When can a stream create a natural severance of a property?

A case is before the Ontario Superior Court in London to determine whether a local watercourse effectively severs a property into two parts.  An application has been commenced by the Municipality of Middlesex Centre for a declaration that a stream (the Bear Creek Drain) is not a navigable waterway such that a particular property through which it flows would be severed in two.  The predecessors in title of the affected landowners had previously applied to sever their property, but the application was denied.  The current landowners then obtained an opinion that the stream created a "natural severance"; a surveyor agreed and registered a reference plan showing the lands north and south of the stream as two separate parts and denoting the stream itself as "Unpatented Crown Land".

This was done without the knowledge of the municipality; the circumstances were discovered when the landowners made an application for a building permit that would have constituted a second dwelling on the same 10-acre parcel; this would not have been permitted without a rezoning unless there was a "natural severance".

Justice Heeney has ruled that it will not be necessary for the municipality to serve its application on other landowners along the Bear Creek Drain as the issue to be determined at trial will relate solely to the specific property in question: "was the stream a naviagble waterway at the time of the original Crown grant to the current owners' predecessors in title in 1831?  If the answer is yes, then the stream bed is deemed to have been excluded from the original grant, and title to it remains vested in the Crown, irrespective of the current status of the waterway.  If the answer is no, the stream bed was included in the deed to the parcel over which it flowed, and title to it vested in the private landowner who obtained the deed from the Crown, and in his successors in title, up to and including" the current landowners.

As the onus of proof will be on the landowners, Justice Heeney also ruled that they will present their case first at trial, to be followed by the municipality and then the Province of Ontario.

Read the decision at: Middlesex Centre v. MacMillan et al.