A voice crying for the wilderness
His one-man crusade to preserve Gatineau Park has made him a thorn in the side of politicians, the NCC and even environmental groups. But Jean-paul Murray may be the park’s best friend. TOM SPEARS reports.
Jean-Paul Murray is a rebel without a pause.
As the most vocal activist dealing with Gatineau Park, he testifies to Commons committees whenever someone (often an opposition MP, sometimes the government) drafts a bill to define the park.
He duels often with the National Capital Commission, writes letters to the editor, deals with environmental NGOs, pesters Chelsea council to stop allowing private development inside the park.
All this comes under his title of secretary of the Gatineau Park Protection Committee.
Which is pretty much a committee of one, plus 12 supporters, a fact that Murray doesn’t hide.
Still, this sharp-tongued part-timer has a talent for research and for making his views heard alongside those of much larger organizations.
And it all began with his chance encounter with history.
It was about 12 years ago, and Jean-Paul Murray was riding his bike near the base of the Skyline hill at Camp Fortune. Murray is a freelance translator who lives just east of the park, near Old Chelsea.
He rode past the abandoned house that had been the home of Percy Sparks, a prominent Ottawa businessman and environmentalist who died in 1959.
“The house was being emptied,” Murray recalls. “I biked by the gate and it was open so I went down to check things out. I met this man who was emptying the house of its contents. His name was Robert Sparks and he was the grandson of Percy Sparks.”
The two got talking. Robert Sparks told Murray that his grandfather was the “father” of Gatineau Park, which surprised Murray: “The NCC had always said Mackenzie King was the father of Gatineau Park.”
Murray went off to the archives and looked up Percy Sparks’s obituary (from 1959) in the Ottawa Journal. “Lo and behold, the headline was ‘Father of Gatineau Park dies.’ That really took me aback.”
“After that, in my spare time I began digging.”
From old newspapers and papers of the Federal Woodlands Preservation League (an old conservation group), a picture emerged: Percy Sparks, more than anyone else, was the driving force behind establishing the park.
Sparks was a great-nephew of landowner and financier Nicholas Sparks. He led a group that wrote a 1949 report concluding there should be a park in the Gatineau Hills, and it should “preserve for all time the natural beauty of the lakes and wooded hills as an inspiration to those who can enjoy them, whether residents of the surrounding district, or visitors from other parts of Canada, or from foreign lands.” (A year later King died and bequeathed his property at Kingsmere to Canada as a public park with the character of a forest reserve.)
Murray was hooked by the Sparks story. The NCC didn’t go along with his view of history at first, so he started pushing. After many twists and turns — there are always twists and turns when Murray and the NCC lock horns — the NCC dedicated the Roderick Percy Sparks Exhibition Hall in the park’s visitors’ centre.
And from that moment he has evolved into a frequent NCC critic, gadfly, researcher and secretary of the Gatineau Park Protection Committee. So, who is he? A 53-year-old former Hill staffer from 1986 to 2009, he’s now a translator. He has an MA in Canadian studies and journalism from Carleton University. Serves as a board member and is a former managing editor of Cité Libre, the political journal. He was a senior policy adviser for senators Dan Hays and Céline Hervieux-Payette, and also wrote speeches for Hays. Today he translates novels by Robert Lalonde.
“We have about 12 members,” he says of the committee. “I haven’t really met them.
“They are people who just want to join and I keep sending them stuff. I’m basically the whole committee, myself. But I have about 12 people who I sent updates to,” such as press releases.
His central goal is to protect the boundaries of the park and the land inside it, which means gradually acquiring private property. He wants the NCC to have a policy of letting current owners stay, but only if the NCC has a right of first refusal when they sell.
He attributes his simple strategy to author and Senator Jacques Hébert: “You keep hitting the fault line until the thing cracks and you get somewhere.”
Murray has spent uncounted hours going through archives, tracing everything from orders-in-council to decades-old letters.
Four years ago, he told the Citizen: “The NCC won’t fulfil its master plan to protect the park unless it is forced to do so. The government only acts to protect the park when there is public pressure.”
He added this month: “The NCC has been at times good but sometimes they are in a heavy state of denial ... They keep saying the NCC does not have a policy for acquiring private property. Well I’m sorry, they do. It’s called the National Interest Land Mass and it’s called the master plans, all master plans (for the park) all the way back to 1952.”
There have been eight bills tabled with the aim of defining park boundaries and protecting the land, often with Murray’s assistance. Past sponsors include Ed Broadbent and Senator Mira Spivak of Manitoba. Murray remains a great fan of Spivak.
Allies have come and gone over the years, and in some cases Murray sharply condemns former allies, feeling they haven’t pushed hard enough. For instance, he claims that “the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, whose main objective is securing park legislation, has gone to sleep on the issue because they fear losing their charitable status” through political activity.
Similarly he believes that “Paul Dewar completely collapsed on the file” when the government wrote its own bill after Dewar, the New Democrat MP for Ottawa Centre, had written a private member’s bill.
And “Nycole Turmel is a complete writeoff on this. She wants to entrench private property rights in legislation.” Turmel, another New Democrat, introduced a bill last November.
This newspaper doesn’t escape either. Here he is on the Citizen’s Facebook page (his tongue sharp even though he knew he was lashing out even while this paper was in the midst of writing a profile of him): “What’s the matter with you guys? Are you protecting your Meech Lake friends, all those Ontario residents who live full time in Quebec while paying no provincial taxes? You might think of changing your paper’s name to The Ottawa Colonial.”
At the Ottawa Valley chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, executive director John McDonnell is cautious about discussing Murray.
“He’s been a good researcher,” McDonnell says. “We’ve had an up-and-down relationship with Jean-Paul Murray. He has made a number of public statements about how we’re irrelevant and useless.”
(In talking to the Citizen, Murray compared CPAWS to “cockroaches” that run and hide.)
It’s an old divide in the environmental movement: Some organizations choose diplomacy as the most reliable method of change while others attack non-stop. Murray, for instance, insists that it’s better to have no legislation for the park than to pass a bill with compromises.
McDonnell acknowledges his group is more diplomatic, while Murray “goes right at them.”
“The fact that he’s out there in this aggressive way does make it easier for us in the sense that people are already primed on these issues,” he comments.
Some fights take place on a smaller stage.
At Meech Lake, Murray accuses both the municipality and private landowners of violating (through inaction) a 2011 county bylaw to protect the shoreline with natural vegetation.
“It’s pure anarchy in the park,” he says. “The real cause is the multiple jurisdictions: federal, provincial, municipal, and then at the end of the line everybody passes the buck to the other level of government.”
When Murray complains to news media, reporters often end up talking to Jean Wolff, head of media relations at the NCC.
Wolff says Murray is “eloquent in speech and he’s eloquent in writing, in both official languages. And he’s media-savvy.
“There’s no doubt he works hard on his issues, in an entirely single-focus way. (But) I have to say that the media does not ask of him the same accountability that they ask of us.”
That, he says, means that Murray isn’t challenged often enough to back up his claims with proof — for instance, that land in the park has the legal status that Murray says it does.
He defends the NCC’s managing of the park, saying it’s a balancing act involving conservation, roughly 2.7 million annual visits and private land that still manage to be unmistakably a park.
We asked Murray what he likes best in Gatineau Park:
“The escape that it permits within a 15-minute drive from Ottawa. You can be in this beautiful Laurentian forest and you can escape all the problems of dealing with civilization: the traffic, the pollution. You can swim in Meech Lake ... You can get back to nature very easily.”
The Percy Sparks house has since burned down but its history hasn’t. “Every time I walk there I feel the place speaks to me,” Murray says.