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Editor’s note: The Public Prosecution Service of Canada said on Oct. 10 that Linda O’Leary does not face jail time, only a maximum fine of $10,000.

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Seguin Township, Ontario — On a rainy Thursday in late September, Neil Hamer, the last of the Hamers on Hamer Bay, stood in the gravel parking lot outside the family store and spoke into the window of a car parked in his open and otherwise empty lot. Hamer, who is 67, wore an old green golf shirt open at the neck. He had a prickly white moustache cut short over weathered skin. He couldn’t say much, he said, not about that night. But he wanted to say this:

“It was wealthy people who squealed on me.”

Hamer’s family goes back more than a century on the bay, a wooded cove at the north end of Lake Joseph in the Muskoka area north of Toronto. They were there before the cottagers, modest enough at first in their little wooden chalets, and long before the super-rich started migrating up from the lower end of the lake. Hamers built the first generation of cabins on the bay. They opened the first resort and the first marina. They operated the gas station and the general store. They were the bay, in many ways. And now they’re just Neil.