PARKS CANADA PROPOSES NEW RESTRICTIONS FOR FLOATING ACCOMMODATIONS ON FEDERAL WATERWAYS

Parks Canada has put out a call for public feedback on new restrictions that would prevent floating accommodations from mooring overnight on Ontario’s Trent-Severn Waterway and Rideau Canal starting May 1.

The change is intended to give Parks Canada more control over the regulation of floating accommodations on its waterways. The government agency is assuring boaters that other mooring provisions will remain the same. Waterfront property owners along the canals will still be able to moor their vessels adjacent to their properties, and boaters will still be able to moor overnight at Ontario waterway lock stations and licensed marinas.

Floating accommodations are defined by Parks Canada as “a floating building, structure, or thing, or a combination of floating buildings, structures, or things, equipped or useable for overnight accommodation and not primarily designed to be used for navigation.” They have become a hot-button topic in Ontario over the last few years, especially in the Georgian Bay area.

In 2020, Joe Nimens and his partner, Erin Morano, built a 1,000 sq. ft. dwelling out of four shipping containers, buoyed by an encapsulated polystyrene foam foundation, and moored it in Port Severn. The structure drew the ire of locals over environmental concerns such as grey water discharge and questions over whether it was subject to property tax. But when local politicians looked into having it removed, they discovered that Nimens’ had found a loophole in legislation that allowed him to skirt municipal and provincial bylaws.

According to Transport Canada, which regulates the movement of vessels on the surface of Canadian waters, any watercraft used or capable of being used as a means of transportation on water, other than aircraft, qualifies as a vessel. Transport Canada confirmed that this included Nimens’ floating accommodation, meaning he was free to moor it on public waterways.

Nimens capitalized on this loophole, starting LOTB (Live On The Bay), a company that builds and sells custom-made floating accommodations.

Concerned about the ramifications of an expanding fleet of floating accommodations on their lakes, locals decided to do something about it. Cheryl Elliott-Fraser and Claude Ricks, both members of the Gloucester Pool Cottagers’ Association (GPCA), had experience dealing with floating accommodations. In 2021, they helped remove a shipping container from the Trent-Severn Waterway that had been installed as a residence.

“The Trent-Severn was able to issue a cease-and-desist order and pull it off the lake,” Elliot-Fraser says. But to make this happen, the two cottagers had to contact multiple levels of government, including Transport Canada and Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF).

Their biggest takeaway from the experience was that the three levels of government weren’t communicating. “The feds do one thing, provincial does another, and municipal does another,” Ricks says. This lack of communication created a gap in legislation.

To rectify this, Elliot-Fraser and Ricks founded The Float Homes Not Vessels Coalition to bring all three levels of government together to regulate floating accommodations uniformly on Ontario waterways.

Thanks to their efforts, the Ontario government amended its Public Lands Act on July 1, 2023— banning floating accommodations from mooring overnight on provincial waterways.

“What the MNRF essentially said is we’re not going to regulate where you float around, we’re going to regulate where you moor,” Ricks says. “Their conclusion is, if floating accommodations have nowhere to moor except for their dock, why even bother doing it?”

On a municipal level, the coalition has been working with Severn Township, Tay Township, and the Township of Georgian Bay. Severn Township is in the process of amending its bylaw to prohibit floating accommodations from becoming shoreline structures on municipal land.

The one government department the coalition has struggled with is Transport Canada. “They keep stonewalling us,” Ricks says. However, the coalition has gleaned some insight into Transport Canada’s position after receiving over 700 pages of documents through a Freedom of Information request.

The documents revealed that Transport Canada is not going to budge on its definition of floating accommodations as vessels because the parameters of what constitutes a vessel are enshrined in an act of parliament, making it very difficult to change. Instead, the documents showed that the best way to regulate floating accommodations is to target the rules around mooring, the way the MNRF did and Parks Canada is now proposing to do.

With this information, the coalition has organized a working group that includes members from several municipalities, the MNRF, and Parks Canada. “We’re going to have all three levels align and make a homogeneous framework,” Ricks says. The group’s first meeting is in April. Both Elliot-Fraser and Ricks are optimistic that Transport Canada will eventually join the group.

In the meantime, Parks Canada is accepting public comments on its proposed mooring restrictions for floating accommodations until April 7.

2024-03-27T14:27:43Z dg43tfdfdgfd