why the DMO is needed
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Ignoring nature’s call
Statistics show the numbers of Canadians who are taking advantage of the country’s national parks are rapidly declining
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Kate Jaimet, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Saturday, December 09, 2006
Thirty-three years ago, Pierre Berton famously defined a Canadian as someone who knows how to make love in a canoe.
Now, the Great White North is increasingly populated by urbanites and new immigrants. And with statistics showing visits to national parks declining, Parks Canada is wondering how to lure the 21st-century Canuck back into the woods.
“With the growth of our major urban centres, we get a little bit detached from our larger wilderness areas,” said Brenda Jones, chief social scientist with Parks Canada.
“Some kids have never even left their own neighbourhoods. How do you connect with those people?”
The raw statistics over the past 10 years indicate visits to national parks have declined by 20 per cent since 1995. However, those statistics are misleading, Ms. Jones said, since the method of counting visitors (as opposed to drive-thru traffic) in the four large Rocky Mountain parks changed around 2000.
Still, if those parks — Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay — are left out of the equation, the data still shows a decline of nine per cent in visits to other national parks over the last decade. In the last five years, visits to national parks decreased in every province except Alberta, B.C. and Newfoundland and Labrador. Overall, about 12.2 million people visited the parks in 2005-06, compared to nearly 12.6 million in 2001-02 — a drop of three per cent.
While a canoe and a quiet lake were once enough to entice Canadians to a national park, that’s no longer the case, said Marc Gregoire, director of the visitor experience branch of Parks Canada.
“Before, you would build churches and people would go into them. Twenty years ago, that started to shift. Now churches have marketing plans,” he said. “It’s the same thing (with parks).”
Mr. Gregoire said it’s good news the popularity of national parks has held fairly steady over the past five years. Still, he has a sharp eye on the trend in the United States, where visits to national parks have plummeted by 20 per cent since 1995, including a 24-per- cent drop in back-country camping over that time. Studies in the U.S. have shown at least three factors contributing to the decline: the aging of the population; a young urban generation glued to electronic devices; and discomfort or disinterest in parks on the part of many members of visible minorities.
Surveys conducted for Parks Canada by Environics Research in 2002 and 2005 indicate similar factors are at play in this country. Significantly, immigrants born outside of Canada made up 20 per cent of the Canadian population in 2002, but only 10 per cent of visitors to national parks. Young adults aged 18 to 24 and people over the age of 55 were also relatively scarce in the parks, while 63 per cent of people over the age of 65 told surveyors they used to visit parks, but don’t anymore.
As the 2002 survey noted with brutal honesty: “Old age appears to be the principal cause for Canadians to stop frequenting national parks.”
Baby boomers, blessed with free time, disposable income, and often good health, still form a core group of outdoor enthusiasts. But people once willing to bed down in a pup tent are now seeking out more comfortable sleeping quarters, said Bruce Keith, executive-director of the Alpine Club of Canada.
“We have seen a steady increase in the use of our back-country hut facilities in the last five to 10 years,” Mr. Keith said. “As the demographic gets older, they are more interested in sleeping inside rather than carrying their tent and everything that goes along with that.”
Mr. Gregoire agrees the surest way for Parks Canada to lose the baby boomers is to make them sleep on the cold, hard ground.
“They want to cycle in the day or canoe, but at night — a nice glass of Beaujolais and a fondue,” he said. “We have to offer them that or we’re going to lose them.”
While baby boomers are seeking more comfort, the young generation is seeking excitement from their national parks — and an experience connected to electronic gadgetry.
Just as the influx of hip young snowboarders saved the Canadian skiing industry, keeping up with new trends in adventure sport will rejuvenate the parks, Mr. Gregoire said.
Recently, Parks Canada was approached about introducing geocaching into the parks. Similar to orienteering, geocaching is a kind of tracking game that involves finding a hidden treasure with the help of a GPS unit and clues posted on the Internet.
“When they came to us the first time, we said if it’s not hiking, it’s not allowed. We don’t say that anymore,” said Mr. Gregoire of the geocaching enthusiasts. “They’re young, they’re on the web, they’re techies. They come, they sign in to participate. It’s fantastic.”
But if Parks Canada is starting to get a handle on the baby boomers and the young adventurers, figuring out how to attract new Canadians is a more puzzling problem. It’s also a pressing one, since people born outside of Canada will make up an estimated 28 per cent of the Canadian population by 2026.
“We know that new Canadians come to Canada in urban centres. … That’s their zone of comfort,” said Mr. Gregoire. “We have to understand their leisure activities, their motivations, their social values. That will give you a sense of how you can market the wilderness to them.”
Kexing Liu, the president of the Ottawa Hostel Outdoor Club and himself an immigrant from China, said it takes time for some immigrants to adapt to the concept of vacationing outdoors.
Most immigrants are focused on getting settled, Mr. Liu said. Visiting a national park is not their first priority, nor may they have the money or free time.
As well, many new immigrants move to Toronto, where there are fewer opportunities for outdoor sports and it’s a long drive to get to a wilderness area. And while the wilderness is an integral part of the identity of native-born Canadians — raised on Farley Mowat and the Group of Seven — new immigrants lack those touchstones.
“Most of the people, especially from Third World countries, they come from areas that are overpopulated. They didn’t realize Canada had so much space,” Mr. Liu said.
We may have the location location location but do we have the prmotion
eh??
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