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PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYThe Founding of the Township of the Archipelago, 1812–2012MICHAEL ERKELENZ

vWelcomeThe Georgian Bay Land Trust is delighted to endorse this important work. From its early beginnings, the Township of the Archipelago has played an integral part in the preservation of the eastern coast of Georgian Bay. The “archipelago” in its true sense is its people, its water, and its land. This book describes the growth of a special union that may occur when people care enough about their natural surroundings to come together in harmony with the water and the land. This is a delightful read and a human story that takes the reader through the hard-fought early days.Our utmost gratitude to the Township of the Archipelago and the donors to this project.Bill LougheedExecutive DirectorGeorgian Bay Land Trust

O’Donnell Point, looking north from the southern end of the township.

Foreword ................. ixPreface................... xiPrologue ................. xiiiIntroduction............... 1Abbreviations .............. 5CHAPTER ONEFinding the Field of Battle: The Georgian Bay Archipelago before 1970 ................ 7CHAPTER TWOCourtship Frolics: The Merger Controversies in Parry Sound District, 1968 to 1973......... 21CHAPTER THREEPutting It on the Map: The Archipelago Project from 1974 to 1978............... 41CHAPTER FOURCrossing the Finish Line: The Archipelago Victorious, 1978 to 1980 .............. 61CHAPTER FIVEOf Roads and Waterways: Governing the Archipelago, 1980 to 2000 .............. 99CHAPTER SIXBeyond the Ordinary: The Archipelago Township in the Twenty-First Century ......... 125AppendicesAPPENDIX 1Timeline ................. 143APPENDIX 2List of Important Documents... 157APPENDIX 3List of Reeves and Councillors since 1980 ................ 169APPENDIX 4The Georgian Bay Land Trust: A Brief History ............. 175APPENDIX 5A Planning Primer .......... 179APPENDIX 6A Pictorial Essay on Socioeconomic Patterns and Land-Use Planning in the Thirty Thousand Islands...... 191APPENDIX 7Two Intrepid Women Buy Islands in 1908 ............. 195APPENDIX 8A “Voyage” through the Archipelago ............... 199APPENDIX 9Henry Bayfield’s Hydrographic Survey of Lake Huron ....... 225Contentsvii

ixForewordReading A Passion for Georgian Bay, I was reminded of how fortunate I was, in the late 1970s, to have been associated with key volunteers as they worked to form the Township of the Archipelago. Ross Gray, Ted Hetherington, Wally King, Douglas Martin, Tony Ormsby, and John Wilson were committed to do everything in their power to preserve the Georgian Bay environment by creating a new and special township. The group had charisma. Their ideas caught the imaginations of our cottage community, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the many other volunteers whose names do not appear in the book. We found that everyone we asked participated unquestioningly, giving practical aid and, when necessary, providing financial assistanceI would also like to thank author Michael Erkelenz for the work he has done to keep the history of our beginnings alive. As well, many thanks are due to the committee of Gary French, Wally King, and Tom Martin. If it hadn’t been for them, this book would never have been written.Reeve Peter KetchumJanuary 15, 2016

The Thomson island in Nares Inlet. The Thomson brothers, John, Robert, and Thomas, having no descendants, donated all their property, including islands and mainland, to the GBLT. They were among the very first to donate property.

xiPrefaceI have been going to Nares Inlet for over 80 years now and look forward to, with luck, many more. My grandmother, Janet Susie Ormsby, and her sisters purchased islands in the inlet in 1908. Nares was an idyllic place for me to spend my early summers with my cousins, uncles and aunts, and extended family. Today, my family from Canada, the United States, and Scotland return annually to enjoy our summer at Nares and to reconnect with family and friends. In effect, the bay is the hub of life for my family and probably for many of yours. There is little that is as important to me as the family life we enjoy there on the rocks, within the white pines, surrounded by our beloved waters.About 40 years ago, storm clouds gathered that potentially threatened our enjoyment of the bay. Unchecked development and concern regarding the objectives of government for the bay demanded a response. At the request of our local islander associations, I and some long-time friends, namely my brother-in-law Douglas Martin, Ross Gray from Pointe au Baril, and Wally King from Sans Souci, revived the Georgian Bay Association from a dor-mant state and proceeded into unchartered waters to find a solution to the pressing problems. It was an enormous challenge for a group of volunteers, and I am grateful to the many others who joined in our efforts. There was no blueprint for what was to come.Michael Erkelenz has told the history of our township with passion and detail. This is a must-read for those who wish to understand why and how our township came into existence.

xii PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYWe should all be grateful to the efforts and financing (matched by the township) provided by Project Chair, Gary French; Wally King; and my nephew, Tom Martin, to bring this book into being. Without their work, I fear that this story would eventually have been lost.I do not know what challenges the future will bring to Georgian Bay. I do know that the careful and sensitive stewardship of our greater archipelago is ultimately dependent on the efforts of the private property owners. It is the responsibility of each generation to do whatever is necessary so that future generations may have the same experience and benefits that they, and past generations, have enjoyed. This history should be very helpful in understanding how we got to where we are and when considering steps for the future. Good luck and Godspeed to those who pick up the torch to that end. I am confident that the efforts will be worth it.A.J. (Tony) OrmsbyKilrie, Kirkcaldy, Scotland, 2016

xiiiPrologueThe history of the founding of the Township of the Archipelago, Passion for Georgian Bay, seeks to tell the story about how citizens decided to formulate and execute a plan to protect the bay for future generations. It is the story of the creation of the township, the early days of the new township, and some lessons learned as well as some thoughts for the future.In the early 1970s, two distinct pressures began building on the bay. The first was from unchecked development. The second was the fear of annexation by other townships, which looked at the unorganized but assessment-rich shoreline as prey to be plundered. The shore-line properties offered significant potential tax revenue with next to no expenditure, easily accessed by annexation or amalgamation, or so they thought.Many people were involved in executing a vision for a new township as a solution to these problems. The result was the creation of the Township of the Archipelago by an act of the Ontario legislature in 1980. It stands as the only water-based township in the province. The volunteers who worked to create the township were neither planners nor politicians; rather, they were simply property owners in the area (i.e., us, our families, and friends), who cared deeply about the bay and saw the twin needs of planning and environment as keys to the future. They saw that the days of having a number of unincorporated townships providing no local governance was not going to be in the area’s long-term best interest. In one sense,

xvi PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYas our time spent there. Extended families reconnect summer after summer. We hope that this story inspires future generations to recognize that the bay won’t look after itself and that they have a responsibility going forward to show vision, leadership, and initiative so that the bay they have enjoyed can be passed to future generations. Things don’t just happen on their own. Our township was created by us, and for us, to help in this cause.Finally, how did this book come to be? The three of us, Gary French, Wally King, and Tom Martin felt that the writing of this book was something “that ought to be done.” The problem with things that “ought to be done” is just who is going to do it. In the absence of any volunteers, we formed a committee to do it and just went ahead with the support of many, particularly the Georgian Bay Land Trust and the township. We felt an important part of this book would be for it to contain important references to other works so that readers who wished to learn more about the past and do further research could do so. This is the reason for the more extensive than usual appendices. It has taken us about five years to bring this “ought to be done” to fruition. We hope you enjoy it!Gary FrenchWally KingTom MartinAddend umAs noted above, many of the key contributors to the creation of the township are no longer with us. This deprived us of the opportunity to hear their stories. Within the text are many anecdotes told by Wally King. It is a particular treat to hear Wally tell these stories in person. We encouraged him to document them as they bring colour and drama to the story. We called them the “Wallyisms.” This is not to try to suggest that Wally was the only one involved by any means; rather, it is that his memory and notes are so much more extensive than anyone else’s from the time. Wally worked very hard to record his thoughts and explain them to Michael Erkelenz. Without his efforts, it is doubtful that we would have either the township or this book.GF and TM

xvii PROLOGUETom Martin, Tony Ormsby, Wally King, and Gary French on the deck of Tony’s island in Nares Inlet, 2012.

Fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-generation out for a row.

1IntroductionWhen representatives of the Georgian Bay Land Trust approached me to write a history of the Township of the Archipelago, I thought of histories of this kind (if I thought of them at all) as exercises in earnest local piety. The typical township history, in my thoroughly prejudiced view, was likely the pet project of an amateur historian wishing to give his “old Kentucky home” its nostalgic due. Having accepted the committee’s assignment (as any professional writer would), I soon discovered that my prejudices and the Archipelago had absolutely nothing in common. Whatever the history of the Archipelago would be, it wouldn’t be a tale of brave pioneers clearing the land, enterprising Victorian gentlemen building vibrant local industries, and refined ladies developing a cultural life based on thriving temperance societies. Like its geography, the township’s history would prove wholly unpredictable.To begin, there is little that’s ancient about the story. The events that make up the bulk of it occurred within living memory. Founded in 1980, the Township of the Archipelago is one of Ontario’s youngest. Passion for Georgian Bay focuses primarily on the efforts made by a group of ordinary citizen planners to bring the township into being during the decade leading up to its actual foundation. It begins with a contextual chapter reaching back as far as the era of French exploration, and it concludes with chapters considering the consequences of the township’s creation and the future that may lie in store for it. But the book is at heart a story of political struggle and intrigue in the Parry Sound District of the 1970s. As a result,

2 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYVictorian pioneering, commerce, and, above all, temperance have little to do with it.In fact, it might be useful to think of this history of the Archipelago as a kind of anti-township history. Other Ontario townships, almost all of which date from the nineteenth century, were founded to support the development of agriculture, industry, and commerce. The Township of the Archipelago, by contrast, was founded, if not exactly to thwart such development, then to control it strictly or otherwise deflect it into very narrow channels. The people responsible for the Archipelago were seasonal and permanent residents who recognized its value as the world’s most unique fresh-water shoreline- and island-based landscape. They agitated for the township’s founding precisely to save it from the standard models of development associated with more typical municipalities. They were inspired by the conviction that the most appropriate use for this land — in fact the only sustainable use for it — is low-intensity recreation in a wilderness or semi-wilderness setting.Throughout this book, I use the word “recreation” only for lack of a better term. In common parlance, it often refers to activities that in the larger scheme of things are relatively trivial and unimportant. Using it to describe the purposes of residents, particularly seasonal residents, in choosing to live in the township can’t begin to convey the attachment and depth of feeling they have for this extraordinary region. The motives that in the 1970s impelled so many citizens not to wait for government but to take an active role in planning their own municipal future had little to do with preserving their opportunities for mere recreation. For many people in the Archipelago, not least those whose families had owned properties on the islands for generations, at stake in the creation of the township were a culture and a way of life. For this reason, if for no other, the township’s story is worth telling.This work is not an academic history and does not include extensive documentation. For chapter one on the background of the Archipelago, I relied heavily on the information provided by Claire Elizabeth Campbell’s excellent Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay (2005). For the rest, I consulted the archive of the Archipelago Township and conducted personal interviews with people who took a direct or indirect part in the events I recount. The archive holds a variety of governmental documents, documents produced by non-governmental organizations such as the GBA and its associations, personal letters and notes, and newspaper clippings. It also holds the papers of the late Professor John

4 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYWilson of the University of Waterloo, who was a leading actor in the events described here and who had spent over two decades working on a history of the Archipelago before his untimely death in 2003. Among his papers is a rough, unfinished manuscript based on numerous interviews he had taped with many of the key participants in the Archipelago story (the interview tapes, alas, appear not to have survived). Although I have not always found myself in agreement with Professor Wilson on matters of fact or interpretation, I have found his manuscript and other papers invaluable aids.I would also like to acknowledge the invaluable aid of all the persons who agreed to interviews. Chief among them was Wally King, who cheerfully submitted to several gru-elling interrogations. Others who made generous contributions of their time included Nancy Christie, Gary French, David Harvey, Peter Ketchum, Tom Martin, Tony Ormsby, and Chris Tzekas. To these interviewees, I owe much of what I got right in this book. Of course, I alone am responsible for anything I got wrong.A brief note on terminology. Whenever I use “Archipelago” with an uppercase A, I am referring to the Archipelago Township or the vision or idea of the Archipelago Township. Whenever I use “archipelago” with a lowercase a, I am referring to the “Thirty Thousand Islands” off Georgian Bay’s eastern and northeastern shoreline. I use “Georgian Bay littoral” to refer to those islands and that shoreline as a single entity.No worthwhile work of history is ever merely a story of “what happened.” To adapt a phrase Churchill used of history itself, it’s never simply an account of “one damn thing after another.” Such an account amounts to a chronology, not a history, and has little meaning. As any historian worth his salt knows, genuine history writing is about the present as well as the past. It always has a present purpose even if unacknowledged and deeply buried. This book makes no bones about its purposes. It is to acquaint its readers with, or remind them of, the formidable efforts that went into the creation of the Archipelago and of the found-ing principles of the township that have succeeded in protecting it as a special place. The Archipelago is no more immune to change than any other place. If the township were to allow its founding principles to wither away or adopt new values at odds with its founding principles or even find itself legislated out of existence, we should all be aware, at least, of what we would be losing.

5Abbreviations Bayfield-Nares Islanders’ Association BNIA West Carling Ratepayers’ Association WCRA Georgian Bay Association GBA Ministry of Natural Resources MNR Ontario Municipal Board OMB Pointe au Baril Islanders’ Association PaBIA Sans Souci and Copperhead Association SSCA Thirty Thousand Islands Protection Association TTIPA

7CHAPTER ONEFinding the Field of BattleThe Georgian Bay Archipelago before 1970During the War of 1812, an American squadron entered Georgian Bay intending to attack the British naval base at Penetanguishene. It was the first phase of a campaign to recover the strategically vital post at Michilimackinac lost to the British early in the war. Not unrea-sonably, the Americans expected to sail across the bay and engage the enemy in the usual way. But after a week of fruitless searching through treacherous waters, they called their attack off: Battles are difficult to have when the battlefield can’t be found. The broken geography of the eastern shoreline and its associated archipelago of “thirty thousand” islands simply proved too much for the squadron’s navigational skills. This wouldn’t be the last time — nor was it by any means the first — that the unique character of Georgian Bay defeated the happy expectations of seemingly rational and competent human beings. In fact, much

PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAY8of the impetus behind the founding of the Township of the Archipelago can be tied to a long history of such defeats.1The question was always, what is it good for? Or to put the issue in more enlightened, less imperial terms: What is the most appropriate relationship for humans to have with this land- and lakescape? For the purposes of their campaign, the Americans might have answered, “a passing one.” The channels of the archipelago were to provide a convenient route to naval victory. If only they hadn’t also proved shape-shifting tricksters that whimsically revealed or treacherously obscured their myriad shoals with the frequent alteration of winds, currents, and water levels. Here, then, was the rub: The place could offer tantalizing prospects but often seemed difficult to grasp and stubbornly resistant to human purposes.In early days prior to European contact, it seems to have suited the purposes of First Nations peoples well enough. They engaged in subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering and made use of the protected eastern channels to pursue trade with distant friends. For the Huron, who had settled in the southern reaches of the bay, the inshore waters provided a particularly important line of communication to the West (via the North Channel and Lake Superior) and the East (via the French and, eventually, the Ottawa Rivers). As a route to the East, this passage offered the special advantage of carrying Huron travellers further out of the reach of their Iroquois enemies, who dominated the southern Great Lakes.Naturally, once the French arrived and allied themselves with the Huron against the Iroquois, they too looked on the bay as a relatively safe route of communication and trade, principally, of course, the trade in furs. But they also looked on it as an avenue for exploration. In early French maps of the area, Georgian Bay is represented as oddly elongated on an east-west axis. The very shape of this representation reflects the yearning of Champlain, La Salle, 1 The best account of the Americans’ attempt to destroy the supplies held at the British base in Penetanguishene (Matchedash Bay) is provided by the Historical Register of the United States for 1814, volume 4, part 2, ed. by Thomas H. Palmer (Philadelphia: 1816), p. 77: “Thence the squadron shaped its course for Matchadash [sic] Bay, and used every possible effort to gain it, but without effect. Not being able to find a pilot for that unfre-quented part of the lake, and finding it filled with islands and sunken rocks, which must inevitably have proved the destruction of the fleet had they persisted, it being impossible to avoid them on account of the impenetrable fog with which the lake is almost continually covered … it was agreed … to push on for the island of St. Joseph.”

FINDING THE FIELD OF BATTLE9and their compatriots for a great route to the Orient — to India and actual Indians — that they still hoped to find despite all the evidence that the wild continent would stretch on intermina-bly.2 The moment they realized that Georgian Bay wasn’t in fact part of such a route may well have been the first occasion that European hopes for the usefulness of the bay were disappointed.The Huron settlements at the south end of the bay would eventually be destroyed — unlike the American Navy, an Iroquois army travelling north along the Humber River had no problems finding Penetanguishene. And the French would eventually lose their North American possessions — while negotiating the Treaty of Paris in 1763, they chose to keep Haiti rather than Quebec. When the British established a military post at York (modern-day Toronto) in 1793, their commander, like the French and Aboriginals before him, looked on the bay as part of a useful line of communication. In the event of Britain’s going to war with the recently independent republican hoards to the south, John Graves Simcoe imagined that his new post could be resupplied from Quebec via the old Ottawa River–Nipissing–French River–Georgian Bay route. His superiors in Quebec were rightly skeptical. Simcoe’s idea proved to be another mirage involving the bay.It wasn’t until the end of the War of 1812 and an era of uninterrupted peace descended on American and British relations that the question of the usefulness of Georgian Bay began to be pursued in earnest. Still thinking strategically, the British sent Lieutenant Henry Bayfield of the Royal Navy to survey and chart in detail the shoreline and islands of the eastern shore. Bayfield’s experience is instructive. On the one hand, he found a barren, inhospitable landscape of such intricate and shifty complexity that he spent four years attempt-ing to survey it (from 1819 to 1822). Even after that Herculean effort, he reported, wrongly, that the area contained about twenty thousand islands. On the other hand, Bayfield went about trying to domesticate this alien, unfathomable territory by assigning it place names that would have been recognizable and reassuring to a British-Canadian audience. Of course, he named Bayfield after himself and the bay as a whole after George IV (despite that feckless, debauched monarch’s vast unpopularity among many Britons). Such naming expressed a 2 Claire Elizabeth Campbell, Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2005), p. 28.

10 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYhope that Georgian Bay might one day make a tamed and familiar home.As well as assigning names, Bayfield initiated the task of assessing the region’s rocks, soils, and wildlife. In subsequent decades, other surveyors would continue that work, all with a view to finding appropriate uses for the eastern shore and its archipelago. First impressions were not encouraging: “As an agricultural country a large portion of the region … appears to be valueless, and the pine-timber … is too much scattered, and … too small to be of any commercial importance,” wrote the Geological Survey of Canada’s Alexander Murray in 1858.3 As early as 1836, the only worthwhile use that Sir Francis Bond Head, lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, could envisage for the archipelago was as a reserve for inconvenient First Nations peoples. First Nations peoples, understandably, resisted the plan.4In the long run, the opinions of surveyors and lieutenant-governors didn’t matter very much. People were determined to press on whatever the cost to the environment or, ultimately, their own lives. By 1835, traditional fur trapping in the region had been exhausted, and First Nations peoples began congregat-ing around the trading posts at La Cloche, French River, and Shawananga to avoid starvation.5 For well over a century after, a series of new, overlapping attempts were made to extract value from the land, often with regrettable consequences. Agricultural settlement, industrial-scale fishing and logging, mineral extraction, and commercial 3 “Report, for the Year 1857” (1858), p. 10, quoted by Campbell, p. 40.4 Campbell, p. 98; and James P. Barry, Georgian Bay: The Sixth Great Lake (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1968), pp. 49–50.5 Campbell, p. 64.10 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAY

11 FINDING THE FIELD OF BATTLEshipping were among the major, sometimes competing, uses to which the region was put.Of these, agriculture was probably the least successful. In the early 1850s, the government of Canada West began promoting agricultural settlement of the tract of land between Georgian Bay and the Ottawa River. It initiated the construction of a network of coloniza-tion roads and offered free land grants to farmer settlers. Although people, as we have seen, had a reasonable awareness of the limitations of farming the Shield country (especially nearer the bay), they nevertheless had faith that pockets of fertility could be found and made valuable.In its usual teasing way, the bay itself may have played a role in inspiring such faith. As the Huron knew as far back as pre-contact times, a tongue of Southern Ontario’s fertile sed-imentary basin stretches north to the bay’s southern shore. By the mid-1820s, those parts of the shore had already been surveyed, settled, and rendered productive. If the climate supported agriculture here, why wouldn’t it in any fertile spots discovered just a bit further north?By 1868, a colonization road (today’s Highway 141) was completed between Bracebridge and Parry Sound. A north-south road passing through McKellar reached the Magnetawan Valley by 1872. A third road connecting Rosseau to Lake Nipissing through Hagerman Township was completed in 1873. Settlers began pouring into the region through Parry Sound, which they reached by a steamer service running from Collingwood. Great hopes were placed in the fertility of the lands adjacent to roads passing through the towns of McKellar and Hagerman and in the valleys of the Magnetawan and Still Rivers.By the 1890s, however, it was already clear that those hopes were misplaced. Many farm-ers upped stakes and headed west to the Strathcona region east of Edmonton.6 By 1912, soil depletion, crop failures, and an economic depression saw the pace of depopulation quicken. Parry Sound was by then the major embarkation point. Only recently has population in the area climbed back to the levels reached in 1910.Although abandoned homesteads soon reverted to bush, the failed agricultural experiment of the later nineteenth century nevertheless left its mark on the landscape — not so much physically as politically. The creation of the districts of Parry Sound and Muskoka and of their subordinate townships coincided with the period of prime agricultural settlement. 6 James P. Barry, Georgian Bay: The Sixth Great Lake (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1968), p. 72.

PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYcontributed to the devastation by selling the timber rights to their land and engaging in logging directly during winter months. The coup de grâce was delivered in the 1930s when a series of devastating fires caused by sparks from rail engines tore through the resinous slash pine, destroying soils and exposing bedrock. Today, vast areas of rock remain exposed, contributing to flooding and erosion. Where soil survived, poplars now grow. Hardwoods as well as brush species survive in the gullies, and cedar and spruce remain at the fringes of creeks. But it will likely take many centuries for the mighty pine to return to the landscape it once dominated. This prospect makes the pine-covered islands that escaped logging all the more valuable.Two other industrial-age activities associated with the bay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were mining and commercial shipping. For a time, prospectors had hopes of finding mineral deposits in the bay’s Shield country. Copper was indeed found in Foley and Cowper Townships, and in 1894 two mines were opened there. But the really significant discoveries were made to the north in places such as Sudbury and Elliot Lake. In so far as the bay region benefitted from mining, it was indirectly. In 1913, an explo-sives plant, for example, was built near Parry Sound at the town of Nobel to supply the northern mines.Shipping made a larger contribution to the area’s economy by transporting, for example, grain from the West to elevators at Collingwood or settlers to the West from rail heads at Collingwood and, later, Parry Sound. As an industrial-scale transportation corridor, how-ever, the bay again proved something of a tease. Its waters were dangerous and difficult to navigate even by the relatively small vessels of the day. The history of Georgian Bay shipping is largely a history of violent storms and wrecks. In any case, shipping fell off with the expansion of rail, the decline of lumber, and the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.8Industrial-age Georgian Bay, then, saw numerous attempts at finding productive uses for the land. None proved durable and almost all left behind a regrettable legacy of environ-mental damage and disappointed hopes. One particular land use, however, that sprang up alongside the others, but that remained essentially hostile to them, did survive — recreation. 8 Barry, p. 163.14

“Hole in the wall,” Pointe au Baril

16 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYThe development of Georgian Bay was unique in that cottaging and tourism didn’t arise, as in many other places, before or after other uses exhausted themselves. It arose, rather, in conjunction with those uses and in the end simply outlasted them. By the 1960s it was, as it were, the last man standing.The region’s potential as a centre of wilderness recreation at the edge of a rapidly urban-izing and industrializing continental core was recognized from early days. The same mid- nineteenth-century surveyors who warned of the land’s “uselessness” from an agricultural or industrial point of view nevertheless extolled its virtues as a tourist destination. Not surprisingly, tourists arrived at the bay on virtually the same trains and steamers that brought the commercial loggers and fishermen.Residents of the south shore were perhaps the first people to make recreational use of the archipelago by picnicking and berrying on the islands. Eventually, they organized island pic-nic parties for outsiders who made the trip to Collingwood by train. A hotel in Penetanguishene advertised rates of between $1.00 and $2.50 per day.9 Camping parties and boarding houses began appearing in the 1870s. American fishing clubs organized many of the first of such parties. In fact, Americans seeking temporary relief from life in highly industrialized towns and cities were among the first tourists to hunt, fish, camp, and, eventually, buy property in the archipelago.10 The first island to be sold in the archipelago was purchased as early as 1881.11As the nineteenth century drew to a close, residents as well as governments realized that bringing tourists into the region could be as valuable as shipping resources out. Steamships began conducting tours of the islands in the 1880s, and hotels began opening in 1890s — some developed by former commercial fishermen who saw catering to the tourist trade as more lucrative than catching whitefish.12 In 1906, the government declared a preference for 9 Barry, p. 148.10 Campbell, pp. 83 and 87. 11 Campbell gives 1884 as the year of the first island purchase (p. 89). However, according to a title deed now in the possession John (Sandy) Boyd, a former president of the Sans Souci and Copperhead Association, the Boyd family first purchased an island in the archipelago in 1881.12 Barry, p. 149.

17 FINDING THE FIELD OF BATTLEselling cottage lots over collecting timber dues. By the 1930s, mill towns like Parry Sound and Byng Inlet avoided terminal decline only by transforming themselves into supply centres for seasonal residents.13Well before the artists of the Group of Seven immortalized the landscapes of the Georgian Bay littoral as icons of Canadian wilderness, the islands and associated shoreline of the archi-pelago were sought out expressly because they appeared to offer a more authentic wilderness experience. The region was valued precisely because of its wild inaccessibility and incon-venience. In fact, it was sometimes contrasted with other popular recreational resorts such as Muskoka, which one late nineteenth-century admirer of the bay dismissed as a “vortex of fashionable dissipation.”14 Modern islanders will recognize the sentiment.What they likely wouldn’t recognize is what actual conditions on the bay must have been like around 1900. Log booms, commercial shipping, bays clogged with sawdust and sunken timbers, smoke from burning mill waste, and the noise of mills at work were all reminders that the wilderness was less than pristine. From early on, industrial uses of the bay conflicted with recreational uses.Seasonal residents soon began banding together to protect their interests. In 1916, a number of local associations united to create the Georgian Bay Association (GBA), an organization that, unlike piecemeal local governments, sought to represent the entire archipelago and act on a regional scale. Its early aims were relatively modest. They included supporting initiatives to control water pollution — not least caused by cottagers, boaters, and hoteliers themselves — and to protect fish and wildlife. The GBA later expanded its activities to lobbying for the creation of parks and wildlife reserves and for protecting the environment generally.The industrial era ended on the bay not because of the activities of the GBA or other recreationists but because the region’s environment simply couldn’t sustain these industrial activities indefinitely. Recreation, by contrast, survived as a land use precisely because it 13 Campbell, pp. 81 and 92.14 “By an Old Camper,” in Guide to Muskoka Lakes, by Muskoka and Nipissing Navigation Co. (1888), p. 47; quoted in Campbell, p. 151.

Snug Harbour lighthouse

19 FINDING THE FIELD OF BATTLErespected the unique nature of the Georgian Bay environment in a way that other land uses hadn’t. It was, after all, in the interests of seasonal residents and other recreational users to preserve (and, where they could, restore) the very wilderness that they flocked to the region to enjoy.In the 1950s and 60s, however, the very success of recreation on the bay began to threaten the integrity of its landscapes and the viability of this form of land use. Rampant recre-ation-related development threatened to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. As a result, the GBA expanded its role again. It led the charge in stopping potentially damaging projects, such as a plan to build 54 cottages on Wahsoune Island. It also pursued important strategic goals such as persuading government to adopt a rational land-use plan for Crown islands and other lands along the eastern shore from Honey Harbour to Key Harbour. In 1963, the province, responding to concerns about unfettered development, imposed a freeze on Crown land sales in advance of formulating such a plan.The GBA during this period was the closest thing the area had to a regional government. Its role in protecting the environment of the Georgian Bay littoral and advocating for sustainable land use reflected a power vacuum. The townships created during the era of agricultural settlement were incapable of extending regulations or planning initiatives beyond township boundaries that, as we have seen, bore little relation to geographic reality. Several townships were, in fact, “unorganized.” Essentially, they were townships in name only — without elected councils, municipal staffs, zoning bylaws, or official plans. Hard services, such as they were, were provided by provincial ministries. In the context of this imperfect patchwork of local government, the GBA was the only organization, apart from the province, constituted to address land use regionally. The GBA, however, was not a government and didn’t have governmental powers.As long as the provincial freeze on land sales held, the inadequacies of local government remained tolerable to both seasonal and year-round residents of the region. However, as the 1960s drew to a close and it became clear that the freeze could soon be lifted, several orga-nized townships sought to extend their tax base and their remit by annexing adjacent unor-ganized townships. Since such amalgamated entities would have continued to bear little relation to the geographic unity of the littoral and since seasonal residents on the islands

20 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYfeared that their interests would be sacrificed to those of a much smaller population base inland, these annexation proposals provoked a crisis. The creation of the Township of the Archipelago a decade later was the ultimate result.The annexation crisis, however, should be understood as only the immediate cause of the drive to form a new township. The roots of its creation, as I have tried to show, go back several centuries to the various experiments to find a viable way of living in this unique and sometimes challenging environment. As that environment defeated the successive uses to which humans have sought to put it, recreation emerged as an alternative that has proven sustainable to date and with careful stewardship may continue to prove sustainable in future. Better reflecting the geographic unity of the littoral than anything that existed before, the township was eventually formed to help enable that stewardship.

21CHAPTER TWOCourtship FrolicsThe Merger Controversies in Parry Sound District, 1968 to 1973If comedy ends in marriage and tragedy in death, the story of the founding of the Township of the Archipelago clearly belongs to comedy. Marriage was the climax of a plot with more intricate twists and turns than the Georgian Bay shoreline. The marriage in question, how-ever, didn’t involve a single starry-eyed couple but the inhabitants of the unorganized island townships who banded together to form the new municipality. Nor was the marriage plot confined to them alone. Starting in the late 1960s, the entire District of Parry Sound was the scene of countless pursuits, wooings, and proposals all promising blissful matrimony to lonely townships but all, finally, proving abortive. Ironically, without these multiple failed courtships, our main protagonists might never have met and tied the knot. The formation of the Township of the Archipelago was, in the usual way of romantic comedy, something of an accident.The story begins in early 1968 when the Town of Parry Sound and the organized town-ships of Foley, McDougall, and Carling formed a joint steering committee to investigate

Gibralter rock in Bayfield Inlet. For years, the site of the Bayfield-Nares Islanders’ Association annual meeting, come rain or shine.

25 COURTSHIP FROLICSfor seeking amalgamation. As the major urban centre in the district, it had absorbed a great proportion of the population of the countryside that had migrated to urban areas as agri-culture and the timber industry declined. By 1969, the town was “bursting at the seams,” as it said in the “Statement of Claim” it presented to the OMB in support of its amalgamation proposal. It simply needed more space if it was to generate new economic development to support its present and future population of permanent residents. As it was, new businesses attracted to the area were often forced to locate in the adjoining townships simply because those municipalities could offer sufficient land. Carling, for example, was the site of a planned industrial park that many hoped would become an economic centrepiece for the entire district. Parry Sound found itself in the unenviable position of serving as a dormitory and service provider for the workforces of businesses that contributed their taxes to other municipalities.It’s little wonder, then, that Foley and McDougall, like Carling before them, proved reluctant amalgamation partners. There was simply less in it for them. Not surprisingly, the councils of each responded to Saad’s letter of March 20, 1969, by not only refusing to meet with him but also rejecting the merger scheme altogether. Throughout the spring and summer, Saad held off on his threat perhaps in hopes that his erstwhile partners might still come around but, by early October with civic elections in the offing, he acted, steering his amalgamation by-law through council and triggering a hearing at the OMB.These developments in the dance between town and townships were entirely predictable. What happened next was less so. Instead of simply reiterating their objections to amalga-mation with Parry Sound, Foley and McDougall went on the offensive. Working in concert, first Foley (on December 15) and then McDougall (on December 18) passed essentially identical by-laws requesting the creation of an even larger municipality than that proposed by Parry Sound, taking in the whole west side of the district. This new entity should encom-pass not only Foley, McDougall, and Parry Sound but also the village of Rosseau; the organized townships of Carling, Hagerman, Humphrey, McKellar, and Christie; and the unorganized townships of Conger, Cowper, Ferguson, Croft, Spence, and McKenzie. The organized municipalities would amalgamate and the unorganized townships would be annexed. The proposed annexations represented the real innovation and, as we shall soon see, the real watershed.

26 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYFor the moment, however, the pressing question is this: Having bravely resisted amal-gamation with Parry Sound, why would Foley and McDougall be willing to unite with a crowd of municipalities in addition to Parry Sound? Foley Council offered one possible explanation in its letter rejecting George Saad’s ultimatum of March 20, 1969. Members of council, the letter reads, “have attended several meetings on regional government and feel [that] the amalgamation proposed by [Parry Sound] is not on a scale the province has in mind.” In its by-law, it makes a similar point but instead of mentioning “several meetings,” it refers to having “authorised studies” and taken the appropriate advice. It appears, then, that Foley (and McDougall) rejected Parry Sound’s proposal and advanced a more ambitious plan of its own out of deference to the will of province, which it understood better having gone to meetings and authorized studies.It may well be that Foley and McDougall advanced their plan because they thought Parry Sound’s more limited vision would never fly with the province; but at least two other expla-nations present themselves. The simplest is that they worried that Parry Sound would dom-inate the partnership and so they sought to draw in other municipalities as a counterweight to the town’s power. The more convoluted is that they were in fact hatching a devious plot to prevent any form of amalgamation whatsoever. This plot, if plot it was, would have had two planks.First, Foley and McDougall might have had a reasonable expectation that Parry Sound would eventually see things their way and support their plan for a grander municipality. On December 9, 1969, only days before they passed their by-laws, George Saad was defeated in the Parry Sound mayoralty race by Roy Smith, who ran on a platform of fostering greater cooperation with regional partners. As he stated in his inaugural address: “If good relations are not maintained, this area cannot grow into a community in which people are happy to live, and in which industry is willing to settle.” Second, Foley and McDougall might have had an equally reasonable expectation that their proposal to amalgamate with several other organized townships would unleash a storm of protest. Even in the unorganized townships, where no municipal government existed, individual seasonal residents’ associations or an umbrella group such as the GBA could be expected to scream blue murder all the way to Queen’s Park.

27 COURTSHIP FROLICSTellingly, before passing their by-laws, neither Foley nor McDougall appears to have made any attempt to win support for its proposal from any of the governments in the organized townships or any of the residents’ associations in the unorganized townships. Even Parry Sound understood that it was best to solicit agreement before resorting to unilateral action. Foley and McDougall, by contrast, took unilateral action from the start, the kind of action that so incensed them when Parry Sound embarked on that path on October 7. Could they seriously have believed that the OMB would rule in their favour in the face of widespread opposition? Or were they counting on such opposition to kill their proposal (and Parry Sound’s) all along?This is the view taken by John Wilson, a professor of political science at Waterloo University, who, as president of the Crane Lake Association (a seasonal residents’ group), made significant contributions to the creation of the Township of the Archipelago. In an account of these events he wrote years afterward (see introduction above), he contends that the Foley-McDougall proposal was indeed launched with the sole intention of scuppering Parry Sound’s amalgamation request. The diabolically clever architect of this scheme, accord-ing to Wilson, was W.D. (Rusty) Russell, the legal counsel retained by McDougall (Wilson mistakenly says Foley, but counsel for McDougall and Foley worked together closely) to represent it at the OMB hearings: “Rusty Russell … suggested that the best way to beat Parry Sound was to say ‘never mind the small stuff, let’s go for the big one.’”If going for the big one was in fact a plan to beat Parry Sound at its own game, it couldn’t have worked any better. Under Roy Smith, Parry Sound warmed to the idea of a larger municipality almost immediately. The day after Parry Sound and other interested par-ties attended a meeting sponsored by McDougall on March 2, 1970, the town rescinded its October 7, 1969, by-law requesting the smaller-scale amalgamation and introduced a new by-law calling for the creation of the same large-scale entity proposed by Foley and McDougall. Without much ado, the first plank of the Foley-McDougall plan was firmly in place. The proposed amalgamations and annexations were now being pursued by a gang of three.The second plank, the incitement of opposition in the outlying townships, fell into place with almost equal ease. Carling Township had already sent an outraged letter of protest to Darcy McKeough, Ontario’s minister of municipal affairs, on December 22, 1969, only five

28 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYdays after McDougall and seven days after Foley passed their amalgamation by-laws. But the real freight train of opposition got rolling on April 15, 1970, when the reeves of Carling, Christie, McKellar, Hagerman, and Humphrey, the mayor of Rosseau and their common solicitor, Bruce Cunningham, met “informally” at the law offices of Powell and Cunningham in Parry Sound. Taking a page out of Foley and McDougall’s book, the assembled munic-ipalities — call them the gang of six — decided that the best defence was offence. Although it would take them more than a year to pass the necessary by-laws, they agreed to advance amalgamation and annexation proposals of their own that would surround Parry Sound, Foley, and McDougall with three new North, South, and East municipalities.In the North, Carling would annex the unorganized townships of Shawanaga and Harrison and parts of the unorganized townships of Ferguson, Burpee, and Burton. (Carling, apparently, had no objections to annexations; it was amalgamations they couldn’t stomach.) In the East, Hagerman and McKellar would amalgamate with each other and annex the unorganized townships of McKenzie and Ferrie and parts of the unorganized townships of Spence, Croft, Ferguson, Burpee, and Burton. And in the South, Humphrey, Christie, and Rosseau would amalgamate with each other and annex the unorganized townships of Monteith and Conger. At first, the unorganized township of Cowper was to be left to the devices of Parry Sound, Foley, and McDougall, but the gang of six eventually chose to lump it in with Monteith, Conger, and the other inmates of the South.As for the motives of the gang of six in advancing their proposal, Bruce Cunningham apparently told John Wilson in one of his 1980s interviews that the six could have lived with the creation of the three new municipalities but really wanted nothing more than to thwart the proposal of the gang of three. In the early 1970s in the west of the Parry Sound District, then, everyone was proposing marriage but no one (with the possible exception of the Town of Parry Sound) actually wanted to marry.For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, it took considerable time for what were now two competing visions for restructuring government in the district to be heard by the OMB. By-laws had to be passed, statements of claim and of defence had to be submitted, and pro-fessional planners had to be engaged to produce studies in support of the one or the other vision. In early 1971, Darcy McKeough, the minister of municipal affairs, began making the

30 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYrounds, hoping to bring the competing parties together in some kind of grand consensus. All of that took time, and hearings kept being pushed back. They were finally scheduled for July 10, 1972, at the Agricultural Hall in Foley. The plan, at first, was for the OMB to hear the gang of three’s application and the gang of six’s set of applications at the same sitting. Eventually, however, it was thought best to consider the gang of six’s plan at a separate session scheduled for April 24, 1973.To this point, one of the remarkable features of our story is how quiet the residents of the unorganized townships remained until the very eve of the first OMB hearings. If Foley and McDougall really did count on these residents’ joining the parade of opposition against their plan for a grand, single municipality, they would have been sadly disappointed for nearly three years. They had every reason to believe that protests in the unorganized townships would be loudest of all.The unorganized townships, it has to be understood, differed fundamentally from the organized townships — and not just because they lacked formal local government. While the dominant populations of organized townships were permanent residents, those of the unorganized township were seasonal. It was precisely because of the concentrations of permanent residents in their territory that organized townships became organized in the first place. The unorganized townships had remained unorganized because they were primarily inhabited by people who resorted to them for purposes of recreation and tourism. For these people, economic development in the region would have been a low priority: They made their living elsewhere. Consequently, their interest, especially out on the eco-logically sensitive islands, was almost solely focused on preserving the environment that attracted them to the area in the first place. This interest would have been shared even by permanent residents for whom economic activity and development was important. Since their livelihoods depended overwhelmingly on servicing the needs of seasonal residents, they understood perfectly the significance of environmental protection to their economic well-being.The organized townships, too, had their share of seasonal residents, and they weren’t exactly blind to the economic significance of recreation, tourism, and environmental pro-tection. All of the amalgamation and/or annexation proposals that came to the fore in those

31 COURTSHIP FROLICSdays cited environmental protection as a prime reason for adopting them. The argument, invariably, was that bigger municipalities with broader tax bases would be better able to control and mitigate environmentally harmful activities. On the other hand, organized townships with their larger populations of permanent residents had interests beyond envi-ronmental protection and the recreation economy. However strong the recreation economy had been in the post-war decades, however great its contribution to local development, it wasn’t generating untold wealth for permanent residents in the present and wasn’t considered a guarantee of economic prosperity in the future. From the permanent residents’ point of view, the District of Parry Sound in 1970 was a depressed region. From 1961 to 1971, the population of Ontario grew by almost a quarter. In the District of Parry Sound, the pop-ulation of permanent residents grew by only two percent. In fact, the size of the permanent population had been stagnating for at least 50 years. In the organized townships, local gov-ernment leaders were convinced that if jobs were going to be provided for the sons and daughters of the permanent population, the economy would have to diversify. If the price of economic diversification involved a degree of environmental degradation, so be it. As Mayor Smith made clear in his inaugural address quoted above, the name of the game was creating conditions “in which industry is willing to settle.”Consider, then, the prospects facing residents of the unorganized townships, especially those, seasonal and permanent, living out on the islands. Absorption into an organized municipality would inevitably mean a significant increase in taxes without any likelihood that residents’ real concerns — planning and the environment — would be adequately addressed. Some resources might go to supporting the enforcement of zoning by-laws or even the construction of a secondary sewage-treatment plant in Parry Sound. But others would likely go to supporting economic development of a kind that would put the environ-ment at risk. The bulk would no doubt be expended providing services those in previously unorganized areas neither wanted nor required. Islanders, for example, don’t need garbage collection or an extensive road network. They must haul their own garbage on roads that are mostly waterways. Of all the residents potentially affected by the plethora of amalga-mation and annexation proposals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, those in the unorganized townships had the least to gain and the most to lose. That’s why Foley and McDougall’s

32 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYThe Ojibway Hotel, Pointe au Baril

33 COURTSHIP FROLICSaddition of annexations to their proposal for local government reform was a watershed. Up until then, their amalgamation discussions involved municipalities who, whatever their differences, shared a community of interests. Centring on the environment, the interests of the unorganized townships were either different from those of the organized areas or even directly opposed to them.Under the circumstances, you might have expected people in the unorganized areas to have led the charge against what the organized townships were proposing. But despite several years’ worth of newspaper coverage, they seemed blissfully unaware of the threats. In 1972 in the months running up to the OMB hearings in Foley, the GBA was having difficulty recruiting new directors and officers. The outgoing leadership under President Morley Patterson decided that the major representative of seasonal residents in the District of Parry Sound should suspend its activities until such time as the organization was again needed. Patterson, however, agreed to monitor and report on any future events that might touch on the interests of the GBA’s constituency. Clearly, in the district of the early 1970s, organized and unorganized townships were two solitudes.The turning point came in late June of 1972. In advance of its July 10 hearings of the gang of three’s proposal in Foley, the OMB sent out a brief notice to all seasonal and per-manent residents in the affected areas. Wallis (Wally) King, a seasonal islander in Conger and the vice president of the Sans Souci and Copperhead Association (SSCA), recalls receiving a postcard: “I thought, ‘there must be some mistake. I don’t understand this. I never heard of the thing before.’” Thinking of the original 1968 Parry Sound plan, he had known that “some of the inland townships had been fighting with each other,” but this was the first he had heard of any proposal to annex Conger and Cowper. His first thought was to pitch the card and forget the matter. Instead, he decided to call Ted Hetherington, another Conger islander and president of the SSCA. In discussing the situation, King and Hetherington soon realized the implications:These inland townships would now be supervising us not appreciating our uniqueness in the sense of water quality, the environment, the planning difficulties — we weren’t a bunch of square lots on Leslie Street in Toronto.

34 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYThis map for Parry Sound District illustrates how the township boundaries in Ontario are laid out in a grid basis with no reference to either natural or socio-economic features. Good planning respects both the natural geography and the interests of the local communities. The grid pattern for the development of township boundaries for political purposes reflects these concerns only by accident as opposed to by design.

35 COURTSHIP FROLICSMany of the staff of these townships had never been on the bay. They had some idea it was out there somewhere and a few of them may have fished out there but they didn’t really know it.By the end of their call, King and Hetherington had decided to hire a lawyer to represent the SSCA at the upcoming hearings. This decision marked the beginning of opposition in the unorganized townships to the annexation proposals. It can also reasonably be said to have marked the beginning of the creation of the Township of the Archipelago itself.The SSCA’s King and Hetherington had only two weeks to find an appropriately expe-rienced lawyer and to prepare a brief for the OMB hearings in Foley. It was a scramble but, by the time the five-day hearings began on July 10, they had hired D.J. MacLennan, Q.C., of Smith Lyons in Toronto and were ready to present their case. After the gang of three made their arguments for, the gang of six made their arguments against, and so too did Hetherington and MacLennan, representing the SSCA and the unorganized townships. According to Wally King, also speaking out strongly against the proposal was a contingent of permanent residents, led by Wellington Welsh, from the Conger islands. They feared that annexation by Parry Sound and the others would lead to the closure of the school on Moon Island that their children attended by “school boat” in summer and snowmobile in the winter. King remem-bers talk of sending the children to school on the mainland and boarding them in Parry Sound. At the hearings, the story goes, Wellington Welsh of Welsh’s Marina broke into tears while addressing the issue. During one session, reports King, the debates became so heated that the OPP had to be called and the hearings temporarily suspended.After the completion of the hearings, the OMB deliberated for several months before delivering its decision on November 9, 1972. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it ruled against the proposal. Rusty Russell’s devious plan, if plan it was, had yielded the desired outcome. But, despite the haste with which it had been prepared, the brief presented by Hetherington and MacLennan evidently made a strong impression on the board. In its ruling, the OMB gave prominent consideration to the impact of the amalgamations and annexations on seasonal residents throughout the townships in question. It noted that seasonal residents “would account for approximately one-half of the assessment in the proposed new town,” before

38 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYprofessional lives in Toronto, Ormsby’s office was directly above King’s. In subsequent years, whenever King needed advice on Archipelago business, he would tap against his office ceiling with a broom handle. Ormsby would then know to get the scotch ready: Wally was coming up for a talk.By early 1974, then, the residents of the unorganized townships, seasonal and permanent, North and South, had formed a joint front against annexation. Many were well aware, how-ever, that simply opposing annexation was not enough. They also had to offer some kind of positive vision to set against any proposals simply to throw unorganized areas into the loving embraces of organized townships. In other words, like other actors we have seen, they had to devise a proposal of their own for restructuring local government.Wally King recalls first discussing the idea of form-ing an organized archipelago township, at least in the Conger-Cowper area, with Ted Hetherington in the two weeks leading up to the OMB hearing in July 1972. John Wilson tells the story that at those hearings, the OMB’s vice chairman, A.H. Arrell, replying to Hetherington’s vehement denunciations of the gang of three’s proposal, suggested that perhaps the SSCA should consider forming a municipality of its own. By August of 1972, the GBA’s then president, Morley Patterson, was reporting on talk making the rounds calling for a “form of coastal government,” although he quickly dismissed such talk as “impractical” and suggested that nothing was actually in view other than “an ‘Authority’ [i.e., a conservation authority] for the coast.” A year later, however, the SSCA passed a motion to seek the formation of a single organized township by uniting Cowper with the offshore islands and western part of Conger. This was still not the full Township of the Archipelago vision, but it was well on the way to arriving at it.Tony Ormsby and Wally King on Tony’s island in Nares Inlet, 2012.

39 COURTSHIP FROLICSIn a sense, then, the SSCA and other associations in unorganized areas were taking a page out of the book of those organized townships that resisted amalgamation by suggesting alternative visions. However, the SSCA and its allies, we must recognize, weren’t simply seeking to forestall annexation. The unorganized townships had pressing internal reasons for organizing that may explain why their initiative ultimately succeeded where those of the organized townships failed. Wally King tells the story of cruising the bay with Ted Hetherington one fine day in the early 1970s. Coming across tennis balls bobbing in the waves, they followed the trail to a small rocky island on which the owner had built a tennis court cantilevered far out over the water. At worst, the tennis court was an example of inappropriate development that detracted from the character of the region. For King and Hetherington, it was nevertheless representative of unchecked building that could have far more harmful consequences for the environment than aesthetic pollution. Some old timers remember the days of the unorganized townships as a golden age when taxes were low and rugged individuals could do as they pleased. But with the seasonal population of the District of Parry Sound doubling over the course of the 1960s (that after having tripled in the 1950s), these rugged individuals were threatening to become a rugged horde. The truth is that the escalating environmental pressures being put on the bay by recreational uses were demanding change in both the North and the South.One change that wouldn’t be coming to the bay was that proposed by the gang of six. Hearings into the gang’s three proposals began as scheduled on April 24, 1973. It soon became apparent, however, that the numerous presentations to be made to the board couldn’t be heard in a single set of hearings; so a second set was scheduled for July 9. On September 13, 1973, the OMB delivered its verdict. It dismissed all of the requests for annexations. It observed that in the case of Conger and Cowper, Foley would have made a more logical annexation partner than Humphrey, Christie, and the village of Rosseau.1 Annexation by the latter three would contribute nothing to meeting the “serious need of some kind of an organized sewage disposal system” in these unorganized areas. Similarly, in the North, the 1 This observation alarmed Hetherington, who feared that Conger and Cowper were being set up to be taken over by Foley.

40 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYannexation of Shawanaga and Harrison by Carling Township would also fail to alleviate the serious sewage disposal problems that existed in those unorganized areas as well. For this reason, the board dismissed Carling’s proposal as it did the annexation requests of Hagerman and McKellar. It did, how-ever, indicate a favourable attitude toward the amalgamations proposed by the various organized townships involved but noted that the provincial government had recently announced a “study of the area with a view to its ultimate reorganization. Under these circumstances,” it ruled, “it would seem unwise to disturb the status quo.”On August 23, only three weeks before the OMB’s ruling, Donald Irvine, parliamentary assis-tant to the treasurer of Ontario, announced the creation of the District of Parry Sound Local Govern ment Study Group (later known as the “Martin Study Group”) to explore alternative forms of local government that would take into account the needs of seasonal, as well as permanent, residents. After five years of witnessing the courtship frolics of the towns and townships of the District of Parry Sound, the government of Ontario had had enough. The OMB was not the appropriate forum to decide the future of local government in the district. The stakes were too high. The province would first inform itself through a study undertaken by a committee chaired by David Martin of the Ministry of Treasury, Economics and Intergovernmental Affairs. Then, it would act. The issue of local government reform in Parry Sound had entered a new phase.The TOA’s first office was rented space above Ritchie Insurance in Parry Sound.

41CHAPTER THREEPutting It on the MapThe Archipelago Project from 1974 to 1978On most maps, the Georgian Bay archipelago simply doesn’t exist — at least not in any form that corresponds to reality. Their scales are too small to register the numbers, sizes, and complexity of the “thirty thousand islands” of which the archipelago is comprised. What the eye doesn’t see, of course, the mind has difficulty grasping. It’s all too easy to discount the significance and integrity of a landform when it can’t be easily represented. Similarly, it is all too easy to dismiss any notion of organizing a government based on a seemingly nebulous geography. In the mid-1970s, when the question of local government restructuring in Parry Sound District shifted first to the Martin Study Group and then to the provincial government directly, the challenge confronting those pursuing the Archipelago project was to put the place and their idea on the map.The creation of the Martin Study Group in the autumn of 1973 fundamentally altered the amalgamation landscape in Parry Sound District. Amalgamations and annexations were,

44 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYthat was quickly getting out of hand. Cottages were being built, it was generally felt, on islands that were far too small, on unsuitable terrain, or on narrow boat channels where their docks proved a hazard to navigation.Eventually, Hetherington and King, who, in addition to their roles in the SSCA, were on the executive of the GBA, were enlisted by the MNR itself to draft the controls themselves. As King explained later:The MNR was trying to impose development controls like those we have in Toronto. But none of those are really relevant to the bay. For example, I remember a discussion about church steeples. Church steeples couldn’t be over 300 feet because of air navigation. I said, “Look, you don’t need to mention that at all.” They said, “What do you mean?” I said, “God will look after that. The wind will blow down anything over 300 feet.” It was development that affects the environment that was the real issue. They knew we understood the situation better; so they got Ted and me to write the draft plan.The control order came into effect on January 3, 1975. It covered the islands fronting Conger, Cowper, Harrison, Henvy, Shawanaga, and Wallbridge and the strip of mainland 1,000 feet back from the water’s edge in front of these areas. What made it significant from the point of view of the Archipelago project was that it represented the province’s implicit acknowl-edgement that the archipelago was a distinctive place requiring its own form of government regulation. The control order, in short, made it easier to argue that the archipelago was a unified region deserving a single unified local government.The second course of action the SSCA embarked on was to respond to the Redfern report by commissioning an expert study making the case for an archipelago municipality. During the autumn of 1974, Ross Gray’s GBA committee was preparing a point-by-point reply to Redfern but without promoting the Archipelago. What was required in addition to Gray’s work was the articulation of a positive alternative to anything Redfern recommended that would introduce the Archipelago vision to Martin, the public, and, most importantly, the province. The key to gaining attention, however, was to find a recognized expert to

give the study credibility and force. Up to this point, the champions of the Archipelago project were merely the leaders of a seasonal residents’ association with no special experience qualifying them to weigh in on matters related to local government. With no roadmap to follow, they needed an expert to express their vision and carry the torch.But here was the rub. For a fee, any number of professional planners might be induced to write a report. But could one be found who would actually believe in what he or she was writing? If the SSCA couldn’t convince a planner of the viability of its idea, how could it possibly con-vince the provincial government and the citizens of Ontario? Wally King led the initiative to find the appropriate person. PUTTING IT ON THE MAP45

46 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYAfter investigating 27 different planning firms in Ontario, he arranged interviews with representatives from four. At his Toronto office early one Saturday, he and several fellow SSCA executives talked to a prominent planner from a firm called Municipal Planners:This planner made a presentation about the number of employees they had, their educational qualifications, who was registered with the planners’ association, and so on. But there was a decided lack of interest. We were about to go to war, so to speak. There was no sense hiring someone who didn’t have the enthusiasm that we had. Eventually, we called a break [the meeting lasted five hours]. I took him out into the hallway and said, “You don’t seem that interested in what we want to do. What’s the matter?” He said, “Well, the idea of creating your own township. … People don’t do that. Townships are created by governments.” I told him we had every intention of moving forward. He replied, “Let me tell you, it’s just not doable.” Then I said, “You might as well go home.”King’s experience with Municipal Planners was typical of that with all the firms. The task of replying to Redfern and formally articulating the Archipelago vision on paper was hardly off to an auspicious start.Having already conducted an exhaustive search, King wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. Eventually, he spoke to Douglas Warner, who had recently succeeded Ted Hetherington as president of the SSCA (Hetherington remained on the executive and returned as president in late 1975). After consulting with Hamilton-based lawyer William White, Warner (who lived in nearby Niagara Falls) advised King to seek out Norman Pearson. As well as a pro-fessor of political science at Western who had once taught David Martin, Pearson was also a professional planner who had established his reputation in government circles with his work Wally King and Dr. Norman Pearson at Forbes Black’s cottage in Sans Souci in the 1990s.

47 PUTTING IT ON THE MAPon the Hamilton-Wentworth amalgamation and his important contributions to various government initiatives in eastern and northern Georgian Bay. It was Pearson, for example, who in the 1960s was the driving force behind the Northern Georgian Bay Recreational Reserve (originally the Killarney Recreational Reserve), whose creation effectively saved from inappropriate development large tracts of Crown land in northeastern Georgian Bay. With his planning and research background, reputation in government circles, and Georgian Bay experience, Pearson was in many ways an inspired find.However, whether he would support the Archipelago project was an open question given the responses of the planners already consulted. His support, in fact, was more doubtful than King could have imagined. Along with his work on the recreational reserve, Pearson’s record included his having written a report for the province on the importance of industrial parks to the diversification and development of the Parry Sound economy. Back in the summer of 1972, Pearson even appeared in front of the OMB in support of the gang of three’s annexation proposal. On June 28, 1972, in a letter accepting the invitation to appear sent by the counsel for Parry Sound, he wrote that it would be “a pity if [the town] simply becomes wholly dependent on recreational and seasonal employment.” While the perfect planner to artic-ulate and promote the Archipelago vision, he could by no means be counted on to respond positively to that vision and sympathize with the SSCA’s aims. Unaware of Pearson’s past history with Parry Sound, King and his colleagues couldn’t know that Pearson might prove a harder sell than even the people at Municipal Planners.Warner arranged for the SSCA’s executive to meet with Pearson in the last week of November. King took a room for the purpose at the old Railway Hotel in downtown Hamilton. As King tells the story:It was just an ordinary two-bed room. I invited some of our directors. About 10 or 12 of us got in this room. In those days people smoked. I’m not sure if the room was air-conditioned but there were clouds of smoke. Norman knocked at the door and came in. I introduced him around. Ted Hetherington was lying on one of the beds with the pillows propped up behind him. I explained to Norman what our problem was and what we wanted. I remember

48 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYhis key words; he said, “Gentlemen, this makes sense. Why not?” From that point on, we knew that we weren’t crazy.Clearly, it wasn’t the demeanour of the SSCA’s directors that sold Pearson but the force of the idea behind the Archipelago proposal. Despite his work on the industrial parks, he had the intellectual flexibility to recognize the significant merits of the plan. For its part, King’s committee, as Doug Warner later wrote, was impressed by Pearson’s “dynamic personality, his intimate knowledge of our area, his empathy for our ideas and his conviction that we were taking appropriate action.” Over time, he would play an instrumental role in establishing

49 PUTTING IT ON THE MAPthe project’s intellectual legitimacy. Not the least of his contributions was his suggestion that the word “archipelago” be incorporated into the name of the proposed township.Pearson quickly got to work on producing his study. The enterprise, significantly, was now a joint SSCA-GBA initiative. On November 13, 1974, Ted Hetherington had written to Tony Ormsby, the GBA’s president, requesting that the umbrella group formally lend its support to the project and sponsor the work that Pearson soon undertook to perform. The GBA agreed and, within a year, essentially became the main vehicle for promoting the Archipelago cause. Its emergence as a leader of this cause was important because it meant that the Archipelago now had the support of representatives of the entire island community and not just of the islanders in front of Conger and Cowper. As we have seen with the BNIA, not all of its member associations were immediately in tune with (or even aware of?) the plan. But all would come on board once Pearson completed his first report in the spring of 1975. (The BNIA formally endorsed the Archipelago proposal on August 16.)“Commissioned” by the SSCA and “sponsored” by the GBA, Pearson’s Georgian Bay Archipelago, A Decision for the Future: Environmental Control, Planning and Local Government in the Georgian Bay Archipelago was printed in April. It set out in detail the case for creating a municipal government encompassing the archipelago and its immediate shoreline. Arguing that existing townships with their rectilinear boundaries were “no longer useful” in serving the needs of the district’s various communities and discrete areas of recreational usage (what he called its “distinctive entities”), Pearson proposed a radical alternative. Areas on the fringes of the district already receiving services from centres such as Sudbury, North Bay, and Muskoka should be made over to those places. Parry Sound, the district’s one truly urban entity, should be assigned additional territory to accommodate its future development but should not be regarded as the anchor of a larger urban-centred region of the kind proposed by the gang of three, since the OMB had already rejected this possibility as undesirable.Smaller communities and their immediate hinterlands along the Highway 69 and Highway 11 corridors could be organized or reorganized according to the provisions of a new piece of provincial legislation that had received first reading on June 17, 1974. The government’s Northern Communities Bill (Bill 102) offered smaller northern centres a “selective form of incorporation.” It allowed them to collect local taxes and apply for the

50 PASSION FOR GEORGIAN BAYsame provincial grants made available to organized municipalities without forcing them to incur “the administrative expense of full municipal incorporation.” With the province being responsible for providing district-wide higher-order services such as hospitals, education, and policing, communities opting to incorporate under the bill could effectively operate independently of any township. As Pearson explained, “The key here is to recognize that the Township is no longer an appropriate unit for ‘point’ urban developments, but it has usefulness for the extensive low-intensity second-home development areas.”It was in the context of this solution proposed for the entire district that Pearson advanced his proposals for the archipelago. Here he relied heavily on the Georgian Bay Interim Development Control Plan (mentioned earlier) introduced by the MNR the previous January. On the basis of this plan, Pearson could propose rough boundaries for the new municipal-ity as consisting of the islands and immediate shoreline of an area stretching from Key River to the southern limits of Conger (but not including the shoreline and islands of Carling, a township already organized). And, more importantly, he could argue that environmental management and land-use issues imposed a natural unity on this area, rendering it worthy of being governed by a single municipality. “An archipelago municipality,” he pointed out, “would … be a strong factor for the preservation of the environment.”To this, he added the argument that people living in the archipelago had distinctive needs best met by a distinctive township:The difference between the archipelago and the inland lakes is precisely the difference between roads, piped services, and the whole gamut of the network of urban infrastructure, which affects all built-up areas, accessible by road, and the contrast of access by water only, with no vehicular traffic and no linkages to the local servicing network.Of course, he acknowledged the essential role that the growing seasonal resident population was presently playing in “subsidizing the urbanization” of inland places whose “industrial and functional base” had been weakening for decades. But he observed, logically (but per-haps not realistically), that the difficulties inland areas faced building an assessment base

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