Many weeks into the summer, the administration of the Town has finally proposed a solution (to come into effect in September!) – to the problem it, itself, created: the problem of restricted access to the public beach. This is what happens in our Trumpian world of today: create an outlandish crisis, and then propose an extreme solution, which almost seems ‘reasonable’ by comparison, declaring that it solves the crisis (Google ‘Overton window’ for a description of this process). 

To return to the basics here: the Town sidelines NHRS, a community of volunteers that has served North Hatley exceedingly well for fifty years, and, in doing so, it limits access to the public beach. And what does it now propose? That anyone who wants to use our public beach obtain, at their own expense (and at ours – we are told this is a solution costing several thousand dollars) a card, confirming their identity and use, and sign a document that, presumably, states they renounce holding the municipality liable if some untoward event should occur (drowning, or other!). Clearly the municipality is more interested in public liability than in public safety! This is a purely bureaucratic solution to a self-created problem – and only to a part of the problem, since the sidelining of NHRS remains.

We, the inhabitants of North Hatley, know and accept what it means to live on a lake (not an ocean, not a swimming pool), and are conscious of both the pleasures and the dangers involved. This inherent ‘risk’ we accept and it does not need to be managed, or signed away, to protect the municipality or the councillors who, I would like to remind them, have been elected to represent our wishes. Not to ‘propose’ and then ‘impose’, which is the mode this (and the previous) Council has constantly adopted.

The solution to this created crisis is far simpler and far less costly, a solution confirmed by the Appeals Court of Québec in Joly c. Salaberry-de-Valleyfield [see in particular paragraph 40; the decision is available online at: https://www.canlii.org]: open up the gates and let people in! End the costly and invasive monitoring; forget the attempts to manage and control us! There are, indeed, connected to the beach, questions concerning public safety, as there would be for any body of water, but what is the actual history of North Hatley and of Lake Massawippi? A total of six drownings in thirty years, related to car and fishing accidents, and a suicide. Do we need a bureaucratic response to an imagined danger, or do we need realism and an understanding of the real history of North Hatley and of Lake Massawippi? This is, of course, a purely rhetorical question.

– Paul St-Pierre

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