The thirty-five or so attendees at the most recent town council meeting in North Hatley, held on August 6, were treated to the spectacle of council members, the mayor, and the town manager attempting to defend a resolution on access to the public beach (or ‘park’, as it now seems to be called – any reference to the presence of a body of water, even implicit, appears to have been banned), a resolution they seemed not to have fully understood or to have thoroughly thought through, despite all council members voting in favour of it.

The resolution makes it necessary to obtain an electronic card to have access to Pleasant View Park – to the lawn, to the beach, to the docks, but NOT to the water, since swimming will continue to be banned. The question can certainly be asked what problem this new, complicated system is intended to solve, since access to the water will not be permitted.

Council, of course, well knows that people will swim, but it seems to hope to be able to pretend it doesn’t expect that to happen – and thereby protect itself from liability, should something untoward happen. There, in a nutshell, lies the purpose behind this whole charade – a charade that, surely, will carry very little weight with a judge, unless, of course, the municipality strictly enforces its prohibition on swimming. But this would seem unlikely to happen, since media reports about the police arresting senior citizens and young children for entering the water are probably not the sort of publicity for North Hatley that council members are hoping for.

To obtain an electronic card, the resolution that was passed stipulates that ‘citizens’ (this is what it calls users) will need to sign a waiver letter – though, as it turns out, the exact content of this letter is still unknown. And who will be able to obtain a card by putting down a deposit? That too remains to be determined, and on this topic there were conflicting and contradictory assertions by the mayor and the town manager. These are all signs the Town is acting without having given due consideration to the implications of the resolution it has drafted and adopted.

To justify this ‘policy’, councilwoman Farrugia read at length from government regulations, in an attempt to defend the position that swimming at an accessible beach in Québec can only be allowed during the time there is supervision. It did not seem to matter, however, that lawmakers in Québec do not require fences around public beaches, that these are accessible twenty-four hours a day, or that, in fact, lawmakers in Québec accept – implicitly, at the very least – that swimming will take place outside hours of when the beach is supervised.

Another councilwoman – Elizabeth Fee – noted that this resolution was merely a first step, and that further refinements would be introduced at a later date. This is perhaps a positive step, if it is followed up on, and one can hope that an intelligent and reasonable solution to access to the public beach can still be found. Proposals by members of the audience were made for binding arbitration to take place involving a mutually-agreed-upon body (the Académie de sauvetage du Québec, for instance) or person (a respected lawyer in the field of civil liability, for example). The cost of such arbitration, like the electronic-card system itself, could be covered by donations. As for the source of these donations, in the case of the electronic-card system, no information was provided at the meeting, the mayor merely affirming that the money had been promised and, in part, collected. Surely it would be of interest for taxpayers in North Hatley to know who is funding this measure the Council is imposing upon us.

But the proposals for arbitration seem to have fallen on deaf ears. As did the request for an accounting of the cost to taxpayers of running the beach this summer, even with severely reduced services. And as have the repeated requests that Council actually consult those who elected it. The mayor’s reaction was to once again compare us – residents and non-residents – to children, this time to children who have lost the key to a mailbox and shouldn’t be allowed access to it anymore. 

If ‘all’s well that ends well’, all is not well in North Hatley.

Paul St-Pierre

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