Staying on a vessel…

Staying on a vessel overnight simply should not be allowed on small landlocked lakes in Ontario.

Almost all the shoreline on these types of lake is privately owned.

These owners have paid a lot of money to own this shoreline and they pay ridiculously high taxes to keep it.

There is no place that vessels such as houseboats can stay overnight that is not going to cause a problem of conflict.

None of the marinas on these lakes are set up to handle sewage/water issues for houseboats.

Also, these lakes, many of which are near capacity already for recreational use and environmental loading, cannot accommodate significant numbers of things like houseboats.

Houseboat type vessels should be restricted to the large lakes (Great Lakes) or to an existing historical waterway such as the Trent-Severn canal. Even on these canals there should be designated overnight stay areas so that conflict with permanent residents does not occur.

Another consideration is that there is currently essentially no way the local authorities, (municipal or OPP) have the ability to police overnight stay boats on the many small lakes in Ontario. There is not much point in making a rule you can't enforce.

For the above reasons alone (and this is no way a complete list) one should be very careful about granting stay aboard boats permission on these lakes.

One possible exception might be for moored boats over flooded land owned by a business that already rents accommodation and thus has the infrastructure to handle the clientele well and look after any waste issues with their existing systems. Sites like this are few and far between I think.

We are seeing a great influx of people from out of the immediate area, who come and use the few public beaches in our area (Dwight Ont.) This influx does not bring significant money to the local businesses but they use up the beach areas completely on some days. This is causing bad feeling and conflict with local residents, who somewhat correctly feel that they should be getting priority on their local parks and beaches over people from hundreds of km away. This was never a problem until recently when these park areas seem to be inundated on weekends.
This problem can only get worse, and by providing free parking and boat launching, we are promoting over use of the lake by people with no vested interest in the survival of the lake or it's quality. In short if they "bugger up the environment" they will just go to another site. This seems unfair to the permanent local population. Some kind of limits to this use, or charge for day use will soon enough become necessary. Look to Europe or some USA water bodies to see what can happen. We want to avoid this issue by catching it early, not waiting "fat, happy and useless" until the problem is bigger as Ontario did with ATV's. Waiting until several hundred thousand had been sold before discovering that there was really no place to use them and then struggling with a losing battle to let them be used and somehow (impossible) protect the environment.
The bizarre reverse logic that says "well they sold me the device so it must be legal to use it" seems too often to end up governing our actions. We should try not to let this happen on our small precious lakes.