How's my vandalism? Carnage on the North Shore

On the road serving Block 4 between Toniata and Faloma beaches there's been an ongoing struggle between cottagers and Park management for several years now. The Park has wanted to cut the trees on either side of the road way back; the cottagers have resisted the idea. (It later turned out that the park was responding to a complaint from their garbage-truck driver, who allegedly smashed a mirror on a tree during a garbage pickup at the block-4 bear-cage.) A few years ago, the cottagers and Park management agreed that the cottagers would keep the trees by the road trimmed so as not to pose a hazard to park vehicles passing through. That's how things stood until very recently.

Some time in the past few weeks, the road to Block 4 was either invaded by hundreds of Hells Angels with chainsaws, who chewed up the forest by the roadside in a drug-induced orgy of destruction....

...or perhaps hundreds of rabid beavers finally took their grim revenge for decades of relentless encroachment on their territory....

...or... Aw, c'mon, who are we kidding?

Park staff, or their contractors, took out a contract on any trees within 30 feet of the road, ripped them out before anybody could complain or stop them, and left their ruins behind. It was vandalism sanctioned by Park administration, pure and simple.

The road now resembles an ecological war-zone.


Park axe-men took out a lot of old oak trees---and these are extremely slow-growing trees which will not return within the lifetimes of even the youngest residents of this part of the lake. These were trees that weren't even remotely a hazard to vehicles.


Actually, if the park were serious about getting rid of hazards to vehicles, they might repair the road itself, which hasn't seen any new gravel in decades and is a new white-knuckle adventure every time it rains.


What is perhaps most distressing about this damage is the utter arrogance of the Whiteshell Park administration. This is not just some garbage-truck road! People walk here for recreation! How would you like to have to look at this every day---it must be a struggle for a cottager to resist running down to Falcon Beach and throwing a dumpster full of live rats into the ranger's station.

Why was it done? Hubris? Incompetence? Simple pettiness towards cottagers?

Oh, I forgot---to keep the garbage truck safe. It all revolves around the garbage truck....

Oops! Look at this: there's the Block 4 bear-cage---gone! There is no more garbage pickup along this road. We'll leave aside the the major inconvenience this means to the residents here, many of them pensioners for whom the trip to the nearest cage now represents a real burden. But now we have to ask what we all wish was a merely rhetorical question: What were these clowns thinking of? The destruction of hundreds of trees along the Block 4 road is either an act of petty vandalism or monumental incompetence.

Which is it? Perhaps it's time to ask the people who made the decision. Perhaps it's time to ask their superiors why some of these administrator still have their jobs.

Better yet, you have an MLA---maybe he's the person to ask first. (Ron Lemieux; mininfratran@leg.gov.mb.ca; (204) 945-3723, 2979).