TRENT RIVER DEVELOPMENT PRESSURES

HARDY ISLAND, NAPPAN ISLAND, SEYMOUR LAKE

My cottage is on a quiet point on the Trent River south of Havelock. Peaceful, I say, although some days it seems Burnt Point is under siege from cottage developers trying to ignore the great stretches of shore that are really more swamp than ideal frontage
Around the Trent, the Latin motto of caveat emptor, meaning buyer beware, should be reworded caveat cottage emptor.
The west side of my point faces across Burnt Point Bay. On the far side there is now a new attempt to flesh out a development that started decades ago in fits and starts.
I Googled the development on the Internet and came up with a professional presentation, filled with chirping birds and flowing strings and pretty footage for something called Lake Seymour Estates. Funny, I thought, where does that name come from when Seymour Lake is at least a kilometre away, and this development is plainly on water called Burnt Point Bay. That  was considered a better name by the locals than the first name of Mud Lake, which was what the bay looked like when the canal system was built around 1880 and farms and woods here were flooded.
On the stretch of the Trent between Healey Falls and Hastings, there are many expanses of river that are just skins of water over weeds, rocks, stumps and logs.
I double-checked on the official charts of the Canadian Hydrographic Service, a branch of the federal  environment ministry, and sure enough, on Small Crafts Chart 2022, the name for the water beside Lake Seymour Estates is Burnt Point Bay, and Seymour Lake, not Lake Seymour, is a couple of stretches of water to the east through a narrows and some islands.
I rather like the name of my point but I guess developers don't think it is fashionable enough.
I noticed too when I checked the charts that all the water around this latest development is rated as "foul" or "stumps," just like almost all the river around Nappan Island, which has a developer sniffing around, and also around much of Hardy Island, which has had preliminary work done by a developer.
I have some relatives who really don't care whether they can go into the water at a cottage but I just can't understand buying a place like that. And if you plan to dredge away the weeds and rocks and stumps, it is plain that the Lower Trent Conservation Authority will not allow you to touch "wetlands" in any way, and, of course, that is what most of the shoreline is.
I know an owner of a parcel of land on the east side of Burnt Point Bay who plans to try to sell at least two big lots. The water there is so shallow, I have had to get out of a canoe and push it into deeper water.
The interesting thing about Lake Seymour Estates is that a visual presentation starts with some lovely pictures of the shore at the hamlet of Trent River which is a couple of kilometres away and has no geographic relationship. This includes a large two-storey white "heritage" cottage on a little island which is praised for its lovely landscaping, giant pots of flowers and nice porches.
According to the owner of this show place,  there is not the slightest relationship to the development that is now including pictures of it in the Internet presentation. And the shoreline around the show place, lined with giant boulders, is so superior to the actual rude shore around the so-called Estates, the comparison is laughable.
The show place has been famous for more years than the Trent Canal has existed because the central part of it was built in 1850, long before the canal came along and flooded its apple orchard.
The owner and I spent a pleasant time yarning about developers and councils and the pressure of the developers and how some of us get hassled or blocked by inspectors and others seem to build more with a lot less effort.
Fall has moved in along my stretch of the Trent. The trees flame with glorious colours. Of course they are no match for the glossy pictures and vivid imaginations of those who would like us to forget that under great expanses of the Trent as the sun burns its way to the horizon is all the stuff that swimmers and boaters hate. 

TORONTO'S COSTLY GRIDLOCK

OUR TRANSPORTATION EXPERTS AREN'T

Just an ordinary Saturday afternoon with a touch of rain as I returned from the cottage.
Then radio 680's traffic report, which occasionally gets it right, said that 401 was basically stopped from the Don Valley to 400. So I went south on the Don Valley parking lot, which is usually crazy to do during daylight hours.,
The DVP was hiccuping with more traffic trying to flow in from all sides, including bullying their way in from lanes that dumped into the lanes filled with drivers who were actually obeying the rules about merging.
We all jerked our way south but just before the Gardiner, the overhead sign said it was slow from downtown to beyond Jameson.
So I took the Lake Shore which turned out to be molasses -like in its flow, and then there were the problems of all the cars  trying to get up to the Gardiner.
The Lake Shore stopped completely south of the Ex so I headed up into the Ex only to be met by drunken yokels hitting my car with banners as they left the latest losing soccer game by the local side.
I was heading north on Dufferin when it stopped, so I cut over to Tyndall where I once lived.
 I pride myself on my knowledge of streets in that area because of all of my years of working and living there. Fat lot of good my insider knowledge was. King was stopped so I headed up to Queen, which was stopped westbound too.
And then I realized that I was experiencing the Toronto phenomenon known as gridlock when out of the blue all the traffic jams come together in one smelly mess and block an entire chunk of the city.
All the escape routes have now been ruined by stop signs at every corner. And in addition to this deadly measles epidemics, there are No Turn and One Way signs that can turn a few blocks into impenetrable mazes.
I actually drove up a street north of Queen where all the escape routes were marked with No Entry signs. So I drove back down and noticed that the mouth was not marked with a No Exit sign of warning.
Finally I got to Dundas and figured I would cut over on Howard Park to High Park. I laughed so I didn't cry when I found that this escape route was blocked by an accident involving a streetcar and ambulances, fire trucks, cars and cruisers.
Finally I was lurching over speed humps north of Bloor and, gritting my teeth, came back down to Bloor West Village where only idiots try to drive on a Saturday.
The whole misadventure took over an hour from the 401-Don Valley intersection to my home near Royal York and Bloor.
I was so mad, I was almost catatonic. The wear and tear on me and the car at least wiped away the memory of the three or four fender benders that I escaped by a gnat's eyelash.
You read the news stories of the incredible waste of time and energy and money due to the horrendous traffic in major cities from Beijing to London to Manhattan to Paris to L.A..
I have driven in all those cities, and can report sadly that the stats are right,  that T.O. is now the sorry king of the gridlock that can hit without warning just because a major accident or road repair triggers the collapse of the road system as if it were potholes paved with cardboard.
My worry is that our politicians and traffic officials have become so inured to all the howls of protest at our traffic that they really don't do that much.
They spend more time moving a few hundred people by bike than tens of thousands of people by cars. They lament all the cars with only one person in them but that's the standard number on a bike.
The cops harass motorists with cash register speed traps and whether cars stop completely at a stop sigh, but cyclists routinely speed through red lights and the wrong-way on one-way streets. But that the heck, the other day I saw a cop on a bike doing exactly the same.
No wonder businesses and stores and people move from the core. Downtown may be filled with condo towers and pedestrians and cyclists but that's a misleading shell of activity because the real growth is out further, and in the suburbs and the surrounding Greater Toronto Area. Two out of every three Torontonians chose the suburbs. And the population of the GTA matches that of the downtown and suburbs combined.
The planners plot and the gLiberal politicians make their 10-speed way to City Hall and most of us each day prefer to live elsewhere than their beloved screwed-up Central Business District.
Away from exorbitant parking charges. Where the traffic jams have not yet blossomed evilly into gridlock that can strike unexpectedly, even on a Saturday at 3 p.m. when everything was going so well.

WHAT THEY DIDN'T TELL YOU ABOUT LINC

WE'VE BEEN BLESSED WITH OUR LIEUTENANT GOVERNORS

I was touring Linc Alexander around the Ex in a golf cart when we ran into five black women. They were what we used to call foxes. There's probably a new term but these were five young ladies dressed in the latest fashions who carried themselves with sexy grace.
"Hullo ladies," Linc bellowed out. He was 78 and they were probably 25, but there was something about the size of Linc and his clothes and his easy manner that caused them not to brush him off.
They couldn't quite figure out who he had been, but, as one told another, he WAS famous. And they buzzed with excitement at meeting a famous black guy who was being chauffeured around by some old fart who wore a security card saying he was CNE president.
And I explained that Linc had been the lieutenant-governor and the federal labour minister and they were quite impressed even though I doubt they knew what a lieut.-gov was, or fot that matter a Conservative or cabinet minister. But I bet they told a lot of people that they had met this old black dude who seemed to be really important.
 Linc beamed and charmed them because he loved women. (And women were charmed by his dash.) And they giggled and we roared off, only to be stopped again and again by people of all ages and all skin colours who actually knew who Linc was.
 Linc talked to everyone. Linc smiled at everyone. Linc liked everyone. And they responded to him. There is a genuine love for Linc in this province which dwarfs that exaggerated acclaim given that  other guy who just had a state funeral.
What a guy! He loved the Ex because there were more than a million people he could talk to. So every year he phoned for his ride around the Exhibition, and the GM, David Bednar, was pleased to get the call.
I'm sure Linc thanked us for golf cart service but he didn't make a big deal of it. He rather expected that after a lifetime of service, after a lifetime of not ever having driven a car, meaning that if you wanted him at a function in Toronto, and many organizations did, you had to pay for the limousine or cab that fetched him from his beloved Hamilton.
It was worth it too. He was an original board member of what used to be called the Terry Fox Hall of Fame.  Linc brought a candour to the annual selection. Vim Kochhar, the former senator, wanted only three inductees each year but Linc was famous, after the chairman David Crombie reminded us all of this rule, for nominating at least five people. And he got away with it bccause we would end up breaking the only-three rule by an inductee or two.
I started telling my colleagues on the board that it was the Lincoln Alexander gambit, although Linc never used his full name and encouraged others not to. And then we inducted Linc into the national hall for disabled Canadians, just one of the many honours that showered on him over the decades.
One day I heard a rumour that when Pete Trudeau, the PM, had snarled "fuddle duddle" in an angry debate in the Commons, he had really said "fuck off", and the reason Hansard and various officials and some media had conspired to pretend it was "fuddle duddle" was that it would be a national scandal if the public knew that the prime minister had yelled "fuck off" at the first black MP in the country's history.
It was glossed over at the time, and another MP was also said to be the target, but everyone there that day knew it was Linc who had got under Trudeau's thin skin. The words "allegedly" were used about the incident, and Linc merely told reporters that Trudeau had mouthed two words, one starting with F and the other with O.
Linc was not that circumspect when I asked him. He was blunt but didn't say his skin colour had anything to do with it, even though he had had more of his share of discrimination as he grew up, the son of a railway porter who lived in a small row house which might as well have been in the middle of the tracks rather than on the other side.
He served with the RCAF and was only a corporal because the air force in those days didn't run around making Negroes officers even when they were in the middle of the second world war. Much later he was given the honourary rank of colonel to review troops.
He loved to do that even when he was finding it hard to walk or even stand. He was reviewing the Warrior's Day parade in 2000 along with the chief of the defence staff, and I was there too as the CNE president.
As each band and group of aged warriors passed, medals glinting in the sun, we would stand. I hoisted Linc to his feet by secretly grabbing his elbow. Then he started to sway. He was 6' 3'' and 220 pounds, and it was like a gnarled oak shaking in the wind. I stood closer and held the back of his uniform. Linc took it with grace after I explained that we couldn't let him fall off the Bandshell stage on his face.
At one point, a female veteran in her mid-70s slowly and painfully limped by us using two arm canes.
"Good for you girl," Linc shouted. And he cried. And I cried, and swore that we would never again force our veterans to march through the Princes' Gates and most of the way through  Exhibition Park to be reviewed at the Bandshell. We made the route much shorter the following year and ended the parade inside the Coliseum where the vets from Sunnybrook in their wheelchairs would be protected from the weather.
It was what Linc expected us to do.
I suspect Linc deep down was a real Luddite. He was chancellor of the University of Guelph for five terms and the university thanked him by providing a car and driver and then, one year, a computer. He didn't even know how to turn it on, so he asked if I could arrange a tutor. I volunteered to drive to Hamilton but he figured he could find help closer to home. And I suspect he did, because Linc was not bashful about asking for help because as an agreeable pragmatist he expected help.
Ontario has been blessed with its royal representatives like Linc, who was Canada's political Jackie Robinson and like Jackie conducted himself with grace in the rude face of insults. He led by example, tall in the saddle, never by being militant or preachy about black discrimination..
 John Black Aird looked like a corporation lawyer born with a silver gavel in his hand but he was warm and generous, learned sign language and even played floor hockey with the kids at Variety Village despite a back in chronic pain. He had been maligned as a Grit bagman but was touched by his new popularity in the media and kept an editorial I had written about him framed beside his desk at Aird Berlis.
James Bartleman has done wonderful work in explaining the crippling depression that has him as one victim. He arranged to ship hundreds of thousands of books to empty native libraries in the north. He wrote a wonderful and candid autobiography and after I praised it, enlisted me for advice on his next  books on foreign service which are quite insightful. (He also loved the Ex and I found him one day wandering the midway with a son, not asking for a ride or free tickets.)
Like Linc, Bartleman had humble beginnings, and like Linc, he had to fight discrimination since he was born to a native mother in a wigwam beside the town dump. For both, university was the the launching pad, Linc from McMaster thanks to a veterans' program, and Bartleman from University of Western Ontario thanks to an American benefactor he worked for in cottage country.
Then there is David Onley who has perservered despite the return of his polio. David was an able researcher for the provincial Liberals who helped me in my attacks on a costly Tory scheme for futuristic transit. He wrote a bestseller on space, which got twenty times more sales than the typical Canadian bestseller, and was a stalwart at the early Citytv. I remember his father, a noted municipal solicitor, crying as he related to me the latest accomplishment of his crippled son about whom he had always worried.
Some of our royal reps have been very rich, some came from backgrounds where log cabins were a step up, and some had to overcome handicaps in mobility and prejudice.
But all of them have brought a lustrous honour to the position that was just supposed to be symbolic..
If only we could say that about our premiers.

BURNED OUT OR FED UP

SENIORS DESERVE TO BE CROTCHETY!

I was the kid editor in the discussion on whether we should hire an older reporter when Doug Creighton,  my agreeable boss, voted no on the grounds he was "burned out."
I blurted out that he wasn't burned out,  he just wouldn't take the shit any more.
Creighton, who was the best publisher I have ever seen, regarded me thoughtfully and said I was probably right. Both Doug and I when we became older were bosses, so we didn't have to take the crap that newspapers, and indeed a lot of businesses, routinely dish out to their older employees. But we could see what was inflicted on veteran employees who are given crummy assignments and have their hours and vacations routinely changed by kid/editors who were probably still in diapers when these reporter got their first bylines.
I was 25 when I became an editor and then was an editor in some form or other for more than 30 years.
There is nothing like confronting a reporter twice your age who was killing Germans when I was in public school to make you tread carefully.
Newspapers in Toronto are rowdy competitive beasts that trampled egos and shred tempers. So I thought a little civility in the middle of the battles was the decent way to survive.
 Perhaps I went too far. When I was City Editor of the old Toronto Telegram (and that is a key position on any major paper)  I was gently sending a grumpy beat reporter out to do a "much better job" when he snapped at me about why I was being so polite when obviously I was unhappy. So I said that if he wasn't out the door in the next five seconds, he was fired.
Occasionally there should be steel inside the velvet .
I am not sure my family would agree with what I have just written and indeed anything I would say  about being diplomatic in the face of someone screwing up.  They would claim I have a short fuse. And I would argue in return that I just won't take the shit any more.
BUT!!!! The waitress, the receptionist, the builder, the mechanic etc. are entitled to expect that I will not explode at the first goof. But don't keep it up.
Unfortunately, it has become difficult during this incredible period of poor service not to become someone perceived as a crank, a crotchety old geezer prone to snapping at people because they keep screwing up routine chores.
Don't you become cranky when.....
You wander a store looking for a clerk....
Find the dentist's receptionist has screwed up an appointment three different times...
The clerk supposed to help you decides to answer the phone when you have taken the trouble to be there in person....
The bank at the noon rush has only two tellers, and they are deep in conversation about their dates...
The phone call just at the critical point of the TV movie is from some jerk ignoring the do-not-call ban...
The best part of the TV movie is edited to make it fit into the assigned time...
The TV commercials continue to blare, despite the government ban insisting they can't be louder than the programs...
The lout lounging in the rear exit of the bus calls you a stupid old man when you squeeze by and then some woman objects when you tell him to f.... off...
The idiot who has just put a lure into your boat tells you he has the right to fish your dock even if you are standing there...
Wrong number at 4 a.m.....
Renovation crews that place their big steel bins almost across the road....
That is when I become a crotchety geezer who remembers that the good old days some times were actually better and service staff were not armoured with righteousness and expected to be told off when they goofed.

TO HELL WITH BEAVERS

NUTS  AT THE BEST OF TIMES

So you wanted to know what happened to my beaver....
My reply is dedicated to the grandson who regarded the beavers who set up light housekeeping in my boathouse as being as cuddly as a kitten and gave me a picture for Christmas of one sleeping on its back with its paws in the air as if it were a hamster.
All this is prompted by a recent story about a crazed beaver attack near Washington. It is not clear whether the beaver was driven nuts by the presidential election campaign or just was rabid, the beaver that is, not the presidential candidates as far as we can tell. It would be tough to pin one of them down long enough to test, for rabies that is, not the truth.
An elderly woman was bitten by a beaver weighing 33 pounds (that's 15 kilos in that strange foreign measurement) and the beaver just wouldn't let go even when it was battered for more than 20 minutes.
She was seriously injured with a huge chomp  out of her calf and a thumb nearly bitten off. Naturally she has to have those painful rabies shots.
The beaver is dead. It was shot after it was not deterred by having two paddles broken over it in repeating beatings by a friend, a rescuer and paramedics. It just kept attacking as paddles splintered and its eye was gouged with a stick.
What was really frightening about the story detailed in The Washington Post is that authorities were said to find the attack rare and the first in the Fairfax County area in nearly a dozen years. Good heavens! I've been attacked by a squirrel that was probably rabid and a fox that was acting strange, which is generally a warning, but I thought I was safe from beavers as long as they just stuck to cutting down my trees.
This story is food for thought for all those who think the beaver, the industrious pest, should be a national symbol for the country that was developed largely on its skins.
I have been busy at the cottage wrapping my trees in wire and coating bark with all the old pepper spices that I can find. The wrapping in the fall and the unwrapping in the spring has none of the joys of Christmas giving and all of the hassles of wire cuts in hands, arms and legs.
But every time I have been lazy and not bothered with a few trees, they are dropped by beaver even though there are woods all over the place filled with succulent trees. I have lost at least 12 mature trees,  including a lovely stand of silver birch. Last winter, despite my precautions, I lost several willows and bushes. The main toll lately was a lovely 12-year-old evergreen because I hadn't put metal protective shields high enough around its trunk. The beaver just stretched and ate.
I have written about how disconcerting it is to go in your dark boathouse and as you are about to stand on what appears to be an abandoned old rug, it moves. So you retreat to the door and a very large beaver shuffles by you to the water. Next day, a smaller mate was there.
Nothing worked. I played classical music 24-hours a day. Apparently the beaver liked the classics. So I tried rock. Probably the beaver played air guitar at the sound.   The beaver kept showing up. I left lights on. Nothing. Just the usual insane charges of Ontario Hydro.
One day I was in a rush, forgot about the beaver and charged into the boathouse, stepping right on it. I was so mad and off balance that I grabbed an old oar and hit it. It ignored me and moved slowly to the water. So I ran to my gun safe, took a very old, very reliable Cooey .22 and ran back. The beaver was swimming slowly in the middle of the Trent River. I deliberately shot lower than the beaver,  not wanting to skim a bullet into a fisherman. It may have skipped into the beaver because there have been no beaver sightings in the boathouse for months.
But, in a sight that can turn a cottager's blood cold, last weekend there were two big sticks floating in  the boathouse slip, both stripped of bark with the telltale gnawed ends.
A warning, a calling card from nature! So I went out and wrapped more wire around my trees.
In my 32 years at Burnt Point, I have cut down six dead trees and the beaver have brutalized 12 big ones and many saplings. I have planted 10 trees, eight of which have survived, and then there were the 20 fast-growth experimental trees I got from the provincial government, none of which survived my sons cutting grass and winter.
So far it's been a draw with the beaver.  So I hope that rabies in beaver stays south of the border, along with their presidential politics.
                                                               ..........

P.S.  My cottage neighbours at Burnt Point have listened to my beaver stories with amused tolerance....until now.
Beavers have been leaving their lodge across the Trent River, which is surrounded by acres of wetlands and bush on Nappan Island, swimming across the strong currents of the river, waddling through the cottages that line the point, and cutting down trees behind the cottages.
I have lost none because I have been, as I wrote above, armouring all my trees with wire fencing, even barbed wire. But in the last two days, beaver have dropped two poplars in two days across the cottage road. The neighbour that used to have those trees is now down to one out of a grove of six.
So our beaver may not have rabies but they are nuts. Can you imagine going to all that work when with a lot less effort, they can cut down trees closer to the lodge, stripping off some of the bark as if it were candy, and abandoning 95% of the tree?
So this is an open appeal to all hunters and trappers (and trappers are still around, my brother-in-law used to trap only 50 kilometres from Toronto) to come to Burnt Point and rid of us all the beavers and, just to really make the trip pay for itself, go after all those flying manure spreaders, the other great symbol of the country, the Canada geese that leave little mounds of excrement as their calling card.

SNIDERMAN'S RECORD EXASPERATIONS

 A FAN OF LIFE AND STORIES

I knew Sam Sniderman before he was Sam The Record Man. And then there was the other side beyond records and music -  his love of the downtown city and of old days along College St.
I don't know who told me 60 years ago but I heard that the place to buy really different records was Sniderman's Music Hall on College St.
So I made the long TTC trek from Weston Rd. near Lawrence to Sam's first music store on the stretch of College west of Bathurst,  familiar to such famous Torontonians as Ed Mirvish, Johnny Lombardi and Mel Lastman.
It was his brother's radio store but Sam, who already had lost his hair, sold me a Stan Kenton Innovations in Modern Music record. I had only change for money in those days, and no record player, but I still have that record.
I attended Ryerson Institute of Technology before Sam moved to Yonge and Gould in 1959. That stretch of our old main street was dominated then by A and A, which had a soda fountain at the back behind the stands filled with texts we needed at Ryerson. It was the first Ryerson book store.
There was rivalry but Sam became the dominant figure at the corner, and in records, because he was a showman, a great supporter of Canadian talent, and he could be crotchety as hell in arguments. He was larger in life than his huge neon signs.
I remember him calling me up at the old Toronto Telegram when I covered City Hall to complain about stupid city bureaucrats and not being able to be open on Boxing Day. And that was the start of many calls over the years dealing with everything from garbage collection in the lane behind his store to the plight of the homeless, one of whom froze to death near his back door and caused him to attack everyone in sight for the savage irony of someone freezing in the downtown of a bustling city.
Sam was one of my more difficult friends. He disagreed with everything I said and wrote and would start a call with "you know Downing, you really screwed up....." and you can fill in the rest because it seemed to Sam that I was wrong, and my papers were wrong, and my friends were wrong, on just about anything.
Sam had a great friend, Derwyn Shea, and he was a fixture at any party that the Anglican canon (and former councillor and MPP) had at his nice house on the western height above Grenadier Pond. And when you came in the door, or the Fileys or Garricks or other threads of the rich city tapestry showed up, Sam was sure to greet you with a quip, a beef and his latest scheme.
He was a great fan of the Canadian National Exhibition and of course would have fit right in at any booth on the Midway. We sat together on CNE boards and committees and argued over his great idea that the fair should be free and we would get the money back on sales. We would point out to him that the millions that we raised through selling tickets was useful in running the fair, but we could never convince him.
In the final days a decade ago, the record chain ran into the vinyl wall of modern competition, and all the music that people could steal instead of flipping through the bins at his creaky music Mecca.
He retreated to the Maritimes and a wine business. Ryerson got his huge neon sign and the Ex has a smaller sign which has yet to be hung on a wall of honour. Ryerson hasn't put its sign up either.
He may have been gone after nine decades from the city life and the calls became few indeed. But Sam really was an original, much more than a record huckster, a giant of his craft, and a mentor and supporter to many.
The legends like Gordon Lightfoot remember his support in their lean days. Lightfoot basically played for beer money at Steeles, a second floor tavern just over from Sam's. Ryerson students used to listen to Lightfoot and nurse their drinks. Around 1960, it would not have been a rare sight to see Lightfoot performing, and in the audience would be Neil Young and his father, Scott Young, the author and famous sports journalist, and Sam.
The old record business may be gone, just like Tin Pan Alley. As ancient history as the little booths that we used to  play a 78 in before we bought it.  But the thousands with pleasant memories of the great gabber, Sam The Record Man,  will remember him long after new technology will no longer play the records that he peddled with such enthusiasm.
He was an original. No greater tribute can be made

NEW TRENT SEVERN TAXES A GOOD IDEA?

 ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND!

Like a dead fish stinking up the dock, the idea floated out again in June about a special new tax on those rich SOBs who live along the 386 kilometres of the Trent Severn Waterway and enjoy themselves.
Of course the politicians are never really happy unless they are pickpocketing us.
Some MPs were said to be about to recommend around now to the federal government that waterside cottage owners be taxed extra - that is in addition to the extra taxes they already pay municipally because of their better locations on the water.
A few years ago I phoned a top waterway official and asking him about the persistent rumours that Trent-Severn docks were to be taxed. He said they had only looked at commercial docks and that had been shelved.
Then there was talk about licence fees for all boats kept on the Trent Severn.  And, for all I know, for the air that we breathe from the rivers and a foliage fee for the weeds.
I think any dumb MP who recommends this should be aware that I for one, and my neighbours around Burnt Point Bay south of Havelock, would expect something for more taxes.
 Like services.
I live at the end of a private road maintained by the cottagers. We run our own sewer and water infrastructure and many of us have no garbage collection, snow removal or anything else. There are general services such as policing, fire protection and hospitals, and of course we have the wonderful advantage of Big Brother bossing us on everything and generally charging us hefty permit fees.
Just try building anything bigger than a bird house and watch the bureaucrats descend.
Since my assessment is higher because I am on the water, a reasonable bureaucracy would leave well enough alone and take any necessary maintenance money for the waterway from the overcharging in municipal taxes. Have they not heard of user fees to cover the costs of the locks?
But, oh no, the Tories (I refuse to call them Conservatives because they are not conservative in their spending) are now sniffing around like a skunk at the outhouse for extra money.
Let's return to the benefits we would expect to get if we have to pay new cottage water taxes. And don't give me any crap about jurisdictions. I don't care whether it's a federal, provincial or municipal responsibility, I just want bureaucrats to ante up and improve the tiny bits of help we get now.
I would expect weed harvesters to be bought and operated along the great stretches  of the Trent-Severn that are now plagued with weeds. There would be no charge to cottagers because the growth of weeds is fed by the government failures in controlling the chemicals that are excreted into the water supply.
I would expect real patrols by the OPP who now flit through every two weeks and let the cottagers deal with all the speeding yachts who send waves of water over our docks and shores.
I would expect a return to fish hatcheries since the provincial government already collects more in fishing licence fees than it spends on fish management.
I would expect payment to be made to cottagers for the use of our rivers in the production of electricity. Or they could tell Ontario Hydro to lower cottage Hydro charges to reasonable sums if Hydro is going to continue to use public water
Governments have never reduced taxes, despite the promises, and are constantly searching for new and occasionally illegal taxes. (You want an example. Printed material, including religious books like the Bible and Koran, were free of taxes from before the invention of moveable type. Now they're taxed. It was considered improper and immoral for a government to levy a tax on a tax. It has become routine.)
Governments always pretend that new taxes and permit fees will be used for a stated purpose. For example, gasoline taxes were levied to pay for road construction and repair. Now they're just dumped into general revenue, and the taxes collected are more than the total spent on road construction and repair.
Fish and hunting permit fees were started to raise money for hatcheries, wardens and wildlife management. Now most of the money is dumped into general revenue and game wardens are as scarce as hatcheries. It is up to individuals and clubs to nurture the trophies that bring visitors and their dollars into the province so there are more people around to pay the taxes and fees.
Remember when it all began. Ottawa started a temporary income tax to pay for Canada's military costs in World War 1. But income tax has stayed along with every other tax that was started for a specific purpose and ended up generating revenue that the politicians could fritter away on their cockeyed schemes.
Let me warn Ottawa that if there is a new tax on the Trent Severn Waterway,  the MPs stupid enough to recommend it will be defeated and will have all the time in the world to cottage and fish and hunt and pay all of the hot new ideas in taxes and permit fees.
Any new monies would be wasted. Of that I am certain. The present situation is that the governments can't evenfigure out how to smooth out the fluctuations in water levels that can either have your dock flooded or your boat grounded. They can't even control any new menace that  comes along The latest is Water Soldier which can ruin a shoreline even as it cuts any kid that gets near it. And it's spreading like the flu in January.
Government are inept but cottagers aren't. We do more maintenance of the shores than they do. Why should we now be punished for their incompetence?
Many cottages started as mere shacks in the woods. Government ignored them until officials figured they could make some money even as they didn't bother to help them very much.
Today, many cottagers cost more than small houses in towns and cities, yet the small houses get the services that cottagers can only dream about.
And now there are politicians talking about going after one group of cottagers along a waterway, and if that works, Lake Simcoe will be next, and the Rideau, and Wasaga Beach etc.
There's an expression about letting sleeping dogs lie. Good advice. If the governments wish to poke this dog, it will turn out to be a wolf which will tear at them even as tax revolts and class action suits are considered. After all, why wouldn't we sue? Taxation without representation is undemocratic and improper. Surely it is also undemocratic and unfair to levy taxes and give nothing in exchange.
 The MPs are running a new version of a costly shell game where there are no services to be found under any of the shells.