Doug Ford was elected PC leader, became premier, and, rather than returning to the same spot in Bala to cancel it, as pledged, announced on August 28 in Milton that, because it would cost a $100 million to stop the well-advanced project, fiscal responsibility thwarted him. He did, however, announce $5 million for Muskoka watershed protection.
On March 1 the premier apologized directly to a large audience of Muskokans for breaking his promise. At a spaghetti supper in Bracebridge Legion Hall, sitting with me as Doug Ford spoke, were Cassandra and Martin, Fords unrelated to the Etobicoke clan. She appreciated him being accountable about a broken promise, but not the outcome.
Campaign feelings remain too hot to cool until after the current project is complete. For example, Mitchell Shnier continues to sound alarms for public safety of canoeists in adjacent waters, concerns Swift River Energy and Ontario ministries dispute.
Local history at least gives perspective to this controversy.
Back in 1917 Dr. Alex Burgess of Bala, son of the village’s first mayor Tom Burgess, decided to generate electricity from Bala Falls so incorporated Bala Electric Light and Power Company and built a 100-kilowatt plant on the millstream – the same site where, half a century earlier, his father Tom operated Bala’s thriving sawmill.
The power plant first began serving Bala, then fed transmission lines to Port Carling and MacTier. With growing demand, Bala Power added a second generator and in 1924, built another powerhouse on Bala’s middle falls. The generating stations’ combined production of 450 kilowatts represented just two percent of the river’s potential.
In 1929 Ontario Hydro bought both, then in 1957, having bigger facilities, closed them. In 1972 the Middle Falls station was demolished. In 1987 Muskoka Lakes Township, having acquired No. 1 station, leased it to Marsh Hydropower Inc. to repair the structures, rehabilitate the turbines, install new generators, rename it “Burgess Generating Station” in tribute to local heritage, and from 1989 sell electricity into Hydro’s grid.
Today Bala continues, like Bracebridge and other villages, with a waterfall around which the settlement grew providing its economic rational for existing.
Downstream from Bala were bigger electric generation projects, and greater controversies. The vast volume of water draining Lake Muskoka through Bala down the Moon and Musquash rivers fell 48.5 unimpeded metres over many falls and rapids along the relatively short distance to Georgian Bay. By the 1920s Ontario Hydro engineers, by damming rivers and altering their courses, plotted harnessing Musquash’s generating potential to feed electricity to its Georgian Bay Region customers.
Ontario Hydro would divert most of the Moon’s flow into the Musquash, and further augment volume by other dams to contain and redirect west Muskoka watershed courses into the Musquash as well, then build hydroelectric stations on the enhanced falls at Ragged Rapids and Big Chute.
However, dead centre in this targeted watershed was Wahta Mohawk territory. Indigenous people and their constitutional rights collided with settler society’s public utility projects – a still crackling century-long drama between Mohawks and Ontario Hydro.
