaking up on this topic; for too long, I think, Sackville/Tantramar have suffered rapacious predation of our buildings and spaces because we were led by people seemingly far more attuned to maximizing developer dollars than in articulating a vision that respects and protects our size and shape.
It’s not solely about our streetscapes and buildings — important though they are — it’s also about development and open space, as well. We should be recreating a body responsible for articulating not only what we want preserved, but what gets built, where, and even what our desired ultimate size (population) should be. We should have a master development plan and use zoning aggressively to control and limit growth and the destruction of our built environment.
Every day, farm land is subdivided into yet more pocket subdivisions… now, even pasture land directly adjacent to the marsh trail (on Donald Harper) has been marked for residential construction. One of our loveliest old barns — at the former Doncaster Highfield Farm — with its two siloes was demolished just days ago.
If current trends continue, I can easily picture a day in the not-too-different future when our population has doubled (or more) and we reduced to being just another Moncton residential neighborhood. Is this what “new kind of small town” means?
I fervently hope not.
When the custodians of a heritage structure can no longer afford the deferred maintenance, what good is a heritage bylaw? If the old Sackville United Church was in, say, Montreal, there is enough public and private capital to transform the space into a library, community centre, or Concordia U residence. But in Sackville all we had was an impasse featuring a church community that wished to be rid of their beloved building if only to sustain the community, local citizens who wished to save the building, but never once proposed a viable plan to do so, and a heritage board that had no plan other than to preserve but not maintain the structure. Then the lawsuits came. I am all for a revived heritage board, and a new municipal plan that is attuned to heritage. But unless we can get around the inconvenient truth that our will to preserve heritage exceeds our means to do so then we will see repeats of the United Church scenario. Perhaps concerned folks should develop a triage list of structures that are worth saving, so that our most precious structures can be proactively identified with plans to maintain them.