This is a story about Muldrew Lakes, so let’s start by setting the scene. Like every cottage lake, including yours, Muldrew is perfect: rustic cottages amid picturesque shores and forests. But Muldrew is also very different from your lake. Even a brief visit there gives rise to a flurry of unfamiliar and contradictory emotions that your lake probably doesn’t provoke.
Muldrew Lakes—North, Middle, and South Muldrew—are actually just one long, s-shaped lake located 200 kilometres due north of Toronto, just outside of Gravenhurst, in Muskoka. It meanders through what must be one of the longest, narrowest gouges ever laid down by a passing glacier, about 15 kilometres, making two, full 180-degree turns before slowly emptying into Muldrew Creek. At first glance you’d think, This isn’t a lake, it’s just one long river! It’s rarely more than 400 metres across and often narrows to 200 metres or less. In some places, steep cliffs form its banks. As rivers go, it would be a majestic one.
Its entire length is dotted with cottages along both sides, some 400 of them, with a recurring motif of long staircases that lead from the water to the clifftops. Most places are modest and, because they were built decades ago, are located closer to the water than today’s restrictions would allow. Lots of lakes have 400 cottages on them, but Muldrew’s close quarters provide a stronger sense of just how intense lakeside development really is—a lot of people, and a lot of watercraft, and not a lot of water. In one breath, you’ll say to yourself, “This place is truly spectacular. I’ve never seen anything like it.” In the next, “This place could be in for some trouble.”
Trouble has indeed come to Muldrew, snaking its way left and right for more than five years now, as the community has debated the adoption of a new lake plan—a set of rules and regulations to preserve a lake’s natural character and environmental health. The turmoil has been whipped up by three distinct forces: the real estate boom, climate change, and a political zeitgeist that prizes aggression and intransigence over compromise and common ground. And as unique as Muldrew may be, let’s be honest: these are forces that hover over every cottage community right now. In fact, they hover over most of the country right now. Muldrew is the place where they’ve come to clash.
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Ted Alley is the nicest guy. No, seriously. He’s kind and affable and well-meaning, and his demeanour was shaped by storybook childhood summers of canoeing and cliff jumping on North Muldrew Lake. “As a kid, I always dreamt of becoming a pilot,” he says. “But that’s expensive and time consuming, so I found my way into the business with a career in aircraft maintenance and sales.” After 20 years with Bombardier, he started his own company, Fleet Transitions, where he assists smaller airlines in tracking down, purchasing, and refurbishing used aircraft. It’s the perfect nice-guy career: helping profitable people and companies make big purchases. He’s been successful enough that, when the heirloom family cottage on North Muldrew landed in his brother’s hands, he was able to buy another for himself on Middle Muldrew in 2018.
One of his first orders of business was to deal with his crumbling dock. He only wanted to replace what was already there, but the Town of Gravenhurst—the municipality governing Muldrew—had no record of it. “That meant I had to apply for a variance, and as part of that, I wanted to meet with the cottagers’ association to make sure they had no objections, which they didn’t.” And not only that: in Ted, the Muldrew Lakes Cottagers’ Association saw their future president.
“Both my father and my brother had served as MLCA president in the past,” says Ted. “I felt it was my turn to contribute.” He took up the role of vice-president in 2020 and served for a year in that role before becoming president in 2021, a position he held until 2023. He saw it as community service, which is what the role had traditionally been and is something that nice guys do, rather than politics, which is what the job was about to turn into, and what tends to eat nice guys for lunch.
Where Middle Muldrew Lake reaches its end, the 180-degree turn reveals a narrow gateway into South Muldrew Lake, and a very large cottage standing guard over the passage—a “mammoth” cottage, to quote one of Muldrew’s local Facebook groups. It stands there over the objections of many Muldrew cottagers. Back in 2019, shortly before Alley took up the MLCA’s vice-presidency, local chatter was focused on the plans for this multi-thousand-square-foot dwelling, which included a three-car garage and a double-width boathouse with upper living space, all on a point of land that would make it tricky to accommodate Gravenhurst’s required 30-metre setback. Indeed, it needed a zoning bylaw amendment to be built.
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To my eye, the finished product sticks out like a sore thumb, especially compared to Muldrew’s older, smaller cottages that blend into the rugged natural shoreline. Many in the community thought the same about the original proposal: they felt it was excessive and should be rejected. One Facebook commenter called it a “Lake Joe” concept—a reference to the tony mansions found further north on Lake Joseph, one of Muskoka’s largest, and most garishly developed, lakes. The Town of Gravenhurst denied the zoning bylaw amendment, but the Ontario Land Tribunal later permitted it—which only intensified community concerns about the impact of development on the lake, the removal of tree canopies, the preservation of the shoreline, and the very character of the lake itself.
These concerns get raised on every lake facing redevelopment, and they are code for a much larger problem: the principles of cottage ownership are changing. While city homes have always been status markers in terms of size and comfort, the cottages of our youth purposefully stripped many of those luxuries away. The hardship was the point—cottaging meant learning to live, love, and laugh with less. And the property’s financial value, as real estate, was always secondary to its emotional value to family.
But as the real estate boom has spread up to cottage country, the influence of money has eroded those principles. People build suburban homes on the lake now. The development on South Muldrew appeared to symbolize that shift: whatever else this development proposal may have been, it was also seen as a play to max out the property’s value. And it led the MLCA, back in 2019, to ramp up its review of its existing lake plan, which had first been adopted in 2009.
“Lake plans are not that common in Ontario, but they’re not a far-out idea either,” says Kent Randall, a principal at the land planning firm EcoVue Consulting, which assisted Muldrew with its plan. “Every city and town has an official land use plan, but many cities have secondary plans for specific neighbourhoods to help preserve character.” Lake plans, he says, serve much the same purpose, and the Federation of Ontario Cottagers’ Associations even offers a handy how-to guide for developing one. Lake plans are community led and require intensive consultation. And in order to become binding, they must be adopted by their local municipality. That’s why cottagers work with planning firms to develop them, delivering to the municipality a proposal that meets municipal and provincial standards for land use policy and management.
Muldrew’s 2009 plan was a vague document that merely made reference to virtuous concepts, such as “ensuring that people know how to develop their properties in a way that is sensitive to the natural environment.” It provided no measurable or enforceable limits, certainly nothing that would have outright prevented the development on South Muldrew point. Sarah Bale, a Muldrew cottager and former land planner with EcoVue, assisted the MLCA with surveying all cottagers on the lake in the summer of 2020, on issues ranging from noise to wakeboating to, of course, development. “The big challenge was to define what modest and reasonable development looks like,” says Bale. “That has to come from the community.” The survey received 188 responses. In all, 73 per cent supported restrictions on the size of new builds and renovations, and most pegged the upper limit of a main dwelling should be 2,500 to 3,500 square feet. With survey results in hand, Bale and the MLCA’s lake plan committee began drawing up a new version.
In June of 2022, after much deliberation, Ted Alley, now the MLCA’s president, distributed the first draft of the new lake plan to the community. It was a sophisticated document with an objective to protect Muldrew’s natural shoreline by curtailing excessive development using a graduated scale: the closer you build your cottage to the water, the tighter the restrictions. The same applied to renovations: a cottage located less than 15 metres from the water could expand only to a maximum of 1,000 square feet, while one located 20 metres from the water could expand to double that amount. Alley’s cover letter described it as “a balanced, 50-year-outlook approach to the concerns raised.”
Vaughn Hibbits, a Muldrew cottager, didn’t think it was balanced, and he said so at the MLCA’s July public meeting that summer. “I stood up and said, ‘This is unfair, in fact, it’s extreme,’ ” he recalls. Hibbits purchased his cottage in 1983, when he and his wife had two young teenagers. His place sits perched atop one of North Muldrew’s cliffs, 15 or 20 feet above the waterline, with a great view down the lake.
He describes himself as “very attached and protective of the lake,” and says he has no plans to expand his cottage. But if he did, that draft lake plan would impact him substantially: his clifftop cottage, purchased in 1983, is already roughly 1,000 square feet and close to the shoreline. “This is not about me at all,” he insists. “This is about cottagers’ property rights being taken away. Under the lake plan proposal, cottagers won’t be able to expand to meet their family’s growing needs, and it will impact property values. Why would anyone pay $800,000 for a cottage they can’t expand as they please?”
Hibbits has a point, and his argument is a bit of a wake-up call for those who hew to the old ways. There may still be lots of modest cottages in the world, and modest cottagers too, but there are no modest cottage prices anymore. When the purchase requires a six-figure down payment; a half-million-dollar, market-rate mortgage; and 25 years of interest payments, resale value matters a lot. It’s only rational to want to improve the property. No one can afford to bankrupt themselves making memories.
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Hibbits was not alone in his opposition, or in his unbridled approach to speaking his mind, and the temperature of the discussion began to rise. Even though debate about the lake plan had been ongoing for at least two years, many felt caught off guard by the draft proposal. According to Muldrew cottager John Goshulak, things quickly got out of hand. Opponents were strident and aggressive, to the point of openly threatening lawsuits. The Facebook group became the locus of the debate: “How are the town’s already restrictive guidelines not enough? Utter Nimby- ism all around,” wrote one person. People also questioned EcoVue’s qualifications.
“A vocal minority was taking over the discussion, and it’s impossible to have a mature, adult conversation on social media,” says Goshulak. “I thought to myself, You can’t treat people this way.” Nevertheless, given the draft lake plan’s rocky reception, the MLCA decided to revise it—again. And then, in the fall of 2022—like a literal, physical manifestation of the mistrust and bitterness now swirling throughout Muldrew—the lake suffered its first-ever bloom of toxic blue-green algae.
Blue-green algae is a growing scourge in Ontario cottage country. Also known as cyanobacteria, its blooms are often toxic and potentially lethal to pets and wildlife, and it renders lakes unsafe for human activities. The blooms’ increasing frequency is often linked to several factors driven by climate change, such as higher water temperatures and shorter periods of ice covering. But blue-green algae is also a result of intensified human activity; it feeds on phosphorus, which is present in rainwater, as well as in soaps, household products,
wastewater, and septic systems.
Muldrew’s blue-green algae bloom quickly became a key point for the lake plan’s proponents. And, in fairness, many of its provisions would likely help reduce the probability of future blooms. The point of the 30-metre setback, and the purpose of shoreline preservation, is to ensure that septic discharges and storm runoffs are filtered through the ground before reaching the lake. This is particularly salient for a rocky, cliffsided lake like Muldrew, which is already short of shoreline soil and vegetation in many areas. That was one of the reasons behind the lake plan’s graduated proposal.
“I made the case multiple times from the very beginning—the principal driver for every recommendation in the lake plan is environmental,” says Alley. “What will our property values be worth if we can’t go swimming or boating in the lake?” But if you imagined that the blue-green algae bloom would cause detractors to reconsider their opposition and galvanize the community, you’d be wrong. According to Vaughn Hibbits, MLCA leadership was using the algae bloom to shut down dissenting opinions. “I just felt that what was being proposed,
especially in earlier versions of the plan, was a gross injustice,” he says.
Opponents remained as vocal as ever, and the debate turned into a procedural battle. They decried the MLCA for a lack of consultation even though all relevant documents had been publicly accessible via the MLCA website and even though, according to Alley, “we reached out more than 30 times to seek input from our members and the whole community.” In an effort to reach a consensus, the MLCA surveyed its members again in early 2023, this time with a detailed set of questions about precisely what kinds of restrictions they would support.
Guided by the survey results, in June 2023 the MLCA presented yet another revised lake plan that significantly loosened development restrictions. But at the MLCA’s August 2023 annual general meeting, as John Goshulak took over from Ted Alley as president, dissenters proposed a motion that would require the lake plan to be subjected to a vote by MLCA members before it could be submitted to the Town of Gravenhurst. The motion was adopted at the tail end of a very long and drawn-out meeting, when many people had already gone home. But in later deliberations, the MLCA board concluded that their proxy voting system made it unworkable. “If we put it to a vote and amendments were proposed, the proxies would need to consult back on every amendment and sub-amendment,” says Goshulak, delaying the process further and adding yet another administrative headache.
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Finally, on March 27 of last year, at a special meeting of the MLCA board, the final lake plan revisions were approved, and the decision was made to submit it directly to the Town of Gravenhurst without a community vote. In a last effort to bridge the divide, the lake plan’s final revisions loosened the proposed restrictions yet again: new cottages or building renovations located less than 10 metres from the water could be as large as 1,900 square feet, while those located 20 metres away could be up to 3,000 square feet. Gravenhurst will hold its own round of public consultations on the plan, hopefully some time in 2025, before deciding its fate. Its detractors will have to wait until then to make their case once more.
Back at the height of the lake plan controversy in late 2023, one cottager made her first and only Facebook post. “As an elderly member of the Muldrew community, I am deeply saddened by the current animosities among cottagers,” she wrote. “Life on Muldrew Lake is dramatically different now than it was when I spent my childhood and adolescent summers there…When we knew one another, it was easier to work together on mututal concers (sic).” She said she supported the lake plan even though it would restrict her own ability to expand, because she worried about the environmental impacts of blue-green algae, and how it would alter property values in the area. And she pleaded with others to “put aside our differences and work to solve this very serious issue together.”
Ted Alley mentioned that post to me, because it meant a lot to him. “The MLCA took a lot of heat for the lake plan, and I was the guy with his hand on the tiller for most of it, so a lot of it was directed at me,” he says. “It was hard to live through, and emotionally very draining. Two years, constant, with all that negativity. And the crazy part is, when I tried to size it all up, it all came from only about two dozen people.” Even so, the tenor of the debate has cast a pall over the lake. “We have neighbours who were acquaintances early on,” says Alley. “Now we don’t talk.”
No matter what the Town of Gravenhurst decides, the Muldrew community will need time to heal. The happy ending to this story will not come when the lake plan is adopted, or when it’s rejected, but when cottagers can get back to being neighbours again. And that’s the lesson to all of us. No single community can stop climate change, but each one will have to confront and deal with its impacts, whether it’s blue-green algae or some other curse. No single community can control runaway real estate prices either, but each one will have to confront and manage the impacts of development. The only thing any community can control is the tenor of the discussion.
Cottages are supposed to be where we unplug from all the noise and discord of our city lives, where we are the best versions of ourselves. As big-city troubles show up unbidden in the country, community health needs to be preserved just as much as the health of the lake itself. Everyone has a stake in that too.
Frequent contributor Philip Preville is a two-time National Magazine Award winner. He lives in Peterborough, Ont.
This article was originally published in the Mar/Apr 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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