By John Francis
It’s tax and budget time again. Your first tax bill has arrived already; more will come along in due time.
The Municipality of Northern Bruce Peninsula collects property taxes from everybody, but they don’t get to keep the money. In fact, our municipality ends up with barely a third of those tax revenues. Bruce County gets as much as we do and the rest goes to the province for education.
Regular readers of this space will have heard me complain that Northern Bruce Peninsula does not get good value for the $8+ million we send to Bruce County every year.
I thought I would explore what our county offers and how little of that is offered to us.
For example: Bruce County operates a network of County Roads. It has been operating pretty much the same network of roads for well over 100 years. Bruce County Maps (an online utility operated by the County — Google Bruce County Maps) shows that network in good detail. There are very few places in the County that are more than four or five km from a County Road.
Except in Northern Bruce Peninsula. Tobermory, for example, is 45.6 km from the nearest County Road. Fortunately, a Provincial Highway provides access.
No such luck for Dyers Bay, though. Its 150 dwellings are all at least 10 km from the highway (and at least 28.9 km from the nearest County Road).
How does this compare to the rest of Bruce County?
Well, in the seven southern municipalities — that is, everybody but MNBP — the vast majority of towns and villages are right on a County Road or a Provincial Highway.
There are a few exceptions. Chepstow and Cargill (about 50 dwellings each) are both 4km from the nearest County Road. Purple Valley (less than 10 dwellings) is 6km from the nearest County Road.
Salisbury (3 dwellings), Lockerby (5 dwellings), Gillies Hill (less than 5 dwellings) and Pearl Lake (2 dwellings) are all 2km from a County Road. Westford (4 dwellings) and Malcolm (3 dwellings) are 4km from a County Road.
I visited Malcolm a few years ago with a friend who is a history buff. He showed me where the hotel used to be, where the churches were, the row of houses, the general store. In the late 19th century, Malcolm was a going concern. But now it’s just three houses.
Bruce County Maps shows all these villages but it does not show Cape Chin North (approximately 70 dwellings, 14 km from Hwy 6; 21 km from the nearest County Road) or Cape Chin South (approximately 40 dwellings, 10.5 km from Hwy 6, 18 km from the nearest County Road). Nor does it show Dorcas Bay/Johnston Harbour (about 500 dwellings) or Cameron Lake (approximately 100 dwellings) or Cape Hurd or Hay Bay or Old Woman’s River or Spry Shores or Pinetree Harbour or…
You get the idea.
I was very interested to note that Bruce County Maps does show Clarke’s Corners, where there are fewer than ten dwellings. I think this illustrates a key point, because Clarke’s Corners was one of the first settlements on the Saugeen Peninsula in the 19th century. If memory serves, one of the peninsula’s first schools opened there.
The map also shows Miller Lake. But it locates it at the corner of Lindsay Road 30 and Highway 6 — where there are about 6 dwellings left from the original farm settlement — rather than on the lake where there are about 250 dwellings.
Spry is on the map, too. These days Spry has barely a dozen dwellings, but 125 years ago it was the hub of the farming community, with a general store, post office, school and sawmill.
The point here is that the map labels — and the County Road system — are stuck in the 19th century. No new settlements have been added to Bruce County’s corporate consciousness in the last hundred years and no new roads have been built to serve those new settlements.
In the 1880s, Northern Bruce Peninsula (then known as “the combined townships of Eastnor, Lindsay and St Edmunds”) constituted .7% — that is, seven tenths of one percent — of the assessment in Bruce County, which meant that MNBP contributed seven tenths of one percent of the County’s revenues.
We now contribute about 18 times as much as we did then — somewhere over 12.5% of the County’s revenues. But the road system the County provides has not changed to reflect that 1800% increase.
The County needs to get its corporate head out of (pause for dramatic effect) the 19th century. It needs to offer proper service to MNBP — such as County Roads to all communities — or else compensate MNBP for the lack of that service.
