Ontario Crown Land non-resident camping permits

This might be helpful to some of you who do paddle trips or camp on crown land in Ontario. A few years ago they changed how you buy these permits online. If you have used Ontario One-key website to get a permit, it is no longer valid. The old system was quite cryptic, and the new system is as well. Simply finding the correct web site is the biggest hurdle. By the way, each person on the trip has to have an account and pay individually for each night camping.

Permits are now available at the Ontario Natural Resources Information Portal: https://nrip.mnr.gov.on.ca

Step 1:
Login or Sign up

Step 2:
Click on “Start a submission”

Then select:
Who? myself
Business Line? Lands and Waters
Select a form? Non Resident Crown Land Camping Permit

You are then taken to a page where you can fill in all the appropriate information for your trip and as far as I remember pay with a credit card and print out the permit and/or save to your phone. If you have days before and after the trip where you’ll be camping on crown land, you’ll have to buy 2 separate permits.

One more tip. At the end of a trip last year I intended to drive back across the border, but was too tired and pulled over on a side road and camped. Some MNR officers stopped and asked for my crown land permit (first time ever), which I did not have, but I did have a day left on my Wabakimi permit. They said that it will work as well. I’m not sure if they were personally OK with it, or if it is official.

Mark

Pretty sure the Wabakimi permit would be acceptable.

FYI - If you rent a tent from an outfitter you don't need to pay for the camping permit!. Not 100% sure but paying an outfitter to park your vehicle isn't good enough but a parking spot and a tent is.

In any event good post, I know some people have spent days trying to figure out how to get these permits.

Welcome to Ontario, the most unfriendly place (for non-residents) in Canada to camp or paddle (only applies to the government policies not the people you might meet.

I got a non-resident Ontario Crown Land permit last year and remember it took a bit of searching to find the appropriate site. On this trip 3 of us were from the states and the other 3 were Canadian residents and thus did not need Crown Land permits.

It is important to have a permit if you are a non-resident. I know guy from Minnesota who did not have a permit and was cited by an NMR officer for lacking one. When the fine had not been paid he was contacted by MNR early the next year and was asked if he wanted to be able to return to Canada and then paid the citation plus a late fee.

...only applies to the government policies not the people you might meet.

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That sums up my experience to date. Navigating the permit system is a PIA but the area & people make it totally worth it.

BTW: the fact that crown land permits are not required for residents is probably the biggest temptation to sell everything & move North.

I’d move to Ontario in a heartbeat. From what I understand, they don’t want more old people l, even if they have a really good retirement and really, really good health care coverage.
I could enjoy my dotage fly fishing for speckled trout in spring, summer and fall. Tying flies and watching hockey night in Canada in the winter, eh

I dunno Boreal, I'd be happy to see you, although real estate prices in G-Town have exploded because of the mine, Nakina still has relatively cheap houses. No grocery store, no medical services, but unlimited bush. You could probably drive a quad from your house to a spot on the Drowning for spec fishing. Keep trying to get my wife to move to Nakina, but she doesn't want to leave the urban landscapes of G-Town behind, lol.

One year I stopped at a small outdoor store in Temagami, (not there anymore), and as I was paying for my items the owner offered a tent rental receipt when he saw that I was buying some topo’s. I took it, but went back and bought my kids a bunch of tee’s. The tent rental receipt nullified the need for me to buy a non resident camping permit, I appreciated the gesture but to this day I didn’t feel right about it.
One year I stopped at a Service Ontario location in Kapuskasing, Ontario but stood in line so long I decided that from now on I’ll buy online.
Last year I drove out near Wawa, Ontario and planned to boondock on crown land before my planned canoe trip. I purchased crown land permits for those nights before and after my canoe trip.
There was a American who mentioned here a while ago that on the way home (southbound) from a Marshall Lake trip he was stopped by a government person (MNR or game warden, I’m not sure) and was asked to see his non resident crown land camping permit.

How do you know whether the wilderness you're in, or driving through, is crown land or not?

Glenn MacGrady said:

How do you know whether the wilderness you're in, or driving through, is crown land or not?

Click to expand...

Crown Land is the name for all land owned by the federal or provincial government. The name Crown Land is still used today, as Canada is part of the British Commonwealth. The term Crown Land in essence means Public Land. Crown Land in Canada represents about 89% of Canada's land area, almost 9 million sq km.

About 95 % of Northern Ontario is Crown Land. This means that if you are outside of settlements in Northern Ontario and there is no private property nearby, you are almost certainly on Crown land. To make sure this is the case, you can use the map linked below
Crown Land Use Policy Atlas

Aslowhand has summed it up pretty well. There is very little private land in Northern Ontario outside of municipalities and Indigenous reserves. If your canoe route is not listed as a functioning park, then it is most likely Crown Land.

If you are heading to western Ontario be sure to check into the Green Zone rules. Even with the Crown Land permit non residents cannot camp in a Green Zone. I was told it was because a few decades ago truck campers were lining the back roads and hurting local business.

Also.if you own land in Ontario a non resident does not need the permit.

I'm unlikely ever to camp again in Canada, or even visit, but for the sake of completeness and for the benefit of future researchers, could you folks be more specific as to which "non-residents" have to pay an extra fee to camp overnight in the 89% of Canada that is crown land.

I suppose a foreign country citizen who is not a resident of Canada or any of its provinces (such as me) would have to pay the non-resident fee in all provinces that have such fees for crown land.

But there are other questions.

Do all provinces have this non-resident camping fee for crown lands within their borders? In other words, is this a provincial fee or a national one?

Is the fee the same for crown lands in all provinces or does the fee differ province-to-province?

Does a Canadian resident (of another province) who is a non-resident of Ontario have to pay the fee to camp on Ontario crown lands? Or, as another example, does a resident of Ontario have to pay the fee to camp on Alberta crown lands? Etc.?

What is the purpose of this discriminatory fee? If it's purely a revenue grab, it would be far more lucrative if it applied to all persons camping on crown lands regardless of residency. Surely, more Canadians must camp overnight in Canada than non-Canadians.

Regulation here:

Policy here:

"Resident" - is a Canadian citizen or someone who has lived in Canada for the preceding 12 months.

The policy is Provincial. I don't know of any other province with such a policy. Certainly in the areas I paddle (NWT and Saskatchewan) there is no such policy.

Non resident means not a Canadian citizen. You need a crown land camping permit unless you are a Canadian citizen to camp on crown lands in Ontario. Renting a tent or camper lets you skip the crown land permit in Ontario. Manitoba does not require permits for camping in the lands outside parks. Not all Manitoba Parks charge fees. I will stop there.

Crown Land is controlled by the individual Provinces so the rules may vary outside Ontario.

In Ontario permanent residents (of Ontario) can camp on Crown Land for periods up to two weeks (then you have to move to another spot). Non-residents of Ontario must acquire a non-resident permit.

75 years ago it was easy to get a permit to build a cabin under 99 year leases, most of the cabins you would see in Northern Ontario were built under these permits/leases. These days getting a permit is nearly impossible unless you are a commercial operation (lodge/outfitter) that will employ locals and attract tourism Dollars. Also great swaths of land have been returned to First Nations control in recent decades, they will rarely allow development by "outsiders", generally speaking they have no objection to paddlers passing through.

Yes, it's really all about revenue but also to prevent people from setting up season trailer parks and campsite or building cabins willy nilly.

The system in Quebec is much different, especially in the south and mid-north areas (the Far North is really complicated because the indigenous tribes of the south dominate in some areas while the Inuit occupy the most northerly areas.


In the south Crown Land is leased to outfitters in what is known as a ZEC (zone d'exploitation contrôlée), they control hunting, fishing and build/maintain access roads, campgrounds etc., they have a range of fees.

I'm not familiar with the rules for other provinces but they do exist.

Thanks for the info, references and links. As I read them, a non-resident is someone who is not a citizen or resident of Canada. Hence the Ontario crown land camping fee should not apply to residents of any Canadian province. It also doesn't apply to persons under age 18, which should cover most of the young-at-hearts on this forum . . . .

Google experimental AI tells me that Ontario is the only province that has a non-resident crown land camping permit requirement, though other provinces "may have other" regulations and restrictions.

The part of Ontario that is subject to non-resident crown land permitting is set forth in a Schedule having a complicated property description. AI summarizes this property description as the part of Ontario north of the French and Mattawa Rivers. I don't trust AI, so is that so?

For even more complications, the regulations also say there are specially regulated "Green Zones" in Ontario where non-resident camping is totally verboten. The regs point to THIS MAP, but it's somewhat confusing figure out where the Green Zones are. There are map areas colored in green, but they include Wabakimi and Quetico. Surely, those parks are not limited to Canadian residents only. Maybe the red areas on the map are, incongruously, the Green Zones. Those areas include Red Lake, which I thought was a popular non-resident tourist spot, once inhabited and aggressively marketed by Harlan Schwartz of the quondam Solotripping.com.

The French / Mattawa "line" is what designates Northern Ontario, the area south of the line is often referred to at the "Near North", the area South of Georgian Bay is Southern Ontario which is broken down into Southern, Southeastern, Southwestern. There is very little Crown Land in the south, what is there are parks, nature reserves, protected sanctuary etc.

The Green Zone, colour me totally confused about that

On the other stuff, I can't get the "THIS MAP" to load so I don't know what you are seeing.

I use this map: https://www.lioapplications.lrc.gov.on.ca/CLUPA/index.html?viewer=CLUPA.CLUPA&locale=en-CA

Open that link, if you do not see a Legend on the left sidebar, enable it with the button near the top of the page.

When you zoom in on an area you are interested in you can match the colour to the Legend to see what it's status is.

If you zoom in far enough code numbers will appear, if your RIGHT click on those and select Find Data On The Map the sidebar legend will be replaced, your will see the same code (in bold), click on that and the relevant data set displays.

Red Lake (G2514) is designated as General Use Area.


One thing for sure at least for the wilderness tripping type that are found here not many ever get these permits. I've done about 20 trips in Northern Ontario with non-resident partners, none of them ever paid for permits.

@dogbrain got checked out because he was a short distance from a highway with US plates, the only time you would be paddling and MIGHT get checked out would be in a popular Operating Park.

I buy the permits simply because it's not my country and, as a guest in someone else's home, I follow (most of) their rules. If I were to move to Canada, I suppose I'd pick & choose which rules to follow (note: Mem says I can go to jail for the way I drive but that's about it for civil disobedience North of the border)

Besides, crown land camping permits are cheap.

Thanks for the map @recped. That'll probably save hotel money along Superior on the way North this summer.

Glenn's linked map does show the Green Zones but they are tan colored. Strictly.enforced around those areas.

recped - see my post above from Weds.

The guy I know from Minnesota was on a Wabakimi Project trip with 3 Canadians on crown lands west of the park. They were in their campsite when a yellow MNR Beaver aircraft passed over. The pilot, who was NMR law enforcement, landed on the lake and called the entire group out to the plane. When he discovered the American didn’t have his crown land permit, he cited him for the violation. The funny part of the story is that the MNR officer was a new guy and when got out of the plane and crouched down on the pontoon to talk to the paddlers. As he stood up to get his citation book from the plane, his gun belt hooked the bottom of a door and detached it from the plane dropping it in the lake. It was the only the quick reaction of one of the paddlers which kept him from having to explain how he lost a Beaver aircraft door when he returned to base.

He went ahead and issued the citation anyway even after the group leader explained that Uncle Phil had a handshake agreement with NMR that they would give his groups a pass on requiring the permits for non-residents as long as Phil shared the field data they developed with MNR. When the group got back to Phil’s house in Thunder Bay, he stated he would take the citation to the local NMR office and get it voided. But he never did and the American paid the citation himself the next year since he was told failure to pay it would keep him from entering Canada again.