By Leni Spooner, creator of Between the Lines.
Once prime soil and public waterfront are sold off, taxpayers pay twice: first in lost food and recreation, then again when governments try to rebuild what we already had.
The Pattern We’re Missing
In Ontario, Doug Ford’s government is pushing changes to the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act that would carve off large, serviced chunks of Wasaga Beach Provincial Park. The official line is “supporting tourism and investment.” What it really does is set the precedent that when developers want prime land, government will quietly rewrite the rules to make it easy.
If this feels familiar, it should. The same logic has driven farmland loss across Ontario: take the most accessible, most productive land — the land that already has roads, hydro lines, and water mains nearby — and pave it. It’s not just about convenience; it’s about minimizing private costs while externalizing the long-term burden to the public.
Why These Parks?
Wasaga Beach isn’t some obscure backcountry. It’s the world’s longest freshwater beach and Ontario’s second most-visited provincial park, drawing more than a million visitors a year. And the land the government now proposes to reclassify or sell is the land already set up for crowds: Beach Areas 1 & 2, New Wasaga, and Allenwood.
These are the spots with paved parking lots, washrooms, utilities, and direct road access. In other words, the cheapest land for developers to monetize. Why struggle with raw bushland when you can inherit decades of taxpayer investment and call it “economic growth”?
The Tourism Excuse
Proponents of the “Destination Wasaga” initiative often point to lower visitor numbers between 2019 and 2022 as proof the town needs revitalization. But those were the pandemic years — tourism everywhere was down. By the town’s own accounting, Wasaga hosted about 1.5 million visitors in 2019, dipped to 1.1 million in 2022, then rebounded to nearly two million in 2023. Peak summer visitation in 2025 is higher than it was before COVID.
In other words, the justification is shaky. The beach didn’t stop drawing people — the pandemic kept them home. The crowds are back, and stronger than ever. What’s really on the table is not “saving” Wasaga Beach tourism, but handing over the most convenient and serviced parts of a provincial park to private developers under the cover of “revitalization.”
The “revitalization” push isn’t just theoretical — land has already changed hands. The Town of Wasaga Beach sold part of its Beach Area 1 lands to Sunray Group, which is building a premium Marriott hotel and festival square on the strip. Another five acres of beachfront went to Stonebridge Building Group for a mixed-use residential and commercial “village.” Additional parcels have been sold to Bayloc/Zancor.
These were technically town-owned lands, not provincial park parcels, but the sales show the direction of travel: public waterfront, once guaranteed for everyone, is being parceled off into private projects under the “Destination Wasaga” banner. The new proposal to transfer provincial park shoreline to the town would extend this same model onto protected land.
The Legal Maneuver
The Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act already requires legislative oversight if more than 50 hectares, or more than 1% of a park, is removed. That means Wasaga would normally trigger debate and a vote. Instead, the Ford government has signaled it will amend the Act itself — not just for Wasaga, but to create new “classes” of parks and give Cabinet the power to redesignate by regulation.
Bill 26’s creation of “adventure class” parks may sound innocuous, but it opens the door to ATV trails, snowmobiles, and other high-impact activities in sensitive ecosystems. More importantly, it opens the door to governments reshaping park protections on the fly, without having to face a legislature full of skeptical MPPs.
We’ve Seen This Before
This isn’t an isolated case. In December 2022, the Auditor General’s Greenbelt Report revealed that carving land out of the protected Greenbelt wasn’t necessary to meet housing targets. The kicker? The province hadn’t even calculated the servicing costs of those sites. Public money would inevitably be required to make private development viable.
At Ontario Place, what began as a redevelopment pitch ballooned into a $2.2 billion public spend, including $400 million for parking lots, to enable a private spa. Once again, prime waterfront — accessible, already serviced, already loved by the public — was diverted to private convenience, with taxpayers footing the infrastructure bill.
The Farmland Parallel
The lesson should be clear. Ontario is losing 319 acres of farmland every day. Only 5% of Canada’s land is prime farmland, and once it’s paved, it’s gone. Asphalt never becomes fertile again. And yet, the land most often lost is not remote marginal acreage — it’s the good stuff, close to highways and cities, easy to hook into existing systems.
Developers build where their costs are lowest, not where the public interest is served. We pay the hidden price later in lost food security, higher infrastructure costs, and weaker municipal budgets.
Parks as Infrastructure
Parks aren’t “free” land. They’re a form of infrastructure every bit as real as hospitals or schools. The parking lots, trails, lifeguards, and washrooms at Wasaga were built with public funds over generations. Stripping them away to hand over to developers is like selling off a hospital because the land under it is valuable.
And once it’s gone? The next generation won’t get it back. They’ll be left with two bad options: travel further and further afield to find recreation, or pay through their taxes to create entirely new park access somewhere else — building new roads, new parking, new services. That’s pure overhead, which governments are historically reluctant to fund.
The Short-Term Mirage
The defenders of these deals point to GDP and jobs: the cranes, the condos, the tourism ads. But these are short-term boosts. Construction ends, units are sold, and tax receipts level off. Meanwhile, the permanent loss of farmland and shoreline parks is forever.
The real productivity — the crops that come from Class 1 soil, the ecological services provided by dunes, the affordable recreation of a family beach day — is written off. In its place, we’re offered a mirage of “growth” that is privately profitable but socially impoverishing.
Kitchen-Table Test
We can’t eat asphalt, and once prime farmland and public waterfront are paved, they’re gone. If we carve away the commons today to save developer costs, there is no buying it back later. At best, future governments will have to find and fund entirely new park spaces — building new access roads, new parking, new services — and hope they measure up to what was lost. That’s pure overhead for provincial budgets, which means it will rarely happen.
The parklands we enjoy today were generations in the making. We risk selling off farm and beach together — the land and the crop — for the appearance of “productivity.” A short-term GDP bump and a few years of tax receipts from construction and sales, while the long-term costs and lost access fall to our kids and grandkids. As Ontario grows more urban, they’ll be forced further and further out just to reach a shoreline or trail.
This is not stewardship. It’s liquidation of the commons for private convenience, leaving the bill for tomorrow’s taxpayers and fewer green spaces for the people who come after us.
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About the Author
Leni Spooner is a Canadian writer, researcher, and civic storyteller. She is the founder of Between the Lines | Kitchen Table Politics, a longform publication exploring how policy, economics, food systems, and everyday life intersect. Her work blends historical context with present-day analysis, helping readers see the deeper patterns that shape Canada’s choices — and the lives built around them.
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