Sam Riches is a freelance journalist based in Trent Lakes, Ont.
On June 27, the same night that Joe Biden took on Donald Trump in one of America’s most momentous debates, a political gathering on a much smaller scale – but with significant consequences of its own – took place at the Trent Lakes Municipal Office near Bobcaygeon, Ont.
Originally scheduled for earlier in the month but postponed because of a tornado watch, the Trent Lakes council meeting had all the classic hallmarks of small-town local-politics. About 25 people shifted in fabric-covered, steel-backed chairs, while a few dozen more tuned in online. A faint scent of patchouli oil and bug spray hung in the air, and the attendees were mostly grey-haired. Before the proceedings began, one man in the audience could be heard troubleshooting how to open a PDF document.
This scene is almost certainly not what comes to mind when you think about cottage country. Natural landscapes, after all, define so much of Canada’s iconography – the mountain peaks, pristine bodies of water and Group of Seven panoramas in our galleries, on our money and in our collective imagination. A cottage dock jutting into serene waters, bordered by lush forests with the call of loons emanating from somewhere distant, is another one of these pure Canadian images. These places promise a certain rustic, simple kind of peace, and they feel essentially ours.
But these town halls in cottage-country community centres have become thorny battlegrounds defining the future of these idyllic regions, where some of the same forces afflicting the rest of Canada have brought both challenges and opportunities. The agenda of this particular meeting, for instance, included a potential licensing scheme for short-term rentals (STR), a bit of profanity in paradise, and just one aspect of the transformation taking place in communities like these that reflect the broader economic, environmental, social and technological forces affecting cities – the very places that cottagers are usually looking to escape from in the first place.
“A perfect storm of factors came together to contribute to the emergence of the short-term rental market,” deputy mayor Carol Armstrong told the room, listing inflation, housing costs, remote work, and an imbalance between housing supply and demand. “There are far more people that want to come visit Trent Lakes than there are commercial accommodations to support them.”
Those visits have only accelerated since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people moved from urban centres to less populated areas. This influx has led to significant environmental and infrastructural challenges, including excessive garbage, noise pollution and strained local resources – roads, water supply, emergency services – that haven’t caught up to the population growth.
The short-term rental boom has also driven up property values, as cottages become seen as assets more than homes, and brought a revolving door of tenants that’s anathema to these close-knit communities.
Of course, this has also brought a swath of benefits, especially around spending in local economies. And as speakers reminded those in the council chamber, both people and money are needed to sustain cottage country as we’ve come to know it.
“I understand, from all the residents here, how tough this is, but I don’t think you understand how drastically different the real estate world has changed,” said one late-30s cottage owner who operates an STR, and whose family has lived in the area for more than 50 years. “There’s no way any younger generation can come in and buy real estate here without renting it out. And quite frankly, we are going to be the ones that buy your cottages at the end. I can’t afford to own this on my own.”
Canadians might imagine cottages are an escape from stress, and for some they can be, but local and absentee owners alike have increasing reason to worry about their lifestyles.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
I live in Trent Lakes, but it is hardly the only municipality dealing with these issues. Across Canada, rural communities are exploring or implementing regulations to manage the surge of short-term rentals and their associated challenges. Provinces such as British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Quebec have rolled out licensing programs, mandating all municipalities to adhere to standardized STR regulations. In Ontario alone, more than 100 municipalities have introduced various forms of regulation, with more than 50 opting for licensing systems. The future of certain proposed measures, such as outright bans on STRs, is currently being litigated in the courts.
The cottage country of Canadian myth may no longer exist today – or at least, if the images do, they’re now accompanied by concerns over infrastructure challenges, environmental sustainability, community cohesion and the encroachment of commercial development: many of the same issues being grappled with in the big city.
For many, the cottage is no longer just a getaway; it’s a full-time home, a remote-working retreat, a business opportunity, and, increasingly, a place undergoing a contentious transformation. Where once it meant something rural and rustic, it has become shorthand for luxury and exclusivity.
The recent discourse about the capital-gains tax and the federal government’s efforts to increase it for the sales of second homes exemplifies this shift; the Liberals have characterized those affected as being among the wealthiest 0.13 per cent of Canadians – a description that feels alien to many long-time cottage owners who now feel targeted. As their communities continue to change dramatically, some felt pressured to sell cottages that have been in their families for generations before the higher tax-rate took effect.
These many fissures are now manifesting in these close-knit communities in unexpected ways. At the Trent Lakes Municipal Office, attendees discussed the need to find a balance that honours the past while acknowledging the inevitability of change and its social effects. “We are not talking about neighbours here,” one woman said, referring to the numbered companies, moneyed private-equity firms and foreign investors buying up huge swaths of cottages and either operating STRs or sitting on the appreciating asset. “We are not talking neighbour-to-neighbour. And until we address this core concept, anything outside of it is going to keep pitting us against each other, which is not in the spirit of building community.”
So what exactly does cottage country mean in 2024? If cities’ problems have come to these small towns, what will they become? And if the region can go back to what it used to be, there’s another important question to ask: should it?
While renting has always been a reality of cottage country, its identity has changed significantly over the past century.
Its history can be broken down into five distinct periods, says the University of Northern British Columbia’s Greg Halseth, the Canada Research Chair in Rural and Small Town Studies and the author of Cottage Country in Transition.
Before the Second World War, these areas were exclusive retreats for wealthy families and accessible primarily by train. “You’d get wealthier business folks from places like Toronto; the families would go up to the cottage in the hinterland, they’d take the train up, and there’d be these big ferries that would carry the families around the lakes to their cottages,” Dr. Halseth said. “It was quite an elite landscape and not something that everyone could participate in.”
After the war, there was a broad uptick in economic prosperity and automobile access, which democratized cottage ownership and enabled middle-class families to access these spaces. This period saw a boom in development as modest cottages sprouted on small lakes. In the latter half of the 20th century, though, this democratization began to roll back, driven by the real estate market. “Cottaging property is scarce,” Dr. Halseth said. “There are only so many lakes. You can’t build around all of them and lots of them already have property on them. So as more people want it, the prices go up.”
Then, from the 1980s onward, the era of Keynesian economic policy, characterized by significant state investment in infrastructure, gradually gave way to neo-liberal policies that emphasized market forces and reduced government intervention.
“The state was really looking more to the market to make the key investments,” Dr. Halseth said. “Part of this was deficit fighting, part of this was government not having the money to invest like they had after the Second World War, and part of it was we had a lot of infrastructure. So provinces, especially, rode the benefits of the investments from the sixties and seventies.”
Property values in cottage country crept up in the 2000s as leisure time became more commodified.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
But as that infrastructure, including roads, bridges and essential utilities, grew out of date, governments began to pull back on investments, especially after the 2008 recession. Amid increased scarcity, the notion of the cottage as a simple retreat began to evolve into commodified assets, leading to increased property values, a shift toward more luxurious, year-round residences, and a change in who cottage country was for.
“Commodification takes an imagery – the cottage at the lake with the wharf, the water, the relaxation, and getting away from the stresses of urban living – and turns that into a commodity that’s bought and sold,” Dr. Halseth said. “Then you start having the rental of cottage properties. It had always been there, but now it was being turned not into something that could help you just pay for the cottage over the year, but it was being turned into a business.”
And at a time when leadership was needed, federal and provincial governments also largely abandoned their traditional roles of setting out development policy for these rural areas, Dr. Halseth told me. “There’s no clear state leadership on what the policy should be for the development of non-metropolitan parts of your province or country. We’re kind of letting it go on whatever industry wants to do, there’s no vision like there was in the 1950s.”
These changes are also filtering into local politics. Families are fearful of being priced out of the communities they’ve long called home. Environmentalists are worried about the strain on local infrastructure and the rapid disappearance of natural land owing to further development. The realities of full-time residents are overshadowed by the commercialization of cottages – with a whole industry of renovation shows dedicated to flipping these types of properties into businesses, for example – while the wealthy build sprawling mansions on fragile ecosystems and properties become ever-appreciating assets and status symbols.
“We’re going to become Vancouver,” one attendee at the council meeting told me. “Everyone local will keep getting pushed further and further away.”
This influx of development and new residents has placed additional strain on local infrastructure – and one of the more unnerving ways this has played out is in the already underfunded and ill-equipped health care services now grappling with new demand.
I’ve seen it firsthand. Last spring, after slicing open my hand doing yard work, I waited more than 10 hours in the ER to get stitched up – an all too common story in the summer, when the Trent Lakes population swells from around 5,500 to about 13,000.
Every time I see an ambulance with its lights flashing through the trees, burning down the road, I now find myself wondering if they’ll get there in time. And I wonder what the future will look like as the population continues to grow, private enterprise expands and communal resources continue to shrink.
When I told locals about my experience at the hospital, I got a tip: Next time, go to the emergency room in Minden Hills, about 45 minutes north. It was a good suggestion, at least for a few months; shortly after that, the Haliburton Highlands Health Services shuttered the department, citing staffing shortages, announcing instead that it would consolidate the services into Haliburton’s hospital, about 30 minutes away.
Several local groups, with thousands of combined members, continue to advocate for a reversal of the decision, saying the closing has only resulted in greater strain on emergency health care services. Growing demand and shrinking resources have turned the rural health care crisis into a ticking time bomb.
“In so many places, funding for things like health care are based on a permanent enumerated population. So how to deliver services, how to make infrastructure, when on paper, your population is quite low, but the visiting population is quite high?” Dr. Halseth asks. “Cottage properties are expensive to maintain, and we’re also asking questions about their environmental impacts – immediate impacts on lakes, waste disposal, water supply and the sheer carbon consumed with so many people travelling long distances every weekend.”
At Ontario's Aylen Lake, a road is closed to all except cottagers and their guests. Many provinces are tightening regulations on cottages as local infrastructure shows its age.
It’s not just visitors, either. There is an appropriately jargony academic term for the recent shifts fuelling surging cottage populations, according to Nik Luka, a professor at McGill University who specializes in ethnography, landscape studies, design and planning: “neo-counterurbanization.” This pronounced demographic shift sees people moving away full-time from major metropolitan centres and their suburbs, largely owing to the housing affordability crisis.
Mr. Luka has seen this shift among his graduating students. Instead of targeting urban jobs, they are increasingly looking to smaller towns and more affordable municipalities. It’s also playing out among older generations, including the oldest members of Generation X, who are approaching retirement and looking to downsize.
Outmigration from cities is a reality we’ll have to reckon with. “We can’t keep making larger metropolitan centres and densifying them,” Mr. Luka explains. “We have to move populations out into other parts of the country or the provinces.” This trend is not limited to Canada, either: This past spring, he attended a course in Belgium focused on the “dead end of metropolitan growth,” and learned that countries with emerging economies, such as Egypt and Morocco are actively building new towns to alleviate pressure on their cities, mirroring the way that England started building new towns to take the pressure off London and Manchester in the 1930s. “That’s alive and well in most of the Global South right now,” Mr. Luka said.
With that movement, though, comes tension. In Ontario, the influx of new residents, often wealthier and with different lifestyles, can significantly alter the local social fabric. Mr. Luka highlights Prince Edward County in Southeastern Ontario as an example. The surge in affluent newcomers shifted the character of local businesses, with more establishments catering to wealthier tastes, such as luxury accommodations, upscale dining and boutique wineries. This transformation has sparked concerns about losing the county’s traditional charm and accessibility, creating a divide between long-standing residents and new arrivals.
This shift also introduces governance challenges and conflicts over who gets to decide the future of these places. Mr. Luka offers another example from PEC, where, in 2021, a proposal to expand a local trailer park sparked debate between seasonal residents, conservationists and local officials. “You get this kind of dilemma around which option do we select?” he said. “And then the second part of it is, who gets to have a voice in that conversation?” he said.
So how can cottage country bridge these gaps, as communities strain amid growing crowds? One way is through education, suggests Becky Big Canoe, chair of the board for Mno Aki, an Indigenous land trust.
Mno Aki, which is governed by a council of Indigenous grandmothers, aims to reconnect Indigenous communities with their ancestral lands, which are now largely occupied by cottage-country developments. “Cottage country is situated on what once was our hunting grounds, and we don’t have access to it any more,” she said. “And yet, the impulse within so many of us is to go back to that kind of life.”
Her work emphasizes the importance of protecting water and maintaining healthy ecosystems, which are vital for the sustainability of traditional food sources. She points to the efforts of James Whetung of Curve Lake First Nation to rehabilitate wild rice beds as a microcosm of broader conflicts.
Mr. Whetung has involved community elders and members in these efforts to revive Anishinabek food sovereignty and food security. “He came into conflict with the cottagers, who thought that the rice was choking out their access to water, particularly for recreational use. Looking at it from our point of view, it was reclaiming our food, and from their point of view, it was we’re getting in their way.”
Education and shared experiences, such as inviting cottagers to participate in traditional practices, can reconnect people to the land and address some of the issues facing cottage country, while also supporting efforts toward truth and reconciliation and the Land Back movement, Ms. Big Canoe said.
“With the growth of the industry, the growth of cottaging, and more encroachment in more remote places, there’s an entitlement to just use it and leave it behind. There’s no real interaction with the land or anything that develops their sense of how nature provides for us. It’s just another venue to satisfy temporary wants.”
Changing that perspective could have reverberations in cottage country and beyond. “It’s about saying, ‘Listen, we’re going to help you understand how to live with the land better and develop a relationship with it,’” Ms. Big Canoe said. “It’s all about developing relationships.”
Building harmony, both environmental and social, is a key goal for those who want to preserve cottage country for future generations.Giordano Ciampini/The Canadian Press
Back in Trent Lakes, as June’s STR council meeting stretched beyond three hours, one resident described the stakes as life-or-death – at least for her pets.
Helen Petre, a long-time resident and dedicated community member of the tranquil Little Silver Lake, was frustrated by the frequent confusion among renters about where to dispose of their trash after their stays, often resulting in it being left strewn about.
“I say, ‘you take it to the dump like the rest of us,’ and they just look at me with a blank stare because they haven’t been told what to do with their garbage,” she told the room, as heads nodded along. “And when you leave it out, we get bears. And I don’t like bears because they eat my cats. I really don’t want them to eat my cats.” Her unexpected remark drew a smattering of laughter, easing the tension in the room.
Later in the night, I caught up with Ms. Petre, who reminisced about a time when the lake fostered camaraderie, when neighbours knew each other and shared responsibilities such as maintaining private roads and caring for the environment. She described how hard it had become to connect with the anonymous owners of short-term rentals, especially a large property owned by a numbered company that often hosts sizable gatherings. “It’s like living next to a business,” she lamented.
As we parted ways in the parking lot outside the municipal office, I made plans to speak with Ms. Petre again. “Don’t call me this weekend, though,” she said with a grin. “I’m having my grandkids up. I’m running my own Airbnb.”
The cost of life and leisure: More from The Globe and Mail
The Decibel podcast
Small-town housing markets now suffer from many of the same maladies as big cities: Low vacancy, high home prices and soaring rent. Four Globe zeporters zeroed in on five examples of the dysfunction across Canada, and spoke with The Decibel about what they learned. Subscribe for more episodes.
Cottage reads
Nine Canadians share the financial pros and cons of cottage ownership
These cottages are designed to be an idyllic retreat for generations
Tim Cestnick: Clever planning can make a cottage transfer tax-smart