South Frontenac has no short-term-rental by-law, and the township has now put in writing that it does not intend to write one. In a June 5 email sent on behalf of council and staff, and confirmed through the township's legal counsel, Chief Administrative Officer Louise Fragnito set out the position in a few plain sentences: "The Township does not use its zoning by-law to regulate short-term rentals. Council considered short term rental regulations a few years ago. It was decided not to pursue a licencing program at that time." She closed by calling it "the Township's last correspondence in relation to this matter."
The choice is one South Frontenac can defend. But it answers a practical question, whether the approach is workable now, and leaves a longer one untouched. A rental market allowed to grow without rules does not stay the size it is today, and the deeper test of any council is how far into the future it is willing to look. On that test, South Frontenac and its northern neighbour have placed opposite bets: North Frontenac has counted the rental cottages inside its borders and is moving toward the very licensing regime South Frontenac set aside.
South Frontenac's wager is that its existing rulebook is enough. Fragnito's email describes the alternative council chose: "several by-laws were updated, administrative monetary penalties were introduced, and by-law enforcement was increased." Those penalties let a municipality fine an owner directly for a breach on noise, parking, or waste without going to provincial court, the theory being that a busy rental cottage can be reached that way even without a rule that names short-term rentals at all.
The limits of that theory surface in the township's own words. Manager of Planning Christine Woods put it plainly in May: the zoning by-law "cannot regulate who can occupy a dwelling, nor the type or length of tenancy." Relaying the planning clerk in an April 22 email, administrative assistant Bonnie Robinson put it more bluntly: if an owner uses a property "as an AirBnB the municipality cannot do anything as [we] don't have any bylaws that regulate short term rentals." That offhand line lands where the CAO does: nothing in the by-law book is built for short-term rentals.
North Frontenac started from the same legal ground and reached the opposite conclusion, and the record sits in its own minutes. At its March 20 regular meeting, council received a report from its Environmental Task Force titled "Proposed Short Term Rental Regulation" and passed Resolution 91-26, moved by Councillor Vernon Hermer and seconded by Councillor John Inglis. It directed the township's Clerk/Planning Manager and Public Works Manager to prepare a report on the steps, costs, and realistic timeline to create a new short-term-rental by-law.
Council has not passed a by-law, and it did not order the text drafted. The scheme it directed staff to cost out is unmistakably a licensing one. A commercial short-term rental, defined as a home on residentially zoned land rented more than 28 cumulative days a year, would need a township licence renewed annually. The number of licences would be capped and reviewed each year, operating without one would draw escalating fines, and fees would be set to cover the full cost of enforcement. The model named in the report is Tiny Township on Georgian Bay.
The figure behind the push came from the task force's own survey, which estimated 218 short-term rentals across North Frontenac's lakes, roughly 9 per cent of the cottage properties it counted. The report put the risk plainly: "unregulated townships (like North Frontenac) have become a target for more commercial STR development."
On one point the two councils do not disagree, and the province backs both: zoning cannot carry this load. That is the ground Fragnito stands on, and it is the point North Frontenac's planning consultant, Dmitri Kurylovich, made to council in August 2025: that municipalities cannot use zoning to regulate short-term rentals, and that licensing is the tool that can. The two townships part ways only on whether to pick up the one tool that can.
The courts have been sorting out which route survives a challenge, and the split runs by method. When Oro-Medonte tried to control short-term rentals through its zoning by-law, By-law 2020-073, the Ontario Land Tribunal struck it down, upheld on appeal by the Divisional Court. When Tiny Township licensed and capped rentals instead, its 2022 short-term-rental licensing by-law was upheld by the Superior Court in 2025, a decision NFNM reported last summer, and affirmed by the Court of Appeal the following year. The lesson rural councils have drawn is that zoning is the losing lever and licensing the defensible one.
That sharpens the South Frontenac story. Frontenac's other councils have looked to South Frontenac as a planning model, a township North Frontenac's own planners have described as ahead on official-plan policies and zoning tools for additional residential units. On short-term rentals, the leader is the laggard.
Left unregulated over a long enough horizon, the logical endpoint of a short-term-rental market is the conversion of lakefront housing into a fleet of rentals concentrated in a few owners' and corporate hands. This is where NFNM parts company with the township's confidence, because the operators driving that trend are not families renting the cottage for a few summer weekends, and the direction of travel is already visible across Canada.
North Frontenac's own task force named that endgame, warning of "corporate entities purchasing properties and purpose-building residential-looking structures that are actually small hotels," a commercial use, in its words, "happening illegally on a residentially zoned property." Those words describe a general trend the task force sees across North Frontenac; they are not aimed at any named operator.
South Frontenac already shows how ownership can concentrate. NFNM has documented a single operator, Enhabit, running multiple lakefront rentals there: The Frontenac on Thirty Island Lake, Black Oak Lodge on Canoe Lake, and the proposed Miners Lodge on Miner Lake. NFNM makes no allegation that Enhabit operates unlawfully or runs the kind of small hotel the task force described; it is named here only as a documented case of one operator holding several lakefront rentals. Nationally, McGill researchers, in CMHC-funded work, estimate roughly 31,000 homes have already been pulled off Canada's long-term housing market for short-term rental use.
We have watched a version of this before. In the early-2000s housing boom, an unregulated rush to flip houses priced young families off the first rung of the ladder, and short-term rentals are that same pattern moved to the water and out of local reach.
Step back from the two townships, and the more striking fact is the company South Frontenac keeps. Across the four townships and the county, NFNM found none that licenses, registers, or tracks short-term rentals. Central Frontenac has studied the question since June 2021, when residents brought a "ghost hotels" delegation to council and Mayor Frances Smith cautioned there was no quick fix; its zoning by-law, 2022-61, carries no short-term-rental provision NFNM could locate, and a 2022 regional working group it joined with North Frontenac produced no by-law. Frontenac Islands has taken no short-term-rental step NFNM could find beyond joining a county consultation last October in Marysville.
The County of Frontenac is the one body studying a new instrument, and it is a tax rather than a control. A Municipal Accommodation Tax, a levy on overnight stays that many Ontario municipalities already charge, would bill short-term rentals without licensing them or capping their number. When North Frontenac weighed the idea last August, staff cited roughly $525,000 in county-wide short-term-rental revenue drawn from 2021 data. The county's decision is not final, and a report back is not expected until 2027.
This is why NFNM will press short-term rentals as a question every Frontenac candidate must answer in this year's election. Voters go to the polls on October 26. Between now and then, every incumbent and every challenger in the four townships and for the county's seats should be asked to say plainly which of four things they will do: license short-term rentals, cap their number, tax them, or leave them unregulated. Residents are entitled to know where a candidate stands before they mark a ballot, not after.
Residents have already asked for exactly that. The family whose correspondence drew South Frontenac's written position into the open pressed NFNM to make short-term rentals a campaign priority. NFNM covers all four townships and the county and endorses no candidate in any of them. The same question goes to every candidate, including the North Frontenac councillors now advancing a by-law.
South Frontenac is entitled to have its choice reported as a choice. Council did not ignore short-term rentals; it examined licensing, decided against a program, and put its faith in updated by-laws, direct penalties, and stepped-up enforcement. Mayor Ron Vandewal and Councillor Steven Pegrum were among those copied on the written position, which the CAO issued for both council and staff and which the township considers final. Any councillor, candidate, or staff member who wishes to add to it may do so, and NFNM will correct anything it gets wrong.
NFNM does not dispute South Frontenac's right to make this call. What we dispute is treating it as finished while the market it governs keeps growing. The current approach may hold up this year, and next. The question underneath it was always the longer one: how far down the road a council is willing to look, and who is still able to live on the lake once it gets there.
Disclosure: NFNM's publisher, Donald Morton, is a declared candidate for mayor of North Frontenac in the October 26, 2026 municipal election. NFNM covers all four Frontenac townships and the County of Frontenac and endorses no candidate. South Frontenac, the subject of this article, is not the municipality he is contesting.