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Precarious Balance in Muskoka – Speculators changing regional character
- for more of what is unwarranted expansion
The rest of us holding on for dear life –

I take accountability as religion. I’ve never had a problem accepting a personal or professional shortfall. If I’ve made an error or caused even a minute part of a problem or unfortunate situation, I fess up as soon as I’ve been made aware of my part in the debacle. I’m not Muskoka’s best citizen, but then I’m not its biggest folly either…..although this is open to debate. I just have a conscience that commands confession. I can’t live with myself if I’ve done a disservice, in house or community. And yes it’s also true, I’ve offered a lot of apologies over the decades, for stuff I probably didn’t even do. That makes up for things I did do….but probably shouldn’t have….and simply didn’t get found-out. As a widely published editorialist since the late 1970’s, it’s one area that has always been non-negotiable…..if I deserve blame and or it’s proven to me I should make restitution, correction or otherwise, there won’t be any question about my making amends. In print. In person. Just cause it’s the right thing to do and it’s a grand feeling to be entirely human……hopefully a decent human being, admitting openly and honestly we may have goofed up.
What I long to hear in our Muskoka region, is an elected official admit their leadership may have “sucked” in the past; their wisdom and insightfulness being somewhat less than what the community really needed in the area of good and responsible governance.
There are many urban development documents and good planning reference texts available to municipal politicians, investigating the negative aspects of urban sprawl and the contentious issue of establishing commercial pods all over God’s half acre, in small communities all over North America. They’ve all had access to this information and certainly they seem at times intelligent enough to understand the material. Yet they lend their resources to developers who know full well what happens when you take a small community and test its economic elasticity. In Bracebridge, in particular, the pod influences and impact on the main street will brutally manifest itself in the coming years for a number of reasons that were all known…..all discussed before approvals were granted to expand all over the place, without a clear town centre in this new century. What the town officials have guaranteed is that there will be an economic adjustment that will border on catastrophe……but they’ll by tradition, take no responsibility for their failures……..only the good stuff is worth recognizing.
The main street of Bracebridge is my old stomping ground and I love it dearly even now after living many years in Gravenhurst. The old buildings are expensive to maintain and often cost inefficient to rent out and still make a profit. I imagine that many insurance companies are researching carefully the fires in Wasaga Beach and Barrie where old commercial businesses were razed this year by large urban fires. As editor of The Herald-Gazette in the early 1980’s, I watched a huge chunk of urban landscape destroyed by fire, when the Thomas Block went up in flames one bitterly cold January day. While this was rebuilt with all the benefit of current safety inclusions to prevent the spread of building to building fire in the future, the main street is still composed of higher risk architecture; connected buildings, many without the firewall installations……..requirements proven effective today in curtailing the spread of fire building to building To make the mainstreets of our Muskoka communities vibrant isn’t as difficult as dealing with the overall problems of seriously aging structures, the need for widespread restorations, and cost efficiency all round. Check the ice build up on roof-lines on main street buildings in our historic mainstreet business sites. Then check out the same on new commercial buildings and box stores and you’ll see that the builders have factored in energy efficiency into their business designs. So what can really help the mainstreets?
The only way to save the downtown areas, the traditional main streets, is for massive urban renewal to be fostered by respective communities. This has happened in Gravenhurst most recently where old homes in serious decline were removed and replaced by a new building and a new commercial tenant. While some have complained bitterly about the historic character and charm of the main street being altered by this contemporary architecture, the fact is that it has guaranteed a critical new dynamic to the main business corridor at a time when the development of commercial nodes threatens to beat local commercial tradition into oblivion.
Municipal councilors need to take a serious look at this outward expansion and node development and how it will affect the future character of the communities. They must show goodwill toward the main street because it is where the town began…..and where it will die, if by ignorance, they leave it to falter in the wake of giant corporations and developers streaming past, who couldn’t care less about community heritage and that old-time sense of neighborhood well-being. If mainstreet commerce died in each of our communities, do you think the commercial nodes would feel a sense of loss……versus a chipper feeling that there’s less competition for the local dollar.
I’ve been a Muskoka historian for a long time and I’ve apprenticed with some of the best known historical types in our region from the 1970’s to the present, and I don’t have even the slightest doubt, that if this node expansion we have been witnessing as of late, is followed up by recessionary times in this province…..we will see a truly unfortunate tumble of local businesses from the traditional downtown centres,….forced into last ditch re-location to nodes….. or thrust unceremoniously into bankruptcies and closures up and down the street.
If you add onto this the statistics about tourism shortfalls and there shouldn’t be a councilor anywhere in this district…….not pondering what a further decline in our number one industry will mean for our economic future. Every councilor should want to know who are buying speculaltion condos and houses here……are they investors or are these to be family owned? Are we a retirement mecca…..do we know the average age of new home buyers in our communities? Are councilors giving any consideration to the fact we have serious limitations in retirement and nursing home beds, hospital beds and medical professionals? Is it wise to be developing Muskoka’s residential capacity with little consideration to the possibility we are stressing our resources too thinly for a safe and accommodating future?
I would like councilors to discuss these issues in public so that we can judge their grasp of the situation. Down the line a few years I have a feeling that these same councilors will be glad-handing all over the place for re-election and will take full credit for every perceived advancement and improvement, but will right-off failings as “the cost of progress.”
I feel the main streets have been badly short changed by those politicians who have fully supported the pod sprawl into the Muskoka countryside. An economic downturn in both real estate, public confidence and spending, will have a deep and profound effect on our respective town characteristics……and in this case, where decisions have been made with full appreciation of good advice to the contrary, well, me thinks there will be a few consciences disturbed amongst the progressives……who may feel some responsibility for shamelessly facilitating the over-retailing and over development of our modestly populated region of rural Ontario.
Heck I feel bad because for all my published critiques, I still couldn’t change the opinion of even one elected official…….to take the side of sensible proportion and loyalty to town heritage. I want to say that “they will live to regret their liberalities,” yet I’m more confident than ever, they will refuse to accept responsibility for the mess they create…….and as we have come to expect, continue to recognize what they see as positive, while washing their hands of the negatives. I do feel sorry for them in many ways, because enlightenment is such a liberating way to live life.
I do not feel we are being governed by “the enlightened,”……rather, I fear we are being led by the naïve, toward a very uncertain, precarious future in the region we call home.

Bracebridge re-visited; and the times I shall never forget

A writer friend asked me one day if there was some sort of historian’s mutual admiration club in Muskoka, where old farts like me could go and talk with vapid vigor about the days of yore….you know the kind of club where we have smoking jackets with crests and glasses of port to mix with a quarter-pounder Cuban cigar….with companion piped-in music from some aged, venerable folk musician regaling us with nostalgia..
“No……local historians around here don’t socialize…..most of them wouldn’t drink Port on a dare and they’re too bloody health conscious to chomp down on a rich, juicy length of wrapped tobacco,” I replied. “It’s not that we don’t agree with the rights and responsibilities of historians of the empire, we just don’t feel like any company just now.”
At one student-parent day at the local school, the teacher asked me to give a talk about being an historian…..after ten minutes of shooting the concept well over the fourth graders’ heads, I said in conclusion…....”let’s just say that being an historian doesn’t get me invited to many parties…..did I say many….ha…ha.” Well, they were still lost but after class, the teacher asked me for some research tips….as it was the case she was embarking on work to uncover some family history. While my kid was fed-up having an historian for a dad, I helped a teacher find her roots.
In Bracebridge I grew up historically. While other of my chums just chewed gum, basked in the sun listening to the transistor radio….playing Dylan or some period rock’n’ roll, I was paying attention to the way the town was advancing day by day. Now while this might seem a tad nuts, and who would be interested in such minute transitions, it was something I needed to know. I somehow knew that the town was on the verge of profound change, and that it would be important one day to know how this wee burg of 2,500 souls would become a sprawling half-empire by 2008.
When I began writing a column in the early 1990’s called “Sketches of Historic Bracebridge,” all the observations and explorations of my times spent here began to make sense. As a matter of some irony I had to move away before I could really make sense of it…..so here I was then…..writing about Historic Bracebridge while living in uptown Gravenhurst, in South Muskoka. Living ten miles away, in the tropics of true South Muskoka, meant I could look more objectively at my hometown experience. There was a sense of nostalgia and there have been times since 1989 when the thought of moving back to Bracebridge crossed our family’s collective mind. With my parents still residing in Bracebridge and business taking me there three to four times every week, I can’t get too homesick afterall….but I can view change with an added measure of objectivity…..I don’t have to give up my nearby meadow for a shopping centre as I might have in Bracebridge, a town with city aspirations here in the Ontario hinterland.
My columns from this period were full of people sketches, reminiscences about old friends and strange encounters. I realized that I was probably one of the only historians who believed it was more important to recognize the history of the people, the everyday front-line folk who built the town’s economic future in the same effort as they struggled to make daily ends meet. I had a greatly diminished interest to highlight local politicians and the major players in local wealth building. I always gravitated to the stories of the bakers and janitors, clerks and post office workers……I held patiently to the words of retired farmers and police officers, teachers and electricians, waitresses at the local greasy spoon, and lumbermen who always smelled like pine.
I despised the histories that over-estimated the contributions of the elite, the rich, the political mucky-mucks, and the social club executives; their stories as a rule always being half as interesting as the worker-bees of the community, the stay at home moms, the clerks, plumbers, and candlestick makers. We were a family of paycheck to paycheck working stiffs and sometimes we had to scrimp real hard and real long to make rent and eat at the same time. But we found kindnesses amongst our mates, our friends up at 129 Alice Street, the apartment where those of modest income could have a few residential comforts. And it was a community within a community, and to this day I will never forget how everyone kept their doors open in the evening, and residents trailed from one apartment to the other, getting in on conversations, good television or a radio program, or even a game of euchre needing a new player.
I have often wondered whether it is true of myself, as an historian, that I have been tainted by this general mistrust for the upper echelon and their still faithful historical scribes, who believe the only history worth telling is what great new thing the community leaders have bestowed on the future this time. While I have always paused to mindfully glance at the society news, just to keep up on what some believe to be the way toward salvation, it’s my opinion the pulse of the community is better understood being close to those in the midst of this ground level machinery….versus listening to the mutual admiration of cronies in between fat cigars.
I grew up as a street kid, tumbling through the alleyways across the town, investigating every nook and cranny, and watching events unfold both humorous and tragic and then, well “tragically humorous”…..such as when the local bouncer at the former Albion Hotel would eject a trouble-maker without first opening the door. Us wee lads used to sit on the railing by the tracks watching the front door for these flights of despair. For the bouncer there was no sense going to the extra effort of opening the door with one arm when a patron’s head would do just fine. When I used to write about events like this….. some of my historical colleagues would become quite belligerent about my cavalier approach to report the history of their town. While I have a great respect for protocol I have no respect for revisionists or those who believe local history begins and ends at town hall.
When I became editor of The Herald-Gazette in the early 1980’s, it was “one for the gipper,” I can tell you. And there were a lot of powerful folks who couldn’t figure out why the publisher would hire someone without social standing, a rootedness in the local service club program, or at least someone who could be moved by the will of protectionist reason. Here I was in the editor’s chair with about fifteen cents to pay that month’s rent, no earthly reason to bow to any of the political grandstanders who used to get all the press, and a person uncommitted to follow any protocol other than honest, responsible, unbiased reporting. I could think what I wanted about the folks in my community and their bad habits but it wasn’t going to influence my editorial capacity….and it never did. Now of course, after I had given up the editor’s desk and settled into a long tenure as a columnist, I let it all hang-out. Needless to say I made more than a few enemies. The combined forces of opposition began tightening the noose I knew was around my neck, and after I’d made my peace with local history….. and presented a new look at what has always been steadfastly maintained as fact ingrained, I knew it was time to move on and celebrate a period of relative non-confrontation in print or otherwise.
Today I’m a tad gentler, somewhat less resolved to save the world from tyrants and local politicians but I really haven’t changed my mind about the good folks who keep our communities alive and thriving……and admittedly I don’t mention the names of politicians, although I’ve met a few recently who have made me wonder if a trend is developing….or a new complacency arrived at.
I loved my job as editor because it allowed me to drink it all in, just as when, as a kid, I sat on the stoop at Black’s Variety and watched the adult world folly and fiddle, hustle and dawdle through each god-blessed day. I was proud to represent my hometown and yet I wasn’t about to hide news or bury what the public needed to know. And I had lots of angry readers who demanded that I bury what they believed wasn’t in the best interest of home and family. I fought them every inch and printed what I believed, in heart and soul, needed to be in the public domain. I was right more than I was wrong. I took a lot of abuse in a decade editing the Muskoka press but it was an experience I needed to expand my appreciation for life and times, good and evil, joy and tragedy. I had readers embrace me with heartfelt appreciation after a feature story…… and then I had angry readers intent on hurting me when we ran stories about their relatives being busted for impaired driving. I took a lot of heat for running negative news reports of any kind. For the first two years of my editorship, every Wednesday in local publishing was like driving with highbeams into a blizzard…..amongst those mesmerizing, dizzying snowflakes, there were a few good wishes….and you know, it was all I needed. Just a few folks to say, “Nice work Scoop….I wondered when someone was going to blow the whistle.”
I was born a writer and I shall die a writer. I will always show my goodwill toward those unsung community builders who work progressively and patiently, most often with modest return, who build the future one brick at a time…..one cheeseburger and fries, one bagged carton of milk in the bag.
Please check out Curious; The Tourist Guide for my newest column series in 2008 regarding the good old days as a beat reporter=controversial editor, working in the South Muskoka region of this grand old Ontario.