17 August 2015
East Arm Park not in best interests
Guest Comment by Lou Covello, a consulting geologist based In the NWT. News/North, August 17, 2015
In what is a major victory for NGOs such as the Tides Foundation, CPAWS, the Sierra Club and other anti-development actors, Environment Minister Michael Miltenberger has announced an agreement-in -principle with Lutsel K'e to establish the Thaidene Nene Park system.
It will consist of a 14,000 square kilometre territorial park. enclosing another 14,000-square- kilometre National Park , covering the East Arm of Great Slave Lake and all of Artillery Lake eastward almost to the western boundary of the Thelon Game Preserve. This is a crucial step in creating a 1,100-kilometre-long development-free corridor from Wood Buffalo National Park in north-eastern Alberta to Baker Lake, Nunavut.
This will effectively preclude the use of most access routes from Manitoba and Saskatchewan to a vast area in the eastern NWT and western Nunavut north of the 63rd parallel and east of Artillery Lake. It will also isolate the mineral-rich south-eastern quadrant of the NWT from the rest of the territory, leaving development of that area in the hands of Saskatchewan interests.
It appears that we have learned nothing from the Cantung experience where the Yukon has largely benefitted from the mine because of our reluctance to develop any infrastructure on the east side of the continental divide. The Yukon also provides the only road access to the NWT's Nahanni National Park.
An egregious assault on democracy has been another casualty of the Thaidene Nene process, which involved only a few influential people in Lutsel K'e (population 289) and the GNWT. The two permanent resident families on fee simple private property, the two fishing lodges and other lease-holders, the north and south Slave Metis, the YKDFN, the Akaitcho and one of the main users of the East Arm - the recreational campers and sailors - largely from Yellowknife and Hay River. They have all been ignored during the negotiations. This is not to mention numerous commercial interests ranging from airlines to outfitters and expeditors and the exploration industry as well as a thriving McLeod Bay-based air charter operation.
The 2012 global workshop of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity has recommended that by 2020 that 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water areas in every country be set aside as protected areas in one way or another. With the creation of Thaidene Nene Park, the Northwest Territories will have designated 24.8 per cent of its land area as protected from development through territorial parks, national parks, wildlife preserves and protected areas (through the Protected Area Strategy).
This does not include the 17,000-square-kilometre "God's Country" uranium exploration moratorium zone in the upper Thelon basin and the collectively-owned ethnic enclaves, such as the 39,000-square-kilometre Tlicho land claim area all of which, in practice, are effectively removed from development for the foreseeable future. It appears that the NWT is doing the heavy lifting in Canada's protected areas warehouse, as the next most-protected jurisdiction is B.C. with somewhere around nine per cent of its land area reserved.
The establishment of the park will also deliver a fatal kick to the NWT exploration industry already on its knees resulting from a culture of outrageous political interference under the guise of misused environmental legislation which was designed to facilitate environmentally-sound exploration practices. The creation of the parks will send a strong negative signal at the worst possible time to an 85-year-old industry that has historically invested between $80 million and $300 million annually in the NWT, resulting in thousands of high-quality real jobs and billions of dollars in real payroll from the producing mines it discovered.
But Mr. Miltenberger assures us that we shouldn't worry, as the exploration and mining industries' disinvestment will be replaced by a traditional wildlife harvesting and eco-tourism based "conservation economy" (about which the people of Paulatuk, Fort Chip, Fort Smith and Nahanni Butte can give you an earful).
From a moral point of view, the NIMBY-ism embodied by this sort of anti-development culture encourages the export of mining and exploration activities so necessary to our comfortable existence to jurisdictions having much less stringent environmental and worker protection legislation.
The walrus in the iglu of course is the central question of: from whom or what are we protecting this area? The NWT is a vast, under-populated and under-developed territory with a declining population of 43,000 people. We are gradually closing our land to exploration (an environmentally benign activity), and so are seeing fewer and fewer visits to our hinterlands compared to the period from 1935 to 2005. These hinterlands are remote and expensive to access, beyond the budgets of most Canadians, and have existed, and will continue to exist, quite happily without the benefit of more parks.
