Civil and Municipal - Mar 2023

119 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 3 a $6 million renovation project was completed, and today, all the former tenants are long gone, and the new 330-seat theater in the century-old venue now hosts live performances, cinema, and art displays, while also offering food services and educational programs for its 55,000 yearly visitors. Then there is Meaford Harbour, a beautiful marina on the Georgian Bay Waterfront that features parkland, a pavilion, and parking for cars, boats, and RVs. The Municipality has had a long-standing interest in developing the Harbour to enhance economic development through tourism activity while encouraging the establishment of new businesses to support it. Over the last two decades, Meaford has invested in plans to shape the development of its waterfront lands. The most recent was the Meaford Harbour Strategic Master Plan (2009), which identified strategic actions to ensure that the harbor lands were developed and managed according to the vision, goals, and values outlined in the Meaford 2005 Official Plan. The Downtown Community Improvement Plan (2008) reinforced the need for strong physical and visual connections between the downtown and harbor, and the Meaford Economic Development Strategy (2010) recognized that seasonal tourism traffic in Meaford should be better connected to the waterfront lands. “It’s the prettiest harbor in southern Georgian Bay,” Clumpus exclaims. Meaford is considered to be a relatively affordable place to live in comparison to many communities in southern Ontario, but Clumpus admits that, recently, housing prices have surged upwards. “Housing is probably the largest issue we face,” she declares. “Since the pandemic, the price of housing has just skyrocketed in this area. We’ve also had an influx of people who had second residences here and now have become permanent residents because they were able to work from home. And through the pandemic, they decided that it was very safe to recuperate here. It means that our transient residents have become permanent residents.” While acknowledging that that change in population has been “a good thing, as well,” she notes that the downside of price inflation is the fact that prospective employees in the growing tourism industry cannot afford to live there, thus starving the sector of local labor. One response to the housing problem in many of Ontario’s smaller but quickly- growing towns and cities, such as Meaford, is the Government’s 2005 Ontario’s Places MEAFORD, ONTARIO