EDITORIAL — Encouraging self-sufficiency — The Lands for Life balancing act

Governments often give with one hand, and take away with another. And that’s what worries some people living in northern Ontario as they wait for the province’s natural resources minister, John Snobolen, to release draft recommendations from the Lands for Life process, and decide what happens next.

The consultation process was led by three round tables, each of which was responsible for developing a land-use strategy for a broad area of Crown land in Ontario. More than 1,000 people attended the round-table meetings, while thousands more made their views known through faxes, e-mail and snail mail. The 800 formal representations included comments from mining, forestry and other resource interests, aboriginal groups, environmental organizations, and the tourism industry, to name but a few.

While the recommendations won’t be made available to government for review until the end of July, environmentalists already describe the process as “off the rails,” and say it will not even come close “to delivering on the government’s promise to complete the provincial park system in northern Ontario.” They blame “the easily predicted industrial veto” for “dismissing one protected area after another, dismissing community and public aspirations, and bringing the process down to the level of intimidation and misinformation.”

Reading between the lines, it appears the environmentalists were surprised by the degree of involvement from local communities and those who make their living off the land. These feisty northerners, who have fought long and hard to be more involved in local land-use planning, are now speaking out against the rush to create parks without taking into account the social and economic impact.

In the past, park boundaries were drawn by bureaucrats at Queen’s Park — a procedure no longer acceptable to northerners and aboriginal groups.

Fortunately, the present government is more responsive to rural Ontarians than some of its predecessors. And fortunately, these hardy inhabitants are no longer afraid to stand up and be counted, notwithstanding the attempts by environmentalists to portray them as greedy industrialists or red-neck pillagers of Mother Nature.

The Ontario government also is trying to encourage more aboriginal partnerships with resource developers. In a newly launched $11.8-million program, dubbed Working Partnerships, the government hopes to remove barriers to aboriginal development by focusing on education, skills development and access to capital and infrastructure. To promote mining, the government will encourage companies to negotiate impact benefit agreements with aboriginal communities. If requested by the aboriginal group, the government will also waive Ontario’s entitlement to half of mineral revenues earned on Indian lands.

Aboriginal communities also want to be more involved in development outside their lands by forming service and supply businesses. But this will come about only if developers have reasonable access to land; hence the importance of sound decision-making by the government in the Lands for Life process. Mining, in particular, has the potential to provide returns many times the value of the less than 1% of land mass disturbed by the total of all past and present operations.

The Lands for Life process is supposed to be about finding a balance. It is not simply about creating more parks, and removing more areas from development. It is about finding ways to preserve jobs and the environment, and to give more say to local communities most affected by the land-planning process. Too many urban-dwellers see the North as only a wilderness; a huge parkland they want preserved for future generations. But what about the generations who live there now? What about the high unemployment rate in aboriginal communities, and the social problems that arise from idleness and despair?

The Lands for Life process should not exclude human life.