Only minutes into a County council meeting March 26 – to discuss the Haliburton Highlands Land Trust’s plans to pitch the Milburn Kendrick area of interest (MKAI) as a conservation reserve – and the meeting was cancelled due to a medical emergency.
The County said the meeting would be postponed to a later date.
However, much of what was to come was already part of the public record as it was on last week’s agenda.
The HHLT is telling landowners its pitch to the province is years away – and won’t come about without provincially-led public consultation.
HHLT board member Sheila Ziman noted in a slide presentation that the MKAI is 100 per cent Crown land, not private, and represents approximately two per cent of all lands and waters in Haliburton County.
“Protection of the MKAI as a conservation reserve is our only proposal,” her powerpoint reads. The Land Trust has been talking about a larger area of land known as the Highlands Corridor.
Members of the newly-formed Citizens for Crown land Protection (CCLP) were in the audience at the Lloyd Watson Community Centre in Wilberforce for the meeting. That group held a packed open house at the Haliburton Legion March 23. They are opposed to the designation.
Ziman said the Land Trust excluded an operating aggregate pit from the boundary, so it can continue. Further, she said there are no mining claims in the MKAI. Conservation reserves do not allow logging, mining or aggregates.
However, “there are several snowmobile trails, ATV trails, and hunt camps in this area. The objective of a conservation reserve designation is to provide opportunities for hunting, and motorized vehicle use is permitted. This is precisely why HHLT is proposing a conservation reserve designation rather than a provincial park, where hunting and motorized vehicle use are not allowed,” she said.
She stressed they were only at the pre-planning stage, and the formal government process for designating the area as a conservation reserve has not even started.
Ziman said the Land Trust simply nominated the area, and it is up to the government to accept, and recommend a reserve. “Once that announcement is made, the formal process … will begin.” She said that triggers public consultation and the Land Trust supports an open and transparent public consultation process.
“The Land Trust does not write the management plan. The government prepares the plan and invites the public to review and comment on the plan. The government administers the plan. The Land Trust has no administrative authority. There is also a process to amend the plan if changes are required.”
Addressing public concerns about use, she emphasized hunting, fishing, and trapping, ATVs, snowmobiles and creating new trails are allowed on Crown Land and in conservation reserves.
“There is evidence that things have not changed since Clear Lake was regulated as a conservation reserve in 1997,” she said.
Land Trust proposal to be discussed at later date
She also offered an emphatic ‘no’ that HHLT plans to control private land, purchase Crown land, control access to Crown land and conservation reserves, close trails, write management plans for Crown land and conservation reserves, and turn the Highlands Corridor into a park.
“We encourage everyone to participate in the public consultation process led by the Ontario government to ensure your voices are heard,” Ziman said.
Petition and Facebook group
During its public meeting, the CCLP, and its spokesman, John Davidson, outlined their position.
They said public land “must remain vested in our provincial and local governments and not be directed by any special interest group. This proposal is an attempt to redesignate huge blocks of public land from general use Crown land to conservation reserve.” Ziman said it is two per cent of County land, and the government would oversee it.
The CCLP said, “it’s no accident many endangered and rare species are found throughout this area. It is the result of sound sustainable management by MNRF, MECP, and local municipalities and they should continue to do so.”
The group went on to claim, “despite what the Land Trust is telling us, such a redesignation would take control completely away from MNRF and the municipalities of Minden Hills and Highlands East, placing it in the hands of the conservation reserve manager, who would have extraordinary powers under the Ontario Parks and Conservation Reserves Act. This would not be in the best interests of the local population, the economy, or the general public.”
The County of Haliburton’s planner, Elizabeth Purcell, and its CAO, Gary Dyke, reiterated in a written report, the Land Trust is the proponent for the designation but once the ministry has passed designation, the HHLT, “will generally be removed from the rest of the process” with the MECP then driving the project. The MECP creates a management plan. That triggers at least two opportunities for public consultation.
They said an example is the recent creation of the Monarch Point Conservation Reserve in Prince Edward County.
Krystle Shannon’s written delegation said the CCLP had 2,674 signatures on a petition against, as well as 384 members on Facebook.
She said, “existing protections are not only sufficient but well-enforced and the introduction of a conservation reserve would add unnecessary constraints at the expense of Haliburton County’s economy and community vitality.”
In a letter to the meeting, Steve Galea, news editor of Ontario Out of Doors magazine said he had looked into landowners’ claims. After discussions with the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, and the HHLT, “I was reassured that none of the concerns raised by the (initial) Facebook post were accurate,” he said.
The Ontario Trails Protection Alliance has written a letter of support to the HHLT, and the Land Trust recently received Conservation Excellence Certification, one of six in Canada, from the Centre for Land Conservation.
