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May/June 1998 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: War on city geese Our Home and Native Tongue Sense of place

Every workday morning, as many as nine million Canadians slide behind the wheel of a car, van or truck, buckle up, turn the key and head off to the job. According to the latest census, about eight million of us make the drive alone. And about 4.5 million of us travel more than eight kilometres to get there. Sure, we inhabit the second largest country on the planet. So we’ve always had a long slog to the mill, mine, ministry or mall. Still, the great temptation is to underestimate to yourself and to others how long the trip really takes. You work downtown and fall in love with a place in the suburbs, thinking, "When everything is going my way, I can make it door-to-door in 20 minutes." But the truth is that 20 minutes is the record and the norm is often twice that.

This is our third annual special issue on the environment and in it we explore urban Canada, more and more of which seems to be taken up by roads and expressways clogged with vehicles bearing a lonesome driver. Jim Boothroyd looks at how the small Quebec city of Rimouski is offering commuters a convenient alternative to driving and saving money on public transit at the same time. From there he takes readers to Vancouver where gridlock is forcing planners to consider more coercive measures that will impose real financial burdens on those who cannot or will not give up driving to work.

Managing traffic must seem like child’s play to people like Mark Hillis, supervisor for lakefront parks in Mississauga, Ont., who is attempting to manage not humans but urban geese. Since the reintroduction in 1968 of Canada geese in southern Ontario, they have become a headache for park maintenance people as well as property owners. In her story on the problem, Elizabeth Shilts describes the measures used so far in the war on the non-migrating geese and investigates the search for peace.

Like the geese, many of us seek refuge in city parks from the stress of urban life. Many major urban parks date from the turn of the century, when large blocks of still-undeveloped land were set aside and sculpted into well-tended expanses of lawn and planted forest. Today’s parks are wedged into smaller spaces and, in some cases, are expected to do more than provide visitors with calming vistas. Charles Mandel looks at new parks in Toronto, Winnipeg and Edmonton and discovers they are more integrated into their environments and are places for learning as much as they are for relaxation.

What makes a city a desirable place to live? Affordable housing, jobs, good schools — all of these things and something more too, something that can’t necessarily be planned. We asked photographers in Halifax, Montréal, Ottawa, Calgary and Vancouver to seek out appealing and appalling niches, corners and blocks (such as Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, above). Cities are a mixed bag of delights and discouragements. Their details — a beautiful building, a quirky crossroads — are often more vividly remembered than the overall impressions they create. As we discovered from the photos, planning does not necessarily make a place harmonious and harmony can occur without planning.

Dr. Kim Bell spent three years preparing a report on the status of Atlantic cod for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC). Last year in our July/August issue, we published a story on his work and the fact that cod is the first commercial marine fish species considered for listing by the committee. Associate editor Pauline Comeau wrote that Bell had completed his report and that discussion of it had been deferred for a year. Bell has since moved to South Africa. In late winter, as the committee prepared to meet again, Bell was advised there were no funds available to fly him to Ottawa to answer questions about his report.

We at Canadian Geographic believe this discussion and COSEWIC’s decision is of sufficient importance that Bell should attend the meeting to contribute to the debate. We advance no opinion on whether cod should or should not be declared endangered. But we believe Bell’s expertise is essential to making a determination that will affect the livelihood of fishing communities across Atlantic Canada. To that end, Canadian Geographic has offered to cover the cost of Bell’s trip to Canada and he has accepted. Look for a story in our July/August issue on the committee’s deliberations.

— Rick Boychuk

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