Rich cottagers like the quiet. Inside Muskoka’s fight to stop the noise

A marina on Lake Muskoka thrums with activity on a recent summer morning.

A major sportswear retailer is pouring Aperol spritzes for ladies in yoga wear at a popup brand event. At the docks, a salesman is waiting to hand over a half-million-dollar wakeboarding boat to the customer who has bought it sight unseen, with its custom Italian sound system.

“If you hate your neighbours,” he says to the oglers, “these are the speakers for you.”

Noise is a big deal these days in Muskoka, eastern Canada’s most stereotypically Canadian holiday spot. Big, exuberant, luxurious, expensive, brash noise, from speakers and boat motors, construction work and dock parties.

A new local noise bylaw, the first in a generation, is in the final stages of development, approved in principle but awaiting some final tweaks. It is causing tension.

The cottagers lobby wants clarity that tourist venues cannot simply play music outside for all their private cottage neighbours to hear from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. seven days a week. The construction community still hopes to make a change allowing crews to start deliveries and waste removal at 6 a.m. weekdays.

But these are trifling details. There is more at stake. A noise bylaw in Muskoka is not like a noise bylaw most anywhere else, because a Muskoka noise bylaw is not only about how to handle complaints about excessive construction or party noise.

A Muskoka noise bylaw is about how closely Canada wants to police the audible expression of the Canadian summer dream, of what it means to be at the cottage, whether to make the noise, or to resent it.

It also reflects a long-running clash of cultures in Muskoka, between flashy developers and old-timey cottagers, between the millionaires of Lake Muskoka and the billionaires of Lake Joseph, between canoes and float planes.

So there are diverse opinions about noise, nuisance and neighbours.

Besides, a township can only do so much. It does not regulate planes, or boats, or trains or cars. It does not even regulate construction with this bylaw, really.

What it can regulate is noise that causes a nuisance, and there is the big problem. Who’s to say?

“It was a quieter place,” Peter Kelley, mayor of Muskoka Lakes Township, said of Muskoka 20 years ago, when the current bylaw was adopted in the aftermath of a messy legal feud between two lakeside nightclubs.

A lot has since changed about Muskoka’s nature and character, he said. Tourist accommodation has shifted from large resort hotels to short term rentals. New private residential and commercial development is booming, the largest economic engine the township has.

“We can’t pretend it’s not important to us, it is,” Kelley said.

“That often has competing interests,” he said. “Noise affects everybody differently,” and construction noise especially “can be offensive” if you’re up for a weekend of lakeside peace and quiet. “We are blessed to be here, but it shouldn’t be at the detriment of someone else’s ability to enjoy the place.”

Kelley said the noise consultation process has been “detailed and thoughtful,” and the new bylaw strikes a workable balance. If passed, he said it will be a welcome update, more easily enforced and explained. Noise is the number one complaint in the summer months, and the numbers are rising.

From January to June this year, Musoka Lakes bylaw officers opened 21 investigations, compared to six in the same period last year, seven the year before that, and three the year before that. Whole-year statistics including high summer show a similar steady increase.

Alyxandra Brown, executive director of Our Muskoka Stakeholders Association, a construction and real estate advocacy group, said she has met with township officials and is “hopeful” that last minute changes will be made to allow site preparation at 6 a.m., and for “waste removal” and “deliveries” to be removed from the definition of “construction” to allow them to take place before 7 a.m.

“This is not about increasing noise. It’s about ensuring the bylaw reflects the realities of how projects operate in Muskoka. Early morning logistics help keep projects on schedule, coordinate trades efficiently and reduce delays and congestion,” Our Muskoka said in its submissions to the township.

Brown said Muskoka has changed, and so have “community expectations,” and her members “are committed to being good neighbours,” with “community-minded etiquette (that) extends beyond compliance with a bylaw.”

“We understand that noise can affect residents’ enjoyment of their properties, and we believe thoughtful, reasonable noise regulation plays an important role in maintaining the quality of life that makes Muskoka special,” she said. “At the same time, construction is essential to supporting our communities and our residents. It provides housing, maintains and improves existing properties, sustains local businesses, and creates employment opportunities. Effective noise regulations should therefore strike an appropriate balance.”

Ken Pearce, president of the Muskoka Lakes Association, an advocacy group of cottagers, said in his submissions that the proposed bylaw is misleading about outdoor speakers and fails to distinguish between ambient music and prohibited noise.

“We suggest it cannot be the intention that tourist entertainment operations be permitted to generate music using outside speakers which is clearly audible by neighbouring properties between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m. seven days per week,” wrote Pearce.

He suggested these operations be banned from emitting noise that can be heard from neighbouring properties in the daytime, and from using outdoor speakers at all after 11 p.m.

Diana Piquette, chair of Safe Quiet Lakes, has picked up a recent mood shift among cottagers. This group, which advocates against boating noise and excessive wakes, has conducted biannual surveys of thousands of Muskoka cottagers to track their concerns about safety and disturbances as their experience of cottage life changes.

“The cottage experience is a very unique thing in that it’s multigenerational,” said Piquette, also a vice president of the Federation of Ontario Cottage Associations.

In the first two surveys, respondents wanted education and awareness campaigns to discourage irresponsible boating. But in the last five years, over two surveys, there has been a growing sense that “it’s not enough,” she said. “So we want advocacy, legislative change and enforcement.”

Much of that is beyond the jurisdiction of the Township of Muskoka Lakes, and so Piquette’s advocacy is instead toward Transport Canada. A new Decibel Coalition aims to rally support around Ontario and the rest of Canada for federal legislative change, with noise as the headline issue.

But some of those cottagers’ concerns are about plain old nuisance noise. Enter the municipal bylaw officers.

The new bylaw offers some examples of “nuisance noise,” which appear to be from a repeated template, as they also appear in bylaws for Georgian Bay, a similar neighbouring district where short-term holiday rentals are a major annoyance for more perennial residents.

They include the operation of any sound system, and also “continuous yelling, shouting, hooting, whistling, singing or other similar sounds made by a Person.”

The “hooting” is a revealing curiosity here. Mayor Kelley wasn’t even aware it was in there. He’s a lawyer, and it’s not really a lawyer’s word. It’s ambiguous. You can hoot in exultation, but you can also “give a hoot,” or more commonly not. “Hoot” is a double-meaning, mirrored sort of word, and it helps illuminate this carnival world of quasi-wilderness luxury, Muskoka, where people who give a hoot about hooting have successfully got it banned, at least part of the time.

Noise itself is trickier to define, not just for lawmakers.

In the bylaw, nuisance noise is “any sound or vibration that may be disruptive, excessive, obnoxious, repetitive or otherwise offensive to the senses and that may be of such volume and/ or nature that it is likely to disturb and/or interfere with the comfortable enjoyment of life or property.”

But noise itself? The proposed new bylaw defines it as “any sound or vibration,” but that’s not quite right. Some vibrations, for example, are not noise. The old bylaw defines “noise” as “a sound prohibited by this bylaw,” which isn’t much help.

Among anthropologists, dirt is sometimes defined as “matter out of place,” and sometimes contrasted with the good, clean mud of the field, where it belongs, as a way to show how we think about what makes something “dirty.”

Noise is like that. It is sound out of place. Noise is dirty sound.

When the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it makes a sound, but it is not noisy. On this view, to be noisy, someone has to be bothered. Someone has to want to put that sound back in its place.

It takes a slightly zen attitude to accept it, but sometimes middle period Bon Jovi blaring through Italian speakers over an outboard motor on a sunny day on Lake Muskoka really is only “sound.” Sometimes it is as natural to its place as the dawn chorus of songbirds and the warbled vespers of the loon, or indeed to the beeping clatter of new cottage construction, and it only becomes annoying “noise” if it passes too close to a dock, dragging a huge wake and a gleeful Torontonian on waterskis.

Noise is sound that annoys, and unless you are there to be annoyed, you won’t be, and it will not be noise, it will just be sound.

It’s no wonder people disagree.

Muskoka has had legal trouble with noise regulation before.

The current bylaw was passed in 2005 after the earlier one was quashed by a judge of Ontario’s Superior Court, having been in force only a couple of years.

A restaurant and nightclub called The Landing burned down in 2002. It was in Port Carling, Ont., the village at the hub of the three big regional lakes: Muskoka, Joseph and Rosseau.

The owners moved to rebuild, and wanted to confirm that bylaw officers would permit them to play music until late in the night. So they installed special doors and insulation to limit noise, and consulted with the township.

The problem was that a competing nightclub on Lake Muskoka, the Kee to Bala, had a unique exemption under a section of the old bylaw meant to preserve local historical cultural traditions “forming part of the character of Muskoka.”

The Kee to Bala’s tradition was described in the bylaw as providing “entertainment dancing and music to Muskoka from 1st of May through to October 31st, plus New Years Eve,” with a “80,000 watt professional sound system,” a headline act that plays from 11 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., and alcohol service.

As traditions go, it was pretty typical, generic even, and arguably the same thing The Landing wanted to do.

So when the new Landing was up and running, and playing music beyond 11 p.m., just like the Kee to Bala was, bylaw officers started issuing fines, but only to The Landing. The bylaw included no criteria for how the The Landing might apply for a similar exemption, nor how such an application would be considered. A judge found this discriminatory, and quashed the entire bylaw.

So the present bylaw was forged in this conflict, and written on the fly in response to a culture clash over cottage traditions in Muskoka Lakes.

The same is true today as they prepare a new one, trying to avoid the mistakes of the past, and to keep things quiet for the future.