Who gets to live on the Toronto Islands?
On the first unseasonably warm day of spring, my husband and I took our kids to the Toronto Islands for a family outing. We rode the ferry to Hanlan’s Point and walked from one end to the other, settling down on Ward’s Island Beach under intense sunshine. My daughter and I plunged into the freezing water. Despite the cold, we both loved being in the lake again after many pandemic months without swimming. We didn’t last long, but it was exactly the kind of refreshing, exhilarating experience we needed.
The Islands always feel magical to me. They’re so wild, so utterly unlike the rest of the city. In spirit, they’re Toronto’s opposite. In Toronto, cars are everywhere, but the Islands are a car-free zone. Toronto’s architecture and design can be blandly functional, but the Islands are full of whimsy. There’s a giant cedar hedge maze, and a miniature farm and a garden devoted to a children’s book character. Much of Toronto is cut off from its waterfront, but on the Islands, there’s sailing, canoeing, paddleboarding.
That said, I’m always happy to get back to the mainland after a day trip. Just a few hundred people live on the Islands, and I wouldn’t want to live in a community that small. I would hate to take a ferry to work every day or schlep my groceries in. Plus, I’m not nearly brave enough to withstand the weather on the Islands, or its regular bouts of flooding.
Islanders have always been a tough, self-selected bunch who tolerate the quirks of island life in exchange for the rewards. Rebellion is in their DNA: for decades, the municipal government tried to get rid of them, but they resisted. In the early 1950s, the Islands residential community consisted of about 630 cottages. There was considerable infrastructure, including a movie theatre, a bowling alley, stores, hotels and dance halls. Then the city decided it wanted the Islands for public parkland—an inspired idea, actually—and began to expropriate land and demolish homes. The remaining Islanders banded together and fought the city, eventually winning the right to stay.
The Byzantine rules governing the arrangement are outlined in the Toronto Islands act, which wasn’t passed until the early 1990s. It grants Islanders deeds to their houses and 99-year leases on the land. Now there are just 262 properties on the Islands, all subject to a special set of rules.
So what happens when there’s an ownership dispute over one of the cottages? How does it get adjudicated? Katherine Laidlaw, a regular Toronto Life contributor, heard about one such dispute roughly a year ago, and it piqued her interest: an elderly island dweller had formally adopted his middle-aged friend, which meant the friend could inherit the man’s cottage. This angered many Islanders who viewed the adoption as a violation of the spirit of the act.
Six years ago, Laidlaw briefly lived on the Islands herself as a renter and saw up close how intimate life is there, how much people care about each other’s business, for better and for worse. She was interested in what a passionate, morally complicated real estate battle would do to the harmonious environment, and how it would all get settled. So she embarked on her reporting, which spanned almost the entire pandemic year, and produced a story (“The House That Divided the Toronto Islands,” on page 38) that is as singular and surprising as the Islands themselves.