Dear Environmental Registry…

Dear Environmental Registry of Ontario--

I am writing today to request that the cottages at Rondeau Provincial Park be given another two-year lease for their cottage land. As a previous life partner and current close friend to a cottage owner and lease holder, I have witnessed the multiple ways the Canadian government has changed the rules and upended the cottagers lives over the last decade, requiring last-minute letters of testament to preserve spaces that people have called their summer homes for nearly seven decades.

The anxiety that not knowing what the government will do to them or their legal standing properties in Rondeau has done huge detriments to family cohesion and--perhaps to the purpose of these ERO shenanigans--their enjoyment of the minuscule amount of public land in Rondeau that their cottages have legally occupied for many, many decades.

When I read into all the background history (via legal documents, not just the Rondeau Cottagers' Association sometimes poorly worded pleas for justice), I couldn't understand what motivation the ERO had for this seemingly flippant behavior. Less than 1/2 of one percent of the land doesn't disrupt the environmental nature of the park, and the documents testify to that.

I work in mediation, so I have experience traversing legal documents and reports for context and subtext, and it is still unclear to me what motivation the ERO has for removing the cottagers and otherwise making their lives difficult, which always leads us to "big money" as a culprit in such cases. I wonder when that story will break with Rondeau as the setting. The other option is at another end of the spectrum: Do you plan on returning the land to the First Nations, to whom it ultimately belongs?

If either of those are the case, make it happen, kick the cottagers out, and be done with it so the lease owners can grieve and move on. But if that's not the case, then grant the cottagers their permanent leases, as has been agreed upon multiple times in the past by the Ontario government. There seems no evidence not to. And if there is, please make that known so cottagers can, again, come to terms with the way their worlds have been continuously upended by these needless debates.

I, for one, am a proponent of returning the land to its original owners (the First Nations people), but if there is some compromise to be had, as the cottagers have been better stewards of the land than the Rondeau park attendants have historically, then let that conversation between the cottagers and the First Nations people proceed quickly, even as it must include the Ontario government as a middle man.