Canada's Parks An Endangered Legacy

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.

Canada's parks: An endangered legacy

Canada's parks: an endangered legacy

Almost 120 years ago, Canada's first national park, Banff, was created as a bequest to future generations. Today, our cherished network of parks is struggling to cope with overuse, underfunding, pollution, disease, habitat loss, invasion of alien species and encroaching development. Does Canada have the will to save its natural wonders?

Ed Struzik
The Edmonton Journal
November 7, 2004

WILLOW CREEK WARDEN STATION, JASPER NATIONAL PARK -- Shortly before midnight, we step out of the Willow Creek warden cabin in the backcountry of Jasper National Park to have one last look at the half moon perfectly positioned over Daybreak Peak.

It's late September. A hard frost is icing up the meadow and a thin column of mist is building over the nearby creek. We can hear but not see our horses grazing somewhere nearby beneath the faint glow of the northern lights. Wrangler, my horse, is wearing a bell so we can track down the animals in the pre-dawn hour if they wander too far.

And then it happens -- the long lonesome howl of a wolf in the distance. Retiring chief park warden Brian Wallace looks at me and I look at Kevin Van Tighem, the man taking over his job.

Then in silent unison, the three of us turn towards the howl of another wolf that answers in kind. Before this one finishes, two others, and then two more call out in similar fashion, but in higher and lower octaves from different parts of the valley. The long operatic chorus, which lasts a good three minutes, would send shivers up the spine of a Puccini, a Verdi or a Strauss.

"You know years ago, I was standing in this very same spot when this pack of wolves came in through the meadow from Daybreak Peak," recalls Wallace after the choir of wolves is finished. "It was just after sunrise. There was a mist fogging over the meadow and these animals were silently coming towards me like a pack of ghosts. It was an unforgettable moment."

Wallace was a backcountry warden back then, just as he is now. After 34 years with Parks Canada, almost all of them in Jasper, he decided he would rather spend his last year doing what he enjoyed most -- riding horses, clearing trails, patrolling for poachers, and sharing the occasional cup of tea with wilderness hikers -- than sitting in an office attending to all the paperwork and meetings as the park's second-in-command. So he asked his boss, Ron Hooper, if he could go back to the front lines of the warden service.

Now on one of his last patrols in the Rocky Mountain wilderness, Wallace couldn't be happier listening to the wolves while a whirlwind of bats flap by in the moonlight.

But there is also a deep sense of sadness associated with this final adventure.

Not only is Wallace saying farewell to an organization he considers to be family, he is leaving an agency so strapped for cash that the integrity of the entire national park and historic site system is in peril.

For most Canadians, national parks and historic sites are sacred trusts. One in four people across the country visit one of the 41 national parks and 115 historic sites each year. Surveys show that 90 per cent of them go home satisfied with the experience.

But unless new funds and bold strategies are forthcoming soon, that level of satisfaction will likely plummet.

Given the agency's financial straits, many parks stand to lose their long-running battles to save endangered species, stop the relentless invasion of unwanted plants and animals, and deal with urban and industrial development that is increasingly isolating these wilderness reserves.

The cash crunch has already resulted in the decommissioning or closure of several trails, campgrounds and national historic sites. If the financial crisis continues much longer, it could threaten the completion of the national parks system itself.

"Triaging is what we've been reduced to doing," says Wallace. "There's no way we can do everything we're supposed to do with the money we have, so each year we sit down and figure out what we can afford. And each year, the list we come up with gets smaller and smaller. It's become a frustrating and depressing exercise."

Among the 120 countries in the world that have a national parks system, Canada has been for decades the undisputed leader. Our national parks, found in every province and territory, cover nearly 250,000 square kilometres, or 2.4 per cent of our country's land mass.

Nowhere in the world can a visitor be wined and dined in the splendour of a Lake O'Hara or Skoki Lodge one night and then spend the next night 2,900 metres high in the rustic comfort of the Alpine Club of Canada hut at Abbot Pass or in a flapping tent somewhere along the breathtaking Skyline Trail.

Several of Canada's parks, including Nahanni, Wood Buffalo, and the seven Rocky Mountain parks, are considered so special that a United Nations committee designated them World Heritage Sites. Nahanni, in fact, beat out the Grand Canyon in the U.S. when the committee convened to pick the first of these sites.

Among all of the nations with national parks, only the United States has been at it longer than Canada.

Commercialism, not conservation, spawned the national parks. The birth of our parks system, however, had nothing to do with conservation.

After three of his employees stumbled upon mineral hot springs in the Bow Valley in November 1883, CPR president William Cornelius Van Horne came to the Rockies for a look. As soon as Van Horne saw what they'd discovered, he proclaimed: "These springs are worth a million dollars."

Van Horne's comments were not out of line, given the state of Canada's development at the time. With so much wildlife and wilderness, there was no real imperative to protect it. So the Banff Springs Hotel was built, quickly followed by Mount Stephen House, Glacier Park Lodge, and golf courses at Banff and Jasper.

Economic development, in fact, so dominated government priorities at the time that logging, mining and hunting were encouraged in a number of parks. Some of these activities, like clear-cut logging in Wood Buffalo and hunting in Point Pelee, continued right up to the 1980s.

The idea of establishing parks for their wilderness value didn't take hold until 1911 when Parliament passed the Dominion Forest Reserves and Parks Act. And it was only by chance that the man who saw parks as a means of satisfying the Canadian public's "soul-craving for nature," became head of the government branch responsible for that act.

James Bernard Harkin has never really been given his proper due for laying the foundation for Canada's present-day parks system or for increasing the number of parks from just five in 1911 to 17 by 1930, including three prairie parks that were later decommissioned. Point Pelee, Georgian Bay and Elk Island in Alberta were just some of the parks created during his tenure.

Like every parks chief who has followed him, however, Harkin had to frame his vision in economic terms in order to satisfy his political bosses.

In 1922, he calculated the value of national parks at $300 million, boasting that no other institution in Canada paid a bigger dividend.

Today, with annual revenues of just $78 million, Parks Canada has struggled to justify why it needs another $400 million in federal funding each year to keep going.

Some critics see this as a reason why parts of the national parks system should be privatized. It's also the reason the federal Alberta caucus and former federal environment minister Suzanne Blais-Grenier went so far during the Mulroney era as to suggest that logging, mining and oil and gas development be reconsidered in some national parks.

However, the notion that national parks are nothing but "sterilized land," as several Alberta MLAs have suggested, is not supported by the numbers.

A recent study estimated that Canada's national parks, historic sites and national marine conservation areas contribute more than $1.2 billion to the gross domestic product each year and provide Canadians with 37,600 full-time jobs.

National parks are magnets for tourists. Half of the Europeans and 25 per cent of the Americans who come to Canada make their way to a national park. Each year, thousands of Japanese tourists bypass the rest of the country and go directly to Banff.

All told, national parks and historic sites attract about 26 million people each year.

Although Canadians are clearly in love with their parks, the level of support for the national parks system has been slowly eroding in recent years. Most new immigrants who come to Canada, for example, arrive from countries where national parks are not part of the cultural landscape.

Parks Canada has tried hard to connect with new Canadians by opening an office in Toronto's immigrant heartland and conducting surveys to see what they want and expect from national parks.

What they've learned thus far is daunting.

"When we asked this one man who had come from a country in East Asia how he enjoyed his visit to Point Pelee, he said it was fine," noted one Parks Canada official.

"When we asked him how we might improve the experience, he thought for a moment and then said 'You know, you could use a hippopotamus. Come to think about it, two would be better. That would really get people excited.'

"It was one of the more extreme answers to our questions. But it showed just how much needs to be done to educate the public about what national parks are all about."

While most other departments pine for the kind of approval rating that Parks Canada still enjoys, the agency has trouble getting on the government radar. Over the years, Parks Canada has been batted around like a badminton birdie from one department to another. It's been the unwanted and often neglected child in the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, Heritage Canada, and now, for the second time in a decade, Environment Canada.

Chretien took pride in creating new parks

One moment of political glory did come two years ago when former prime minister Jean Chretien announced his government would create 10 national parks and five marine conservation areas.

It should not have come as a surprise. Chretien had called the creation of Nahanni, Kluane and Auyuittuq parks during his tenure as minister of Indian and Northern Affairs one of his greatest political achievements.

Despite the legacy of parks Chretien left behind, it was under his watch as prime minister that the national parks system suffered the most financially.

Since 1991, Parks Canada has endured a series of crippling cuts that has reduced its spending power by about 25 per cent.

In some ways, the cuts were necessary. The big budgets that Parks Canada enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in a number of unnecessary roads, bridges, trails and poorly designed buildings that were increasingly costly to maintain.

The situation got so ridiculous that Kluane, a park in the southwestern corner of the Yukon that entertained just a few hundred people annually in the 1970s, came up with a management plan that envisaged a tramway up the side of Mount Vulcan, shuttle buses to take people up the Slims River Valley to the Kaskawalsh Glacier, and a commercial boat operation to ferry people around Mush and Bates lakes. It was to be the new Banff of the North.

Had former prime minister Pierre Trudeau not imposed the wage-and-price controls that effectively killed the park development plan, the agency would have been left with a white elephant.

The economic hit taken by Parks Canada during the past 13 years, however, has been devastating.

While many other government departments endured similar cuts, Parks Canada never had the same flexibility to adjust.

Instead of downsizing across the board as other departments and agencies were able to do, Parks Canada was given seven new national parks and dozens of new national historic sites to run. It was also handed the task of creating eight new national parks and marine conservation reserves in the coming years, and administering a number of other domestic and international programs.

Throughout the 1990s, new northern parks had to borrow from ones in the south to do research and pay staff. Only recently has new money been promised to create future parks.

What's really crippling Parks Canada these days, though, is the decaying roads, dams, canals and national historic sites the agency is responsible for.

Given that the value of Parks Canada's historic and cultural assets is $1.7 billion, the agency should be spending $44 million on upkeep and repairs if Treasury Board guidelines are to be followed. But all it's been able to afford in recent years is about $11 million. Compounded, that has resulted in a $425-million shortfall, almost an entire year's budget, to deal with the decaying assets over the next five years.

Faced with a hold-the-line budget next year, Parks Canada officials are doing what they hoped they'd never have to do. They are closing or downsizing several national historic sites, and continuing to decommission a number of campsites and footbridges like those that used to take wilderness hikers into the Jacques/Merlin Pass area in Jasper. They're also proposing to dramatically raise the price of user fees, including the annual parks pass that will go to $139 from $89.

Inverarden House near Cornwall, Ont., is already sitting empty because of water and structural damage. Part of Dufferin Terrace in Quebec City, which attracts three million visitors a year, was closed this fall for similar reasons. The walls around Prince of Wales Fort in Churchill, Man., are so unstable that temporary trusses have been installed to prevent them from collapsing.

And two years before the bicentennial of explorer David Thompson's trek through the Howse Pass, Parks Canada is proposing to tear down the interpretive centre at the Rocky Mountain House National Historic site, where Thompson was once based, and replace staff with electronic voices activated by pushing buttons on a display panel.

Given the fact that half the national historic sites in Canada are considered to be in poor shape, Christine Cameron, the woman heading up the historic sites branch of Parks Canada, warns that the list of closures is going to grow.

Parks motto treated as an office joke

Even the motto "Ecological Integrity is Our First Priority" that appears on the annual parks pass is mocked these days. Park employees joke that it must be a misprint because the word "not" is missing.

While surveys show most Canadians believe Parks Canada does a great job in search and rescue, firefighting and patrolling for poachers, its record of protecting wilderness has long been the subject of heated debate.

That debate, however, was largely settled when former heritage minister Sheila Copps appointed a panel of experts to assess Parks Canada's performance.

After spending more than a year travelling across the country talking to experts and visiting a number of national parks, the panel members emerged shocked by what they had discovered.

Well over two-thirds of the national parks, they found, were suffering significantly from wildlife diseases, overuse, pollution, invasion of exotic species, roads and the urban and industrial development that was blocking the movement of wildlife and the flow of water in and out of national parks.

To the surprise of no one closely associated with national parks, panel members found the biggest problems in large parks like Banff that attract millions of visitors and in small parks like Point Pelee that are surrounded by industrial and agricultural developments.

In its blueprint for restoring the wilderness integrity of many parks, the panel made 127 recommendations.

Parks Canada has acted on a number of them since the panel reported more than three years ago. Marten have been returned to Gros Morne in Newfoundland, exotic fish species have been removed from backcountry lakes in Banff, and stream water will soon be flowing unabated through the Fundy National Park golf course so that fish can once again migrate and spawn. And wolves, cougars and grizzly bears are now able to move more freely through the Maligne Valley in Jasper thanks to a reconfiguration of the Jasper Park Lodge golf course.

Over the past three years, more than $1.8 million has been spent on 122 projects to protect endangered species.

Parks Canada and partners like the Nature Conservancy of Canada will also soon announce other, more ambitious, initiatives including a plan to reintroduce bison to Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan and a plan to expand the protected area around Point Pelee and St. Lawrence Islands in Ontario.

But even the head of Parks Canada concedes that much of what the expert panel recommended has not been acted upon.

"We did get $75 million recently to spend on ecological integrity over the next five years," says Alan Latourelle, the parks' new chief executive officer. "We've also been promised a yearly allocation of $25 million after that.

"That, however, is only a fraction of the $80 million that is required for Parks Canada to do everything the panel recommended. And there is no new money to address the $425-million shortfall that we (face) over the next five years to deal with decaying assets."

Because maintaining historic sites and canals eats up a quarter of Parks Canada's budget, there are people inside and outside the agency who believe that responsibility should be shifted to the federal heritage department or a new department of infrastructure.

"You have to question why Parks Canada is responsible for plowing or twinning the Trans-Canada Highway or shoring up walls on the Rideau Canal," says Stephen Hazell, an environmental consultant who has worked for a variety of groups, including the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, and now Nature Canada and the Sierra Club.

"They are huge money drains that undermine Parks Canada's more important responsibility of conserving nature and completing the national park system. While we pour piles of money into roads and canals that are used almost exclusively by rich yacht owners, new national historic sites like the Grizzly Bear and Scented Hills on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories and the expansion of Nahanni sit on the back burner."

Latourelle, however, won't even contemplate the possibility of giving up the national historic sites branch, although he would welcome the idea of someone picking up the tab for paving and plowing parks roads.

"I view national parks and national historic sites as two children in the same family," he says. "I see myself as a father to both. I won't give or take away from one to save another. It's not a solution. Somehow we have to make this work. Culture and environment go together."

Just how Latourelle can make it work without an infusion of more dollars is something that even he admits is going to be difficult, if not impossible.

Budget cuts have forced Parks Canada to be more innovative. Many national parks, for example, are now hiring university scientists and students to do the biological studies that parks scientists did in the past.

Other parks like Elk Island have partnered with provincial and local governments to help protect greenscapes and wildlife corridors in and around their boundaries

But even in many of these cases, Parks Canada doesn't have the money to pony up and pay for its end of the deal. Given the rapid development of the Canadian North and the shrinking wilderness in southern Canada, many observers and people within Parks Canada itself feel that time is running out.

Point Pelee in southern Ontario, for example, is home to 42 species considered to be at risk, Grasslands in southern Saskatchewan has 18, and the Trent Severn Waterway in Ontario has at least 50 and probably more. Because its ecological restoration budget is so small, Parks Canada doesn't have the resources to find out.

And so the triaging continues.

In the mid-1990s, Jasper National Park had a capital program budget of about $4.5 million. Now it's down to $1.4 million.

Cash-short Wood Buffalo struggles to defend its interests Wood Buffalo, the second-largest national park in the world next to North East Greenland, employs just one biologist for an area that is nearly the size of Nova Scotia. That's four fewer than what the ecological integrity panel recommended.

Wood Buffalo biologists used to be the lead players in monitoring the catastrophic changes occurring in the Peace-Athabasca, one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world.

But over the past decade, the park has passed off that responsibility to B.C. Hydro, which has announced plans to build another dam upstream on the Peace, one which could possibly further affect water flows into the delta.

So when the project goes up for a federal/provincial environmental review, B.C. Hydro, not Parks Canada, will have the data to back its claims about the dam's impact downstream.

Wood Buffalo even failed to send a representative to a recent hearing on an oilsands expansion project that proposes to remove tens of millions of litres of water that flow into the national park.

"We spent several hundred thousand dollars on experts to intervene at those hearings," says Archie Waquin, grand chief of the Mikesew Cree Nation in Wood Buffalo. "I assumed that Parks Canada would be there. When they failed to show up at the hearing, I couldn't believe it. I phoned them up and said 'Hey guys, where the hell are you? This is a national park issue.' "

In Nahanni National Park, Chuck Blyth is one of a number of superintendents across the country who have more routine matters to deal with. To complete repairs of the three-kilometre-long boardwalk around Virginia Falls this year, for example, he borrowed money from other parks.

It will take three years for him to pay it back. That means he will have no money until then to repair the damage done at the Deadman's warden cabin when the river flooded a few years ago.

Nor does he have the resources to relocate an old forestry building in danger of falling into the river because of erosion. The forestry cabin on the Nahanni River is a shrine of sorts for paddlers from around the world, and a possible candidate for national historic site status.

Over the years, hundreds of canoeists have commemorated their trip down the internationally renowned river by leaving hand-carved miniature paddles hanging from the cabin's ceiling and walls. Justin Trudeau, artist Bill Mason and songwriter Bruce Cockburn are among those who have paid their respects there.

Blyth thinks it would be a tragic loss if the cabin collapsed into the river. Apparently, so does Paul Desmarais, the Quebec entrepreneur who has close links with the Liberal government. When he learned of the cabin's possible fate while paddling down the river this summer, he reportedly offered to pay to move the cabin if it became necessary.

"My problem is it's not a national historic building, at least not now, and therefore not a priority for spending," says Blyth.

"And I've had to make some tough choices. Replacing the boardwalk was a priority because it's a safety issue as well as an ecological concern. I probably could have spread out the job over three years, but that would have almost doubled the cost. In order to get the people and the supplies into Virginia Falls, we have to fly them all in. And that is very expensive."

In some ways Parks Canada has been the architect of its own problems. The agency was criticized, for example, when it decided to prohibit the use of sidearms for its law enforcement officials. Given the fact that the federal government recently proclaimed it didn't want a second police force, the agency may not have had a choice.

But in picking a fight with its wardens at a time when the financial crisis had reduced morale to historic lows, Parks Canada diverted attention from some more serious concerns about conservation and backcountry maintenance. Many park wardens say the firearms issue was one reason they voted to strike last summer.

Parks Canada officials have also made several management decisions in recent years that have come back to haunt them.

Several years ago, for example, a small group of businessmen in the town of Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories lobbied hard for a winter road through Wood Buffalo National Park. They hoped it would lead to an all-weather road that would attract more tourists to the area and shorten the drive to Edmonton.

The idea should have been stopped dead in its tracks because study after study has shown that roads create environmental nightmares for national parks.

Now, more than three years after the agency overruled the park superintendent by giving the road a green light, Parks Canada is still fighting a costly legal battle to defend that decision. The latest challenge to the road by the Mikesew Cree will go to the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Wood Buffalo road decision highlights why many superintendents are loath to do anything too dramatic to defend their parks.

Wood Buffalo superintendent Peter Lamb, for example, is still considered a solid administrator and is highly respected by those who have worked for him. But when his opposition to the road in Wood Buffalo collided with that of his bosses, he was quickly transferred to another park.

Anne Morin, the former superintendent of Prince Albert National Park, suffered the same fate when she would not heed cottagers' demands that Parks Canada spray for spruce budworm in the Waskesiu townsite.

Rightly or wrongly, many people within Parks Canada believe the talents of Doug Stewart, Ken East and Merv Syroteuk, three of the agency's more passionate park superintendents, were wasted when they were sidelined for controversial things they said or did. Stewart and East are now biding their time watching over affairs at the Rideau Canal and the Trent Severn Waterway in Ontario, and Syroteuk took early retirement.

Stewart is already a folk hero of sorts within the agency. Many Parks Canada veterans still get a lump in their throat when they recall the night he appeared on national television defending his staff in Wood Buffalo for publicly questioning Agriculture Canada's $20-million proposal to slaughter all 5,000 of the park's bison because of tuberculosis and brucellosis.

Paul Galbraith commands the same kind of respect. But unlike Stewart, who has hung in with the agency, Galbraith recently retired early after 34 years with Parks Canada because he thought it had lost track of its mandate to protect the environment.

"When I was superintendent of Jasper in the 1990s, I had to fight to get senior bureaucrats to take a stand on the Cheviot coal mine that was being proposed along Jasper's border," he notes.

"No one wanted to have anything to do with that even though it was clear it would affect the movement of grizzly bears and other animals in and out of the park. They just didn't want to have a fight with the province of Alberta or with industry. It's the same with the ski hill operators and the big hotels. They get what they want and nature suffers."

Galbraith says the more he pushed for conservation, the more he was isolated within the agency. "Parks Canada is a very insular organization. If you rock the boat as Doug Stewart and I did when we were at the regional head office in Calgary, you'd suddenly discover that you wouldn't be invited to meetings.

"What Parks Canada has got to do is get rid of the honky-tonk talk and get back to the business of conserving nature for the enjoyment of Canadians," says Galbraith. "The agency has got to stand up and tell people that you just can't do this in a national park."

David Schindler, one of the country's top scientists and a former ministerial adviser on national parks, agrees.

"They seem to have this head-in-the sand attitude," he says.

"Yes, you can add two more lanes to the Trans-Canada Highway, and yes you can add aconvention centre in Banff or a road through Wood Buffalo, and everything will be fine.

"They're good at doing all of the studies but the ecosystem never wins. There are always compromises.

"What Parks Canada really needs to do," says Schindler, "is to get some hard-ass superintendents in there who say the integrity of the ecosystem comes first. Sorry I don't need any more front office or PR people. I need to hire three or four scientists. And you need a bureaucracy in Ottawa to support that."

GET REAL, PARKS BOSS TELLS HIS SUPERINTENDENTS

While Parks Canada head Alan Latourelle understands where the criticism is coming from, he notes that money is extremely tight. Park superintendents, he insists, have to be realistic.

"We can't be doing a hundred studies and not know if they're doing any good," he says. "What I want my superintendents to do in the next 18 months is to set out six priorities for the parks that we can realistically support. And I want those priorities to make a difference."

Being hard-assed, as Schindler suggests, has not produced good results in the past, says Latourelle, who points to the agency's unilateral effort to create Kouchibouguac National Park in Nova Scotia in the 1970s.

Opposition among locals was so swift and passionate that the situation almost ended in violence. Park officials still haven't won over the respect of locals.

"We have to work with the local communities to find solutions to our problems," says Latourelle. "Waving the big stick is no longer going to get the job done."

As a relative outsider who did not rise up through Parks Canada ranks as many other senior administrators have, Latourelle has had to work hard to earn the respect of the rank and file.

Most people who work for Parks Canada do so more for the lifestyle and the love of nature than for the pay, which is low even by federal government standards. They tend to look at their bosses more as family members than as colleagues.

Latourelle's accessibility and easy-going manner has won over a number of these people. It also hasn't hurt that he did not have a role in many of the agency's past mistakes. Many of Parks Canada's most senior people are buying into his vision and action plan.