October 19, 1996

KEN MACQUEEN
Southam Newspapers

POINT PELEE NATIONAL PARK - The monarch butterfly was running late, skittering across the sky like a fallen leaf with a case of nerves.

It searched the beach for an opening in the wall of southeast wind, impatient to depart this southernmost tip of Canada and strike out across Lake Erie. Soon, even here, the leaves will turn. Agitated and alone, it pushed against the warm morning wind, whispers of winter drawing on its improbable migration to Mexico.

There is something called Chaos Theory that tries to explain the precarious balance of our world. It holds that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing can generate a thunderstorm in New York. Who knows?

This park is a migratory haven for a million beating wings -- raucous blue jays, prowling falcons, warblers, monarchs. It is dynamic, in constant change. Even the trailing, sandy tip of the park, pounded by Erie's currents, lashes from side to side like the restless tail of a cat. With a few taps of a computer in far-off Ottawa, a budget-minded bureaucrat can buffet the park with storms of change.

Last month, on Sept. 17, some 250,000 migrating monarchs lifted as one into the wind here, pouring down this funnel of land and out over the lake in an unbroken 90-minute stream. It was a sight witnesses say they will never forget.

In such scenes are born the complex love affair Canadians have with their 38 national parks -- a relationship their government seems increasingly unable to afford.

From Banff, the 111-year-old crown jewel of the system, to Point Pelee, among the smallest and most exotic, Canada's national parks are lashed by powerful, chaotic forces.

Federal budget cuts reduce park staff. Development pressures and public popularity threaten their natural integrity. Public volunteers and private partnerships carry a greater share of the load. Businesses, paradoxically, are asked to underwrite the cost of stripping away commercialism and returning the parks to a more natural state.

Perhaps the pressure is greatest in Banff which is ravaged by its very success.

Heritage Minister Sheila Copps has just released a long-awaited study containing 500 measures to limit commercial development there, cap population growth and preserve or enhance the natural state of large portions of the 6,600-square-kilometre park.

"I call on you to understand that the stresses and strains of human development cannot be allowed to snap back and injure the wild places we are pledged to protect here," Copps said in Banff. She has already endorsed some of the recommendations, announcing that no more land will be used for commercial development, and committing to remove an air strip, a camp and other impediments to wildlife.

It is not clear from her early response how far a government of limited means can afford to go toward returning the park to a nature preserve from its dominant role as a tourist destination. It attracts five million visitors a year, and spins more than $700 million into the economy.

Can the park afford to scale back its commercialism to become, in Copp's words "a model for ecotourism into the 21st century?"

Here in tiny Point Pelee -- long a hothouse of just such change -- the answer is a qualified yes. The park, only 16 square kilometres in size, has spent 30 years edging back from the brink of environmental disaster, with a lot of help from its friends.

Pelee is an uncharacteristic Canadian park. Its point reaches below the 42nd parallel, as far south as Rome or Barcelona. Its Carolinian ecosystem -- from flying squirrels and creeping vines to prickly pear cactus and swamp forest -- is reminiscent of the southern United States.

Until 30 years ago, Pelee was being crushed by the careless footsteps of almost 800,000 visitors a year. The park was a place to sun and party on the beaches, to fish, to boat, even to hunt ducks.

There was a hotel and staff lodging on site, roads and parking lots were cut anywhere, there were private cottages in the park, apple and vegetable farms. There was talk of removing Point Pelee from the national parks system.

All that has changed. Today, the crowds are armed only with cameras, binoculars and birding guides. Attendance is limited to 1,000 cars at a time. Yearly attendance had dropped to below 500,000 visitors. The marsh is restricted to canoeists or visitors using a boardwalk. People are shuttled to the southern tip by a tram service. Not so much as a fallen feather, a shell or a wild flower can be carried away.

Millions of foreign plants have been ripped out and roadbeds returned to natural habitat. Apple trees have been replaced with native trees. Nesting pairs of bald eagles have returned. Today, high above the beach, a peregrine falcon ripped a migrating blue jay out of a flock too hesitant to make the lake crossing.

All this has been achieved, remarkably, at a time of eroding budgets and declining staff.

Much of the credit goes to the Friends of Point Pelee, an increasingly sophisticated group that has been helping the park since 1981. Today, virtually all national parks and federal sites -- including Banff -- depend on a network of "friends" who use paid staff and volunteers to raise funds and help share the load.

Lea Martell, general manager of the Point Pelee Friends, says the partnership model is borrowed from south of the border where federal sites have long hustled for support. "Most good things come from the United States," she chuckled. "We take them and then we adapt them to make them work here."

In Pelee, they run a gift store and the Cattail Cafe, they hold bingos and festivals. They have underwritten much of the cost of planting and species removal crews. The group encouraged a local funeral home to have its clients consider donating memorial trees to the park.

Governments aren't much good at raising funds, Martell says. It's much harder to refuse a local group with a strong bond to the park.

For instance, nearby Pelee Island Winery, which decorates its labels with rare or endangered birds, underwrote the reintroduction of the flying squirrel. Bushnell, the binoculars manufacturer, sponsors a spring birding festival that can draw 90,000 tourists to the area. Ontario Hydro is sponsoring a solar energy project that will allow the park to rip out a kilometre of overhead lines.

Park superintendent Ross Thomson, who has not seen a federal increase in Pelee's $2.1-million budget since starting at the park eight years ago, is preparing scenarios to cut his budget a further 10 to 30 per cent.

Corporate and public donors are essential, he says. So far, donors have not insisted on garish billboards trumpeting their generosity. "They don't want to be criticized, as we don't, for a lot of commercialization."

Still, some park employees whose jobs are threatened by buyouts, layoffs and privatized services say parks are selling their souls to commerce.

"We're getting to the point that the government is refusing to govern," says Mike Longmoore, who organized a recent public meeting here sponsored by the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents park employees. The meeting, and a low-key information picket at the park, are part of a national campaign sponsored by the PSAC. So far, it has proved unable to turn back the tide of budget cuts and privatization.

Even Longmoore concedes there is no evidence, yet, that Pelee has declined due to a lack of funding. In fact, paradoxically, it is more commercialized and yet more natural than it has been in many years.

For all the storms of nature and mankind that buffet it, Pelee endures as a sanctuary for tired hearts and beating wings -- a model of rest and healing.