Wasaga Beach has seen better days, if we’re honest. A fire in 2007 gutted businesses along the town’s beach. Doug Ford’s PC government took power just after the town finalized plans to rebuild and spent much of its first year in power causing chaos for municipalities. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which put tourism into a deep freeze. It’s still a wonderful place to visit (I was there only a few weeks ago for a family occasion) and it’s hard to beat the world’s longest freshwater beach.
The good news is that things seem to be turning around: the areas around Beach 1 are part of a large town-driven redevelopment project, including a major new hotel, and the local government seems pretty serious about it becoming a year-round tourism destination. That’s harder than it sounds, not least because Wasaga is going to be competing with nearby Collingwood.
Their success or failure is mostly not something I’m required to have an opinion about, so I wish them well.
There is, however, the small matter of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, part of which the Ford government is proposing to slice off and sell to the town. (Depending on which headlines you read, you may have totally missed the important detail that this entire controversy surrounds the transfer of public lands from one level of government to another.) The province would sell its chunk of beach to the town, which would now be solely responsible for the contiguous public areas of beach. The non-profit advocacy group Environmental Defence raised the alarm about the proposal early, warning about both the immediate threat to sensitive lands and to the precedent it sets.
At the risk of saying something unpopular: the Wasaga Beach proposal itself is fine, and in fact may actually amount to a substantial improvement over the status quo. For the government of Ontario, the condition of Wasaga Beach will always be just one matter competing for attention with 10,000 other more important issues like hospitals and schools. For the town of Wasaga Beach, however, the condition of the beach is something like an existential matter, given the role that tourism plays in the local economy. It makes basic organizational sense for the body most invested in the revitalization of the beach and the tourism economy to have direct control of the lands in question. That's the town, not the province.
Wasaga Beach’s council has been asking for provincial collaboration for years now, passing motions begging in sometimes desperate tones for the province to take concrete steps to make the revitalization efforts happen. The proposal from the Ford government isn’t coming out of nowhere.
Wasaga mayor Brian Smith is explicitly disavowing anything nefarious in a statement released last week. “What many people don’t know is that over 50 years ago, our town was forever changed. To create Wasaga Beach Provincial Park, the province bulldozed hundreds of homes, family-run cottages, and thriving small businesses. While the positive legacy of this mass expropriation is that it gave the public access to the beach — something we will always defend — it left our economy hollowed out and our future uncertain,” Smith said. “Let me be clear: this land would go to the Town, not to developers — and it would come with the requirement that the beach remains public. The citizens of Wasaga Beach wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Nobody is obligated to trust the provincial government, nor even the current council of Wasaga Beach (which might be different after next year’s elections anyway). But Smith is explaining here that the town’s own self-interest is in maintaining the natural heritage that makes it a tourist destination. So, we’ve got an Ontario community that has a decent idea for diversifying its economy a little so it’s not entirely dependent on summer tourism, and what it needs is for the province to either collaborate or at least get out of the way. Ford has decided to get out of the way, and hand the town a substantial cheque to help get things going.
Environmental Defence isn’t wrong to question the broader precedent the Ford government is setting here, but at least in this specific instance I do not find anything terribly upsetting about what’s being proposed.
I can’t help but ask: why Toronto didn’t get the same deal? Ontario Place was also a substantial public land the province had neglected that could have played a key role in Toronto’s ongoing waterfront revitalization efforts. There are a number of answers to that question going back to 2011 when the McGuinty government shut it down. But knowing what we know in 2025, there’s a fair argument that Toronto would be better off if the province had sold the site to the city, as is being considered in Wasaga.
People can argue that it would be better if the province invested directly in Wasaga Beach and held onto the lands, just as they’d argue that Ontario Place ought to have been kept entirely public and not handed over to a foreign spa operator; I might agree in principle but it’s also the case that sometimes the province is just a bad landlord. If the province does in fact end up selling its lands to Wasaga Beach, I think the best thing for me to do is to wish them luck, and to visit more often.
Editor's Note: This article has been edited to clarify that, under the existing proposal, the province will maintain ownership of part of the shoreline.