About a month ago, the Scheewe family installed a new fence along the property line, and sure enough, the bear showed up and knocked one of the panels out.

Rather than put the panel back, Curt Scheewe left a one-metre by one-metre hole in the fence and framed it in to let the bear through.

“Our neighbours, we all love the bear,” Scheewe told Global News.

“We are careful with our garbage and our compost, but we enjoy being on the bear route. We don’t really want him to go away.”

“I would spend time to fix it and replace boards, and after a while, he just kept breaking it down all the time so we just left the hole,” he said.

But he said the family was worried about coyotes and other creatures getting into the yard — and the bear door idea was born.

“I think it was the kids, we’ve had big dogs in the past, who said, ‘Let’s do a dog door/bear door,’” he explained.

Scheewe installed hinges and a wooden panel heavy enough to keep smaller animals out, which the local bear quickly figured out.

“Sure enough two weeks later he comes walking down the driveway and walks right through it like he’s done it 20 times,” he said.

Sheewe’s family captured footage of the bear using the bear door, which was posted on social media by the North Shore Black Bear Society.