What is a buffer zone????

What is a buffer zone?????

The Minister of Natural Resources “MNR”  now wants to restrict your access to prime lands and lakes   to protect what the MNR defines as a “value”. Examples of values are remote tourism or fly-in lakes and or high quality fisheries.  That is one of the reasons they cite for closing bush roads usages by trucks, ATV’s or Snowmachines to residences of Ontario. Rational is when the public are accessing a lake by truck, ATV or Snowmachine, a remote tourism operator cannot market a fly-in vacation.

MNR states their goal to balance the needs of the public while ensuring sustainability and various economic opportunities. This may be accomplished by providing a limited window of access according to MNR.

So let’s break these statements down and see what they really mean;

• MNR has various means at their disposal to protect high quality fisheries such as creating a sanctuary where no fishing what so ever is allowed by anyone, at anytime winter or summer for certain periods of time.
• MNR can close lakes , “and they do” to all ice fishing to protect the fisheries ,and provide a limited window of access in certain lakes,  unfortunately most of the lakes they do close for ice fishing is to protect tourist outfitters rather  that to protect high quality fisheries.
• MNR closes road access to motorized vehicles to prime lakes to protect remote outfitter guest from the noise of motor vehicles and give their guest a false sense of remoteness.
• MNR basically disallows taxpayers of Ontario access to pristine lakes unless they hire a remote Tourist Outfitter “at a high cost” to fly them into their camps.
• MNR has or is reviewing submissions from Remote Tourist Outfitters suggesting a 6 km or more buffer for logging operations so as to give a false sense of remoteness against noise for the guest of these outfitters.
• MNR’s seemingly only rational for limiting access to the taxpayers to Ontario is to protect Remote Tourist Outfitters and their wealthy or prestigious guest.
• MNR is also suggesting and in some cases imposing a 3 km buffer zone around pristine lakes, which overlap Hugh areas and other lakes that are effectively reserved for remote outfitters, Go to References then Maps, see north end of map to understand the implications.

OntORA’s values and views on public access;

Eliminate all buffer zones