Our Heritage Falls Through The Cracks

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.

Our heritage falls through the cracks

Besides being steward of our wilderness future, Parks Canada is custodian of our cultural past. With two-thirds of the 150 historic sites in disrepair, it's a daunting task and a drain of scarce dollars

Ed Struzik
The Edmonton Journal
Sunday, November 14, 2004

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HOUSE -- In the summer of 1807, David Thompson, his Metis wife and three children camped along the North Saskatchewan River near Rocky Mountain House before embarking on a trip that would take them across the Rockies through Howse Pass.

The epic journey was only the second time a European had crossed the Continental Divide in Canada. Unlike the first by Alexander Mackenzie a few years earlier, this trip set the stage for a prosperous trade with aboriginal people on the western side of the mountains.

And unlike many of his fur-trading colleagues, Thompson did it without selling whisky to the Indians.

By the time the legendary explorer retired in 1812, Thompson had covered more than 90,000 kilometres and mapped 3.9 million square kilometres of Western Canada. He also left behind 77 field journals and a memoir that has given generations of historians a first-hand insight into the landscape and its inhabitants.

Not even Lewis and Clark, the legendary American explorers, were as pivotal in the development of western North America as Thompson.

On a blustery July day last summer, Sylvia Pedrazzini was walking along the banks of the North Saskatchewan, waxing poetic about his legacy.

As head of the Friends of Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site, Pedrazzini and her group of local volunteers have been planning long and hard how to celebrate the bicentennial of the explorer's historic journey and the 150th anniversary of his death.

So she was shocked when she learned that instead of offering support for her group's efforts, Parks Canada is proposing to tear down the site's interpretive centre.

"We couldn't believe it," says Pedrazzini. "We knew the roof needed replacing and that there was trouble with the water supply. But we never dreamed that they would simply tear it down and replace it with (a display with) a bunch of push-button voices. I mean, if you take away the interpretive centre, a lot of people aren't going to come."

Pedrazzini is not alone in believing this would never have happened in Central Canada where, she points out, the Liberal sponsorship scandal cost taxpayers the equivalent of what Parks Canada needs each year to maintain 150 historic sites across the country.

"What do they care, we're just a bunch of farmers out here, and the site only gets 10,000 visitors each year. But this is a part of our history."

The reality, however, is that nearly two-thirds of those sites are in as poor or worse condition than the interpretive centre at Rocky Mountain House.

After more than a decade of crippling cutbacks, Parks Canada is so strapped for cash it can't afford to repair the walls of the 18th century Prince of Wales Fort at Churchill, Man., which are in danger of falling down.

Nor can it find the $15 million to fix Fort Henry, built in Kingston, Ont., in 1836 to thwart an American invasion and now crumbling because of water leaks and freeze-thaw cycles.

Parks Canada has been so short of cash for so long that several sites, including the historic gold rush buildings near Dawson in the Yukon, Inverarden House at Cornwall, Ont., and the Fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia have been shut down or partially closed.

Not only is the list of closures going to grow, says Christina Cameron, head of Parks Canada's national historic sites branch, but some sites like the Twin Falls Tea House in B.C.'s Yoho National Park could be lost forever if funds aren't forthcoming soon.

"There is a point of no return," she says. "We keep trying to patch the worst and most-threatened sites. But with only $11 million to spend each year, it's not easy to do."

If Treasury Board guidelines had been followed, Parks Canada should have been spending four times as much as it has spent each year to maintain the $1.7-billion worth of cultural assets the historic sites represent. Because the agency has fallen far short of that target over the past decade, the backlog of repairs is now about $425 million.

In a sweeping report on the state of Canada's cultural heritage last year, Auditor General Sheila Fraser lamented the neglect of these treasures. "Once a piece of our history is lost, it's lost forever," said Fraser. "And the situation is not improving."

Like most countries in the western world, Canada has the means to bear witness to its defining moments and the human creativity and cultural traditions that underpin what we are as a nation.

Over the years, federal ministers responsible for parks have, on the recommendations of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, commemorated more than 1,500 places, persons and events. Some of the historic sites like the Bar U Ranch in southwestern Alberta pay homage to a unique way of life. Others like L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland preserve what remains of the earliest European settlement of North America.

Architecture, literature and aboriginal history are all notably represented in the extended family of historic sites across the nation.

Although there have been complaints that Western Canada has been under-represented in the system, board members do not act arbitrarily when they make their recommendations. Each year, they consider dozens of nominations.

Lac Ste. Anne, 80 kilometres west of Edmonton, is one of the most recently designated sites. For more than 100 years, First Nations and Metis people from around North America have made sacred annual pilgrimages to its shores. As many as 40,000 people gather every July to pray, be healed and be reunited with friends and relatives.David Thompson was the first European to visit the lake in 1801. Oblate missionaries, who followed in his footsteps, built the church rectory, confessional building, stations of the cross and a gazebo on the shore where priests make their blessings.

The ranks of the aging Oblate order are not being renewed by younger blood. Knowing the order might not be around for much longer, the Oblates recently turned over the land and buildings at Lac Ste. Anne to a trust run by a board representing mostly Metis and First Nations interests.

To help the new administrators, the order has generously forgiven a $300,000 loan made to help maintain and service the site.

Muriel Crossen, a Metis board member who lives year-round at the lake, is concerned about what will happen if and when the Oblates, who provide support in other ways as well, are no longer part of the scene.

"All we got from Parks Canada when they declared Lac Ste. Anne an historic site was the promise of a plaque," she says. "And they told us that the writing on the plaque could only be in English and French and just one aboriginal language, which you can appreciate is a bit of a problem for us given how many different groups come here. Other than that, we're on our own."

Cost-sharing is something Parks Canada has promoted in the past. But because it lacks funds, the agency has entered no new cost-sharing agreements in the past two years. The waiting list for the cost-sharing program now numbers 63, with a $30-million funding deficit.

While there is sympathy for Parks Canada and its cash crunch, some people question how the agency sets priorities in these tough times.

While the Metis and First Nations people are left to fend for themselves at Lac Ste. Anne, for example, no blade of grass is left uncut at the Green Gables historic site in Prince Edward Island.

Known to some critics within the agency as "the house in which the girl who never lived never lived," the farm was the home of David Jr. and Margaret Macneill, cousins of author Lucy Maud Montgomery's grandfather. Montgomery only drew her inspiration for the fictional heroine Anne from her summer visits here.

The real history of Green Gables is clearly lost on some visitors when they see the plastic cow in the more-than-perfect barn, and the retail store packed with thousands of Anne dolls. A couple of young Japanese girls were devastated last summer to learn a "real" Anne, Marilla or Matthew never lived there.

Keeping Green Gables manicured and painted, however, is merely a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of maintaining the Trent-Severn Waterway in Ontario.

The Trent-Severn is a 386-kilometre-long system of locks, canals and waterways linking Lake Ontario and Georgian Bay. When the spread of highways in the 1950s made the waterway commercially obsolete, the department of transportation somehow managed to hand off responsibility for it to Parks Canada.

Some elements of the waterway, like the Peterborough Lift Lock, which at 19.2 metres is the highest hydraulic lift lock in the world, have significant historic value. But several dams and other manmade structures along the system are nothing but bricks and mortar and other structural materials that have nothing to do with the agency's mandate.

"We have 72 pairs of wooden lock gates in the system that have a 35-year life before they need to be replaced," says Brian O'Neill, the waterway's chief engineer. "That means we should be replacing two pairs of gates each year. We haven't replaced one in 10 years. Our backs are to the wall here."

The deteriorating condition of the locks is only one of the worries facing Ken East, superintendent of the waterway. He is also responsible for managing water flows throughout the system for agriculture, hydroelectric power and municipal water supplies.

It's hardly the role he expected after serving nearly 30 years in the national parks branch of the agency. He's keen on trying to protect fish and wildlife along the waterway and in the 230 wetlands in the Trent-Severn system, but admits he may well be in over his head.

Over the past 16 years, 30 per cent of the wetlands have been lost to dredging and filling for new cottage land in this area. And the millionaire cottage owners with the lush golf-green lawns are more concerned about Parks Canada's plans for clearing the weeds their use of fertilizers promotes than about the agency's efforts to protect 50 endangered or threatened plant and animal species on the waterway.

"It's kind of pathetic, really, the state we're in," says East. "I've got 300 staff on the waterway to deliver services at 54 locations. But I can afford only two or three people to look after the natural world. Something is wrong here."

Parks Canada is so overwhelmed just maintaining the Trent-Severn that it has been forced to turn down offers from people wanting to donate their land once they die.

Pat McDonald, a historian who is a member of the Friends of Rocky Mountain House Historic Site, attributes a lot of the agency's problems to the poor job Canada has done to promote its history.

"There's a lost generation out there who knows little of our history," McDonald says. Referring to the CBC's recent television program, he asks: "(Why else) does David Thompson rank just behind Pamela Anderson on the Greatest Canadian list and quite a distance from Don Cherry?"

For McDonald, the problem hit home a few years ago when a Tokyo television crew asked him to take them on a trip from Rocky Mountain House to Howse Pass.

"The video that ensued was shown to 28 million Japanese last year," he says. "The photo-graphy is spectacular as they traced the journeys of David Thompson. They knew all about him just as they knew about Anne of Green Gables. ... It saddened me in one vein but thrilled me in another."

The Rocky Mountain House group isn't giving up, though. Two weeks ago, they sent a letter to Parks Canada offering to take responsibility for construction of a new interpretive centre if the agency forgoes some revenue the site generates.

"I don't know where we're going to get the money," says Pedrazzini, head of the group.

"But just because the federal government doesn't see this as something worth investing in, doesn't mean we're going to let it happen. This really reflects a sad state of priorities within the federal government."

estruzik@thejournal.canwest.com

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