“There are a huge number of boundary disputes and this adds clarity,” said Clayton Ruby, a lawyer who argued for the new rules. “This decision means that a lot less trees will be cut down because it now requires the consent of both neighbours.” With the base of the tree only three centimetres from her backyard, Hilary Scharper sought to stop Ms. Hartley from cutting down the giant. Learning of her neighbour’s plan, Ms. Scharper sat a statue of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of the environment, beside the maple’s trunk. “We were stunned,” said her husband, Stephen Scharper. “It’s a perfectly healthy tree.” Legal documents filed by Ms. Hartley’s lawyer describe the moving of the statue under the tree. The Scharpers also posted a notice to any would-be lumberjacks that the tree’s ownership was in dispute. Under Toronto’s Private Tree bylaw, owners are entitled to remove sick trees. Presenting a report that the tree was healthy and its removal unnecessary, the Scharpers offered to install a system of cables to secure the maple to the ground. Ms. Hartley rejected the offer. Because the large tree sprawls over much of the Scharpers’ backyard, Ms. Hartley sued her neighbours to establish her right to cut down the tree and enter their backyard to do so. On May 17, Justice J. Patrick Moore ruled that a shared tree under the provincial Forestry Act starts from where its roots join the trunk up to where the trunk branches out. Justice Moore dismissed the idea of defining a trunk at ground level alone as “arbitrary.”
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:15:31 +0000
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