317 Kanata homes ring the old golf course. I measured it.

Three hundred and seventeen houses in Kanata Lakes sit within thirty metres of land that used to be a golf course and is now zoned for housing.

I did not get that number from a press release. I pulled the City of Ottawa's live zoning layer, isolated the nineteen polygons the Ontario Land Tribunal created at the old Kanata Golf and Country Club, and measured every municipal address point around it against the edge of that line.

317 inside thirty metres. 814 inside a hundred. 1,468 inside two hundred.

If you live on Knudson, Windeyer or Zokol, you are in the first group. Sixty-two addresses on Knudson Drive alone are inside thirty metres. Twenty streets have at least one.

The rezoning is not a proposal anymore

This is the part people still get wrong when they call me.

On January 27, 2026 the Ontario Land Tribunal issued draft plan of subdivision approval and final approval of the zoning by-law amendment. The Supreme Court had already refused to hear the City's appeal on September 18, 2025. The 1981 agreement that was supposed to keep forty per cent of the Kanata Lakes development area as open space did not survive the courts.

Go look at the City's zoning map yourself. The land carries exceptions 3078 through 3083, consolidated onto the map on March 11, 2026. Most of it is Neighbourhood Zone 1B. There is a block of N4B with a fifteen metre height cap and a block of N5B at twenty-two. That is roughly 48.7 hectares of former fairway, already zoned, already final.

The proponent's own design splits the seventy hectare site into about 33 hectares of residential land, 14 of roads, and 23 of parks, open space, buffers and stormwater ponds. The application was for roughly 1,500 units.

The boundary between that site and the existing neighbourhood runs 21.3 kilometres. Golf courses weave between houses. That is the entire appeal of a golf course community, and it is exactly why so many homes ended up this close to the line.

Now the mercury, with a ruler held against it

Here is the number that has been circulating in Kanata Lakes all year.

The mercury is real. It came from mercury-based fungicides used to stop snow mold on the greens, which the industry phased out in the 1990s. Of 74 soil samples in the earlier studies, 15 exceeded the provincial standard, about twenty per cent. On the putting greens it was 69 per cent of 16 samples. At the tee boxes, half of four. In the roughs and fairways, low or none. Almost all of it sat in the top fifteen centimetres.

The highest reading at the site to date is 3.0 micrograms per gram, from a single sample taken during preliminary works this spring.

Now put that on a scale, because almost nobody does.

The standard that triggers cleanup is 0.27. That number is not a health threshold. It is set by vapour intrusion into the indoor air of a future house, the pathway itself would give 0.25, and the province rounds up to the natural background level. So 3.0 is about eleven times the trigger.

The component value for direct soil contact, the scenario where children and pregnant women are touching and ingesting soil at high frequency, is 9.8. Plants and soil organisms, 10. Mammals and birds, 20. Soil to outdoor air, 36.

So the site has to be remediated before anyone builds on it, and it is nowhere near the level at which the province starts worrying about a kid digging in it. Both of those are true at the same time. The people telling you it is nothing are wrong, and the people telling you it is a catastrophe are wrong.

What the September testing actually said

This is the new part, and it is the part that matters if you own one of those 317.

The City hired WSP to sample surface soil on the eight City-owned pathways that connect the surrounding streets to the old course. Thirty-five sampling locations. Mercury turned up at low levels everywhere, and every result came in well below the provincial standards for residential and parkland use. There was one boron exceedance, attributed to naturally occurring organic matter.

The City's conclusion was blunt: historical golf course activity has not contaminated the shallow soil on those pathways.

Two nearby parks, Weslock and Sue Nickerson, were sampled in 2023 and 2024 for unrelated reasons and showed no mercury exceedances either. Seven more City parks around the course are getting Phase One assessments, expected this fall.

Three stormwater samples taken in March and April, including one at the point where the course's private system enters City pipes, all came back below the lab's detection limit.

That is a better set of results than the rumour mill has been pricing in, and I have spent months hearing the opposite.

Two things I would still want answered

ClubLink let WSP watch its consultant collect soil samples but would not let WSP collect its own duplicates. When your results are fine, you let the other side split the sample. That refusal is in the City's own update, and it is worth remembering when the next batch of numbers lands.

Then there is drainage. The City's independent reviewer found that nobody has assessed the cumulative stormwater impact of full build-out alongside the other developments feeding the same system. Beaver Pond carries the whole Kanata Lakes drainage network. For the 317, that is a bigger long-run question than the mercury.

If you own here, or you are buying here

Owners: the thing that moves your price over the next several years is not a soil reading, it is construction. Years of it, six metres from some back fences. Price accordingly and stop reading the soil reports like they are the story.

Buyers: read the City's Engage Ottawa page before you write an offer, not after. Pull the zoning yourself. Ask what the view becomes, because on twenty of those streets it changes. Then browse Kanata with that in mind.

Sellers: if a buyer asks you directly about the course or the soil, answer honestly. I sell houses, I am not a lawyer, and what you are obliged to disclose about a known condition is a conversation to have with your real estate lawyer before you list, not one to improvise on offer night.

None of this makes Kanata Lakes a bad place to own. It has been one of the stronger west end holds for two decades, and the tech park next door is still the demand engine it always was. It just stopped being the neighbourhood people bought into in 2015, and pricing on 2015 assumptions is how sellers there get hurt. The wider read on the area is in my Kanata breakdown, and this is the same map exercise I ran on the flood plain overlay.

Want the exact distance from your address to that line, or the sales on your street since the January decision? Call me at 613-262-6545 or send a note to fil@613realtor.ca and I will measure it for you the same way I measured the other 3,696.