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THE PETERBOROUGH EXAMINER: August 2004
Co-written with Evan Ferrari, director, parks and protected areas program, CPAWS – Wildlands League
Imagine you are enjoying a peaceful day-perhaps on the upcoming long weekend-in one of Ontario’s beautiful provincial parks or conservation reserves. Suddenly you hear a loud explosion nearby; before you can figure out what has happened there is a second explosion.
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Despite this shock, you continue your vacation in another provincial park where you canoe down a magnificent river. You plunge your paddle into the cool river, only to notice a large sewage pipe discharging effluent below the river’s surface.
To avoid further surprises, the next stop on your vacation is the province’s oldest provincial park. You and your family decide to hike deep into the forest but before long you come to a logging road where a deer lies dead on the gravel. And before you have walked much farther you arrive in an area recently visited by chainsaws. “What happened to all the trees dad,” asks your daughter.
Unfortunately Ontarians need little imagination to think up these scenarios in one of the province’s protected areas, including parks, conservation reserves, and wilderness areas.
The first scenario is from a designated conservation reserve near Kingston, known for its rare plant and animal species. The reserve is adjacent to a proposed gravel and granite quarry. (In fact, the quarry was inside the reserve until the government moved the reserve’s boundaries on a questionable basis.) If the Ministry of Natural Resources approves the quarry-and the MNR almost never says “No” to anyone proposing a gravel quarry-then the blasting will soon begin.
The second scenario is from a designated waterway park in northern Ontario, in which the Minister of Environment recently approved a sewage works application for a mining conglomerate to discharge wastes laden with heavy metals, despite the proximity of a spawning area of the threatened lake sturgeon.
The final scenario is from Algonquin Park, where logging continues to be permitted and 2,000 kilometres of logging roads scar the environment.
The problem isn’t simply government decisions that favour short-term economic benefits over protection of our natural capital. The root problem is an outdated Provincial Parks Act that remains virtually unchanged since 1954 and that is ineffective at protecting our so-called “protected” areas.
Fortunately, there is also good news for the province’s protected areas system, which has grown from a single park in 1892 to about 600 actual or designated parks, conservation reserves, and wilderness areas today. Before the last election Dalton McGuinty promised to overhaul the existing Provincial Parks Act; a promise recently reaffirmed by David Ramsay, the Minister of Natural Resources, who said, “I want our legislation governing provincial parks to be the best ever for the province and one of the best anywhere.” There is good reason to be skeptical, but not only for the obvious reasons. The Tory regime under Mike Harris made a similar promise, but left office without anyone ever seeing a new act.
Provided the new government honours its promise, most of the main ingredients of a new parks act for existing and designated protected areas should not be difficult to figure out.
First, the act must ensure that the earth does not shake when you are having lunch in a park. Under the current act there are virtually no limits on the type of activities permitted on lands adjacent to parks. Quarry pits on the perimeter of protected areas are just one example of the type of activity that can turn parks into”islands” of nature. Nature does not prosper in a straight jacket. Wild animals that roam areas straddling park boundaries, for example, will not change their habits because someone wants to develop a mine, construct a conference centre, or locate an industrial project just outside the boundary. In short, parks need effective buffer zones.
Second, activities that are allowed within parks must be consistent with the goal of protecting nature for us and from us. Discharging mining effluent into a river is one example of an incompatible use; logging, which is still allowed in 70 per cent of Algonquin Park, mining, tearing up nature trails with ATVs, and golfing are other examples.
Third, a new parks act should allow the public to keep track of the state of its parks, with regular reports on threats to the park system, the progress of park managers in fulfilling goals for individual parks, and recommendations for expanding the park system to protect ecosystems.
Finally, the new act must respect aboriginal rights and promote partnerships for park management that could draw on traditional aboriginal understanding and knowledge of the land.
A new parks act would allow Ontarians, and the province’s many foreign visitors, not only to imagine a peaceful outing in a treasured natural area but also to actually experience it and to be assured that their children and grandchildren will be able to do the same.
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