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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

JEAN CHRÉTIEN APPEARED BOYANT one morning last October as he stood before several hundred invitees and media assembled at the Ottawa Congress Centre, a block east of Parliament Hill. The Prime Minister was announcing that the federal government will create 10 new national parks and five new marine conservation areas over the next five years. As images of spectacular landscapes and cute aboriginal children flashed across two large screens behind him, Chrétien harked back 30 years to when he was Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Then, he said, creating national parks “sometimes seemed as simple as circling a place on a map. In fact, I did that once.”

He and his wife Aline were flying from Pangnirtung to Broughton Island off the southeast coast of Baffin Island, Chrétien told the audience, when they passed over a fiord. “I was like a kid, running around the plane telling everybody to look out the window. They were already looking, but I told them to look anyway. Finally, I sat down and said, ‘Aline, I will make a park here for you.’ When I returned to my office on Monday, I consulted the Minister of Indian Affairs, who was myself, consulted the Minister of Northern Affairs, who was myself, and consulted the minister responsible for parks, who was myself, and they all agreed on the matter. I took out my pen and made [Auyuittuq National Park], and the law came after that.”
The story was meant to charm the audience, and it did strike a chord with those who share his passion for wilderness parks. It also raised eyebrows, however, especially among people who remember the problems created by the unilateral approach of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The days of a cabinet minister arbitrarily choosing the location of a new park — no matter how stunning the vista — are long gone. Today, the government is committed to a complex process of consultation that, combined with the deep cuts to Parks Canada’s budget 10 years ago, has slowed to a glacial pace the process for creating new national parks.

It now takes so long, in fact, that most of the “new” parks in Chrétien’s fall announcement have been in the works for more than a decade. And one of them, the east arm of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, has been on the books since 1970. The almost dysfunctional consensus-building practice has conservation groups warning that there is a limit to how long we can wait. It’s an indication of just how far the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction.

For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue.

Sylvia Barrett is senior editor of Canadian Geographic.

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