Adventure Kayak, Summer 2006
In this feature story I take readers on a sea kayak tour of the islands and saunas of northwestern Lake Superior

Backpacker, September 2008
This short population biology primer was published as a Phenomenon column in one of the most widely read outdoors magazines in the United States. I had another story describing hiking in Newfoundland’s Gros Morne National Park (“Trekking the Long Range Traverse”) in the same issue.

Adventure Kayak, Spring 2009
More of an inside joke than anything, this piece is a parody of outdoor fashion norms and a brief take on a friend’s love for Value Village.

In this short feature for Cottage Life magazine I explore Ontario’s ban on cosmetic pesticides, which came into effect in the summer of 2009. My piece outlines the environmental effects of pesticides and investigates what the ban might mean for water quality in Cottage Country.

By: Conor Mihell

Mary Smith has a “personal attachment to the water” of the Kawarthas, the patchwork of sprawling lakes north of Peterborough where she’s been swimming all her life. But after witnessing decades of development, she is afraid that those once-pristine waters are slowly morphing into stagnant ponds. Fertilizers and pesticides streaming off lawns and agricultural fields are fuelling the growth of weeds and algae and lacing ground and surface water with unpronounceable chemicals.

A Lakefield resident and deputy reeve of the Township of Smith-Ennismore-Lakefield, Smith did her part to protect her favourite lakes by introducing, in 2007, a township-wide bylaw banning the use of pesticides for cosmetic reasons. While she still sees some immaculate waterfront lawns, she insists her township’s ban and cottager education programs have received unanimous support. “The people have told us loud and clear that we should be taking these types of conservation measures,” says Smith. “But there are always those who need more forceful legislation. Our feeling is that we need a provincial ban.”

Environmentalists like Smith have long awaited Ontario’s Cosmetic Pesticides Ban Act. This law, which was passed this spring and is enforced by the Ministry of the Environment (MOE), restricts the sale and non-essential use of chemical herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides. The big difference between the new provincial legislation and existing municipal pesticide bylaws in Toronto, North Bay, Smith-Ennismore-Lakefield, and other Ontario municipalities, is that the province has the power to control the sale of products, while municipalities can only ban their use. Quebec’s Pesticides Management Code, Canada’s first provincial ban, for instance, pulled garden products containing 20 red-flagged chemicals off store shelves in that province in 2003. Ontario’s regulations outlaw 85 pesticide ingredients for most lawn and garden applications. All told, 295 pesticide products and fertilizer-pesticide weed-and-feed blends were pulled from Ontario stores.

MOE spokesperson Kate Jordan says Ontario’s new pesticides policy is part of the province’s efforts to reduce public exposure to toxic chemicals. “By definition, the cosmetic use of pesticides is an unnecessary risk,” she says. “The new legislation addresses the question, ‘Why put a poison into the environment if it’s not necessary?’”

According to Mike Gibbs, the coordinator of the Peterborough-based Lakeland Alliance, a network of organizations and government agencies promoting local water-quality and shoreline-naturalization initiatives, pesticide bans are good news for cottage country. Although the quantity of pesticides used in residential applications is far less than in industrial agriculture, Gibbs says their use in Canadian Shield country is particularly risky because of shallow soils, steep lots, and proximity to the shoreline. In waterfront areas, explains Gibbs, “there’s a short, direct path for chemicals to travel from land to water.”

The environmental benefits of chemical-free landscaping aside, it’s a mystery to Gibbs why cottagers would want to maintain an immaculate lawn or introduce non-native plants in the first place. Yet in the community education programs he organizes north of Peterborough, Gibbs routinely sees both in cottage gardens. “If you don’t have [non-native] plants, you won’t need to use fertilizers and pesticides,” he says. “That means more time relaxing. In my opinion, that’s the whole idea of going to the cottage in the first place.”

The American writer and ecologist Rachel Carson brought the dangers of pesticides into the mainstream with her enviro-lit classic Silent Spring in 1962. Since then, studies have linked many of these “elixirs of death,” as she called them, to cancers, reproductive problems, neurological diseases, and respiratory ailments.

Synthetic chemicals and monoculture lawns are thought to be responsible for plummetting populations of songbirds and pollinator species such as bees and butterflies. The Sierra Club cites studies that demonstrate that more than 90 per cent of 2,4-D, a possible human carcinogen and the active ingredient in herbicides such as Killex, migrates through the soil and into ground and surface water. Furthermore, pesticide-fertilizer blends contribute to nutrient spikes in lakes, which can lead to algal blooms.

Under Ontario’s new legislation, one of the few exceptions for lawn and garden pesticide use is “the promotion of health and safety.” This means irritant plants, including poison ivy, and insects that sting, bite, or could compromise the structural integrity of buildings, plus a few other creatures, are still fair game for chemical assault—with certain conditions. Georgian Bay Association executive director and Go Home Bay cottager Bob Duncan is a big supporter of the overall pesticides ban, but he concedes the health and safety clause is a good thing.

“Obviously there are places where pesticides are necessary to avoid other ills,” says Duncan. “But still, the idea is not to use these chemicals where they can leach immediately into the water.”

So, while cottagers will be relieved there are no restrictions on the use of mosquito repellents, Duncan says that for the environment’s sake, they should also accept that buying products to kill poison ivy and other “noxious weeds” requires more effort. For these applications, MOE spokesperson Jordan says cottagers can request “behind the counter” chemical products from retailers. The retailer will then issue the purchaser a waiver that outlines their responsibilities for pesticide use and storage. Pesticide products used to control disease outbreaks in trees will be issued on similar grounds. And the existing Ontario Pesticide Act permit system for aquatic herbicides will remain in place for the treatment of underwater weeds.

If there’s a weakness in Ontario’s new pesticides ban, it’s an exemption that places few restrictions on the use of pesticides at golf courses, says Lisa Gue, an environmental health policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation. Mandatory reporting in Quebec reveals that golf courses spray an average of 5.2 kg of pesticides per hectare annually, a startling figure that’s more than three times the average intensity of agricultural applications. Under the new act, Ontario courses will have to file similar reports. “The transparency elements are encouraging,” says Gue. “At the very least, it will give the neighbours the right to know what chemicals are being used and entering the environment.”

Loophole withstanding, Gue says Ontario’s cosmetic pesticides ban is a big improvement over the existing law in Quebec, where the use of household pesticides has been cut in half since 1994. The scope of Ontario’s legislation is broader and its list of outlawed products longer than Quebec’s. What’s more, Gue predicts its enforcement—a responsibility that was largely handled by eliminating the sale of dangerous products—will usher in a green wave of landscaping. “The products simply won’t be accessible,” she says. Even if consumer demand for pesticides continues, “shelf space will be filled with alternative products that are legal and safe.”

According to Mary Smith, her community’s municipal pesticide bylaw has already caused a shift in attitudes—a big deal, she insists, in a township where waterfront comprises 25 per cent of the residential properties. “Many of our seasonal residents come from other municipalities where there’s a similar bylaw in effect,” says Smith. “Pesticide bans are becoming an expectation.” Smith’s experience mirrors provincial trends: Polls suggest more than 70 per cent of Ontarians support a cosmetic pesticide ban. Ontario’s new policy, it seems, is falling on fertile ground.

ON Nature, Winter 2007-2008
My first feature assignment for ON Nature magazine explored what Ontario’s new Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act means for the ecological integrity of the province’s protected places.

But it shouldn’t. Our parks are supposed to be wilderness sanctuaries, yet the trees are still logged, the waterways polluted and the trucks keep rolling through. Ontario Nature lobbied hard for tougher protection So, will the new Provincial Parks Act really put ecological integrity first?

By Conor Mihell

AT A CAMPSITE beneath an 80-metre-high cliff in the south end of Lake Superior Provincial Park, sunset shadows play across the Sand River. This will be my fourth and last night camped alongside the river; another 10 kilometres of gravel swifts, whitewater and falls remains before the river joins Lake Superior. Ojibwa people canoed what they called the Pinguisibi for millennia, and named it for the expansive dunes at the river mouth.  To get here I’ve paddled the narrow bends of the river’s upper reaches, listening to warblers and glimpsing a moose crashing through the shoreline alders. I’ve caught and released more of the Sand’s legendary brook trout than I’ve fried up for breakfasts. And I’ve taken to portaging when whitewater pinballs turned into thundering falls.

It is my first time canoeing the 56-kilometre long river that runs between Sault Ste. Marie and Wawa since a logging road along the river’s east bank dating back to the 1960s was rebuilt in 2003 to usher loggers and supplies through Lake Superior Provincial Park and into 20,000 hectares of privately owned land beyond the eastern boundary. But on this evening at High Cliff, all seems well and songbirds chorus clear above the swift-flowing river. The logging road might as well be hundreds of kilometres away. In reality, it is barely 800 metres from my campsite.

That a logging road can cut across Lake Superior Provincial Park tells you something about the degree of protection afforded our parks – or the lack thereof.  Seventy-eight per cent of Algonquin Provincial Park—Ontario’s first “protected” area—is still open to logging, and development infringes upon dozens of other, supposedly safe, places.  While the designations suggest iron-clad safeguards from any manner of habitat destruction, Ontario’s 631 parks, conservation reserves and wilderness areas (together constituting only nine percent of Ontario’s land mass) are not nearly as well protected as one might think.  The archaic 1954 parks’ act—in effect until this year—was a pushover whenever mining, forestry and hydroelectric interests came looking for new areas to exploit.  “Ontario’s original parks’ act was more about accommodating development [within park boundaries] than preserving supposedly protected spaces,” says Evan Ferrari, director of CPAWS-Wildlands League.

The long-awaited Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act, which came into force in September of this year, states the primacy of the notion of “ecological integrity.” And while Ferrari, who played a significant role in the development of the new legislation, is optimistic about the act’s potential, a few conspicuous loopholes remain.

Most notable is the fact that the new act does not recognize the “greater park ecosystem”—the so-called “good neighbour clause.” Protected areas like Lake Superior Provincial Park—and most others—have become islands of wilderness amid a sea of development.  For example, the town of Saugeen Shores recently entered negotiations to acquire a 7.5-hectare parcel of land adjoining MacGregor Point Provincial Park, which contains an assemblage of forest, wetland and sand dune habitat on Lake Huron in southwestern Ontario.  The town intends to build a housing development, potentially threatening the park’s more than 100 species of migratory birds.

Nor does the new act make Ontario’s waterway parks any less vulnerable to development. Mining giant Falconbridge pumps contaminated mining wastes into the “protected” Groundhog River, a northern Ontario waterway park. Falconbridge’s claim to a site 12 kilometres from the river pre-dated the Groundhog’s 1999 designation as a Waterway Park and included a corridor of mining claims leading to the river’s edge. At the point of discharge, a spawning area for lake sturgeon, water quality does not meet provincial standards. But Ministry of the Environment monitoring is done further downstream where the contaminants are diluted and standards met.

Undercutting any gains made through the new parks act is the fact that the province’s parks are enormously underfunded. The government of Ontario contributes only $15 million towards provincial parks’ annual $68.7 million operating costs—the lowest as a percentage in Canada. (The province spends $75 million each year to maintain 62,000 kilometres of logging roads.) User fees cover the balance of the parks bill and then some, generating $46 million annually in provincial revenue. Furthermore, parks generate another $390 million in economic activity in surrounding communities. As for the 257 “paper parks” – parks that lack an official management plan and so do not collect visitor fees – ecological provisions such as prescribed road closures, habitat rehabilitation and user regulations are non-existent.

ON A HOT JULY DAY I drive 80 kilometres along the Trans Canada Highway south of Wawa to take a closer look at Sand River Road. After ducking under the gate that keeps unauthorized vehicles out, I bike into Lake Superior Provincial Park’s backcountry. I cycle through a transitional forest of birch, maple and balsam fir, stopping to admire 30-metre-tall old growth white pines that dwarf the second-growth canopy. Streams chatter through shiny new culverts; rusty old ones have been left like decomposing skeletons at the road’s margins. A white-throated sparrow calls out, perhaps in a last-ditch effort to find a mate. At several points I swerve to miss fur-laden wolf scat.

The road is of the typical logging variety: Well-graded except for the odd bit of washboard, just wide enough for two vehicles to pass abreast and slightly eroded on the hills by the one-ton, V8 pickups that use it a few times a week year-round to deliver supplies to loggers outside the park. After 10 minutes of riding I’m within a stone’s throw of the river just downstream from my favourite campsite at High Cliff. Pinguisibi is visible through the trees.

“Logging roads fragment the forest, reducing available habitat for wide-ranging mammals like woodland caribou that need massive areas of continuous, undisturbed forest to survive,” says Jennifer Baker, Ontario Nature’s conservation campaign coordinator. “The negative impacts are far-reaching and often permanent.” By chopping through habitat, roads make for smaller communities of flora and fauna and reduce an ecosystem’s biological diversity.

I reach another gate just past kilometre marker 14 about 45 minutes later. This gate designates the boundary between the park and 20,000-odd hectares of privately owned land. But the reminder is unnecessary. The transition from second-growth greenery to clearcut barrens is striking. The dusty road curves through piles of unwanted slash and no birds sing beneath the hot sun.

It is something of a shock to discover that nearly every Ontario park is similarly surrounded by development pressures pushing against sensitive boundaries. Bob Payne, a professor at Lakehead University’s School of Outdoor Recreation, Parks and Tourism, says that the province has supported the argument put forward by resource companies that there is no such thing as a “good neighbour” clause. Payne says that as far as logging, mining and hydroelectric interests are concerned, buffer zones should be within park boundaries and resource extraction should be allowed to take place anywhere else.

“This type of infraction happens all across the province,” says Payne, citing the example of Quetico Provincial Park, where forest company Bowater cuts right up to the park line. “A sensible buffer would be outside of the park. This is something that should be put into policy.”

ANYONE WHO HAS EVER TRAVELLED the northern Ontario leg of the Trans-Canada Highway remembers Lake Superior Provincial Park. Early on in the 700-kilometre-long, are-we-there-yet stretch of blacktop between Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay, 83 kilometres of Highway 17 bisects the park just south of Wawa. It feels like you’re driving along the edge of a frontier. If the jaw-dropping views of Lake Superior Agawa and Old Woman Bay don’t keep you alert, the transmission-grinding hills will.

But topographical maps—or better yet, Google Earth satellite imagery—reveal that Lake Superior Provincial Park has essentially become a 1,600-square-kilometre island. Its western boundary is 120 kilometres of Lake Superior coastline, and the eastern boundary an equally long swath of clearcuts accessed by the Algoma Central Railway (ACR) and a spider web of logging roads.

While modern forest management practices attempt to mimic natural disturbances, Shelley Hunt, a researcher in University of Guelph’s Department of Environmental Biology, says that clearcuts create ecological discontinuities that are far from natural. The resulting checkerboard forest lies just outside Lake Superior Provincial Park and across northern Ontario.

“Individual clearcuts may not be very big,” says Hunt, “but neither are the residual untouched areas in between.”

Lake Superior Provincial Park was originally established in 1944 “to protect a significant area of Lake Superior’s coastline.” Before it became a park, hardscrabble hand loggers spent winters and springs felling and floating giant white pines down the Agawa River to Lake Superior. Each year for more than a quarter of a century, rafts of old growth pine the size of city subdivisions were towed by tugboat to mills in Sault Ste. Marie.

The network of roads and skidder trails crisscrossing the area continued to grow even after park designation. An investigation by the Algonquin Wildlands League in the early 1970s revealed that 95 percent of the park was open to logging. Bruce Litteljohn, a writer and photographer, and Douglas Pimlott, a professor of forestry and zoology at the University of Toronto—both founding directors of the Wildlands League—concluded that “the people of Ontario [were] funding the destruction of their own wilderness.”

The province finally abolished logging within Lake Superior Park boundaries in 1992. But a wording loophole in the park’s current management plan allowed the road to be redeveloped at Sand River, according to park superintendent Bob Elliott. He says the management plan specified “access to allocations east of the park would be allowed on existing roads.”

Elliott says park managers were specifically referring to the Crown allocations set aside by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) in townships more than 10 kilometres east of the park line. ACR-owned land formed a 10-kilometre-wide buffer along the park’s eastern boundary; Elliott didn’t foresee the wording to cause any problems because the railway had no intentions of logging.

But when the cash-strapped ACR started offloading its property to chainsaw-toting buyers, Sand River Road became a convenient—and presumably legitimate—means of accessing uncut tracts of land. Even more alluring to loggers was the fact that because the land was privately owned, it wouldn’t be subject to provincial forestry regulations such as stumpage fees and habitat and reforestation guidelines.

British Columbia-based logger Mike Jenks purchased two 10,000-hectare plots of land east of Lake Superior Provincial Park from the ACR in 2002 and asked Bob Elliott for permission to rebuild the Sand River Road for access.  Both Elliott and MNR rejected his proposal. “At that point the road was little more than a trail,” says Elliott. “You could drive an ATV down it but that was about it. All of the road crossings were washed out.”

Despite a court injunction, Jenks had the road upgraded during the three years the case was in limbo. The dispute between Jenks, the park and MNR ended in 2005 when the Supreme Court of Canada sided with Lake Superior Provincial Park ruling that Jenks was never to use the Sand River Road again.

But the damage was already done. The road had been widened and graded, water crossings were replaced and any sign of habitat regeneration cleared. The improved roadway had allowed year-round access to Jenks’ property in Greenwood and Bullock townships, where scarcely a tree now stands.

“IT’S INFINITELY BETTER THAN WHAT WE HAD BEFORE,” says Ferrari about Ontario’s new Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act.  “But it’s still a working document.”

Ontario Nature, CPAWS-Wildlands League, Sierra Legal Defense and other environmental organizations, had lobbied hard for the overhaul of the old Ontario Parks Act. When the Liberals balked at maintaining a 2002 election promise to upgrade parks’ legislation, CPAWS-Wildlands League and Sierra Legal Defense wrote up their own act.

The new legislation is the polar opposite of the 1954 act’s directive of accommodating development. In theory, this is exactly what the environmental lobby called for: An end to logging, hydroelectric development and mining in provincial parks, conservation reserves and wilderness areas.

But the new act is not retroactive: any development projects that were approved before the new act came into force can be completed. Such is the case in northern Ontario’s White River Waterway Park, where a series of hydroelectric dams to be constructed over the next five years will suck the life from a wild river.

“All [these projects] will be allowed to be finished,” observes Payne. “Unless there’s a groundswell of opposition locally, these things aren’t going to go away.”

Under the new parks act, logging is prohibited in every provincial park except for Algonquin, which is crisscrossed by 8,000 kilometres of forest access roads. Ferrari expresses concern about the new act’s questionable anti-mining wording. The act says that through an Order of Council, boundary changes could be made to allow mining in the lesser of either one per cent or 50 hectares of a protected area.

“Fifty hectares is enough to put a mine in, and there’s nothing preventing [the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines] from making multiple exceptions [in the same park],” says Ferrari. “This makes me nervous to say the least. If they were to find diamonds or something really valuable you can be sure they would pull out all the stops to make it happen.”

The success of the new legislation boils down to how much money the Ontario government is willing to ante up to support the concept of ecological integrity. Payne says that as long as the Ontario Parks budget remains “laughably inadequate,” he doesn’t expect much to change. “It’s a question of staff and money and having the science available to know what’s out there,” says Payne. “All of that’s going to cost money. If we’re going to believe the act will do what it says, we’ll have to believe that the money is coming. Otherwise it’s just going to be the usual type of smoke and mirrors.”

THE SILVER LINING IN THE REDEVELOPMENT OF THE SAND RIVER ROAD is that it provides an opportunity to test the resolve of the Provincial Parks and Conservation Reserves Act’s quest for ecological integrity. Decommissioning and rehabilitation of the road is slated within the next three years. With regard to the latter, Ferrari says he will gauge the success of the new parks act by comparing it to the federal equivalent, which takes a no-holds-barred approach. Ferrari lauds the example of Bruce Peninsula National Park, where 110 kilometres of existing roadway is scheduled to return to the land and 47 park buildings will be removed in the next five years.

To celebrate the hard-won victory at Pinguisibi, I suggest to Ferrari that he take a canoe trip on the Sand River, to run its rapids and sweat out its lumpy portages, and to be sure to spend a night at High Cliff, where the sunset casts long shadows and the river chuckles over cobble. Ferrari agrees. In the meantime, the river will continue to cascade over granite bedrock and carve a serpentine course through brown sugar dunes and into Lake Superior.

Conor Mihell is a freelance environmental and adventure travel writer who lives on the north shore of Lake Superior.

ON Nature, Fall 2008

A feature-length investigation of Ontario’s mining legislation and its environmental implications.

Ontario’s antiquated legislation allows the mining industry to stake claims almost anywhere and operate without full environmental assessments. Responding to the demands of First Nations and conservation groups like Ontario Nature, Premier Dalton McGuinty promised (again) to overhaul the Mining Act. Will this promise be kept?

By Conor Mihell

ON A SUNNY, LATE APRIL DAY, Catherine Bayne hopscotches her way along a steep and rocky portion of the northeastern shore of Lake Superior. I follow behind, balancing unsteadily on the wave-washed rocks; at the very least, a slip would mean an icy swim. Bayne seems unaware of the danger. Her eyes sparkle in the sunlight as she admires the rugged beauty of the coastline.

“It doesn’t take someone with a geology degree to be able to tell that this place is special,” says Bayne, who owns 310 hectares of land about 100 kilometres northwest of Sault Ste. Marie. “Just look at all the colours and textures in the shoreline. There are sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks side by side.”

Bayne and her partner, George Browne, live off the grid and telephone-free on a rugged, hilly piece of northeastern Ontario they call Bay Niche Conservancy. Running water comes from a garden hose that diverts some of the flow of a stream and drinking water is scooped from a spring. Their homestead is decidedly rustic and isolated–the nearest neighbour lives 20 kilometres away.

Bay Niche wasn’t always so peaceful. Up until Bayne bought the property in 1986, prospectors had clearcut parts of the land to drill and dig for bedrock samples. The area has been the site of ongoing prospecting and commercial mining activity for more than 160 years. You can still see parts of an 1840 copper mine hidden along the coastline adjacent to Bayne’s property, and the 60-year-old headframe of Canada’s first uranium mine stands precariously 10 kilometres to the north. Ironically, the saving grace for Bay Niche is that since the land is patented, or designated, for mining, Bayne can own both its surface and mineral rights by paying $1,200 annually in mining taxes. However, if she misses a payment, she forfeits those rights back to the Crown. Difficult and stressful as this is on her meager income as a photographer, it’s worth every penny to keep her property prospector-free.

Unlike Bayne, the majority of rural Ontario landowners are completely unaware that their property is fair game to anybody hoping to strike the motherlode. The Ontario Mining Act, passed in 1873 and falling under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines (MNDM) since the late 1980s, enshrines the right of “free entry”:  two small but earth-shattering words that give prospectors access to most of Ontario’s land mass and the power to stake claims and undertake exploration on private and Crown land, without consulting property owners or the public, without regard for First Nation treaty rights, and without weighing the benefits of mining versus other land uses, such as conservation, or considering the impact on the local ecology.

With such carte blanche legislation, it’s no wonder that Ontario is a mining stronghold. The province produced $9.4 billion worth of minerals in 2006, more than any other jurisdiction in Canada. According to the Ontario Prospectors Association, there are currently 41 mines in operation and more than 800 ongoing exploration projects. As of April 30, 2008, 335,000-plus mining claim units were filed with the provincial mining recorder, the MNDM department responsible for handing out land tenure. With each claim unit measuring 16 hectares, the amount of land staked for mining interests totals nearly 54,000 square kilometers – about six percent of the province’s land base.

“The province assumes that mining is the best use of land,” says Marilyn Crawford, a member of the steering committee Bedford Mining Alert, an advocacy group based near Kingston. “This old-fashioned, colonial mindset dates back to when the province was trying to populate the north and mining was done with picks and shovels. Today, it amounts to giving our land away.”

Bolstered by skyrocketing metal prices and high demand for diamonds, the mining section is riding a wave of prosperity. Prospectors with an eye for gold, silver, and copper have staked claims on the Crown land surrounding Catherine Bayne’s property and throughout northern Ontario, and high uranium prices have brought the abandoned mines of Elliot Lake to the brink of revival. The boom has expanded to the James Bay Lowlands area, where 2,316 claims were hurriedly staked in the nine months following last fall’s provincial election, when the Liberal government vowed a modernization of the Mining Act; according to MNDM statistics, this amounts to 35 percent of all claims in the Far North. And, as with prospecting and mineral exploration, the development of large-scale mines, like DeBeers Canada’s Victor mine in James Bay, continues to pass below the radar of comprehensive environmental assessments.

This flagrant disregard for overall environmental impacts worries many. First Nations across the province are calling for a mining moratorium until Premier Dalton McGuinty upholds his promise to review provincial legislation. The position is backed by Ontario Nature and more than 30 other environmental and human rights organizations, as well as Gord Miller, the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, who encouraged strategic land-use planning in the pristine Far North region and modern reforms to the province’s mining regulations in his 2007 annual report, released last December.

Certainly, it’s disturbing to hear the MNDM’s rationale for having so little regard for land rights or repercussions to habitat. “The purpose of the Mining Act is first to encourage prospecting and development and second to protect the environment through rehabilitation,” says Tony Scarr, a senior lands technician at the MNDM. “The role of the ministry is to issue land tenure, not to carry out exploration or permit mining activities. We look after the conveyance of land from one user to the next.” In other words, government is effectively distanced from what mining companies do, an archaic mandate reflecting the fact that, at 135 years old, the Mining Act is the one of the longest-standing pieces of legislature.

“Through this ancient act, the Ontario government is supporting an industry that imposes massive impacts on the environment,” says Jennifer Baker, Ontario Nature’s boreal outreach coordinator. “We need new policy that offers a comprehensive assessment of all environmental and social values.”

MARILYN CRAWFORD GOT A RUDE AWAKENING TO THE REALITIES of the existing policy in 2001, when a prospector staked a claim on her cottage property near Kingston. She filed a dispute to challenge the prospector’s right to explore on her land and has been active in the lobby to reform mining legislature ever since.  “It was unfathomable to me that someone could just walk onto private property and stake a claim, much less come in with heavy equipment to explore for minerals with only 24 hours’ notice to the property owner,” Crawford says, admitting she “got lucky” when the claim on her property was abandoned.

Anyone can stake a mining claim virtually anywhere in Ontario so long as they are at least 18 years of age and purchase a $25.50 prospector’s license, which must be renewed every five years. While Tony Scarr likens the MNDM’s role in the mining process to that of a real estate agent, in practice, the government acts more like a clearinghouse.

Once a claim is staked and reported to the MNDM, the prospector has exclusive right to explore it for minerals. The holder must put $400 of “assessment” work into each claim unit per year and, in the case of Crown lands, the MNDM has no right to refuse leasing the surface rights should the prospector decide to further explore the mineral potential of a claim. On patented mining land, such as Bayne’s property on Lake Superior, surface and mining rights are bundled together in perpetuity, so long as the landowner pays an annual mining tax to the government. This historical system of land tenure and tax has been replaced by 21-year mining leases, in which the government levies an annual fee of $3 per hectare.

Despite the obvious ecological concerns, mineral exploration isn’t subject to environmental regulations. Once the land is under lease, companies are not required to submit an exploration plan and are not subject to government inspection, says Crawford. In fact, the rehabilitation of an exploration site isn’t mandatory unless more than 1,000 tonnes of subsurface rock is excavated or 10,000 square metres of vegetation and topsoil is removed from each claim unit. “Companies are not required to report all the exploration work they do,” she says. “We have no idea of the number of exploration sites that haven’t been restored because nobody is watching.”

According to MNDM statistics, about one in every 10 mining claims will advance to the exploration stage. But only about one in 1,000 exploration projects will develop into an operating mine. Joan Kuyek, the past national coordinator of MiningWatch Canada, a national mining-policy watchdog organization, explains that the relatively large number of exploration projects can be directly tied to the huge federal and provincial tax incentives for investing in junior mining companies. Investors receive a 100-percent tax deduction for their support of mineral exploration, says Kuyek. What’s more, investing in juniors is further encouraged by an additional 15-percent federal and five-percent provincial tax credits.  “The tax system treats exploration as a separate industry from mining,” she says. This makes exploring for new sources of raw materials far more economically appealing than recycling or conserving existing supplies. “The end result is enormously costly to taxpayers and the environment. It is completely unsustainable.”

THE IMPACT OF THE MINING INDUSTRY is obvious in my hometown of Wawa, located 230 kilometres north of Sault Ste. Marie. A brief gold rush first brought miners here in the late 1800s; shortly afterwards, Algoma Ore Division’s (AOD) iron mines formed the backbone of the community. The last iron ore was blasted from the earth in 1998, but AOD’s legacy remains in the form of 40-kilometre-long, 20,000-hectare treeless zone – the result of atmospheric sulphur dioxide fallout from the processing of ore into iron. A Ministry of the Environment (MOE) study showed that soil levels of arsenic, another byproduct of processing, were up to 50 times the MOE guidelines in the area; and the study estimated the risk of cancer to Wawa residents as a result of exposure to arsenic was 100 times the level used to set provincial standards.  (Further studies concluded that because Wawa’s soil arsenic was “very insoluble and therefore biologically unavailable,” the risk to human health was “very low.”)

Similar trends have been observed in communities across Ontario, says MiningWatch’s Kuyek, nickel and lead-contaminated soils being reported in Sudbury and Port Colborne. In the northeastern Ontario town of Cobalt, the medical officer of health cautioned against swimming and fishing in area lakes in 2005 and 2007 because of arsenic concentrations of more than seven times the provincial water quality objectives.

An even bigger concern is the estimated 650 million tonnes of waste materials generated by the Canadian mining industry each year. Kuyek says that most ore bodies contain less than one percent valuable metal. For instance, one gram of gold is the product of about one tonne of gold-bearing material – besides the one to three additional tonnes of “waste rock” that must be removed to access the ore and is disposed of in mountainous heaps. Chemical- and heavy metal-laced sludge ponds of fine-grained mine waste known as “tailings” comprise about 25 percent of mineral extraction byproducts. Tailings ponds may contain certain types of metals that can leach deadly acidic toxins into the water table and surrounding waterways and wetlands. Since about 20 percent of mining waste in Canada is acidic and leaching may not occur for decades after mine closure, Kuyek says tailings ponds require costly monitoring and treatment long after a mine is abandoned.

What’s more, with Canadian mines using upwards of two billion cubic metres of water per year, it’s no surprise that MNDM case studies demonstrate that 70 percent of operations contaminate surface water and 65 percent pollute groundwater.  DeBeers’ Victor mine in the James Bay Lowlands received permission to draw 100,000 cubic metres of water from the Attawapiskat River every day. Mining in the muskeg area will also require removing the same amount of groundwater from below the water table in the mine pit. Besides creating a 260,000-hectare sinkhole over the mine’s 12-year life span, the draining process could release methyl mercury, a dangerous neurotoxin that bioaccumulates in the aquatic food chain as revealed in a 2007 study by University of Ottawa ecotoxicologist Dr. David Lean. Ontario Nature’s Jennifer Baker explains that “the problems associated with flooding vast areas of peatlands for hydroelectric projects also applies to draining [them] for mines. Both processes free up mercury that’s been harmlessly stored in the soil and converts it to a toxin that contaminates fish and threatens human health.”

Other environmental impacts include tailings spills, such as the 1990 accident near the northeastern Ontario town of Matachewan that dumped 300,000 tonnes of gold mining byproduct, including high concentrations of toxic lead into the Montreal River. At northwestern Ontario’s Red Lake gold mine, Kuyek says, 20,000 tonnes of underground arsenic trioxide is slowly seeping into the surrounding groundwater.

I often backcountry ski in Wawa’s treeless zone, carving telemark turns on the slopes and kicking and gliding across lakes of the windswept and arctic-like landscape. Since AOD operations ended, restoration work has not extended beyond removing equipment, dismantling the processing facility, and re-routing runoff from the mounds of waste rock surrounding the processing site. According to Brennain Lloyd, the coordinator of Northwatch, a coalition of environmental and citizen organizations in northern Ontario, AOD is but one of a legion of shoddily rehabilitated former mining sites that remain scattered across the province. Timmins’ Kam Kotia mine, which closed in 1972, has been the most costly to taxpayers. Once complete in 2009, the rehabilitation of Kam Kotia’s acidic tailings will cost the province an estimated $60 million, says Lloyd.

Lloyd maintains that the solution to decreasing the costs of abandoned mines is to comprehensively assess the environmental, social, and economic impacts of mining before projects are allowed to begin. “The way it works right now is that there are very few decision points where it’s possible to take a comprehensive look at the project,” she says. “If all costs of mining were considered, including environmental and health impacts, and companies were required to prove they could pay the bill of remediation up front, I’m sure we’d see much less development, and fewer abandoned mines.”

PERHAPS THE GREATEST SHORTCOMING OF ONTARIO’S MINING POLICY is that it has no provisions for measuring the cumulative environmental impacts of development. Because of the split jurisdiction between Ottawa and the provinces, mines are subject only to a piecemeal review, where federal agencies, such as Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and provincial legislation, like the Ontario Water Resources Act, assess and authorize individual components of a proposal. As a result, explains Anastasia Lintner, a staff lawyer and economist at EcoJustice Canada (formerly Sierra Legal Defence), a national non-profit environmental law organization, “no one does an overall examination of a project.”

The situation is further confounded in Ontario by the fact mining has been historically protected from environmental assessment legislation. Lintner says that before the Ontario Environmental Assessment Act came into force in 1990, the government “wanted to allow ongoing [mining] projects to be able to continue while they went through the process of determining the criteria of class environmental assessments.” An exemption for mining development was first put in place in 1981 and has been extended ever since, with the current three-year term set to expire in June 2009.

Lintner believes the problem of split jurisdiction and piecemeal assessments could be overcome with joint panel reviews, where federal and provincial agencies and the mining proponent agree to a review of potential environmental impacts by an independent panel of experts, including, she says, “an overall assessment of whether or not it’s worth it.” In 2007, for example, a joint review panel in British Columbia rejected a proposal for a copper and gold mine, the first mine proposal turned down by an environmental assessment in Canadian history.

THIS APRIL, DALTON MCGUINTY RENEWED his promise to review the Mining Act and told reporters that Ontario’s mining policy doesn’t mesh “with our values and expectations at the beginning of the 21st century.” According to Cindy Blancher-Smith, the MNDM’s director of mineral development and lands, the government will begin its overhaul “once cabinet determines the scope of the review.”

That’s welcome news to environmentalists like Catherine Bayne, whose 20-plus years of protecting her Lake Superior property from prospectors has made her skeptical that reform would ever come. Marilyn Crawford is hopeful, too, but not relenting in her activism. While she wants the MNDM to commit to wholesale changes of the Mining Act, including the abolishment of free entry, incorporating comprehensive environmental assessments at all stages of the mining process, and implementing effective rehabilitation, she continues to plug away at the smaller details of mining policy. Under the current system, any proposed changes to mining legislation must first go through the Minister’s Mining Act Advisory Council, 70 percent of which is comprised of mining industry representatives who are selected to the council by invitation only from its members. “It’s a big problem for activists,” she admits. “Every letter I write to the minister gets filtered by what’s essentially a pro-mining body.”

Still, demands for changes to the Mining Act are getting stronger. In an April letter to McGuinty, 20 high-profile Canadians, including author Margaret Atwood and human rights activist Stephen Lewis, urged the premier to expedite changes to mining policy. In another letter to the premier in May, U.S. environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. scolded the province’s hesitant response to the plight of aboriginal leaders from the Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug reserve, in northwestern Ontario, and Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, near Kingston, who were jailed in March for opposing mineral exploration in their traditional lands.

The public will no longer stand for the assumption that mining is the best use of the province’s land base, says Ontario Nature’s Jennifer Baker. “Right now, mining companies don’t even bother to say that they’re environmentally friendly. They’re all powerful and they’ve always had the government’s support. But attitudes are changing, ” she insists. “We want to make sure that a review of the Mining Act is open, transparent, and has solid public consultation along the way.” For Baker, the glitter of diamonds and gold can’t compare with the simple pleasure that will come when the ground beneath our feet is truly ours to hallow.

Conor Mihell is a freelance environment and adventure travel writer based in Wawa, Ont.

ON Nature, Summer 2008
This feature story describes the creation of the world’s largest freshwater protected area, located in northwestern Lake Superior, and the environmental uncertainty that remains in the area.

When 10,000 square kilometres of Lake Superior became Canada’s first National Marine Conservation area and the world’s largest protected freshwater area, conservationists and paddlers cheered. But with all the exemptions buried in its new status, Lake Superior’s majestic wilderness still remains vulnerable.

By Conor Mihell

WHEN THE HOT, late-afternoon sun beats down on Bowman Island in mid-July, Lake Superior feels like the Mediterranean. Warmth flows from a terracotta shore of cobbles and rises from the lake. Beyond the storm line of driftwood, dwarf white birch and black spruce trees veiled in lichen string out across the carpet of deep green groundcover. I sink knee-deep into the lush sphagnum and fill my mouth with blueberries and know I’m in northern Ontario.

I launched my sea kayak at Silver Islet, a tiny community at the tip of the Sibley Peninsula, planning to spend a week paddling the 125 kilometres of northwestern Lake Superior coastline to Rossport, a village located 200 kilometres east of Thunder Bay. I reach Bowman Island, an Area of Natural and Scientific Interest (ANSI), on day four. Like other islands in the area, Bowman Island is a series of 50-centimetre-high terraces, created by the earth’s ponderous rebound in the wake of retreating ice sheets from the last ice age. Millennia of storms tossed and shifted apple-sized stones into distinct beach levels. Exploring farther inland, I discover that the steplike pattern continues beyond the treeline, hidden beneath the greenery of succession, forming the foundation of the entire 160-hectare island that began its rise from the lake some 10,000 years ago.

Here, the vegetation is sparse, stunted and wind wizened – typical of the sort found in the subarctic or at alpine elevations due to the perennially chilly Lake Superior water, which creates a similarly cool microclimate.

After admiring knotted pearlwort – a wispy, but surprisingly hardy, herb normally found 1,600 kilometres to the north – I return to my campsite and pitch my tent on cobbles just beyond the lake’s grasp. As evening falls, I consider what the future holds for Bowman Island. This part of northwestern Lake Superior has been declared Canada’s first National Marine Conservation Area (NMCA), but because portions of the island are privately owned, it is not included within the protective embrace of the NMCA designation.

As much as the NMCA designation is cause for celebration, there is also some reason for concern. After years of lobbying various ministries to create the world’s largest freshwater protected area, the environmental community now wonders whether the federal government has gone far enough. Many important areas within the NMCA boundaries have been omitted from protection, including the untamed island on which I’ve pitched my tent. Some of these unprotected areas could become prime real estate cottages; others could be logged for pulpwood, mined for uranium or quarried for aggregates. It turns out that even after being awarded NMCA status, the wilderness of northwestern Lake Superior remains vulnerable.

IN OCTOBER 2007, PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER ended a decade of deliberations and political limbo by announcing the establishment of the Lake Superior NMCA. The diamond-shaped reserve sprawls across approximately 10,000 square kilometres of northwestern Lake Superior – an area nearly half the size of Georgian Bay – from the tip of the Sibley Peninsula at the mouth of Thunder Bay, to Bottle Point, east of the town of Terrace Bay. The southern boundary follows the Canada-U.S. border. Despite its distinction as the world’s largest freshwater marine conservation park, the NMCA protects barely 13 percent of Lake Superior’s 82,100-square-kilometre surface area.

This is the first such protected area to be established under the Canada National Marine Conservation Areas Act, which in 2002 enshrined the importance of protecting “self-regulating marine ecosystems … for the maintenance of biological diversity.” Doug Yurick, Parks Canada’s marine program chief, says that under this act, the flora, fauna and structure of northwestern Lake Superior – including the lakebed, water column and 60 square kilometres of islands and mainland coast – will be safeguarded indefinitely from the exploration for and exploitation of oil and gas, mineral and aggregate resources, as well the dumping of waste products. Similar to a national park, the Lake Superior NMCA must have an interim management plan in place in the next five years, which will be reviewed every five years in Parliament.

Yurick says shipping, pleasure boating and commercial and recreational fishing – all of which are allowed by the act – will be overseen by existing agencies, such as the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) and Transport Canada. He says the overall objective of an NMCA is ultimately to “protect the structure and function of the ecosystem while allowing ecologically sustainable use to continue.” The act also requires zoning to accommodate the “ecologically sustainable use of marine resources.”

The island archipelago and open water of northwestern Lake Superior were identified as a potential federal marine park in 1997 for their unique 250-metre-high sedimentary cliffs, terraced beaches and approximately 25 species of arctic-alpine plant life. According to MNR’s Natural Heritage Information Centre, the area provides habitat for about 70 species of rare or at-risk plants, including devil’s club, a thorny, metre-high plant that typically is found in the Rocky Mountains.

“At first you wonder why many of the plants on these islands aren’t in your guidebook,” says Gail Jackson, the Lake Superior NMCA’s first project manager and now the Parks Canada’s NMCA program advisor. “Then you realize the biting cold water of Lake Superior has perpetuated communities of vegetation typical of the Far North.”

Species of note include cliff-nesting peregrine falcons and coaster brook trout, an anadromous fish that spends most of its life in Lake Superior and reproduces each autumn in a few tributaries with upwelling springs at specific temperatures. According to Rob Swainson, an MNR area biologist in the Nipigon district, coaster brook trout habitat has been altered so extensively by logging, mining and road development that Lake Superior’s only self-sustaining population exists in Nipigon Bay, part of the new NMCA. The reserve also protects Gapen’s Pool on the Nipigon River, which Swainson says is the most prolific spawning area for coaster brook trout in the entire Lake Superior basin. MNR research suggests that the area contains about a dozen species of fauna of rare or at-risk status, while 290 species of birds have been observed at the Thunder Cape Bird Observatory, located at the western terminus of the NMCA.

With Prime Minister Harper’s approval, the federal government is now responsible for working with MNR to finalize boundaries between federal, provincial and private lands and develop a management plan for the NMCA. Yurick says $36 million has been earmarked for capital development, operations and maintenance for the next 10 years. Currently, Parks Canada is working with MNR to develop an interim management plan they hope to be completed in the next 12 months.

The Lake Superior NMCA is not Canada’s only marine park. Fathom Five, which started out as a provincial park and joined the federal suite in 1987, protects a portion of Georgian Bay near the tip of the Bruce Peninsula. But Lake Superior will be the first to put the mettle of the Canada NMCA Act to the test. Revisions to the Fathom Five management plan and guidelines for future NMCAs will follow the blueprint established by the Lake Superior Conservation Area.  As a result, Anne Bell, Ontario Nature’s senior director of conservation and education, stresses the importance of doing it right.

“We know from a long history of experience that development adjacent to a terrestrial protected area can have devastating impacts on its ecological integrity,” says Bell. “I think we can safely assume that this is true of aquatic protected areas as well. It’s obvious that development will need to be carefully managed, but what else will it take to adequately protect the water column and the species and natural communities that inhabit it?”

THE SITUATION OF BOWMAN ISLAND TYPIFIES one of the challenges facing the Lake Superior NMCA. Much of the land that would logically fall within the conservation area is excluded. Of the more than 700 islands contained within its boundaries, around 600 are protected. But most islands larger than 100 hectares are omitted, including St. Ignace Island, which is over 30,000 hectares and home to a remnant herd of woodland caribou. And the vast majority of the mainland does not fall within the jurisdiction of the NMCA.

This means that cottage developers could purchase privately owned land and be subject only to local municipal or provincial regulations. A prime example is a 38-hectare lot on Vert Island, currently for sale, located in Nipigon Bay within a few kilometres of the public marina in Red Rock.

Brian Christie, executive director of the Lake Superior Conservancy and Watershed Council (LSCWC), a nonprofit advocacy group based in Sault Ste. Marie, says he could live with some private land development so long as it is “reasonable and done in a manner that’s consistent with the management principles of the NMCA. But since [cottages] usually include lawns and gardens, there’s an environmental price to pay,” he adds, citing concerns of fertilizer-laced runoff entering Lake Superior. “Plus, it’s somewhat incongruous in a supposedly wilderness area to come around a bend and be faced with a three-storey log home and all that goes with it.”

In theory, Parks Canada can “buy certain private lands if the option becomes available,” says Yurick. But these can be acquired only by a “willing seller and willing buyer.” There have been no confirmed purchases yet.

Bob Hartley, a member of the Lake Superior Binational Forum, an international policy advisory group, says that purchasing additional land is less important than drawing up a plan that controls development on coastal Crown land. “There’s a dynamic and delicate interaction between land and water on Lake Superior,” says Hartley. “If the shoreline land isn’t protected, aquatic habitat will be threatened.” Because of Lake Superior’s depth and cold water, explains Hartley, the nutrient-rich, life-supporting littoral zone is narrower and more fragile than that of other Great Lakes, making the protection of the coastal corridor all the more important.

The Black Bay Peninsula is a boot-shaped, 75-kilometre-long spit stretching into the heart of the Lake Superior NMCA southwest of the town of Red Rock. Undeveloped in its entirety, the peninsula provides the usual mosaic of boreal habitat, including wetlands, recent burns and a dense forest of black spruce.

It takes me nearly two days to paddle the “sole” of the peninsula, from Magnet Point to Fluor Island. Enveloped in a fog bank, I grip my paddle with white knuckles and follow my compass, trying to relate the islands I pass to the dozens I see on my map. I shift my course northeast when I think I’ve reached Shesheeb Bay, a 10-kilometre-deep gulch cutting into the midsection of the peninsula. As if on cue, the fog lifts like a stage curtain and reveals the towering red rock cliffs of Otter Island. I paddle a five-kilometre-long arm of sheltered water to Otter Cove, where I touch down and on foot follow a chattering stream inland. Soon, I’m swimming in a pool beneath a towering cascade. The peninsula supports thriving populations of moose and black bear and the odd woodland caribou, but the NMCA protects precious little of it.

Although loggers first explored the Black Bay Peninsula 60 years ago, companies preferred to exploit more accessible forests closer to the Trans-Canada Highway. Hartley is concerned that, as timber becomes increasingly scarce, forest access roads will soon weave across the Crown lands of the peninsula. Logging in nonprotected areas surrounding the reserve would compromise the NMCA’s mandate of protecting the Lake Superior ecosystem, he argues.

“Crown land along the shoreline and the tributary rivers flowing into Lake Superior need to be protected,” warns Hartley. “If the management plan doesn’t control the use of Crown land, how will it be successful in controlling development on private lands?”

Another potential weak spot in the Lake Superior NMCA is a loophole that exempts two marine and coastal areas with “very high mineral potential” from protection for the next seven years, during which mining exploration and development would be allowed. Operating licence holders will be re-evaluated after the seven-year window.

A 2001 report that the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines commissioned identified six sites bordering the NMCA as candidate aggregate resource areas. Christie warns that if a pending deepwater port, quarry and processing facility are developed on Lake Superior near Wawa, 250 kilometres east of the NMCA boundary, the entire north shore could become a hot spot for aggregate production.

What’s more, with uranium trading high on the global market, more than 6,000 claims encompassing over 100,000 hectares of land have been staked in mainland areas adjacent to the NMCA in the past two years alone. This particular terrain acts as a 300-kilometre-long wildlife corridor linking the NMCA to northwestern Ontario’s Wabakimi Provincial Park and the James Bay Lowlands beyond. It also drains into Gapen’s Pool on the Nipigon River.

“Mining is one of those activities that has the potential to disrupt recharge areas and groundwater flow, both of which are critical for coaster brook trout,” says Swainson. “The possibility of contamination is huge if there’s any development in the area.”

Making a tactful transition from a fickle regional economy dependent on exploiting forests and minerals to one based on sustainable tourism and responsible resource management is the NMCA’s key to success. Both Hartley and Jackson agree that Parks Canada must interact and cooperate with local communities. “Whether they supported [the NMCA] or not, everyone I spoke to in the task force meetings was really passionate about keeping the area the same,” says Jackson. “As the NMCA evolves, we hope to develop partnerships with local communities and turn passion into stewardship.”

MUCH OF LAKE SUPERIOR’S NORTH SHORE remains pristine wilderness. Along the northeastern portion of the lake, Neys Provincial Park, Pukaskwa National Park, Lake Superior Highlands Conservation Reserve and Lake Superior Provincial Park together protect a near-continuous 400-kilometre-long swath of coast. In the spring and fall, I have sea kayaked in these areas for weeks at a time without seeing a soul, let alone a cottage or private property sign. Having first paddled the Silver Islet to Rossport route in 2003, in later years I was surprised to find cottages sprouting up at some of my favourite campsites.

From Bowman Island, I continue east and set up camp on a steep cobblestone islet at the southeast corner of St. Ignace Island. Twilight blends water and sky into ever-darkening shades of blue. The feeling of mystery is heightened by the metre-deep dugout depressions known as Pukaskwa Pits that dot the rocky beach. It is thought that teenage Ojibwa once held vision quests at rugged, exposed places like this, fasting and patiently peering out from the pits at the same scene, awaiting visions of the supernatural. But the magic is fleeting, diminished by a cottage – modest by Georgian Bay standards but development nonetheless – that now stands on a nearby spit of land.

Thankfully, organizations like the LSCWC are promoting public awareness and working to acquire privately owned land within the Lake Superior NMCA and safeguard it from development. Jackson says this approach to stewardship supports her community-based model of management and, she hopes, will do much to get locals excited about their watery backyard.

“I envision a great synergy here,” says Jackson. “I know we celebrate and share the lake with some great neighbours.”

In good weather it takes only a day to paddle from the east end of St. Ignace Island to the takeout at Rossport. But Lake Superior has a way of mocking the best-made plans. By lunch, gale force winds and a heavy swell leave me stranded on Simpson Island, halfway between St. Ignace and the mainland. Jackson is fond of saying that more than any management plan, Lake Superior’s ice-cold water, volatile temperament and largely uninhabitable coastline are its greatest protectors from the damages wrought on the other Great Lakes. I agree with her. Playing castaway, I comb the agate-laced, black stone beach and scramble atop Beetle Point, where geodes cast toothy grins to the sky and encrusted saxifrage – a diminutive succulent of Arctic descent – clings to bare rock. I tuck into a sheltered cleft above the booming waves and drift off, lulled by the rhythm of the restless lake.

Conor Mihell is an environmental and adventure travel writer based in Wawa. His last feature for ON Nature was “A road runs through it” (Winter 2007/2008).

Adventure Kayak, Summer 2008
My feature-length account of a two-week sea kayak trip on the remote Southwest Coast of Newfoundland with photographer Ryan Creary and editor Tim Shuff was published in Adventure Kayak magazine.

Exploring the long-lost outports of Newfoudland’s wild Southwest

By: Conor Mihell

AMID THE BOUTS OF SEASICKNESS that overcome my gut like the swells that pitch and roll this rattletrap ferry, I feel a kinship with Joey Smallwood. The man responsible for bringing Newfoundland into Confederation in 1949 wasn’t much of a seafarer. He once spent days seasick in the hold of a hired schooner as a part of a hair-brain plan to unionize remote coastal fishers and preach his political ideals. Since fishing season lasted from break-up to freeze-up, Smallwood decided that a wintertime voyage was best. When the captain dismissed him for a lunatic, the soon-to-be premier disembarked and continued on his own, walking the ice of the island’s bottom half—locally known as the Southwest Coast.

Adventure Kayak editor Tim Shuff, photographer Ryan Creary and I came to Newfoundland with more rational plans. We sea kayaked 200 kilometres of the Southwest Coast, visiting many of the long-lost communities Smallwood attempted to unite. For 11 mostly glorious days in September our trip was nothing like Smallwood’s, with no high seas adventure, pack ice or blinding blizzards. But now, hanging over the stern of the coastal ferry as it retraces our route from Francois to Rose Blanche, I can’t help but feel fellow to a man who got to know the people of the Southwest Coast in its heyday, even if it was in the most manipulative way.

IT’S FITTING AFTER A WHIRLWIND JOURNEY by air and road to get here that Tim, Ryan and I find ourselves hunkered down with too much time on our hands scant kilometres from our launching point. We hummed and hawed in the fog at a wharf in Rose Blanche, Newfoundland and Labrador, while the local fishermen looked on with as much incredulity of our plans to spend the better part of two weeks paddling to the isolated outport of Francois as the idea of sea kayaking in the three-metre seas that were punishing the breakwater. But we launched anyway.

An hour later we washed ashore on a decomposing boat slip in the old village of Petites, population two, where gale force westerlies held us captive for two nights. Petites was once one of the hundreds of “outport” communities spread out along Newfoundland’s 10,000 kilometres of rocky perimetre. Few faces peer from the windows of the 20-odd houses remaining atop rickety two-by-four stilts at the water’s edge or clinging to the treeless, granite barrens of uptown. Despite it’s mid-latitude location, this arctic-like, windswept and glacier-carved landscape of bogs, domes and fjords extends from the Marine-Atlantic ferry docks in Port-aux-Basques east along the island’s southern half and north to Gros Morne National Park and beyond.

At Petites we befriend one-half of the community’s resident pair who tells Tim and I how he returned to his birthplace in 2002 and bought a modest two-storey clapboard house for $2,700. A year later, the province sent in its last supply tanker to feed Petites’ diesel generators and most of the citizens collected $80,000 resettlement payouts. In choosing to stay, the man says the government paid him $12,000 for the house it now leases to him for one dollar a year. Petites’ last holdouts cook with propane and go to bed early. They let their subscription to satellite television expire and watch the caribou instead. The next morning, we’re paddling before the first curls of woodsmoke rise from their chimney.

There’s about 90 kilometres of coastline as the gull flies between Rose Blanche and Burgeo, made up of rocky jetties, serpentine inlets, bedrock headlands, steep islands and, in the last half, sweeping sand beaches. Leaving Petites, we surf a residual swell and building wind waves past the ghost towns of Westport, French Cove and Cinq Cerf—outports that Smallwood once tried to unionize. The coastline is pleasantly diverse yet somewhat unremarkable, except for the portion between the active outports of La Poile and Grand Bruit where 300-metre-tall granite cliffs stretch far inland.

Wind holds us up for another day-and-a-half and we make tracks as soon as the swell is half-manageable, skirting the leeward side of a labyrinth of reefs with ominous names like The Smoker, The Jumper and The Galloping Moll. We pull into Burgeo after 35 kilometres and a long morning in the saddle.

Burgeo is the hub of the Southwest Coast with a highway to the outside world and an increasingly transient population of 1,700. The fish processing plant collapsed with the cod fishery and locals say their town is now more of a bedroom community for Nova Scotia apple-pickers and Alberta tar-heels. Streets of quaint saltbox houses radiate haphazardly from the probing fingers of the sea: Short Reach, Long Reach, Mercer Cove and Aaron Arm. The off-lying islands feel removed from the open ocean and make for great sea kayaking for the same reason that Rencontre—the largest of the lot—was chosen as rendezvous site for 17^th century French sailors.

EVERYWHERE WE SPEND A NIGHT, entire lives have been lived before us. Smallwood for one was a benefactor of the clichéd Newfoundland hospitality—he need not have carried camping gear on his ice walk. Before the advent of deep-sea trawlers and on-board refrigeration, hardscrabble hamlets sprung up as close as possible to the best fishing grounds—sometimes within shouting distance from each other. Some outports date back 500 years to the time of Basque and French fishers and whalers, ranking them among the oldest European settlements in North America.

Up until Newfoundland ceded from England to become a province of Canada in 1949 and Smallwood took reign, outport communities thrived in an isolated, unheralded kind of way. Smallwood began the process of centralization and the majority of outports—like the codfish—started to disappear. By 1975, more than 300 communities and over 28,000 people had been uprooted. Our Sailing Directions guidebook, published in 1995, describes dozens of communities like Petites that have since been “evacuated” due to fishing moratoriums and the lure of greener pastures elsewhere—not to mention healthy government-issued lump-sum compensation.

A day’s paddle east of Burgeo, we tuck into a sheltered harbour rimmed by 150-metre talus slopes and forested hillsides and find a spectacular campsite on a gravel spit on the north end of Fox Island. Only two houses remain but the rotting cribbing of old fishing stages and a grassy meadow suggest there were once many more. I follow a trickle of a stream up a brambly hillside and discover a shallow-dug well brimming with ice-cold, peaty brown, sugary sweet water. Ryan finds the old cemetery on a dome-shaped promontory, its weather-beaten tombstones overlooking the sea.

The weather settles into a stable trend and we knock off the 18 kilometres of cliff-bound coast between Fox Island and Grey River by lunch. The community here occupies all of the marginally flat land in a triangle-shaped bight. Otherwise, the 20-kilometre-long granite fjord is inhospitable. After some lean years the outport now bustles, though there’s less activity at the wharf than there is at the helicopter landing pad. The fjord echoes with the whirring thump-thump-thump of rotors and reeks of aviation fuel—the sounds and smells of a prospecting boom.

Luckily, the crux of the trip comes on a magical day of lifting fog, skirting clouds and bright sun and we tackle the better part of the near-continuous 300-metre cliffs connecting Grey River to Francois in idyllic conditions. The landscape blows the mind—as much Newfoundland as it is a combination of Alaska, Hawaii and Thailand. A talus valley bounded by twin 300-metre glacier-worn buttes fans out to the sea at the tiny indentation of Seal’s Rest Cove. And at Cape La Hune, craggy, crumbling spires of volcanic rock contrast with neighbouring slabs of granite. We round the promontory rubbernecked and walleyed and set up camp at another abandoned outport.

We spend two days at Cape La Hune not because of miserable weather—by now the Southwest Coast is fully enveloped in a 1,025 millibar high—but because it’s so hard to leave. Hiking up the breadbox-shaped peak behind the campsite occupies an afternoon with scrambling up sloping rocks and crashing through tuckamore thickets of dwarf birch and fir trees. From the top, the Atlantic stretches uninterrupted to Antarctica, save for the inconspicuous dots of the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon to the southeast. Facing inland, La Hune Bay cuts a granite corridor through a sweeping expanse of tuckamore and barrens. On the treacherous descent I find an old threadbare rope—proof that the Cape La Hune outporters did more than just fish. Later on, I watch the moon rise over the rockbound coast from within the foundation of the old church, imagining the building itself departing on a barge bound for the horizon.

IN SOME WAYS, there was method to Smallwood’s madness. Like a used car salesman pitching to the spouse who’s keener on colour than anything else, Smallwood appealed to the outports where, at the time, the provincial balance of power was held. As dubious as his reputation was in St. John’s, Smallwood became a backwoods legend for his Southwest Coast sea ice expedition and popular radio show. He solidified his cause by flying into these same remote communities that had never seen an automobile, let alone an airplane, with promises of money for all should Newfoundland vote to join Canada.

Walking the ice of the Southwest Coast, Smallwood found communities of people who knew nothing of the concept of unionized labour, much less government and current affairs—the same way he was ignorant of their arduous and simple lives by the sea. Maybe Smallwood’s resettlement plans and promises of centralized labour and its associated benefits were innocently skewed attempts at giving thanks for their hospitality. One way or another, when the people of Newfoundland chose to cut ties with Britain and join Canada largely on the strength of the rural vote, it marked a beginning of the end that continues today.

Upon ending our trip in Francois—with 175 residents, two stores and a high school the most populous and well-endowed outport on the Southwest Coast—the weather takes a turn for the worse. We board the coastal ferry in foggy drizzle and southerly winds, with the wavelets in the bay a gut-churning harbinger of what’s to come on the open coast. The last thing I remember before falling into the throes of nausea is spotting a pink, white and green Republic of Newfoundland flag flying taut alongside a line of sopping wet clothes, less an affront against Smallwood than a fading grasp on a way of life.

TRIP PLANNER

When to Go

Late summer is best. We chanced the risks of hurricane season and went in mid-September, the least foggy time of year. August is also a good choice. Don’t expect to see much of the coastline if you go earlier in the season: Burgeo receives an average of 20 days of fog in July (compared to nine in September). Air temperatures are moderate throughout the paddling season and the sea temperature rarely rises above 10 degrees Celsius. Dry suits are recommended.

Difficulty

The distance between reasonable landings (especially between Burgeo and Francois) makes this route suitable for advanced paddlers only. Between Rose Blanche and Burgeo, the sea is a minefield of reefs (locally known as “sunkers”) where swells may break in otherwise decent paddling conditions. Paddlers with less experience can get a taste for the Southwest Coast by exploring the more sheltered Burgeo Islands.

Access

Marine-Atlantic offers daily ferry service from North Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland. From the Port-aux-Basques ferry terminal, follow route 470 east to the village of Rose Blanche, a distance of about 40 kilometres. It’s best to launch from the sheltered water of Harbour Le Cou, located at the end of the road just beyond Rose Blanche. Burgeo can be reached via the Trans Canada Highway and route 480. Travel time from Port-aux-Basques is about four hours.

Egress

There is regular passenger ferry service between Francois and Burgeo and Burgeo and Rose Blanche. However, the coastal boat doesn’t run everyday and schedules are obscure, especially for routes west of Burgeo. Visit www.tw.gov.nl.ca for schedule details. Be sure to call and speak with a representative for confirmation once you’ve sketched out a plan.

Maps/Charts

Canadian Hydrographic Series charts (1:75,000): 4823, 4824, 4826

National Topographic Series maps (1:50,000): 11-O/9, 11-O/10, 11-O/11, 11-P/10, 11-P/11, 11-P/12

Guidebook

A Guide to Sea Kayaking in Newfoundland and Labrador by Kevin Redmond and Dan Murphy (Nimbus, 2003)

Guided Trips

Coastal Adventures, www.coastaladventures.com, (877) 404-2774

Accommodations

Burgeo Haven Bed and Breakfast, www.burgeohaven.com, (709) 886-2544. Ask the proprietors about their guesthouse in Francois

Globe and Mail, F8, February 16, 2008
My feature story in the Globe’s acclaimed Focus section brought readers across Canada up to speed on a natural resource standoff in northern Ontario.

Randy Klockars fondly remembers the camaraderie of long winter nights when neighbours came together and celebrated the hardscrabble life they shared “on the Bay.”

At his beachfront home on Lake Superior’s Michipicoten Bay, near Wawa, Ont., friends would gather over potluck dinners to complain of overflowing septic tanks and epic snowfalls while food simmered on the woodstove and someone stoked the sauna. Toward midnight, crazed souls would escape the intense heat indoors and charge across the snow-covered beach for a quick dip in the lake.

It has been a few years now since Mr. Klockars, a high-school teacher, and his wife and six children have hosted a party. With layoffs and shutdowns at area lumber mills, pickings have been slim for Wawa, a community of 3,500 just off the Trans-Canada Highway between Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder Bay. What’s more, a proposed quarry and processing facility has opened a rift between those for and against an American company’s promise of jobs that comes with potential environmental risks.

Superior Aggregates Company (SAC), a subsidiary of the Michigan-based highway-building giant Carlo Companies, is poised to start clearing vegetation on a 386-hectare site to within 60 metres of the Lake Superior shoreline in order to blast away the underlying, 2.5-billion-year-old rock into high-grade gravel.

The land was formerly owned by Algoma Steel, which shipped iron ore mined near Wawa to its mill in Sault Ste. Marie by freighter on Lake Superior. In 1999, a year after Algoma ceased operations in Wawa, SAC purchased the property for $725,000 (U.S.). It contains trap rock, which is far more valuable to road builders than the typical crushed limestone aggregates from the Niagara Escarpment. Furthermore, the company could cut costs significantly by shipping the aggregate from an existing 450-metre-long wharf.

After waiting almost a decade for proper approvals, SAC could begin operations as early as next year, says project manager Harold Cheley, of DST Consulting Engineers, the company that has been contracted to develop the quarry.

SAC will remove up to 23,000 tonnes of material a week, he says, and provide permanent seasonal jobs to about a dozen people during the first phase of operation, which will last five to 10 years. Profits generated during this phase will be used to upgrade the wharf and research the feasibility of expanding operations, Mr. Cheley says.

Wawa resident Richard Watson has been outspoken in his support for the quarry in local media outlets. “It’s really frustrating when there’s a great opportunity here for a town that’s hurting,” Mr. Watson says. “I wonder how many millions of dollars in taxes have we lost already because of a few people who know how government works and have caused delays.”

In 2004, SAC applied to the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources to develop a quarry, but “it was determined that the groundwater elevation was closer to the surface … than was previously thought.” SAC then reapplied for a permit to quarry beneath the water table.

Now, “the concerns of government agencies have been dealt with and we’re responding to objections from the public,” Mr. Cheley says. “The community needs something energetic and new to start up,” he adds. “I’d say 98 per cent of the population supports it.”

Joel Cooper, a member of the Citizens Concerned for Michipicoten Bay, a group of full-time and seasonal residents who have been “caring for the coast” since 2002, would beg to differ.

“We may be in the minority,” Mr. Cooper says, “but we’re the ones looking out for the best interest of Lake Superior.”

Among those supporting the citizens group’s position are environmental advocacy organizations such as Gravel Watch Ontario, Environmental Defence Canada and Freshwater Future, based in Michigan, he says.

Mr. Cooper’s humble year-round home of 25 years looks out across Michipicoten Bay. It is separated from SAC’s property by two kilometres of Canadian Shield and the boreal forest immortalized by Group of Seven painter A.Y. Jackson, who once kept a summer cabin next door.

All his group wants, he says, is to ensure that the area’s clean water and air continue to provide habitat for fish and wildlife, and remain attractive to residents and tourists alike. The noise of pit quarrying, the risk of water contamination due to dust and leaching, and the visual impact of stripping the land and blasting the rock do not fit the group’s vision.

Of most concern is the fact that, under existing legislation, SAC will need to assess the potential environmental effects only on the 10 per cent of its land that it has applied for a licence to quarry. Yet if it plans to be in operation over the long haul, Mr. Cooper says, it will have to apply to expand its area of operations within five years.

“It’s a ‘foot-in-the-door’ strategy where the hope is future approvals won’t come with the same degree of scrutiny,” he says. “We’d rather examine the long-term, cumulative impacts now, rather than in phases over the next 50 years.”

In 2004, Mr. Cooper’s group presented the Ontario Ministry of the Environment with 4,600 letters of support for an inspection under the provincial Environmental Assessment Act. Instead, the province extended the jurisdiction of the Aggregate Resources Act, which is managed by the Natural Resources Ministry and until then had encompassed only Southern Ontario; the act now includes the development at Michipicoten, but it is fundamentally different from the Environmental Assessment Act.

Brian Messerschmidt, manager of the Natural Resources Ministry’s aggregate and petroleum resources section, says that to acquire a licence to quarry under the act, an applicant must provide a site plan and documents outlining land use, the type and amount of aggregate to be removed and rehabilitation plans, as well as technical reports dealing with environmental, cultural and hydrological considerations. These materials are then assessed by municipal, provincial and federal agencies. The applicant is also required to notify and consult the public and attempt to mediate any objections – the current stage of the SAC application.

“The act is sound, but it presumes that the MNR has exclusive control when other laws such as the Environmental Protection Act should apply as well,” says Ric Holt, president of Gravel Watch Ontario. “The rules might make sense in some contexts, but it’s not at all clear that they apply on the north shore of Lake Superior.”

Mr. Cooper says the applicant-driven Aggregate Resources Act “isn’t the appropriate piece of legislation” because it facilitates SAC’s piecemeal approach to developing its property and is too narrow in its environmental scope. “They’re only required to look at impacts within 120 metres of the proposed site,” he says. “But the impact is going to go well beyond 120 metres, especially on Lake Superior.”

Of greater environmental consequence is the fact that the proposed Wawa quarry could compromise the entire north shore of Lake Superior, says Brian Christie, executive director of the Lake Superior Conservancy and Watershed Council, a non-profit environmental advocacy group based in Sault Ste. Marie.

Michipicoten Bay sits in the middle of more than 300 kilometres of wilderness comprising the world’s longest stretch of undeveloped freshwater coast. The area’s lichen-draped forest and 200-metre-tall cliffs provides refuge for rare wildlife such as woodland caribou and peregrine falcons, and, clinging to the rocky coast, plants commonly found in the Arctic attest to Lake Superior’s glacially cold water. Many consider Lake Superior clean enough to drink straight from the source.

But, according to Mr. Christie, the province seems more interested in building quarries than protecting the area. And the looming SAC development could open the door for more. In 2001, the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines commissioned a study that identified 15 other potential quarry sites on Lake Superior’s north shore – including six bordering the newly designated Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area.

Since this federal marine park protects little of the shoreline, Mr. Christie says, smaller quarries could be developed to feed a large processing facility at Michipicoten, 250 kilometres to the south.

He says that hawking the area to prospectors hardly jibes with the province’s pledges to revive the Northern economy with tourism and promote the area as a world-class destination with already “bought-and-paid-for” initiatives such as the Great Lakes Heritage Coast.

That initiative, which was drawn up in 1999 by the former Progressive Conservative government, was supposed to bring wilderness-seeking tourists and a management strategy to Lake Superior’s north shore, not encourage an aggregate-producing stronghold, Mr. Christie says.

“The Heritage Coast would’ve been well established by now,” he says. “But for whatever reason the Liberals deep-sixed it. We’re trying to encourage them to reopen the file and get on with it.”

The situation at Michipicoten Bay bears an uncanny resemblance to a standoff at Digby Neck, N.S., in 2002, when a New Jersey-based road-building conglomerate proposed a quarry of similar proportions on the shore of the North Atlantic. That bid was snuffed out in November by the provincial Department of Environment and Labour because of “unacceptable risks to the environment and communities.”

In Nova Scotia, worry about the proposed quarry’s threats to fisheries and a burgeoning tourism industry outweighed the promise of 20-odd jobs.

But in Wawa, even a dozen new jobs from SAC is helpful after more than 130 full-time workers were left without employment in December when Weyerhaeuser – another company with stateside head offices – permanently closed the local pressboard mill. Those layoffs – along with hundreds of others in the region’s forest sector – were blamed on the stagnant American housing market, strong Canadian dollar and high energy costs.

Wawa’s population is dwindling as fast as its jobless rate skyrockets.

Ryan Lamming is one local who will not be around for long. After losing his job with Weyerhaeuser, Mr. Lamming, 29, promptly pulled up his lifelong stakes in the area and by next week will be living in Dawson Creek, B.C., where he plans to make ends meet as a tradesman, with the eventual goal of becoming an officer with the RCMP.

He says he will let time decide whether he is for or against the proposed quarry. “The area needs something, especially now,” he says. “But I’m 100 per cent against anything that will make a massacre of the shoreline.”

Quarry or no quarry, Randy Klockars says he will continue to fire up the sauna on Saturday nights at his home on Michipicoten Bay. The parties might not be as boisterous as they once were, but everyone is invited to enjoy the sounds of the lake.

Conor Mihell is a writer based in Wawa.

explore, May 2008
Many of Canada’s best outdoor adventures are within easy striking distance of some of its biggest cities. In this piece I profile some of the best urban outdoor adventure hotspots in the country.

A traveller’s guide to Canada’s best urban escapes

By: Conor Mihell

So you’re stuck in some strange Canadian city—strange to you, at least—and you’re looking for a quick outdoor hit. No problem. Pretty much every Canadian metropolis offers a few quick and easy escapes. Here’s our all-star list of some of the best urban adventures across the country.

Vancouver: Paddling

Avoid the crowds at Stanley Park by paddling along the Seawall instead of walking it. Sea kayak rentals are available at Ecomarine, an outfitter located in the heart of downtown on Granville Island. Launch from Ecomarine’s docks, carefully navigate the busy waters of False Creek and then paddle into English Bay and watch the multi-million-dollar high-rises of downtown Vancouver give way to the ancient Douglas firs of Stanley Park. Follow the Seawall to Siwash Rock, a stalwart pillar of basalt, looking for harbour seals along the way. “Even right downtown the scenery is gorgeous with the mountains right there and Vancouver Island on the western horizon,” says Lisa Blachut, a day guide at Ecomarine. For more sheltered paddling, stick to the area around Granville Island. Get there: Granville Island is easily accessibly from Translink’s B-Line bus stop on West Broadway Avenue and Granville Street, or by the False Creek South bus (#50), which takes you to 1^st Avenue, just off the island. More info: ecomarine.com

Calgary: Mountain biking

Calgary can’t be beat for its diverse array of urban mountain-biking singletrack. For starters, there’s Nose Hill, a 2,700-acre municipal park in Calgary’s north end, which offers a large and intricate network of trails for riders of all skill levels. Many of the trails here are fairly mellow, but you’ll also find some steep climbs and sweet drops. If you’re looking for something a little more intense, head for Bowmont Park, an area with many expert trails, the gnarly crown jewel being “Sideshow Bob,” whose  dicey off-camber traverses and sharp drop-offs are guaranteed to thrill. Tip: By starting at the east end of the park at the gravel pit on Home Road you’ll keep the uphills to a minimum. For both spots, bike rentals are available from Sports Rent, located on 16th Avenue NW near Bowmont Park, or at The University of Calgary. Get there: Nose Hill is accessible from Shaganappi Trail at Edgemont Boulevard or 14^th Street just north of John Laurie Boulevard. Bowmont is located on the north side of the Bow River, just off 16th Avenue NW and a 10-minute ride from the University of Calgary campus. More info: cmbalink.com; sportsrent.ca; calgaryoutdoorcentre.ca

Saskatoon: Mountain biking

The hard-packed trails of Sutherland Beach on the South Saskatchewan River’s east side, just north of the University of Saskatchewan campus, provide some of the best mountain biking on the Prairies. “It has a little bit of something for everyone,” says local rider Dave Jones, who offers rentals at his Bike Doctor shop in downtown Saskatoon. “There’s close to 20 kilometres of trails with singletrack, old fire roads and an abandoned sand pit.” Get there: Sutherland’s gently rolling terrain and aspen forest are located a short ride from downtown along the paved Meewasin Path—short, that is, provided you can ignore the lure of dropping into the singletrack that veers off the asphalt and into the riverside greenery at countless spots along the way. More info: bikedoctor.ca; saskcycling.ca

Winnipeg: Trail running

There’s no better way to get a quick taste of the Prairies than to go for a trail run at FortWhyte Alive (formerly called the Fort Whyte Centre). Located in Winnipeg’s south end, the trails of this nature centre crisscross native grasslands and wetlands before blending into the aspen forest of Assiniboine Park. The biggest challenge of running here is resisting the temptation to stop and check out all the cool interpretive displays, which include a teepee encampment and sod house, among others. After weaving through Assiniboine Park, extend your run into double-digit distance by following the Harte Trail—an abandoned CN railbed—before returning to FortWhyte. Get there: If driving from downtown Winnipeg, follow the Pembina Highway south and turn west on McGillivray Boulevard. Or, take the Pembina and Kenaston buses. More info: fortwhyte.org; mrta.mb.ca

Toronto: Paddling

The small archipelago that makes up the Toronto Islands shelters paddlers from the open water of Lake Ontario and forms a myriad of lagoons and channels to explore. Go mid-week for the best chance of solitude. “The islands are like a peaceful Zen water garden in Canada’s biggest city,” says Erik Ogaard, head instructor at Toronto’s Harbourfront Canoe and Kayak Centre. Ogaard says the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, Toronto’s oldest landmark, is a must-see. It’s tucked away in the southwestern corner of the island chain, an hour’s paddle from downtown. Harbourfront offers canoe and sea-kayak rentals and a convenient place to launch. Get there: If driving, take Lakeshore Boulevard and exit on Rees Street. Or get off at Union Station on the Yonge-University subway line and take the Queen’s Quay West streetcar west. More info: paddletoronto.com

Montreal: Trail running

Famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead designed Montreal’s Mount Royal Park to be an antidote to the pressures of urban life. And if your idea of stress relief is a heart-pumping trail run, this beautiful park is ideal. Paths weave in and out of the woods and gradually climb to Mont Royal’s 755-foot summit to offer lofty views of the urban jungle and St. Lawrence River below. A 12-kilometre route starts at the Georges-Etienne-Cartier monument on avenue du Parc and follows the winding Chemin Olmstead to the peak. Add distance and greater challenge by foraying into the park’s network of Nordic ski trails on the way back down. Get there: The trailhead is located a short jog from the Mont-Royal station on the Cote-Vertu to Montmorency subway line. More info: lemontroyal.com

Halifax: Hiking

There’s no better way to stretch your legs and admire the lake-pocked rock barrens and hardwood forests that once covered most of Nova Scotia than by hitting the Bluff Wilderness Hiking Trail, 15 minutes outside Halifax. A series of four loops covers more than 30 kilometres of challenging terrain atop a granite dome separating the Woodens and Nine Mile rivers. And yes, the hiking is challenging: the six-kilometre Pot Lake Loop alone can take three to four hours. The Bluff is located near Halifax’s west-end suburb of Timberlea. Get there: By car, take Highway 103 from downtown. Get off at exit 4 and turn right onto St. Margaret’s Bay Road. Follow it east for about two kilometres to get to the trailhead parking lot (which is on the right, immediately after Bay Self-Storage). Alternatively, Metro Transit’s Timberlea bus route will get you within a short hike of the trailhead. More info: wrweo.ca

St. John’s: Climbing

It figures that an island known as The Rock would have good climbing pretty much everywhere, including its main city. Just 15 minutes from St. John’s, the crags of Flatrock tower over the Atlantic Ocean. Leo van Ulden, owner of Wallnuts, the local climbing shop, says the opportunities at Flatrock are nearly endless. “It has about 40 boulder problems and 120 climbing routes to date with a nice mix of sport and traditional lead climbs.” The main “Big Wall” area features cracks, overhangs and roofs with single-pitch routes ranging from 5.8 to 5.11-plus. Most climbs have top rope access. Wallnuts provides shoe and harness rentals and guiding services. Get there: There’s no public transit access, so you’ll need to drive or cab it along Torbay Road north from downtown St. John’s to the Flatrock parking area at Wind Gap Road. More info: wallnutsclimbing.com