Parks Canada Encroaching Development

Edmonton Journal feature writer Ed Struzik spent four months this summer trekking through Canada's national parks, from the High Arctic to Point Pelee, Pacific Rim to Gros Morne. He found a parks system adored by Canadians, yet crumbling due to neglect. Over eight weeks in the Edmonton Sunday Reader, Struzik explores the mounting challenges the parks face.

Encroaching development: Can you serve two masters?

Knocking on haven's door

It is cool, damp and windy when we set off by boat from Burleigh Falls onthe Trent-Severn, a 386-kilometre-long Parks Canada-run waterway that linksLake Ontario to Georgian Bay.

Along the way, superintendent Ken East points towards one of the hundreds of cottages located along the shoreline. This one is a two-storey estate with a putting green, a tennis court and a Kentucky blue grass lawn that rolls out like a lush carpet all the way to the water's edge.

"It's gone way beyond the cottage mentality," says East, who has been on the job here for less than a year. "Some people are having elevators put into get them from the water's edge to their front door. It's not uncommonfor people to put in $50,000 kitchens and three furnaces to heat these places through the fall and winter."

The Trent-Severn is an interconnected network of lakes, improved river channels and artificial canals that was once administered by the federal Department of Transportation until Ontario's highway system made it obsolete for that purpose in the early 1960s.

With more than 4,500 kilometres of scenic shoreline, it has become a getaway for hundreds of thousands of central Canadians and Americans seeking refuge from the hustle and bustle of the city and the smog that smoulders over many urban centres during the hot summer.

But for Parks Canada, which inherited the waterway when it became a national historic site, it has become the kind of environmental nightmare that is confronting nearly every national park in southern Canada as well as a few in the North.

Whether it is mining next to Nahanni and Jasper, logging around Fundy in New Brunswick and B.C.'s Pacific Rim, residential developments creeping up against Elk Island and Waterton Lakes in Alberta, or farms that virtually surround Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba and Point Pelee in southern Ontario, Parks Canada officials are realizing they can no longer ignore what's happening along their borders.

MILLION-DOLLAR COTTAGES ANYTHING BUT RUSTIC

"I was born in Ontario and grew up in the midst of the summer-at-lake, cottage culture," says East, who has spent much of the last quarter centurywith Parks Canada managing wilderness reserves in the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

"We still have the family cottage on a lake along the Trent-Severn. But having come back and seen things here from a Parks Canada perspective, this has been a bit of a shocker. Unless we do something about all of the development that is taking place in and around this area, we're going to lose the natural beauty that makes this part of the world so special. We
can't do this alone."

Most of the residential and commercial development that now threatens the Trent-Severn has occurred incrementally over the past 30 years. Real estate is in such high demand that waterfront cottages on Balsam Lake in the Kawarthas, an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of Toronto, cost from $400,000 to several million dollars.

People who buy these properties aren't looking for anything rustic.

Over the years, hundreds of truckloads of sand have been brought in soswimmers don't pinch their feet on the gravelly lake bottom. Dredgers havebeen employed so yachts can be parked in lavish boathouses that have been,in some cases, carved out of the rock with the help of dynamite.

The new generation of cottage owners has also brought its passion for green, weed-free lawns. The fact that lawns now cover more than one-third of the shoreline landscape in the Kawartha Lakes area of the Trent-Severn is one of Parks Canada's biggest problems.

To keep those lawns green and weed-free, cottage owners are using copious amounts of fertilizers and herbicides. Those fertilizers, however, promote algae. To prevent the algae from choking other aquatic life, up to one thousand litres a year of herbicides are being poured into the waterway.

"It's a never-ending cycle," says East.

"Our people have been processing upwards of one thousand applications each year for dredge and fill activities, weed harvesting and the application of herbicides. It's getting better, but some people just don't get it. One woman warned that she'd sue Parks Canada if one of her kids drowns getting tangled up in the weeds that her lawn chemicals help fertilize."

As natural resources adviser for the Trent-Severn, Joan Chamberlain is just one of two people who exclusively deal with environmental issues on the waterway. She concedes she doesn't have enough resources to deal with the more than 50 species now at risk and all the wetlands now threatened by newdevelopments.

Lacking money and resources, however, isn't her only problem. The fact that Parks Canada can't control what people are doing just outside park boundaries also adds to her headaches.

"It's hard to turn back the clock or change minds when people have so much invested in these properties," she says. "Many of them can't see the harm in doing a lot of little things like fertilizing their lawns or clearing the natural growth along the shoreline. But when you get thousands of people doing all those little things, it adds up to one big problem for the
environment."

While Waterton Lakes National Park at the southern end of the Canadian Rockies seems far removed from the human development that threatens Trent-Severn, it represents the kind of emerging challenge that other parks face.

Ski hill operators, oil and gas developers, ranchers, farmers, snowmobilers and hikers all want a piece of what is left around the park.

But no one has focused the debate about Waterton's future more intensely than Jim Garner.

After a two-year battle with ranchers and environmentalists, the former Saskatchewan MLA is forging ahead with plans for a residential subdivision on the park's boundary. A sign on his Heaven-on-Earth Estates property recently suggested more than half of the 23 lots have been sold.

Waterton, which covers only 525 square kilometres, is too small to protect carnivores like wolves, cougars and grizzly bears that require vast tracts of wilderness to survive.

Once outside the park boundaries, the animal's chances of getting killed or into trouble increase dramatically. Just last year, a female bear and her two cubs died after eating poisoned bait on a Hutterite colony near Waterton. A member of the colony, who said he was targeting raccoons, was fined $5,000.

While Waterton staff have made progress working with the provincial government, local counties and Glacier National Park across the border in Montana, co-management of grizzlies who wander out of the park remains a problem.

That was made clear this past summer when one of Waterton's grizzlies, hungry because of a berry crop failure, was lured out of the park into a private campground to feed on garbage that was not stored in bear-proof containers that officials had tried to get the owner to buy.

Normally, bears like this are either tranquillized and moved off to other wilderness areas or hazed to remind them of the danger of human contact. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't.

This bear, never in trouble before, would have been a perfect candidate for relocation or hazing. Parks Canada officials, in fact, had been watching this animal for some time and had been impressed by the tolerance it showed towards humans.

TRAGIC END FOR A PREVIOUSLY TROUBLE-FREE BEAR

The scene was potentially dangerous -- a bear acting boldly in a busy campground. The wildlife officer there did the logical thing and tranquillized the animal.

But now that the bear had a record of borderline aggressive behaviour, neither the province nor the national parks in the Rockies were willing to take it. Wildlife officers had no choice but to destroy an animal that likely would have avoided trouble if the province had insisted the campground use bear-proof garbage containers.

John Weaver, a Wildlife Conservation Society biologist who has been studying carnivores in Canada and the U.S. for more than two decades,believes the bears of Waterton/Glacier face an uncertain future unless aplan to expand the Canadian side of the international park into B.C.'s Flathead Valley goes ahead.

"The Flathead is perhaps the single most important area for carnivores in the Rocky Mountains," says Weaver. "Grizzly bears, wolves, lynx, marten and wolverine move across the international border, making the Flathead River basin truly a transboundary landscape that must be managed as one integral, ecological unit."

Weaver is working with Parks Canada and the Deh Cho First Nation, hoping to pave the way for expanding Nahanni National Park in the Northwest Territories so that the mistakes in managing carnivores in the south won't be repeated there.

"Nahanni is like Waterton in that it is too small in itself to maintain a viable population of grizzly bears," says Weaver. "But unlike Waterton, it doesn't have all of the human development surrounding the park. So it's not going to be as difficult to ensure a future for them there."

Weaver was reminded how inadequate Nahanni's boundaries are this past summer when he identified a grizzly on Tlogotsho Plateau at the west end of the park as the same animal he found along the east boundary near Prairie Creek the previous summer.

"That's about 65 kilometres as the raven flies over some pretty rough country," he says. "It reinforces what we've discovered in previous years. Grizzlies need a lot of space. And Nahanni, as it is, just doesn't have the space necessary to maintain a viable population into the future."

Expanding Nahanni, however, hasn't turned out to be as easy as initially expected when the Deh Cho agreed to the interim protection of 70,000 square kilometres of land -- twice the size of Vancouver Island -- in the southwest corner of the Northwest Territories.

That agreement includes interim protection of 18,800 square kilometres of land in the South Nahanni watershed around Nahanni National Park Reserve.

The money needed for mapping and wildlife research before the first deadline expires in three years has been hard to come by. Nor has a mechanism been put in place to expropriate land now being targeted for a mine within the expansion area.

'COLOSSAL TRAFFIC JAM' ALONG MACKENZIE VALLEY

The Department of Indian and Northern Affairs hasn't helped matters by continuing to act as if the park expansion plan isn't on the table. The department continues to provide the mine developers at Prairie Creek with the permits they need for their plans on the east side of the park.

Monte Hummel, past-president of the World Wildlife Fund of Canada (WWF), says Indian and Northern Affairs has created "one colossal traffic jam all along the Mackenzie Valley," by allowing companies to continue to explore in areas targeted for protection by the wildlife group and aboriginal people along the Mackenzie Valley.

Hummel says he and former Northwest Territories premier Stephen Kakfwi have had 40 meetings in Ottawa with various officials -- cabinet ministers, the prime minister and senior bureaucrats -- trying to get the government to commit $9 million to a protected area strategy that includes expansion of Nahanni and protection for at least 19 other sites along the Mackenzie Valley before a proposed $7-billion natural gas pipeline is built.

Although WWF and industry is committed to raising the other half of the $18 million needed for this task over the next five years, he says the federal government has yet to commit a penny.

"There's something very wrong when the federal government can easily come up with $70 million for pipeline preparedness in the Canadian North but not the $1.2 million a year that is needed for expansion of Nahanni and the establishment of other protected areas, including Grizzly Bear Mountain and the Scented Grass Hills that have been targeted for national historic site status," Hummel says.

"The prime minister can go up North and ooh and ahh about how breathtaking the landscape is, but unless he commits money to these conservationinitiatives, it's all going to be lost.

"Parks Canada, the Canadian Wildlife Service and the other agencies that are responsible for our national parks, historic sites, marine conservation areas and national wildlife reserves can't do it on their own."

estruzik@thejournal.canwest.com