Cultural Heritage Conservation Plan Workshop

On Wednesday I was invited to participate in a workshop as part of the development of the Gatineau Park Cultural Heritage Conservation Plan. The point of the exercise is that the NCC owns things that have heritage value and is responsible for their maintenance. Maintenance costs money so an effort is being made to assign relative weights to the list of heritage assets so that budgets can be allocated appropriately.

Ideally we might like to conserve all those assets but that never really happens. More to the point, with this Plan the NCC hope that they avoid letting something slip that hadn’t been recognized as important.

These assets are not only things like the Mackenzie King Estate but extend to archaeological sites and “intangibles” like toponyms – an idea that appeals to me with my enthusiasm for bringing back the old ski trail names.

The workshop was an invitation to historians and heritage experts from local groups as well as the federal and local governments and the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation to comment and give input on the direction the Plan was taking. In addition to a database of assets, so far the process has established a vision, guiding principles, values and a thematic framework. It’s all just talk, but it seemed to me to be the right kind of talk.

One of the draft paragraphs read

The NCC will ensure that interventions to resources of heritage significance are preceded by research to gain a comprehensive understanding of the resources and of their associated values.

One of the participants illustrated the change from bygone approaches saying that once when he was working on establishing heritage information in Algonquin Park an older park ranger pulled him aside and said “interesting, we used to just burn all that.”

The idea that the park isn’t just “pure nature” but has a history of human occupation is one thing, but the people in the room seemed in agreement with taking it even further; that the park is as it is because of its interaction with people in the past, and that how we feel about it depends on how we interact with it in the present. A kind of parallel with an ecosystem approach was suggested.

A range of people from within the NCC were there and seemed to be serious about the exercise. The Cultural Heritage Conservation Plan is on a par with the Green Transportation Plan, the Recreation Management Plan and the Interpretation Plan, all of which were called for in the 2005 Gatineau Park Master Plan.

The upcoming phase of the Heritage Conservation Plan is establishing the criteria against which items in the inventory can be judged. A suggested approach to these criteria was presented but this may be in flux.

One of the important elements that came out was that although the NCC is a national institution and as such heritage assets with national significance should get a higher priority, there are plenty of assets in Gatineau Park with local significance and these can’t be allowed to be forgotten.

It was an interesting day and I came away feeling good about the overall direction.