THUNDER BAY — A court case heard recently in Thunder Bay showed there are limits to a law designed to ensure property-owners can access their land.
The owners of abutting parcels of waterfront land on Lake Superior's north shore got entangled over the use of a road.
Until 2015, one of the parties had accessed a road that passed through her neighbour's property in order to drive to the lakefront and her dock.
She gets to her lot and her cottage via a municipal road, but a significant downward slope starts mid-way on her lot and drops off sharply to the waterfront.
The terrain required her to use the neighbour's road if she wanted to get to her dock area by car.
After her neighbour blocked that road, the woman went to Superior Court seeking a declaration that she had a right to use the route under Ontario's Road Access Act.
She argued that it meets the definition of an access road under the Act, meaning that the neighbour is barred from closing it without a court order.
The neighbour took the position that it doesn't qualify as an access road since the applicant can already get to her own property by way of another road. According to a copy of the court's decision, she maintained that "The fact that she [the applicant] no longer has preferred vehicular access to her dock is a circumstance that is not provided for in the Act."
The judge who heard the case in Thunder Bay last month agreed.
"The applicant's parcel of land is not landlocked. It does not become landlocked because access to the lower portion of the parcel via [the neighbour's] road is cut off. She does not need access over [it] to get to her land."
He noted that the applicant can still get to her dock on foot once she has driven on to her land using the municipal road.
The Act, the judge said, was designed to ensure that people could get onto their land with a motor vehicle where the only way to do so was over a road on someone else's private property.
He said it doesn't give property owners the right to have additional road access to a particular portion of their property when that additional access is through another person's lot.
The judge ordered the applicant to pay her neighbour's court costs totalling $4,000.
