It’s no secret everyone wants their own piece of cottage paradise.
And many hard-scrabble Northern Ontario communities battling outmigration and loss of industry are warming up to the idea that rocks, trees and isolation has its own hidden rewards. 
The City of Elliot Lake’s successful cottage lot program has grabbed the real estate headlines in southern Ontario, but Karl Hopf likes to think Pickle Lake wrote the book on Crown land cottage development.
“Pickle Lake is light years ahead of anybody in the province,” says the town administrator, who has brought his power point presentation to other communities eager to hear how a remote town of 479 has become cottage country.
Pickle Lake is as far north as one can drive on a paved surface in Ontario.
The former gold and copper mining town serves as a transportation and service hub for mineral exploration and the fly-in Aboriginal communities to the north.
But the distance has been no great hardship for people from Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin who are willing to drive six hours north from the border to the end of Highway 599 for 200 feet of frontage on one of Canada’s best walleye lakes.
The community has been running a successful cottage lot development since starting a five-year process in 1999 with a dozen other northwestern Ontario municipalities.
But Pickle Lake emerged as the only one to see it through.
“The reason the town did it was because no one was doing it,” says Hopf.
With no private developer in sight, the town fronted the $175,000 for all the the environmental and planning studies while working arm-in-arm with the Ministry of Natural Resources to set down sustainable development guidelines.
Pickle Lake’s reasons are like many communities who seek to diversify their economy, attract a population that spends locally and to encourage construction to boost their tax base as mines and mill close and young skilled people head elsewhere.
The first round of development on 12-mile-long Kapkichi Lake west of town, sold all 34 remote lots within six months.
About 40 per cent of cottage owners are local, 20 per cent Ontarians and 40 per cent from the U.S.
“You’d be amazed,” says Hopf. “I got a call from a border patrol office two months ago who wanted nine lots with his friends because the people coming through were telling him how this worked.”
There hasn’t been any great marketing campaign. It’s been mostly word of mouth.
Hopf estimates cottage taxes makes up 10 to 12 per cent of the municipal base with some camps valued well into six figures.
The town installed as little municipal infrastructure as possible to keep it rustic and seasonal.
Cottage lots are water access only with only a bush road carved out leading down to a boat landing.
“We do not want to create a subdivision in the middle of nowhere.”
To keep development under control, the town insisted prospective owners put down a certified cheque to be eligible for a draw on the one-acre lots. A four-year build clause was inserted into the contract. Purchasers must have a minimum 400-square-feet building framed in with windows and doors installed within that time.
No final transfer of title from the municipality to the purchaser takes place until all the building requirements are satisfied.
Failure to do so means a prospective owner forfeits half the purchase price to the town. “But it’s never happened yet,” says Hopf.
Their project is now entering its fourth year with plans between the town and MNR district office to open up between 28 and 30 lots on Pickle Lake itself.
In Ontario, Crown land makes up 87 per cent of the land base with 937,000-square-kilometres, roughly the size of British Columbia.
Creating cottages on former Crown land is nothing new. The Ministry of Natural Resources has been granting it for years a way to drive economic development.
But in years past the environmental planning controls were less rigorous with few land-use planning controls, says Ken Cain, director of the MNR’s land management section in Peterborough.
Under the MNR’s old business model of recreational cottage lots through the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, the Ministry acted as developer, sub-divider and real estate agent for Crown land. Lots were either sold on the open market or by lottery through an active Crown land cottaging program.
“We still have an awful lot people phoning at the field level or main office asking for a cottage lot in Parry Sound like their relatives did years ago,” says Cain.
Today, there’s a slew of studies, public meetings and consultations with other government ministries to be done before land is transferred to municipalities.
Gary Davies, the MNR’s northwest land specialist, says each community’s wants and needs are different, but the new model remains the same.
The MNR screens possible sites to ensure it can environmentally sustain development activity. That means no building near wetlands or nearby trout spawning streams; it must be within an organized municipality with developers working as partners, and there’s a market value return to the province.
No updated statistics were available, but prior to these larger cottage lot programs, between 1997 and 2001, the MNR’s land management program collected $60 million in sales, rents and other fees.
The developments must occur in organized townships where there’s a service provider.
Once the land passes to municipal control, Planning Act development standards such as setbacks and zoning bylaw provisions take over, just like any private lot or subdivision.
Elliot Lake is a prime example of the new business model.
The four-laning of Highways 11 and 69 north to North Bay and Sudbury has widened the consumer search for prized lakefront cottage property. More affluent and price-conscious southerners are moving beyond the high-priced Muskokas of central Ontario.
The marketing machine that branded the former boom-bust uranium mining town for its retirement living concept has shifted gears to establish it as ‘Ontario’s New Cottage Country’ with its development agency, Lake Shore Properties.
The Elliot Lake version was created through an act of legislation in 2001 allowing the municipality to bring properties on 10 lakes to market.
Heavy consumer demand has construction speeding ahead on Dunlop, Quirke and Popeye lakes with more expected to open in the coming years.
The township of Atikokan is the latest community to hop on the cottage building bandwagon.
The northwestern Ontario town’s population has been in steady decline since the closure of the iron ore mines in the early 1980s, when 1,100 jobs were lost. “We’ve been reeling ever since,” says Atikokan mayor Dennis Brown.
There’s further uncertainty over the eventual closure date of its coal plant by the Ontario government.
The population decline has levelled off at 3,300, but Brown wants to boost it to 5,000 to 6,000.
“We need more people,” says Brown flatly, mentioning amenities and infrastructure like a municipal pool, golf course, arena and ski hill that all need tax money to operate.
The future cottagers may only be seasonal, but the business community wants them to buy lumber, shop for groceries and have their outboard motors repaired.
Brown says the Ministry rules allowing cottage development only with organized municipalities certainly fits well since 80 per cent of the land within the township is Crown and contains at least 25 lakes.
“For 20 years, we’ve been talking about cottage lots as a development tool, now we’re finally getting there.”
But the township administration didn’t have the expertise for such a project until they approached the MNR two years ago to take the lead.
After a Request for Proposals process, the MNR picked out three lakes – Jackfish, Plateau and Lerome – then selected a developer in June through an RFP process.
The job of mapping out a conceptual plan for future subdivisions has been left to Thunder Bay’s Techno Logic Timber.
“It’s a bit of a test,” says Davies who drafted the rules of the RFP selection process.
“Techno Logic is very positive. They’ve found nothing too onerous.” he says, “But the real test will be in 2009 if we have cottage lots for sale out there.”
Though still at the grassroots stage, Brown says, “If it works out well, we hope to open up more lots.”
