Our national parks, including the Crown jewel of Banff, may belong to all Canadians, but information about them clearly belongs to the Stephen Harper conservative government.
Outlook reporter Cathy Ellis, who has dealt with Parks Canada for more than 15 years, saw a huge change in how Parks Canada was handling Outlook media requests.
Public documents about Parks Canada’s media protocols, gained through the Access to Information request that took seven months to be completed, found that all employees of the federal agency have been instructed not to speak to media and all media requests must be approved in Ottawa. The documents show the change did not sit well with local media personnel in Banff and the new direction was clearly out of their hands.
The question was asked as to where exactly this directive came from – and would you be surprised to learn an answer was refused. Was this directive from Parks CEO Alan Latourelle, the Minister of the Environment’s office or the Prime Minister’s? Given the stifling of scientists across Canada by this government, it would not surprise us if this direction came from Harper himself.
We could argue at length as to why this level of information control is stifling for democracy, decries a power controlling centralized autocracy that has zero respect for the rights of its citizens – but that angle has been covered already.
Let’s bring this on home – this affects each and every single resident of the Bow Valley. We all live, work or regularly visit a national park – this is the nation’s playground and Alberta’s backyard, but our front yard, porch and entire house. This level of information control stretches all the way to these very pages and what you read – or don’t read – in the Outlook each week.
Somebody in Ottawa at a desk charged with preserving a political party’s media script line gets to decide what all of us know about what is happening here in the environment we live in and we have an abundance of examples to illustrate this point.
Take the issue of biosolids for Canmore. There is a proposal to process them at Banff’s N-Viro facility, which it definitely has the capacity to do and there are certainly concerns about the traffic on that road affecting wildlife and the implications of trucks carrying processed sewage sludge going past tourists on the adjacent golf course. But can you know what the superintendent is considering or what are the issues to work through? Not a chance, as interviews with him were denied and an email statement provided.
It is a phrase, if you have been paying attention, that is appearing more and more often in Outlook stories as requests to speak with experts or officials are denied – a decision made 3,437 km away.
Even the most mundane stuff – head shaking, ridiculously simple, I can’t believe they need permission to discuss this – stuff.
Locally, Parks staff are more than capable of speaking with the media about what is happening whether it is wildlife research, fire management, public safety, development approvals, programs and services. They have actually been doing this for years, decades even, without the help of politically motivated message managers in the nation’s capital.
But at the broader level it also prevents discussion about the big things – the direction of the mountain national parks and its ecological integrity. And that should concern all Canadians because the future direction of our national parks is at risk of being hidden from us and decided by those more concerned to sticking with manufactured media lines than preserving and protecting the wildlife and the environment.
