There have been questions as to why the NCC would publish the Ecosystem Conservation Plan summary but not the full plan. Some said it was a translation issue, others suspected that something was being hidden. In either case wasn’t it a little much in the internet age to ask interested parties to go to the NCC library or visitor center to view the paper version?
So I put these questions to Louis-René Sénéchal, Manager of Nature Interpretation, Information and Marketing for Gatineau Park. He’s only been on the job a few months so he said he’d look into it. He explained to me that what he had uncovered was that:
- The Plan is seen by the NCC as an internal guiding document and not so much a public communications document. That is why additional pieces such as the summary and fact sheet had been developed.
- The plan isn’t secret though. The delay in posting it is due to process requirements (admittedly bureaucratic) whereby everything that gets posted to the website needs to be reviewed by a group called “Creative Services” who check to make sure that the French and English versions match. This takes a lot of time because when a translation change is suggested it also has to go back to the original writer of that text to be sure the new translation hasn’t changed the meaning.
- As noted by Gordon Dewis yesterday evening, the NCC has in fact distributed PDF versions of the full Plan to individuals who’ve made special requests for it, so it is available to the deeply interested (total length 178 pages).
From this it isn’t completely clear to me that the full Plan will soon or ever be posted on the website (I expect it will, but who knows). I am also not completely clear if there is a restriction on people other than the NCC to keep from posting a version of the Planthat hasn’t yet made it through the “Creative Services” process.
In any case there is lots more detail in 178 pages than there is in 45 so I’ll see what I can draw out of the document over the coming days and weeks.
I’ve been reading the full report over the last couple of days to kill the time while The Cold That Won’t Die runs its course. I haven’t posted the version I have because it’s clear that it hasn’t gone through a final comparative edit yet. Some of the graphics haven’t been fully/properly translated and there are other little “translation artifacts” in the text that will probably be cleaned up during the comparative edit. Having gone through this process as an author, I know that it’s non-trivial and can take longer than you might expect.
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