Read Your Mail

Ralph Sutherland | Mar 23, 2022

A recent experience of mine has shown why landowners should carefully examine all important documents.

In 1974, forty-eight years ago, my family bought a 460-acre woodlot in the Township of North Frontenac. Starting about twenty years ago, maps began to circulate indicating that someone (probably MPAC or the Township) believed that some of the land that we considered to be ours was not ours. One map removed about 170 acres from our holding, a second excluded 69 acres.

In 2021, a new lot with a new description was created out of land we thought we owned – and the Sutherlands were not the owners. The Township gave the new lot a roll number and then sent a tax bill to the man from whom we had bought the land almost fifty years ago.

The above experience has led me to review old records, and in a 2015 document telling us that the Committee of Adjustment had approved the creation of a new lot, there were three legally significant errors that we would have found if we had been wise enough to carefully read important documents (which we do now).

Ralph Sutherland