When a visitor pulls into his long driveway, Charles Fipke steps onto his porch, large food-storage container in hand. He reaches in and tosses fistfuls of birdseed off the stoop and around the rental car. “There’s a quail’s nest nearby,” Fipke explains. He steps inside, setting down the birdseed bin, not minding that some spills on his rug and tile floor. He invites his guest inside his 6,250-sq.-foot Kelowna, B.C., abode.

Picture windows showcase his outdoor pool, the beach and Okanagan Lake—Fipke calls this his “front yard,” and complains about beach-walkers occasionally trespassing on the area he’s roped off as his. Within minutes of plunking down on his white leather sofa to chat, he’s up toward the window to show off his two favourite parts of lakefront living. There’s the towering willow that convinced him to buy this property on Capozzi Road. Its falling leaves require a pool cleaner to come several times a week, but it’s worth it. The winged wildlife is his other love. No birds are out on this chilly, bleak-sky day, but there are photos of plenty in albums stacked on his window ledge. His professional-grade long lenses have captured images of great blue herons, swans, cedar waxwings, nesting ospreys and more near his private boat dock.

In a fast-growing city full of affluent retirees and businessfolk from Alberta and the Lower Mainland seeking sun, golf and wine, Fipke is in a class of his own. He’s the geologist who discovered diamonds in Canada’s North and amassed a mining fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars. He believed he’d found his treed and avian paradise when he paid $6.3 million for the property, among a tidy clutch of lakefront family homes in Kelowna’s Mission Creek district, in 2006. But now it’s a lonely place to own a standalone house. Across the street, five- and six-storey condo buildings stand on land once occupied by single-family homes. The house next door and four adjacent ones have been razed to make way for Aqua Waterfront Village: 344 luxury condos and townhouses, including a 13-storey tower metres from his property line. In a few years, his house will likely be the last among a sea of lake-view condos and vacation rentals.

The rock hunter who beat the world to where diamonds slept in the Arctic has found himself, without initially realizing it, smack in the middle of the area his city had long pegged as its new tourist district. Most of Kelowna’s lakeshore is lined with private houses much like Fipke’s. He just happens to live on a slab of waterfront that planners and developers want to carve up for the countless newcomers yearning for a small slice of one of the country’s premier summer destinations.

Many people in his predicament would’ve sold out and moved by now—especially those with the means to buy nice houses (or a few lots) anywhere else. Not this 75-year-old. Fipke has launched a lawsuit against Aqua’s developer and the City of Kelowna, mounting technical objections in hopes of quashing permits for the massive project. The result is one of Canada’s most unique and intractable not-in-my-backyard battles in recent memory: a lone centimillionaire pitted against one of the region’s most powerful condo builders and a city hall that has embraced rapid growth; a man who got rich opening up the earth to extract its goodies and now wants to safeguard his neighbourhood’s wildlife.

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