- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- NDP
- South Okanagan—West Kootenay
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 61%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $128,729.57
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to thank the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent for his speech because at the very end he mentioned Alexander Graham Bell and Baddeck. That is the historic site from which the plane took off in February 1909. I just have to say it was my grandmother's cousin who was piloting that plane. His name was J.A.D. McCurdy. I wanted to get that in there, as I am proud of that heritage, and I am glad the member brought it up here in the House.
I am also proud to rise to speak to Bill C-248 here this evening. It is a bill that would create Ojibway national urban park near Windsor, Ontario, and it was put forward by the wonderful member for Windsor West, who has been working so hard and passionately on this for a decade now. I did speak to this bill when it was at second reading some time ago, but I would like to go over that ground again and really dive into why the bill is so important and why Ojibway national urban park is such an important initiative that we need to get done.
This proposal would combine lands that are owned by all levels of government, the federal government, the provincial government and the City of Windsor, and combine them into a really priceless package that would protect an endangered ecosystem that is unique in Canada. That is why this should be a national park. It is a small area. It is only 900 acres, or something like that, but it is so important from the national perspective and from the environmental perspective, that it would really be a fabulous addition to our national park system.
I would also like to thank the member for Windsor West, as I mentioned before, for inviting me down to Windsor a few years ago to visit this area. I had never been to Windsor. It was great to tour around the city and see the urban sprawl of Detroit right there across the river. It is such a vibrant place.
I toured the Ojibway Shores area, where the member told me all these stories, and each story was about the battles he had been through to protect this important area from various plans for development. He brought the community together, and he brought Caldwell first nation, other community groups, naturalist groups, biologists and even developers together to say it would be such a wonderful addition to not just the local area, but also to Canada.
We were there on a beautiful day in September. We hiked along some of the trails through beautiful grasslands. The big bluestem grass was full of the late summer flowers, such as asters and other beautiful flowers. There were birds, of course. That is my thing. I am always looking for rare birds, and there are a lot of birds there. We walked through the groves of oaks. This is kind of a savannah habitat. We saw a lot of people enjoying these trails. It was clear that this was a popular place for the locals to come on the weekends, get out of the urban habitats and enjoy nature.
I think that has even amplified since the pandemic. We have seen a huge increase. I have not been back to Ojibway Shores, but around my home, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of people getting out on trails and enjoying nature, just because people have discovered that. They had nowhere else to go during the pandemic, and suddenly they have discovered that here in Canada we all live in beautiful places. Ojibway Shores is one of those places, and this area would protect three really important ecosystems: the tallgrass prairie; the oak savannah, as I mentioned; and the Carolinian forest.
In my previous life, as some members know, I was a biologist, and a lot of the work I did in that career was centred around endangered ecosystems and species at risk.
There are four ecosystems in this country that are consistently listed as the most endangered. There are the Garry oak savannahs of southern Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands in British Columbia. We have the desert grasslands in the South Okanagan area of British Columbia, which is where I come from, my home habitat. There is the Carolinian forest of southern Ontario, which is a deciduous forest. They are found throughout the eastern United States and squeak into Canada in southern Ontario. There is the tall grass prairie in southern Manitoba and parts of southern Ontario as well. The Ojibway national urban park would protect two of these important ecosystems, the tall grass prairie and the Carolinian forest.
We do not often think of Ontario as a prairie province, but it once had extensive tall grass prairies. Those have been largely wiped out over the last two centuries through agriculture and urban development. Only about 1% of these habitats still exist. In Ontario, there are only three areas larger than a few acres that represent this habitat. One of those is Ojibway Shores.
Endangered ecosystems, almost by definition, are home to a lot of species at risk. That is what makes them species at risk: Their ecosystems are endangered. There are almost 200 rare and endangered species in Ojibway Shores. There is no other area in Ontario that would come close to that length of a list for endangered and rare species, and only one or two areas in Canada would come close. One, as I mentioned before, is my home habitat in the desert grasslands of the Okanagan.
There are endangered plant communities. There are endangered insect communities. We do not know a lot about some of these things. I would just say in passing that one thing the government could do is spend a bit of money doing an inventory and a survey of some of our endangered species. We might find them in a lot more places or we might find that they are truly endangered. It would be a good investment.
In a previous speech, I mentioned the beautiful damselfly, the giant spreadwing, which is found in Canada only in Ojibway Shores. That is the only place it is known. There are also endangered reptiles, like the Massasauga rattlesnake. In my hometown, we have rattlesnakes that are threatened as well. Here, the Massasauga rattlesnake is found in a small population that is 300 kilometres away from the next population. It is isolated and endangered. There is the bobwhite quail, a really iconic species of small game bird that is found in Canada only in extreme southwestern Ontario. It used to be in Ojibway Shores. Now it is found only in Walpole Island, which is nearby. If we protect these areas, then we can talk about bringing some of these species back, but we need to protect them first.
This is not an area like Banff, Jasper, Kluane or Ivvavik, which are big, wild parks. This is an urban national park that is special. It is built in a mosaic of properties that are close to Windsor. It would be an integral part of that urban population. We have to make sure those properties connect habitats correctly so these species can thrive even in the small areas. We have a similar proposal in the South Okanagan to create a national park in a similar area, a mosaic of different lands.
Once again, I want to thank the member for Windsor West for his work on this. I congratulate him for all his effort and I hope everyone here joins us in voting for this very important bill.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Nunavut.
I am happy to rise today to speak to Bill C-23, the historic places of Canada act, which will modernize the Historic Sites and Monuments Act. In short, this new act will update the protection and conservation framework for historic places and give indigenous people a role in determining those places.
Canadians value our heritage places and the role they play in our collective history and culture, but for most of Canadian history, the history of indigenous peoples has almost been entirely absent from our historic sites and monuments. This bill takes a first step to include indigenous peoples in the designation and development of those sites.
While the member for Nunavut will expand more fully on this issue, I would like to bring up two examples of important indigenous sites from my riding that illustrate this.
There are two provincial parks in the South Okanagan that are popular camping spots but also happen to be important cultural sites for the Syilx people.
Unlike most non-indigenous historic sites, these sites do not have a building to mark them but have been important gathering places for millennia.
One is sẁiẁs Provincial Park. It is a beautiful narrow peninsula that almost cuts the Osoyoos Lake in two. The nsyilxcən name means a shallow place where one can cross the lake on foot or by horse.
The name sẁiẁs was altered by the first settler justice of the peace, Judge Haynes, to Osoyoos, and that has become the name of the local town and of the lake.
Legend has it that Judge Haynes added the “o” in front of the name because of his Irish heritage.
Ironically, the long peninsula took on the name Haynes Point and then became Haynes Point Provincial Park. In 2015, the name of the park was changed to sẁiẁs Provincial Park, and the park is now managed and operated by the Osoyoos Indian Band.
A similar situation is found a little further north, at Okanagan Falls. This site, at a rocky rapids where the Okanagan River flows out of Skaha Lake, has been a sacred gathering site for the Syilx people for thousands of years, as it was a place where sockeye and chinook salmon were caught as they swam upstream to spawn.
Like sẁiẁs Park, which I mentioned previously, this became a provincial park, called Okanagan Falls Provincial Park, but in 2015 it too was renamed, and it has since been managed by the Osoyoos Indian Band as well. It is now known by the nsyilxcən name sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ Provincial Park, and that name means “little falls”. That signifies a connection to Kettle Falls, in Washington state, on the Kettle River.
The nsyilxcən name for Kettle Falls is sx̌ʷnitkʷ, which means “big falls”. These two falls were two of the most important fishing sites for the Okanagan Nation's traditional territory.
Kettle Falls was flooded by the Grand Coulee Dam almost a century ago, and while that was done in the United States, it reflects the complete disregard for sites that were critically important to indigenous people in the settler development of North America.
The campsite at sx̌ʷəx̌ʷnitkʷ Provincial Park is closed annually on the third weekend of September for the Okanagan Nation Alliance's Salmon Feast. The event raises awareness of Okanagan history and culture, as well as the Okanagan Nation's effort to revitalize and restore sockeye salmon numbers in the Okanagan River.
Everyone is welcome to attend the celebration, and I heartily recommend it. It is a wonderful celebration.
There is one official national historic site in my riding, and that is the Rossland Miners' Union Hall. This building was opened in 1898 at the height of the mining boom in West Kootenay. Local miners had created the first Canadian local of the Western Federation of Miners in 1895, and each donated a day's pay to create the hall.
That local went on to advance many of the first labour laws in British Columbia and Canada, laws that brought in the five-day workweek, the eight-hour workday and laws enforcing safe workplaces and the first workers' compensation act.
Continued unrest in the mining camps after the hall was built resulted in the Canadian government's sending Roger Clute, a prominent Toronto lawyer, to Rossland in 1899. He reported back that compulsory arbitration would be less effective than conciliatory measures and, after another trip to Rossland, his reports led to the federal Conciliation Act of 1900, which helped create the Department of Labour and the Canadian system of industrial relations.
Rossland helped build our system of labour relations across the country, and the miners' hall was at the centre of that activity. It is even rumoured that Joe Hill, the legendary labour activist from the United States, lived in the attic of the hall while hiding out from American authorities, so the Rossland Union Miners' Hall can be truly held up as one of the most important historic sites in Canada, and it still plays an important role in the community life of Rossland and the surrounding areas.
It fell into disuse after the mines closed in the late 1920s, and it needed a lot of renovations to bring it back to light. More recent renovations began in 2015, and initial attempts to find federal funding to aid in that were unsuccessful, though I am happy to report that the most recent renovations received funding from all levels of government. In 2020, the Rossland miners' hall was designated a national historic site, and I was very happy to be there for that ceremony.
I wanted to tell the story of the miners' hall to make it clear that these historic sites need ongoing maintenance and renovations, and the sites that are not owned by the federal government, like the miners' hall, need this just as much as those that are.
In 2017, the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development recommended that the annual federal cost-sharing funding for historic sites be increased to a minimum of $10 million annually, but only $2 million is available for the next cycle. In 2018, the Auditor General reported that no resources are allocated to new national historic sites, and that these precious resources are literally falling apart. We need to do better to maintain the heritage that Canadians cherish.
I would like to finish with one more example of an historic place in Canada that as yet has no federal designation or protection, and that is the SS Sicamous in Penticton. The SS Sicamous is a historic paddlewheeler steamship that plied Okanagan Lake in the early 1900s, providing a vital link up and down the valley before roads were built. It is permanently docked at Penticton, along with the stern saloon of the SS Okanagan, an earlier vessel that actually brought my grandparents down the lake when they immigrated from England to Canada in 1910. This marine history park has also added the SS Naramata, an old steam tug, and another historic CPR diesel tug that pushed train barges on Okanagan Lake early in my lifetime.
These historic ships are a big part of the historic heritage of our country and deserve national designation. Like the situation with the Rossland miners' hall, maintenance and renovation of these ships is very expensive. There is a large, very talented and enthusiastic group of volunteers who work on them every day, but they need the funding for materials to help with their work.
This bill is long overdue, and the NDP will be supporting it, but we need to do more to ensure that indigenous voices and indigenous sites take their rightful place in our national historic places. We need to ensure that adequate funding is available to save these precious places for the future generations of Canada.
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