Re: NCC limits rock climbing in Gatineau Park, centretownnewsonline.ca
The recently disclosed Gatineau Park Conservation Plan is a cynical exercise designed to keep rock climbers and the public out of the park, while allowing residents to continue building houses in the Meech Lake water.
The plan mandates conservation as a top priority and flows out of the 2005 Gatineau Park Master Plan. However, since adoption of the Master Plan in May 2005, significant residential development has impaired the park – in direct violation of every master plan.
The plan lists three main factors leading to the park’s ecological degradation – invasive species, recreation and visitorship, and private property. Unfortunately, there are no proposals for eliminating residential proliferation.
Instead, this “action plan” urges the limiting of “water-borne human activities and swimming” to protect natural vegetation on the shores of La Pêche, Philippe and Meech lakes.
So, according to NCC logic, swimming, canoeing – and climbing – are greater threats to park ecology than use of dynamite to blast the Meech Lake shoreline (see www.gatineauparc.ca).
Moreover, the NCC rests its decisions on grossly inflated and bogus figures, as demonstrated by NCC CEO Marie Lemay’s public display of confusion at the conservation plan press conference.
She said park visitorship was three times greater than it was “30 years ago.” Seems Ms Lemay thinks six million people visit the park every year – i.e., page 9 of 1980 Gatineau Park Master Plan placed yearly figures at “over two million” way back then.
Gatineau Park was supposed to be a monument to democracy; the NCC has made it a monument to mismanagement, incoherence and public exclusion.
Andrew McDermott,
Co-chair,
Gatineau Park Protection Committee