An interesting series of events unfolded last week, all of them to do with Picton Terminals.

First, MP Ryan Williams argued in favour of the Terminals’ application to become a container port during an address to Council. He said he would draw the bid to the attention of the federal government to advance the business interests of Quinte West.

How would he do this? The government’s Electric Vehicle push includes a $1.5 billion dollar EV battery components plant for Loyalist Township. Williams sketched out the environmental benefits — benefits dear to the government’s transportation strategy — of shipping the parts through the Great Lakes to their destinations. Suddenly, our bay was at the centre of the green shipping action.

It was stimulating, to say the least, to hear that Picton Terminals could soon be a key part of the Federal government’s green transport plans. This is the company that has clashed with the Ministry of the Environment on multiple occasions since it took over the port, and incurred a dizzying number of orders, directions, and fines for failures of compliance as its mounds of salt slowly oozed into the drinking water.

Then, on Friday, the County announced its negotiations with the Terminals over its failures to heed local bylaws in the pursuit of its multi-million-dollar expansion plans had concluded.

The County’s legal team will soon bring a deal, it seems, to Council. One wonders if a David-and-Goliath battle will now unfold. The County, of course, is the little guy. Picton Terminals has outsize ambition. And it has evaded local bylaws, and zoning, by claiming our piddly municipal government has no jurisdiction over it, as a port. Multiple courts have insisted, however, that the Terminals is bound, like any landowner, by a fretwork of municipal and provincial laws. This recognition may be what brought the Terminals to the table.

At issue is the Terminals’ expansion plans. These — for cruise ship docking, or container shipping, or rock quarrying — go well beyond the historical, and legal non-conforming (“grandfathered”) uses of the port on Picton Bay.

While the County might be applauded for its effort to avoid an endless legal wrangle with the Terminals, it’s difficult to imagine how these negotiations could possibly have gone well. One wonders what the County stood to gain from entering them at all.

What Picton Terminals wants — the expansion and intensification of its historical shipping activities — and what the County wants — a reliable, perpetual source of clean drinking water for the thousands of people who live around the Bay — are totally at odds.

In assessing legal non-conforming use of a property, part of council’s job is to maintain a balance between the community’s best interests and those of a private landowner. A landowner can be said to be changing the historical use of a property if the scale or intensity of its activities changes. Or even if business-as-usual can be shown to create undue problems for its municipality compared to what went on before.

Legal non-conforming protections can and should be lost if the impact of a business on its immediate community has become, over time, untenable. This impact must be demonstrable; not imagined. It must be established with evidence. And if it is, the case is clear. The nature of this community and its needs has changed considerably since what was once a very small port began operations in 1955. The Terminals’ own history of shipping on Picton Bay, far from establishing a perpetual right to operate, might be precisely what sinks it altogether.