I was crossing the street at a busy downtown Toronto intersection this week and noticed once again a discreet sign that hangs there among the larger and more colourful advertisements: It's the heritage plaque reminding us this was the site of the "Bishop's Palace," the residence of John Strachan, Toronto's first Anglican bishop. This city is littered with such markers. In Canada, it seems that we are very good at putting up signs to commemorate things we have knocked down.
This country has a poor record of preserving its built heritage. Our conservation legislation is often toothless: It forces owners and developers to wait, to hold meetings, to consult and wait some more, but eventually they can tear historic buildings down. Most of the legislation is provincial, but the federal government's Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act – the law that was supposed to preserve those embattled icons of maritime life – is typical of the problem. It protects designated lighthouses from being sold off or torn down by means of published notices, public meetings and 90-day waiting periods, but, in the end, if no one steps up with the money to save an old lighthouse, it's going to go.
That is what lakeshore and seaside towns across Canada are discovering this summer as they digest the reality of the new act, a clever federal scheme that off-loaded responsibility for the historic structures. Instead of protecting lighthouses in an age when ships mainly rely on GPS to navigate rocky shorelines, the act appears to have laid the ground rules for a sell-off. Soon after it was passed, the federal department of Fisheries and Oceans declared most of its lighthouses – about 500 of them, active and inactive – to be surplus. The only way to actually save them under the act was to petition the government for heritage designation, which would only be awarded to those petitioners who could put together a business plan that showed they had the ability to pay for repair and upkeep.
It's a lot to ask of small, remote communities, to privately maintain aging wooden structures exposed to the elements, yet 348 places sought the designation. The list of the 74 successful applicants was unveiled with some fanfare on Canada Day – there's Cape Beale and Cape Mudge in B.C.; Flowerpot Island and McNab Point in Ontario; Fort Amherst and Green Island in Newfoundland and Labrador. But what about the 274 lighthouses that didn't get designated?
Not everyone is as unconcerned with their fate as the federal government. While communities were awaiting word on designations, the Nova Scotia Lighthouse Preservation Society and the National Trust for Canada organized their own campaign called This Lighthouse Matters. The two groups held a $250,000 contest to help Nova Scotia lighthouses pay for repairs, with winners determined by public voting on social media, a method that allowed contestants to crowd-source funding at the same time.
Twenty-six lighthouses competed, 20 of which were on the Fisheries and Oceans hit list. The nine winners include: Low Point Lighthouse near Sydney, which won a first prize of $75,000 to shore up a seawall and work on a tourism plan that includes developing a nearby beach; the Gabarus Lighthouse, also on Cape Breton, which won $50,000 to move the building back from an eroding shoreline; and the lighthouse at Cape Forchu, near Yarmouth, which won $25,000 for restoring its building and the original lens. Meanwhile, Cape Forchu and the Baccaro Point Lighthouse were also able to meet their fundraising goals through the crowd-sourcing, which wrapped up last week.
None of the winners turned out to be lighthouses that had earned the federal heritage designation, although five of the contenders were so designated.
The National Trust says the competition is just a pilot project for a campaign that could be used to raise money for lighthouses across the country – and even for other heritage buildings. On a much larger scale in Britain, the BBC reality series Restoration and its several spinoffs have let the public vote on which town or village will get funding for a much-needed restoration project. These contests inform people about the threats to heritage buildings and provide an opportunity to raise money to save them.
But, at the end of the day, governments have to take responsibility for built heritage – especially if they owned the historic buildings in the first place. And Ottawa's minimalist approach to its lighthouse problem is mainly an example of shirking duty. Perhaps, once hundreds of old lighthouses lie rotting, the feds will cough up enough money for a few historic plaques.
Kate Taylor