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March/April 2003 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Creating a park À la carte Mosaic Reverberations

Parkland, justice and peace
Hands up if you support the idea of new national parks. OK, I sense a few dissenters out there, but this is one government intitiative that’s even more popular than tax cuts. Now imagine if creating a new park meant bulldozing eight villages and expropriating the homes and properties of some 1,200 people. Outrageous, you say? Could never happen here?

When Prime Minister Jean Chrétien served as Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs from 1968 to 1974, his department created 10 new national parks. It was a time when thorough planning meant government officials consulting other departments and negotiating with their counterparts in provincial governments. Little or no effort was made to invite public input. Once a final plan had been prepared, residents would then be told that their lives were about to turn head over heels for a new national park. That’s pretty much what happened in the early 1970s on the east coast of New Brunswick when Kouchibouguac (Koo-chee-boog-wack) National Park was created.

The area included in the park was, at the time, the poorest county in New Brunswick and one of the poorest in the country. Families were large, and many depended on the land for their livelihood. They were subsistence fishermen or woodcutters. They picked blueberries, dug clams, trapped and hunted, kept a cow or two for milk and cultivated gardens for fresh vegetables. As the authors of a special inquiry into what went wrong at Kouchibouguac later concluded, “No amount of planning could have completely succeeded in avoiding serious trouble once the decision was taken to empty the Park within a matter of a few years. For these people, the change from a traditional lifestyle with a clan-type social organization was traumatic.”

The expropriations touched off years of protests and occupations, vandalism and arson. At one point, the office of the lawyer representing the federal government was firebombed. And it has never really ended. To this day, one of the leaders of the protests is still squatting in a trailer in the park.

There were other expropriations for other parks created at the same time — at Forillon in Quebec and Pacific Rim on Vancouver Island. But it was the experience at Kouchibouguac that turned the tide. To be fair to the government departments and officials involved, they made every effort after the initial bungling to redress the wrongs. Files were reviewed; compensation was increased. But none of the adjustments managed to alter the public view that the government had acted as a bully and that it valued pristine landscapes more than it did the rights of people who occupied those landscapes.

Since then, the federal government has never again resorted to expropriations to assemble land for national parks. As senior editor Sylvia Barrett reports in her cover story on how we create parks, today’s approach couldn’t be more different. We asked her to explore the issue after the prime minister announced last fall that his government is planning another 10 national parks and five new marine conservation areas. Seven of those new parks have already been identified; her story is accompanied by photos, maps and a brief description of each.

Bungled land deals are also the theme of our in-depth feature on the Metis of Western Canada. Edmonton-based writer Linda Goyette tells the tale of how, in the late 1800s, the federal government sought to settle the Metis on small parcels of land after it had acquired the Prairies from the Hudson’s Bay Company. She tells a disturbing story of how the government turned a blind eye to the activities of speculators who wound up with almost all the land meant for the Metis. After years of fruitlessly pressing the federal government to address their complaints about a process that left them landless and on the margins of Canadian society, the Prairie Metis have now taken to the courts for legal redress.

Disputes over land, as Europeans and the inhabitants of the Middle East well know, are incendiary and corrosive. In addition to the Metis demand, the federal government is wrestling with land claims by First Nations across the country. Those which have been settled — Inuit claims in Nunavut, for example — show that just and fair solutions are obtainable and critical to enduring social peace.

— Rick Boychuk

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