All posts by George

Worst Day

February 16, 2025 George Leave a comment

Originally posted May 1, 2012 (my 55^th birthday)

The following is from a post I wrote almost 13 years ago when the Canadian federal government under Stephen Harper unleashed cuts that had devastating impacts on federal employees and their families. I resurrect it now in solidarity with US federal employees, especially those within conservation and environmental departments, agencies and organizations, who are feeling the full brunt of recent cuts.

Personally I was lucky to have been in a position to retire right when the Harper cuts took effect but I did not escape the survivor’s guilt so many felt. I can’t speak for others but I do think things work out and even though it looks dark and bleak right now in the US, I believe there will be day of reckoning in the end.

Believe!

A few days ago I received a call from an office full of friends in Jasper asking me, on the eve of my retirement, a series of questions meant to tease out some of my more memorable moments with Parks Canada over a career that has spanned almost 37 years. The Jasper crew had heard my going away party was a little tamer than they thought it should have been and were doing their best to extract a self-inflicted roasting. What was the most embarrassing moment for me during my career? What was the funniest? Toughest? Proudest? And on it went.

We never got into “worst day” as the call was meant to be celebratory to leave things on a high note.

If they had asked that question I probably would have been lost for words anyway, which is a rarity for me.

There have not been a lot of really bad days. Invariably those that did happen involved the death of a friend, of which there have been a few, or news about a friend and colleague receiving their own bad news.

Yesterday changed all of that.

A part of me died yesterday.

It started with an email from an old friend, which simply read:

“Got surplussed.

A terrible way to end. I had a call from some stranger who read a script and said it was not a reflection on my work.

I started in 1975 … and will take the corporate memory with me. I am very sad and feel worthless. “

It was one of a myriad of emails, calls and messages I received yesterday from friends and colleagues across the country who once considered themselves part of the Parks Canada “family”. Their words speak for themselves but collectively tell a greater story that Canadians may wish to hear.

Yesterday was a very bad day for Parks Canada.

We seem to have been hit particularly hard.

The night before, we didn’t even make the news as the next round of impending cuts to other federal departments and agencies was front and centre.

Same thing with the morning news.

By midday we were front page news, for all the wrong reasons.

Parks Canada staff found out over a span of very anxious hours, as they waited their turn to discover their fate.

To be fair, the people whose lives were going to be impacted the most needed to know first and it would be up to them to decide how much or how little they wanted to share about their particular situation.

But in the Information Age of the New Economy, it seems odd that information in general has been hard to come by over the past few months, doled out piece meal by managers sworn to secrecy, having signed an “attestation” that they would not divulge information they were being given by more senior managers related to the impending cuts.

From discussions with friends in other departments, it sounds like a pattern that was widespread among the federal public service. Is there something larger happening here? Unmistakably. But that is another topic.

For Parks Canada staff, more details will come today, no doubt wrapped in a communications package of speaking notes and spin, but at the end of the day these words will be all but meaningless to people impacted by yesterday’s news.

Recently, Parks Canada has become more about Brand and Spin than anything else.

BS.

If I sound a little bitter and twisted I apologize.

I have had no intentions of leaving Parks Canada bitter and twisted.

But the devil is in the details and what happened yesterday, albeit inflicted by a government bent on reducing the public service and with its own vision for Canada, has not only hurt a lot of people but also cut into the soul of the protected areas we manage for all Canadians.

Front line workers, the backbone of any organization, bore the brunt of the cuts. In one foul swoop, we have been relegated to seasonal tourist destinations with many visitor and work crew positions reduced to reflect significantly shortened “seasons” or cut altogether. Science capacity in the form of park biologists and ecologists who provide the information that park interpreters use to help educate Canadians about their national parks, was all but obliterated at service centres and at many national parks. Many of our interpreters, our “educators” and “sales people”, were lost. Resource conservation staff, the people who provide public safety, respond to wildlife incidents and fight fires were cut back across the country.

In many small communities across Canada, where national parks and national historic sites represent a significant part of the local economy, the impacts will be particularly devastating. The lack of other work opportunities will leave people with little recourse but to either leave their communities to look for work elsewhere or collect employment insurance … a partial cheque when they could be working productively year-round and contributing.

Talented young people trying to break into the organization will have fewer opportunities and those that have their foot in the door will probably leave for the full time work we all need to pay the bills. Experienced people with extensive corporate memory have been lost as well. New science capacity hired just a few short years ago to meet our legal obligations to report to Canadians on the state of their national parks has been shown the door.

I could go on.

These stories are rolling out across the public service and are not unique to Parks Canada. The cuts are meant to get us back to a surplus situation economically but in the oxymoronic world of the current regime, “surplussing” people really amounts to furthering the deficit.

In a progressive country like Canada that was well positioned for the recession and is projecting fiscal surpluses in a couple of years, the environment is taking a back seat to everything else of late. In the absence of any other substantial environmental feather in its cap, the government took a shot at Parks Canada, the one organization that stood out globally as a model protected areas system positioned to deal with some of the emerging challenges facing Canadians in the 21st century.

Yesterday it was dealt a blow that many people, including senior managers who responded to my blog, feel we might not recover from.

Humbled By Fundy’s Tides – 1984

February 8, 2025 George Leave a comment

One of the highlights of transferring to Fundy National Park in the early 1980’s was the fact that at the time, Fundy was probably leading the Atlantic Region national parks, if not the country’s, in conducting natural resource management projects, including three very high profile species reintroductions for American marten, Atlantic salmon and Peregrine Falcons.

I don’t know the specifics of the genesis of these projects but suspect they were a collaborative effort on the part of the park’s former Chief Park Warden Paul Galbraith, the current Chief, Duane West, the park’s resource management advisor Stephen Woodley, and Park Superintendent Ken East.

In my career, these four men stand out as some of the more progressive thinkers in Parks Canada at the time and I was lucky enough to have a continued working relationship with them at various points throughout my more than three decades with the outfit as we moved across the country working in different national parks.

The Peregrine Falcon project in particular also shone a light on the many skills of one of the local park wardens, George Sinclair, who would become the poster boy for the program and shoulder much of the responsibility for its success, including installing the young birds in a hack box situated on the cliffs high above Point Wolfe and seeing them through their first few weeks of acclimatizing to their new surroundings before fledging.

My own role was more limited but because I had a boating background acquired from my time in Terra Nova National Park, and because most of the other wardens, despite being from the Bay of Fundy area, were landlubbers in the truest sense of the word, I was given the honour of manning the park’s only seaworthy vessel, a small inflatable Zodiac, on the day of the birds’ release.

That morning I was to position the Zodiac in the small cove at Point Wolfe, directly below the peregrine hack box, in the event one of the fledglings ended up in the water. If that happened my job was to save the bird (I think at all costs was implied).

Piece of cake, I thought.

I’d handled lots of bigger boats in rougher seas and come away unscathed.

Launching the boat at high tide on the flat calm of the Bay of Fundy, I fearlessly ferried to the middle of the cove and threw out the anchor, planning to remain as stationary as possible until the birds were released and had safely flown away from the site.

I would save any bird that foundered and ended up in the drink.

Simple enough, I thought.

And then the tide turned, literally.

Anyone who has seen the Bay of Fundy fill with water, or empty, as the case may be, knows only too well the magnitude of the change.

Here’s how Google describes it …

“On a flood tide, 160 billion tonnes of seawater flows into the Bay of Fundy — more than four times the estimated combined flow of all the world’s freshwater rivers during the same 6-hour interval. The vertical tidal range can be over 16 metres — giving the Bay of Fundy the highest tides in the world.”

On an ebb tide, the reverse is true.

Here’s how I described it that morning …

Holy shit!

As the Bay of Fundy emptied, I should have been proud that my anchor held.

And I was initially.

However, as the force of the tide created a massive bow wave in front of the Zodiac, giving the appearance of going upstream in a raging rapid, I was certain the boat would swamp and I would become the former Wolfe Lake warden.

I had never before and have never since seen anything so powerful happen so fast.

And while I was panicking, the Peregrines were starting to fly.

Lookouts were reporting the bird’s first flights, and the park radios were buzzing with excitement.

First one bird, then all four young were airborne for short periods, hopscotching along the cliffs, finding a secure foothold in red spruce as they continued to test their wings.

Meanwhile, a hundred metres below, a very scared park warden fumbled for his Leatherman, the knife specifically, planning to saw away at the anchor line, riding tautly against the rubber-neoprene tubes of the inflatable boat.

Cut the rope and I’d be home free.

Cut the rubber-neoprene tubes and I’d be … you guessed it.

Thankfully I managed to cut only the rope.

And while others were caught up in the magic of restoring Peregrine Falcons to the Bay of Fundy that day, a hugely successful reintroduction by the way, I was bowing to the Bay gods, eventually landing the Zodiac and dragging it, as well as my sorry ass, across the wide expanse of mudflats, back to the warden truck … as quietly and unceremoniously as possible.

Nothing was saved that day, certainly not my pride.

Six Parks

February 7, 2025 George Leave a comment

One Evening In Fundy – 1983

The day had been a routine one in Fundy, split between vehicle patrols to wave the flag and time spent in the office catching up on paperwork, the not so glamorous side of being a national park warden, completing occurrence reports and taking time to write up more of the summer’s resource management work.

As I recall it, Alan Nicol was working the late shift until midnight and after staying a little longer than planned, probably just shooting the shit with Alan, I headed back to Wolfe Lake, taking my time to keep an eye out for anything unusual.

Fundy’s weather could be notoriously unpredictable and while the little village of Alma on the coast could be blanketed in fog with no snow on the ground, there could be several feet of snow at the Wolfe Lake Warden Station, roughly twenty kilometres away.

Such is the influence of the Bay of Fundy, with the transition in road conditions from the shores of the bay to the Caledonia Highlands Plateau often quite gradual or sometimes abrupt. On this particular evening it was the latter with a layer of black ice coating the highway as I crested the top of the plateau.

Touching the brakes to test the road, the warden truck skidded slightly sideways, forcing me to slow down for the trek back to Wolfe Lake. In the looming darkness of late autumn, I took my time, hoping to make it back to the lake before it started to snow, making the ice-covered road surface even more treacherous.

Passing the now-closed entrance to Chignecto Campground, I scanned for vehicles and seeing nothing continued on my way. Driving past Kinnie Brook picnic area I noticed the silhouette of a vehicle half-hidden behind an island of trees in the parking lot. Easing the truck to a stop I cautiously turned around and drove back toward the entrance, slowly entering the picnic area and pulling up slightly behind but angled toward the vehicle, not ideal positioning but it often never is.

With my headlights shining into the driver-side mirror of the late-model pickup I could make out one person sitting behind the steering wheel and wondered if there was a passenger, now somewhere outside of the truck.

For the life of me, I can’t recall if I radioed Alan to say I was checking a vehicle or not, but flashlight in hand, I exited the warden truck and approached the vehicle from the rear, along the driver’s side.

Tapping on the side window I motioned for the driver to roll it down, indicating I was a national park warden doing a routine hunting patrol. At that moment I could see an uncased rifle laying across the driver’s lap, its barrel angled directly toward me. Stepping back slightly I reiterated my request, but to no avail.

Completely ignoring me, the driver started his vehicle and began to pull away, almost catching me between his truck and my own. Squeezing my body against the warden truck I barely managed to avoid getting crushed or caught on the other vehicle’s bumper and dragged out onto the highway.

As the now-suspect vehicle turned onto Highway 114, I quickly climbed back into the warden truck and gave pursuit, radioing Alan that I was now in hot pursuit of a suspected poacher. Since the vehicle was headed north toward Sussex and the Trans-Canada Highway, I asked Alan to contact the New Brunswick Highway Patrol to try and intercept, advising him that Highway 114 through the park was ice-covered and very slippery.

The words were barely out of my mouth when I saw a flash of light against the low clouds and suspected that the driver had spun out of control and gone off the road. When I rounded the next turn, my suspicions were confirmed. The pickup was right-side up but had slid well off the road and was stuck, as the driver spun the wheels to try and extricate his vehicle and escape.

Radioing Alan I updated him on the situation and sat for a moment, evaluating my next move. After all the man was armed and I had, well, a flashlight.

At that moment the driver got out of his vehicle … without his rifle.

It was immediately obvious to me that he was under the influence as he staggered toward me, trying his best to stay upright as he negotiated the highway’s icy surface.

I got out and carefully walked toward him, quickly realizing he was significantly bigger than me; taller and broader with a reach I couldn’t match. As he continued toward me, he kept wind-milling his arms in slow motion, trying to grab me as he appeared to consciously test his footing, largely ignoring my explanation that I was a national park warden, and he was under arrest for having an uncased firearm in the park.

At the time it seemed almost comical as I easily evaded his moves, all the while asking him to get in the warden truck. I advised him that New Brunswick Highway Patrol was enroute and there was nowhere he could go.

After a few minutes he finally conceded and using the truck for support, walked to the passenger door and got inside. I had no intentions of getting in with him but opened the driver’s side door and spoke with him until the Highway Patrol finally showed up and took him into custody.

I later found out he was known to our Park Commissionaires as he had served in the military.

A few months later he pleaded guilty in Sussex court and was fined both for impaired driving as well as the lesser charge (at the time) of having an uncased and loaded firearm in the national park.

In hindsight I know this could have turned out much worse than it did. If road conditions had been different, I have no doubt we would have been involved in a high-speed chase until the suspect either went off the road or was stopped by the highway patrol. And if he didn’t have to contend with an icy road and could have gotten his hands on me, or if he exited his vehicle with the rifle, well I don’t even want to think about how things might have ended.

But on this night, it ended well.