WHEREAS under The Highways and Transportation Act, 1997, “No person shall break, cut, fill, or otherwise alter or damage a public improvement”; and

WHEREAS municipalities incur substantial public improvement expenditures building roads and planting grass along slopes and in ditches; and

WHEREAS there is an increasing problem experienced by many rural municipalities in that roadsides are being eroded by adjacent landowners spraying, cultivating and otherwise destroying the slopes and grass along roadsides; and

WHEREAS existing mechanisms for remedying contravention of bylaws and provincial statutes prohibiting damage to public improvements is costly and time consuming;

BE IT RESOLVED that the Provincial Government be petitioned to expand municipalities’ powers to enable charges for remediation of roadside damages caused by abutting landowners be charged to taxes.

View response from the Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure