I understand why golfers or the families who used to go tobogganing would like this view to be preserved. Viewplanes like this are fundamentally unbalanced though; they're trading off extremely valuable property rights, development potential, and good planning for a large district so that a comparatively small number of people can have a better view on private property.

The fact that something like that would fly in HRM shows just how messed up the political process at City Hall can be. In some cases decisions come down to 1 or 2 councillors (happened all the time in the Harbour East CC) who may run unopposed or may win with only a couple thousand votes (this may be better now with the larger districts), so special interest groups have a disproportionately large amount of power. If you can get, say, 500 people voting on an issue, you can severely damage a councillor's chances of being re-elected and by extension you can hijack a committee or community council, or even regional council if most councillors don't really care about the issue at hand.

We never seem to have an issue with completely blocking a harbour view with trees.

Trees block harbourview:
http://maps.google.ca/maps?hl=en&ll=...12,203.23,,0,0