[Previous] [Contents] [Next]

Ideology: Trends in Wilderness Conservation

Conservation

The wilderness conservation movement has changed greatly since 1885, when some 26 square kilometres on the north slope of Sulphur Mountain, Alberta, were declared protected Crown lands and legally designated for public use. In 1883 two workers employed in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway discovered the sulphur-laced hot water that subsequently became the Cave and Basin Hot Springs, the initial space that eventually grew into Banff National Park. Information about the discovery of the hot springs and an appreciation of its obvious tourist appeal spread quickly through the ranks of the railway workers. Several among them with entrepreneurial flair addressed proposals to the Minister of the Interior in whose gift the disposition of the lands lay. He decided not to grant private title but determined that the Crown would retain control for the beneficial enjoyment of all Canadians.

In 1886 the land was surveyed and the boundaries of the Hot Springs Reserve were defined. The Dominion Lands Commissioner reported that "a large tract of country lying outside the original reservation presented features of the greatest beauty, and was admirably adapted for a national park." In April 1887, a bill to establish a national park was introduced to the House of Commons, and on 23 June, 1887, the Rocky Mountains Park Act was passed. Over the next few years five additional mountain parks were created. From the start, therefore, an intergenerational obligation to preserve wilderness was bound to the prudent and sustainable use of natural resources for the benefit and enjoyment of all Canadians.

It is perhaps worth emphasizing again that the mountain parks were established to fulfil and actualize a double purpose, namely protection and use. The logic was obvious: in order to be enjoyed by future generations, the land had to be protected. It was to be protected in order to be enjoyed. It was assumed as a matter of course that there would be a balance established between social purposes, the most basic of which was wilderness preservation; economic development would ensure that the "benefit, education and enjoyment" contemplated in the 1930 Parks Act might become a reality. Recreational facilities and capital investments were undertaken to ensure that recreation, use, and enjoyment would be possible. In short, because it was intended from the beginning to make Banff a tourist destination, the famous CP Hotels were built, and the ski hills and the back-country trails were created. Because of contemporary revision of the initial purposes of the mountain national parks, it is important to recall that a multiple use strategy is not an anomaly, but was what inspired the creation of Banff National Park in the first place.

Early private investment ensured park success

Initially, the entrepreneurial vision of the CPR was needed to prompt the Dominion government to create the Hot Springs Reserve. Before the CPR lay down the track and built the first hotels to accommodate visitors from Canada and abroad, few people had an opportunity to experience the spectacular beauty of this wilderness area. As Dennis Duffy recently reminded Globe and Mail readers, the Dominion government was reluctant to establish a nature preserve because of the cost. "A park in Banff," he wrote, "made sense if a way could be found to make it pay for its own upkeep."¹⁶ The concessions that the CPR paid to Ottawa in order to introduce tourist facilities into the Rockies could, the government reasoned, help support its upkeep, and thus make the park possible. Today, the Banff Springs Hotel, Chateau Lake Louise, and Jasper Park Lodge are among the country's most architecturally significant and well-used heritage facilities. From those modest historic origins, Canada's national system of protected areas now stretches over 224,266 square kilometres, covering about 2 percent of Canada's land mass. The province of Alberta is a special guardian of Canada's wilderness: the 69,500 square kilometres protected in the province represents over ten-and-a-half percent of its area.¹⁷

The symbolic and substantive value of wilderness to Canadians is reflected in the steady increase in amount of reserve lands set aside by both federal and provincial governments.¹⁸ Voluntary private stewardship programs like those organized by the Nature Conservancy and Ducks Unlimited have also contributed significantly to this progress.¹⁹ These represent significant increases over the course of a decade, reflecting growing environmental awareness on the part of both politicians and private individuals. Banff itself has grown from the original 26 square kilometres set aside around the hot springs, to cover 6,641 square kilometres today. Three provincial parks, one wilderness park, four wilderness areas, and three Canadian heritage rivers also afford the region special protection.

Park zoning

The Banff region of the Rocky Mountains has become a large, ecologically distinct, and highly regulated space. The area within the national park, for example, is regulated by strict zoning laws. Each of Canada's national parks are designated into five zones (figure 1):

1. Special preservation. (3.25%) Motorized access and circulation is prohibited in these areas.

2. Wilderness. (94.01%) Human interference is kept to a minimum in these areas. Outdoor recreation activities requiring few, if any, rudimentary services or facilities are allowed. Only strictly controlled air access in the remote north is allowed.

3. Natural environment. (2.16%) Open to outdoor recreation requiring minimal services. Facilities must be of a "rustic nature." Controlled motorized access is allowed, a\lthough public transit is preferred. Park management plans may define provisions for terminating or limiting private motorized access.

4. Outdoor recreation. (0.48%) A broad range of activities, services, and facilities directly accessible by motorized vehicles. Park management plans may define provisions for limiting private motorized access and circulation.

5. Park services. (0.09%) National park communities containing a concentration of visitor services and support facilities. Specific activities, services, and facilities are defined and directed by a community planning process. Major park operations and administration are based here.²⁰

Increasingly stringent rules also limit residency in the park to people providing services to park visitors. In this historic and legislative context, it is worth noting from the start that critics who have so strongly opposed commercial and recreational activities in Banff are focusing their concerns on a relatively small area of the park that is available to human use. We will see, however, that they have made some highly imaginative arguments to expand their focus from the Banff townsite and recreational ski hills to a very much larger area.

Whatever the basic strategy of wilderness advocates may turn out to be, it is unquestionably true that much of the debate over national park policy has in fact focused on the municipal planning for the town of Banff and its surrounding areas. Moreover, the perspective advanced in the Banff-Bow Valley Study and in subsequent reviews, consultations, and reports has sought to implement a public land use policy that reflected the private agendas of a narrow understanding of the purpose of national parks. According to the BBVS, for example, "Commercial interests will ease out aesthetic and spiritual values, to the detriment of the creativity of the nation."²¹ This is a large, even a grandiose claim, presented without supporting argument and without a coherent account of what these alleged "spiritual values" are or how they may be connected to "the creativity of the nation," which is itself a surpassingly obscure notion. Moreover, it is difficult to see what these undefined "values" and national creativity have to do with sound land use and wildlife management policies. As we shall argue in the following section, such opinions and evocations reflect a reinterpretation and reconfiguration of parks policy and of the mandate of Parks Canada through the lens of a novel and highly contentious environmental paradigm.

Figure 1: Land Use in Canadian National Parks

Preservation

The early conservationism that gave Canada and the United States their first national parks can be contrasted with the preservationism of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. Muir believed that nature preserved from forestry, grazing, and other development activities would allow people to "enrich their own little ongoings with Nature... [by] washing off sins and cobwebs of the devil's spinning... [through] getting in touch with the nerves of Mother Earth."²² This highly metaphorical, even sacramental language, which has come to typify much of the preservationist rhetoric today, inspired the "wilderness movement" of the 1930s, with Aldo Leopold and other biologists emphasizing the "intrinsic value of self-willed nature," opposing predator control in order to protect what they called "charismatic" species.²³ Subscribing to the belief that modern social values (the "commercial interests" identified by the BBVS), were harmful to natural environmental harmony, the language and goals of the early preservationist movement informed the more radical "deep ecology" notions Arne Naess developed during the 1970s. Rejecting the multiple use principle that had characterized park policy, contemporary preservationists frequently appeal to an "ecocentric" paradigm derived from Naess, Leopold, and Muir that challenges man's privileged position in the natural world. Historically speaking, human beings have developed a rich variety of interpretations of nature, of human nature, and of the relationship between human and natural beings. It is certainly intelligible enough that a utilitarian and technological approach to nature as a resource should help inspire a romantic alternative.²⁴ However legitimate it may be for anyone to seek for, and perhaps find, divine inspiration or other spiritual comforts in the experience, rather than balancing human needs alongside the importance of environmental protection, the (usually capitalized) Earth must now come first, in a reversal of modern social priorities. According to Peter Lee of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the task of organizations such as his is one of "changing, even if in a small way, today's dominant social paradigms."²⁵ The new paradigm contests the traditional human-centred understanding of public policy-making, and casts the discussion in a rhetoric of rights, most of which are understood to be self-evident and non-negotiable. Thus, for example, human rights are held to be no higher than the "rights" of nature. Monte Hummel, President of the WWF, declared: "I believe nature has rights, natural systems have rights…"²⁶ One can certainly acknowledge the right of Monte Hummel or of anyone else to hold whatever eccentric beliefs they wish in exactly the same way that people can pronounce lakes, rivers, mountains, and caves to be sacred. The question of concern in this analysis, however, is that some of these eccentric opinions, which may or may not be held by individual environmentalists, do not provide a sound foundation for the development and implementation of sensible public policy concerning Canada's national parks. We will see that efforts to formulate a coherent parks policy on the basis of a kind of mystic ecocentrism introduces several additional and unnecessary constraints.

Defining the issues: science or spiritualism?

More than idiosyncratic spiritual beliefs and eccentric opinions are involved in the modern preservationist agenda. The adoption of bureaucratically-centralized land use management policy and the discourse of new conservation science have also advanced preservationist goals. In the United States for example, the 1964 Wilderness Act began by defining wilderness into existence.²⁷ By designating wilderness as a general category of land capable of receiving blanket legal protection, environmental activists were at a stroke capable of taking broad offensive action without the bother of dealing with smaller, already legally defined areas.²⁸ Thus, the campaign to preserve the "old-growth" forests of the American northwest from logging during the mid-1980s shows how efforts at broad scale legislated preservation of large tracts of land can be significantly enhanced by cultivating allies in the scientific community.

The key to the success of the campaign, which centred around the spotted owl in much the same way that today's campaign to restrict human use and activity in Banff focuses on the grizzly bear and the wolf, lay in establishing a large area of protected habitat. Alston Chase has described how the Sierra Legal Defence Fund (SLDF) enlisted demographer Russell Lande to help establish a scientific rationale for greater spotted owl protection. The environmental activist put the demographer in touch with scholars who could produce data for a novel theory, called "island biogeography," that argued how a species could become extinct if its habitat were not spread over a wide, connected region. The SLDF helped to find peer reviewers willing to write supportive letters.²⁹ While it is important that public policy for protected areas be based on sound science, there is an obvious danger in reversing the process and soliciting "science" in support of a preferred policy. Scientific discourse, unlike politics, is in principle not about compromise.

Biodiversity crisis

The rhetoric and imagery of crisis has also be been used to mobilize popular and political support for wilderness preservation. Despite evidence of conservationist success, the rhetoric of environmental crisis and the warnings of impending biological catastrophe have continued without let or hindrance. The WWF, for example, has issued annual report cards to both federal and provincial governments since the launch of the Endangered Spaces campaign (a joint initiative with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, CPAWS), grading them on their progress in fulfilling the WWF understanding of governmental commitments to "completing" Canada's park system. All levels of government have systematically scored poorly, despite the steady increase in reserved and protected lands. Alberta, with the third most protected lands of all the provinces, has been judged particularly harshly. Since 1992, the Sierra Club of Canada has also taken to publishing annual environmental report cards, judging, among other things, government commitment to biodiversity protection. Again, the reviews have been consistently negative.

The nature of this alleged crisis is further complicated by an absence of agreement within the scientific community (far less policy-makers) as to how to measure the "biodiversity" that is supposed to be in crisis. There is disagreement about what constitutes a species; there is disagreement about how to count species (however defined) within an ecosystem (which is also an ambiguous concept); and there is disagreement about measuring species per area, in multiple or overlapping ecosystems.³⁰ In other words, the fundamental and unresolved problems associated with biological classification—the absence of any consensus on cataloguing species—and measurement—the absence of consensus on estimating their numbers—allow preservationists to make extravagant claims.

The sixth great extinction

Notwithstanding the scientific ambiguity of the concept of species, it has been used in a rhetorically charged way to evoke the threat of a "sixth great extinction," which is now said to be under way, and which is the first to be caused by "unnatural" human activity.³¹ In a speech at the 35th Anniversary dinner for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, for example, former president Harvey Locke warned that "until humanity embraces Nature as something more than an object of greed, we will inflict on this Earth an extinction event equivalent to the death of the dinosaurs."³² Dave Foreman, former Earth First! president (and currently the chairman of the Wildlands Project), has described how, based on "disturbing anecdotes and bits of data," E.O. Wilson and others have used fossil records to calculate the current rate of extinction, and concluded that one-third of all species on Earth could become extinct in 40 years.³³ This is but one of many alarming projections of biological extinctions. The wide range of the estimates, however, undermines their predictive merit and persuasiveness. For example, Wilson estimated that current rates of species extinction are between 1,000 and 10,000 times that which existed before human intervention; Jessica Hellmann estimates that 10,000 species go extinct per year; Jeffrey McNeeley of the World Conservation Union estimates between 50,000 to 100,000 species may disappear each year; Robert May projects an annual extinction rate of 75,000 per year.³⁴ However, without an accurate or comprehensive catalogue of species with respect either to name or to number, it is difficult to determine the rate of their disappearance. Despite his own dire predictions, in 1992 E.O. Wilson admitted that the very concept of species "has serious flaws."³⁵

In spite of these grave predictions, it is broadly accepted in the scientific community that extinction itself is a natural process. Over 99 percent of species that have ever existed have become extinct; five mass extinctions have been recorded, the most recent occurring about 65 million years ago.³⁶ Wading through the litany of ambiguous definitions concerning species, spaces, and the diversity of each, one thing becomes clear: today's apparent crisis exists more within the universe of rhetoric than in reality.

From species to spaces

If policy-makers strongly and fervently believe there is a biodiversity crisis, the fragile scientific basis for it is not likely to concern them. Policies established in a crisis atmosphere, however, are likely to bear the attributes of their origin. In addition to domestic sources advertising a growing peril to "endangered species," an increasing number of international organizations and agreements devoted to environmental problems have also contributed to the problem. The report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) of 1987, for instance, had such an effect. The Brundtland Report has become a landmark study, frequently cited by environmentalists and policy-makers alike. Thus, the suggestion of the Report that the nearly 4 percent of the Earth's land area then being managed for explicit purposes of species and ecosystem conservation be tripled, became the basis for the World Wildlife Fund Canada's 1989 Endangered Spaces campaign.

The goal of the campaign was to establish a network of protected areas of "at least 12 percent of the lands and waters of Canada" by the year 2000.³⁷ The figure of 12 percent was officially adopted as public policy in 1992, when the Canadian Tri-Council (of Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, Canadian Parks Ministers Council, and Wildlife Ministers Council of Canada) signed "A Statement of Commitment to Complete Canada's Networks of Protected Areas." Provincial governments have also agreed to this strategy, as evident in initiatives such as Alberta's Special Places 2000 program.

Moving goal posts

Whatever the scientific merit of the 12 percent figure, if governments accepted it and worked towards it, that would constitute a major achievement for environmentalists for which they might claim credit. Instead of claiming a political victory, however, the environmentalist lobby moved the goal posts. Thus, Monte Hummel and Arlin Hackman of the WWF "clarified" what was called the "12 percent fixation" at the halfway point of their campaign. They argued that the figure of 12 percent was never intended as a specific target or ceiling, but rather it identified a bare minimum that governments must meet.³⁸ It now turned out that the real goal was to protect 100 percent of Canada's natural regions. As with the scientific controversy over what constitutes a species, there is no consensus on what a "natural region" might be. The absence of a uniform system of classification, however, is no barrier to strident advocacy. According to Hummel and Hackman, Canada had 453 natural regions, of which only 18 (a mere 4 percent) were protected. In fact, the number of "natural regions" has increased over the years making it even more difficult to protect an "adequate" percentage of them. Thus it was by the standard of a "moving target"³⁹ that Alberta recently scored an "F" for improving only 1.56 percent in the past five years, despite the fact that Alberta already had 10.6 percent of the province protected.⁴⁰ This is well above the national average of 6.6 percent.⁴¹

In Canada, the WWF campaign indicates that the preferred policy response among environmentalists is no longer so limited as an endangered species act. In order to protect biodiversity, legislated protection for endangered spaces is necessary. With an ecosystem approach to land management, governed by moving targets and shifting boundaries, the preservation of what are called natural systems and processes would ensure the protection and conservation of individual species within it. It would address multiple levels of biological diversity—"from genes to the entire biosphere. Otherwise we might miss something."⁴² In Canada, recent debate over proposed Species at Risk Act (SARA) also draws attention to the broadening of the agenda to the protection of spaces, rather than species. The chief concern among environmentalists today is that the existing legislation does not provide mandatory protection for the habitat of species considered endangered. Opponents of SARA, such as farmers and ranchers in the prairie west, are concerned that their livelihoods are endangered far more than any wildlife that shares their land. SARA died on the order paper when the 2000 federal election was called.

In some respects, American legislation provides a model and a warning for Canadians. There, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) is perhaps the most persistent attempt to achieve a bioregional central land management regime.⁴³ Encompassing highly flexible concepts such as species viability, connectivity, and reserve system design, it proposes to link together over 16 million acres of federal roadless land by means of connecting corridors. Supported by environmental groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, the bill was first introduced in Congress in 1992, reintroduced in 1993, and again in 1995. It was most recently brought before Congress in 1997, in an attempt to codify the bioregional strategy advocated by environmental coalitions such as the Wildlands Project.⁴⁴ Driven by the goal of protecting all native life and processes, the strategy contemplates a vast a bioregional network of core reserves, buffer zones, and wilderness corridors between and among them. For Canadian preservationists, these efforts south of the border are models of advocacy, particularly for individuals interested in "rewilding" North America.

Rewilding

In recent years, the preservationist agenda has not so much changed (for one of the tiers of the rewilding strategy is the establishment of large core areas) as broadened to encompass a growing geographic territory. Adopting an "ecosystem approach," activists have changed their focus from species to spaces, looking to the field of conservation biology for scientific justification for a wide ranging political agenda. Thus, Reed Noss (former science director of the Wildlands Project) can advocate that conservationists insist "every wild and natural area be saved, and that many degraded areas be restored to viability by closing roads and introducing species."⁴⁵ Noss is fully aware that he is advocating a political as much as a wildlife project. His demands are unequivocal and his approach is uncompromising: "Wilderness recovery must not be compromised in an effort to appear reasonable; the time for compromise, if ever, was when North America was still a wilderness continent."⁴⁶ The historical fact that North America has not been a "wilderness continent" since the end of the last ice age some 10,000 years ago does not warrant the notice of those set upon the task of wilderness recovery, rewilding, and wilderness restoration. Their views, in fact, are so far from the original conservationists that they make the preservationists who preceded them look responsible and moderate. Nevertheless, such opinions have inspired the proposals mentioned earlier to poison mountain lakes or elevate the CPR.

The political project advocated by Noss and his allies is conventionally called "rewilding." The creative vision behind the rewilding strategy took shape in 1991, when the Wildlands Project (TWP), was born from an alliance between conservation biologist Michael Soulé and environmental activist Dave Foreman. Currently coordinating 30 projects across North America, TWP also serves as a clearinghouse for information on rewilding projects and planning, as well as providing funding, networking, and technical expertise. Rewilding is essentially a politicized hybrid of several traditional approaches to wilderness conservation. Part theory, part political program, rewilding strategies have three essential components: the establishment of "core reserves," attention to "keystone species," and strategies to "connect" the core areas. Michael Soulé and Reed Noss have called these the three C's: cores (core areas of wilderness, surrounded by specially managed buffered areas), carnivores (the keystone species/ predators upon whom the integrity of the ecosystem is said to rest), and connectivity (wilderness corridors linking larger connected areas).⁴⁷ The Wildlands Project claims to have established a new agenda for the conservation movement. No longer is it a question of preserving duck habitat or protecting rare species: the Wilderness Project seeks to "recover" whole ecosystems in every region of North America. Thus, Noss proposed that at least half the land area of 48 contiguous American states be set aside; of this total, 50 percent would be returned to a "wilderness state," which meant that 25 percent of the lower 48 states would be depopulated and another 25 percent turned into buffer zones.⁴⁸

To most Canadians (as to most Americans) the vision of TWP looks like nonsense. In fact, however, it is an integral part of a very practical coalition of environmental activists. TWP joins both radical and more mainstream elements in a political program that aims to alter the rules of both public and private land ownership. The Project encourages the private purchase or donation of the land to be rewilded, but the central target of their campaign is government: governments can legislate new core areas of wilderness into existence, or tighten the rules of human use in existing protected areas.⁴⁹ This has clear implications for the existing recreational and visitor activities in the national parks in both Canada and the US that form the "core" of these rewilding strategies. As their website announces, "Business-as-usual will no longer be possible."⁵⁰

Wildlands project backed by prominent environmentalists

A list of TWP affiliates reads like the Who's Who of the North American environmental movement in the year 2000: Michael Soulé is science director (replacing Reed Noss); Dave Foreman is chairman; CPAWS' Harvey Locke is President, while Mary Granskou (former CPAWS executive director) is also a board member. What unites them is not so much a concern for wildlife conservation as the dream of "the day when grizzlies in Chihuahua have an unbroken connection to grizzlies in Alaska; when grey wolf populations are restored from Durango to Labrador; when vast unbroken forests and flowing plains again thrive and support pre-Columbian populations of plants and animals; when humans dwell with respect, harmony, and affection for the land; when we come to live no longer as strangers and aliens on this continent."⁵¹ Lest sober Canadians think this kind of rhetoric is the sole province of reckless Americans, the same vision informs the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) conservation initiative of which Canada's mountain parks form the most important core area.

Initiated in 1993, Y2Y is one of the rewilding projects affiliated with the Wildlands Project. Like TWP itself, it claims the support of a large network of environmental groups and private foundations. Federal funding has also been channelled through environmental groups into Y2Y planning efforts, and Canada's Heritage Minister, who has responsibility for the parks, has expressed approval of the interconnected strategy.⁵² The final report of the Ecological Integrity Panel glowingly reviewed the Y2Y initiative as part of "the new paradigm of protected areas."⁵³ Founded on the notion that this region is "the world's last best chance to retain a fully functioning mountain ecosystem," Y2Y aims to recreate a connected wilderness zone stretching across the Rocky Mountains from Northern United States, through Alberta, British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories, to the Yukon. This project covers almost 500,000 square miles of public and private land.

The economic consequences of such environmental mega-projects have only just begun to be addressed by members of the business and resource communities who stand to be most directly affected by the proposals. Governments and the general public have largely failed to recognize, or be informed about the social and economic impact of the project. A few interested parties have noted that Y2Y carries with it large economic costs. The Alberta Chamber of Commerce, for instance, warned that "The addition of any new protected areas in the eastern slopes has the potential to severely impact businesses."⁵⁴

Any serious debate on the advisability of Y2Y must take into account the economic impact of the proposal. The assumption of proponents, however, is simply that things will work out. The CPAWS account, for example, holds that "Within that rewoven natural fabric, communities will find new prosperity as they become aware, adjust to, and learn to benefit from, the population and economic changes that are creating 'the New West.'"⁵⁵ This same sanguine appraisal of rewilding an enormous tract of land some 1,800 miles long is found in the Wilderness Society report by Ray Rasher and Ben Alexander, The New Challenge: People, Commerce and the Environment in the Yellowstone to Yukon Region.⁵⁶ The opinion of the Y2Y activists regarding the economic consequences of their proposal was challenged by the Chancellor Partners report, but there has been almost no serious debate about the advisability of the Y2Y initiative.

Rewilding efforts such as Y2Y are not unique to the west, where the presence of North America's largest parks and protected areas has helped capture the imagination and stirred the passions of environmentalists keen to restore what they wrongly believe to be a pre-Columbian natural harmony. Similar initiatives have been spearheaded in more populated parts of central Canada and the US as well. An example is Adirondacks to Algonquin (A2A), modeled and organized by many of the same "co-operators" as the Y2Y initiative. The impetus for A2A came from the Ottawa Valley Chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society who were afraid of development pressures from the urban centres of Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Kingston. The six million hectares included in A2A plans (three times the size of Prince Edward Island) winds through dozens of towns and through the heart of eastern Ontario's cottage country.⁵⁷ Most of the land required to link the parks is privately owned and is located in two different countries. Neither of these factors is considered particularly troubling. Land can be expropriated by changing the law, and as for political boundaries, "the natural system does not recognize these boundaries. To preserve that system, we must look beyond the lines that have been drawn on maps."⁵⁸ As with all rewilding schemes, A2A has as potentially devastating implications for private property rights and public land use in eastern Canada as Y2Y does in the west.

[Previous] [Contents] [Next]

info@fraserinstitute.ca You can contact us at the above email address for any comments or information requests. Please report any dead links or technical problems.

If you know someone who would be interested in this web page, please enter their email address below, and we will forward this URL to them: Email Address:

Last Modified: August 23, 2000.