Buying back our waterway access points ++

[MuskieBait]

I'm already thinking bigger, OT. That's my whole point about thinking toward the future...the undeveloped land...which you can actually control going forward. It is the future development that we need to worry about...not the areas that are already developed. The government has control over the land and how to zone or allocate that land. You don't necessarily need to buy back land to control its use.

For example, government do not need to buy back land to build stormwater ponds. They just need to enact a requirement that developers must incorporate a stormwater pond on property of the developed areas. It is very common now in many municipalities. For example:

http://www.brampton.ca/en/residents/Road...ponds.aspx

It is up to MNR, MOE and the provincial government to push for this by creating those legislature to apply these requirements on developers...if you want a consistent province wide approach.

Along the same lines of requiring public access on developed land, the government can also enact legislature to require the reservation of land surrounding a tributaries to serve as a riparian zone, in much the same argument as they use for the requirement of stormwater ponds (to prevent erosion, flooding, conserving habitat...etc). A strip of several hundred meters of land to be reserved on each side of the watercourse bank can be reserved...and this land will allow for public access in the future. There is no need to buy back any land.

As you are familiar with situation in Florida, there is a ribbon of land surrounding all of the bigger urban canals that is zoned off for municipal and state access to maintain the canals. When the land was developed, this was required by the municipality and state such that developers cannot build on that land. Such restriction can be done in Ontario.

BTW, there is no home town or personal interest in this discussion from the start. If there was any personal interest, I would actually push hard for buying back urban land instead of dumping money to protect access to northern lakes that I rarely, if ever, fish anyways. But my view is broader than just my immediate needs. This issue is about protecting undeveloped lakes that are currently considered "remote" but steadily being developed into "private" lakes surrounded by more million dollar cottages that I will never be able to afford. It is also about protecting access to water when urban sprawl is moving northward and the many smaller creeks, ponds and lakes that will be developed into neighbourhoods in the future. When you have land that is not developed, the government has the most control and it is not necessary to buy back any of it.

Unless your point is to buy back sufficient land to create new parkland areas...