cityscape Rouge National Urban Park Stalled

Toronto could be the home of Canada's first national park in an urban area—if the federal government can reach an agreement with Ontario.

Kathleen Wynne isn’t the only Ontario politician critical of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s environmental record. Liberal cabinet minister Brad Duguid says the Conservatives are failing Torontonians on an issue close to home, and it could jeopardize what was supposed to be a crown jewel in northeastern Toronto.

On his last visit, the prime minister told Toronto the government was expanding plans for the country’s first urban national park, located in northeast Scarborough. But Duguid, MPP for Scarborough Centre, told Torontoist that the provincial government isn’t currently willing to move forward with the planned park.

Harper announced that the Government of Canada will contribute an additional 21 square kilometres of land to Rouge National Urban Park, which increases the size of the park by approximately one third. But that’s only if the provincial and federal governments can sort a dispute over environmental protections, and the park ever gets built.

Although the federal government is donating new land, the province said this spring that it isn’t willing to hand over any parkland until an agreement on environmental protections is reached.

Critics say that the protections set down in the Rouge National Urban Park Act aren’t clear, paving the way for environmental exploitation in the park. Parks Canada counters these accusations by saying the act provides the Rouge with its “strongest ever” protection. But right now the Rouge isn’t an established national park and lacks the stronger protections that status offers. The same critics argue that the protections offered by the Rouge Act are insufficient.

“Despite the widely recognized importance of a nature-first approach for Canada’s national parks, federal legislation passed earlier this year to create Rouge Park makes no reference to ecological integrity,” wrote David Suzuki and Faisal Moola in a July op-ed for the Toronto Star. “Instead, it contains a weak reference to ecosystem health and offers a highly discretionary approach to protecting and restoring nature.”

Suzuki and Moola added that the Rouge Act contains weaker environmental protections than the Canadian National Parks Act or the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act in Ontario.

At press time, Parks Canada representatives had not replied to Torontoist‘s requests for comment on the current status of the Rouge National Urban Parks project and the details of planned environmental measures.

The David Suzuki Foundation, which Moola is also involved with, are part of a coalition of organizations that also includes the Friends of the Rouge Watershed and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.

“I’m pleased to see the federal government dedicating this additional land to the park. We’ve been calling on them to do that for some time,” says Duguid.

But the MPP says that the province’s stance remains unchanged, and the federal government is stonewalling attempts to reach consensus.

Perhaps in anticipation of local objections, during his July announcement, Harper said that “the new Rouge National Urban Park will have the highest level of environmental protection.”

But Duguid says the feds haven’t attempted to address Ontario’s environmental concerns, and also haven’t responded to a proposed compromise.

“In fact, we worked very hard with our environmental partners to find a compromise solution that we thought would be acceptable to the federal government when [the Rouge National Urban Park Act] went through the Senate, and they shot that down as well,” he says.

The idea of turning Rouge Park into a national park had been floated for years when the project was first announced by the feds in 2011. The project stalled this spring. Throughout the dispute, Duguid has been clear that the current federal government may not be the one to complete the project.

“We’ll just have to see what the fall brings,” says Duguid.