The 66 feet between the lot and the water

On paper the listing says waterfront. On many older Ontario lots there is a strip of land between the lot and the water that the listing never mentions: a shore road allowance, one chain wide, which is 66 feet, about 20 metres, set aside in the original township survey more than a century ago. Where it was never closed and sold to the owner of the lot behind it, that strip is generally still public land. The dock, the boathouse, sometimes a corner of the cottage itself can turn out to stand on it. Cottage-country law firms describe it as one of the most common closing-day surprises in waterfront deals.

It catches owners and sellers as often as buyers. People who have held the same cottage for thirty years sometimes meet the allowance for the first time when they go to replace a dock, or when they list the place and the buyer’s lawyer finds it before they do.

Where it came from

When Crown surveyors laid out Ontario’s townships in the 1800s, they reserved strips of land for future roads: along concession lines, between blocks of lots, and, in many townships, along the shoreline of navigable lakes and rivers. The shoreline strips were meant to keep a route open for public travel by water’s edge. Almost none of them ever became roads.

But a road allowance does not disappear by going unused. Unless something has been done about it since, the strip laid out in the original survey is still there, running along the shore in front of the lot, and it is not part of the lot.

Open, closed, conveyed

Three words do most of the work here:

• Open is the original state. The allowance was laid out in the survey and nothing has been done since. It is generally still public land, usually the municipality’s, and in unorganized territory the Crown’s.
• Closed means the municipality has passed a by-law ending the strip’s status as a road. The land is still the municipality’s at that point, but closing is what makes a sale possible.
• Conveyed means it has then been sold, almost always to the owner of the lot behind it, and merged with that lot on title. Municipalities have processes for this, with survey costs and fees that vary from place to place.

Over the decades many waterfront owners have bought the allowance in front of their lot, and many have not. Two neighbouring cottages on the same bay can be in opposite states, and nothing visible from the water tells you which is which.

What it changes in practice

Where the allowance in front of a lot is still open, the lot on title ends at the strip, not at the water. The rights a buyer might assume come with waterfront, riparian rights among them, may not be part of the purchase. Which rights apply to a particular property is a legal question, and only a lawyer reading title can answer it.

Anything built on the strip stands on land the owner holds no title to. A dock, a pump house, a stairway down to the water: that can sit unremarked for decades and then surface when the municipality is asked to permit a new one, or when a sale forces the question. And an open allowance is, in principle, public land, which is a strange thing to learn about the ground between a cottage and its dock.

An open allowance does not make a property a bad one. Thousands of well-loved cottages sit behind one. But closing and buying the strip takes time and money, and both are far easier to negotiate before a deal than after it.

What the public records show, and what they do not

Ontario publishes the original township survey fabric as open data, and it records where road allowances were laid out, including the shoreline strips. Provincial Crown land records can separately show whether any Crown interest, such as an unpatented parcel or a disposition, is recorded along a stretch of frontage.

Those records stop well short of the full answer, and the limits matter:

• The survey fabric’s published accuracy is “within 100 metres”. It records that an allowance runs along a shore. It does not record where its edges fall, and it cannot place a boundary against a dock or a deck. Only a surveyor working on the ground can do that.
• Whether an allowance has been closed and conveyed lives on title, in the parcel register, not in any mapped layer. No map answers it.
• A shoreline with no allowance in the mapped fabric is a shoreline where none is mapped, not one where none exists. Records lag, and the surveys of the 1800s were not uniform.

The questions that settle it, and who answers them

If you are buying, the useful move is one sentence to your lawyer, early enough that walking away is still free:

Your lawyer answers it from title. A surveyor is the person who locates the strip’s edges on the ground, if it comes to that. The municipal clerk’s office can tell you what closing and buying an open allowance costs there, and some townships publish the whole procedure: Algonquin Highlands sets out its steps, the survey it asks for and a timeline of about a year. Costs and rules differ from one township to the next, so read the one that governs the property. If you are selling, the same question asked before listing removes a surprise from your own closing.