Rehabilitating our national parks

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Sunday is the Fourth of July, when Americans will celebrate their nationhood just as we did on Thursday. And while we like to think of our neighbours to the south as an obese lot who would rather chug Budweiser in front of the big screen than enjoy the great outdoors, you wouldn't know it from all the activity at their national parks.

Buoyed by two high-profile visits by a vacationing family named Obama and a well-received TV series by award-winning documentary maker Ken Burns, attendance last year reached 285.5 million, almost one visit for everyone in the population and the highest tally in nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, here in the land of the canoe and camper van - a country famous for its national parks since Banff became the first 125 years ago last month, the trend is the exact opposite. Canada's 42 parks haven't had so few visitors in more than 15 years.

The 11.9 million visits recorded last year represent a 22-per-cent drop from the 15.3 million logged in 1995. At the same time, Canada's population has risen almost 18 per cent. Some of the decline stems from the toll on travel, especially from the United States and abroad, taken by rising gasoline prices and the recession. But clearly, at a time when everything from the threat of urban sprawl to concern about climate change is supposed to have Canadians keenly interested in the state, and fate, of their environment, greater forces are at work.

The predicament has not escaped the notice of federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice, the cabinet minister responsible for Parks Canada. "These are the jewels of our country," he says of the parks, adding that the less people visit them, the less they will appreciate the beauty of the nation they inhabit.

So the parks service has decided to face the problem head-on - after all, it is partly to blame. It took a quarter-century after the appearance of Banff National Park (which began as a 23-square-kilometre ring around some tiny hot springs), but on May 19, 1911, Canada established the world's first national parks service. Led by commissioner James Harkin, it considered getting Canadians out to the parks just as important as preserving the landscape.

"The national parks ensure," Mr. Harkin declared, "that every Canadian, by right of citizenship, will still have free access to vast areas possessing some of the finest scenery in Canada, in which the beauty of the landscape is protected from profanation, the natural wild animals, plants and forests preserved, and the peace and solitude of primeval nature retained."

But in later years, the balance shifted, Mr. Prentice explains. "For a period of time, there was a kind of emphasis on, to put it in graphic terms, protecting our national parks from Canadians, as opposed to protecting our national parks for Canadians."

In 1964, the first comprehensive statement of national parks policy tabled in the House of Commons established that the preservation of significant natural features was to be the park service's "most fundamental and important obligation."

That overarching philosophy remained in place for decades. But, in recent years, Parks Canada has come to see attendance as vital to its conservation efforts.

"Visitorship is important because we need a population that loves the national parks, that supports the national parks, that are motivated by a desire to protect and enhance them," Mr. Prentice says.

It's a desire that may be in doubt.

Although the Environment Minister says members of his generation can recall with joy the first time they went on a camping trip, fewer kids today share those memories.

In an increasingly urbanized society, with many people choosing to spend their leisure time at home, going out in the woods to pitch a tent and roast s'mores no longer holds the appeal it once did.

"It happens less so today," Mr. Prentice says, compounded by the fact that new Canadians often "don't have the same experience with the outdoors, the same comfort with the outdoors."

Realizing that "we need to reach into a younger generation of Canadians who are more urbanized," Parks Canada got serious.

Two years ago, it began "to explore in a lot more detail" what the park experience was like, Mr. Prentice says, and conducted focus groups to determine why people weren't going as much.

UNCLE SAM'S SECRET: NEAR MEANS DEAR

Location, it seems, is a big problem.

Americans have proximity to motivate them, as well as the six-part Burns series, which venerated their 392 parks as "America's best idea," and Barack Obama's decision to take his family to see both Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. "Most everybody can get to a park by lunchtime, if they get in the car after breakfast," says Jeff Olson of the U.S. National Park Service in Washington.

The logistics in Canada are very different. "A lot of our national parks are quite removed from urban centres," says Eric Hebert-Daly, national executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.

No one can get behind the wheel and reach Tuktut Nogait in the Territories or Quttinirpaaq at the northernmost edge of Nunavut for lunch.

This remoteness has a reason, says Andrew Campbell, director-general of external relations and visitor experience for Parks Canada. Under the National Parks System Plan approved in 1970, park expansion has been guided by the desire to select sites that represent the physical, biological and geographic features of each of the country's 39 distinct natural regions, such as the Manitoba lowlands, the interior dry plateau, the western High Arctic and the northwestern boreal uplands. Preservation was the goal, not convenience.

Besides, attempts to create parks near established communities have met with controversy. While developing Kouchibouguac on the New Brunswick coast an hour north of Moncton, in the 1970s, Parks Canada encountered years of opposition in its attempts to expropriate the required property.

In the process, it learned a lesson, says Bryan Smale, president of the Canadian Association for Leisure Studies. "Where is it going to be easier to establish a park, in these remote areas where there aren't any challenges to deal with, or ... right next door to a thriving community?"

So some of the newer parks are very lonely. Last year, 126 people visited Ivvavik in northern Yukon, while a mere 26 went to Aulavik in the Northwest Territories and the 16,340-square-kilometre Tuktut Nogait, 430 kilometres east of Inuvik, had a grand total of six people swing by.

Still, many of the parks are not nearly that remote, and Mr. Prentice says much can be done to drive traffic their way - and "to draw people back to the magic of the outdoors."

The first step is to recognize that "the tourism market is competitive and people want an exciting tourist offering - they want to be able to do interesting things, they want to see up-to-date infrastructure and so on," he says. "And so we need to meet those needs." To that end, Parks Canada has launched an ambitious series of programs fuelled by more than $300-million from the federal Economic Action Plan. They involve many small-scale projects, from rejuvenating campsites to sprucing up visitor centres and park facilities, many of which are in desperate need of a makeover. For example, at Waterton Lakes National Park in southern Alberta, he says, "the signage was from the 1950s and 60s."

Other measures are more substantial, including a $3.3-million advertising campaign during the Vancouver Olympics that Mr. Prentice describes as an attempt to overcome Parks Canada's long-standing lack of emphasis "on making sure Canadians know what the national parks have to offer."

In March, the agency announced "Canada's Greatest Summer Job," a contest that will see 32 postsecondary students producing videos about their experiences in national parks and at national historic sites. The best will be screened next fall at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

Then in April, a partnership with Nature Canada and the Historica-Dominion Institute produced My Parks Pass, a program that allows more than 400,000 students in Grade 8 to enter national parks and historic sites for free over the next year, dragging their families with them.

To make things affordable, Parks Canada has instituted a price freeze that will see the public pay 2008 fees at least until next April. In fact, admission was free on Canada Day and will be again on July 17 to celebrate Parks Day.

But the most practical of the Parks Canada programs is one designed to address the fact that the less people know outdoor living, the less likely they are to visit a park. It's being offered at several locations, and "we call it our 'Camping 101,'" Pam Clark, visitor experience manager at Jasper National Park, says of the training, which covers everything from how to set up a tent to how to operate a portable stove.

According to Mr. Prentice, so much has been staked on the Parks Canada campaign to drum up business that, despite the remote location of many parks and Canada's changing demographics and all the entertainment options now available, he feels this year will mark a turning point.

Matching the U.S. rate of almost one visit per citizen would require nearly tripling last year's figure (Canada's population hit 34 million this week), but the true target is much more modest, Mr. Campbell says - a jump of 10 per cent by 2014.

MEASURES MAY BE PAYING OFF ALREADY

The early signs are encouraging. Reservations for the Canada Day weekend were up 13 per cent from last year, and park attendance in general has risen 3 per cent this year.

Pleased by these figures, conservation groups applaud the efforts that appear to have produced them.

"There's a huge need for people to connect to nature and to do so in places that offer real wilderness experiences - which are national parks," says Mr. Hebert-Daly of the Parks and Wilderness Society.

Conservationists now admit that the emphasis on protecting parks rather than encouraging people to explore them was short-sighted and in the long run made their own efforts more difficult.

"It's really that people won't value what's out there" if they don't go and see it for themselves, says Alex McDonald, protected areas program manager at Nature Canada.

But Mr. Prentice offers an even simpler reason why we need to get out into the woods.

"It's an essential part of the Canadian experience."

BY THE NUMBERS

Number of distinct natural regions in Canada: 39

Number yet to receive protection of a park: 11

United Nations' deadline for Canada to protect its natural areas: 2010

Canada's oldest national park: Banff, 1885

Canada's newest national park:Torngat, 2005

Canadian land mass in square kilometres: 9,093,507

Percentage that is protected: 7

Where that ranks Canada globally: 61st

Some countries that rank higher: Guatemala, Zimbabwe

Annual spending per hectare on national parks, Canada: $8.84

Annual spending per hectare on national parks, United States: $62.44

Area of Wood Buffalo National Park, Canada's largest (sq km): 44,807

Area of Denmark (sq km): 43,094

Sources: Parks Canada, The Atlas of Canada, Nature Canada