Clear Lake boat ban prompted by legal threat: Parks Canada

WASAGAMING — A legal threat convinced Parks Canada that its promise to reintroduce motorized boats on Clear Lake this season would not be viable, a Parks Canada spokesperson told a crowd of about 600 people at a town hall Tuesday night in Wasagaming.

Andrew Campbell, senior vice-president of operations for Parks Canada, told the crowd that the agency found out with a two-week window before the May long weekend that it was going to face a judicial review for the planned “one-boat, one-lake” policy on the lake.

The review would have caused the plan to be paused, he said, and so there would have been no boats on the lake “either way,” whether Parks Canada instituted a ban or the judicial review was filed.

“We made decisions based on, would the one-boat, one-lake (policy) be able to survive a judicial review?” he said.

Campbell did not identify the party that made the legal threat.

Parks Canada announced at the beginning of the May long weekend that it would ban motorized boats from the lake. It came as a reversal to the agency’s decision in January, when it officially told the public that boats would be allowed on the water again.

At the time, the agency said the reversal was intended to curb the spread of zebra mussels in the lake.

Campbell said Tuesday that the federal election disrupted consultations, which resumed once the election was over.

“We continued to do our constitutional obligation to consult.”

Also during the town hall, a scientist told the packed crowd that zebra mussels are going to spread through Clear Lake regardless of whether boats are banned from the park.

Fisheries biologist Mark Lowdon, owner of owner of AAE Tech Services Inc., was contracted by the advocacy group Fairness for Clear Lake to study the spread of zebra mussels.

“Ecologically, those mussels are still going to move around the lake with or without boats,” said Lowdon, who has also been hired by Manitoba Hydro to study zebra-mussel spread. “Boats or no boats, my guess is you’re going to see zebra mussels all through” the lake next year, he said.

“Once you’re within a lake, the wind current, the wave action, that’ll be the dominant force and that’s essentially going to move it around,” he said. “The driving force is definitely wind and wave action.”

He said boats are a big factor in introducing zebra mussels to a body of water, but not for speeding the spread once they are there.

In fact, he said, it was “probably better” to have boats on Clear Lake. Under a one-boat, one-lake policy, he said, having boats on the lake could work to prevent boaters from spreading the zebra mussels into other water bodies in the province.

Fairness for Clear Lake hosted the town hall to provide an update on what the organization had done so far with more than $115,000 it has crowdfunded.

Trevor Boquist, a spokesperson for the group, said about $35,000 has been spent on a legal filing asking for a review of Parks Canada’s boat ban, as well as public relations and contracting Lowdon.

Speaking to the crowd, Riding Mountain Conservative MP Dan Mazier reiterated calls to replace Parks Canada leadership in the area, saying the agency had stopped serving the people but instead had become a “fortress.”

Mazier encouraged everyone to sign a petition to reverse the boat ban and go back to a “one-boat, one-lake” policy.

Provincial Municipal and Northern Relations Minister Glen Simard (Brandon East) said governments and communities “need to be at the table together.”

He emphasized that the boat ban this May caught everyone, including himself, by surprise. He said that was not the way policies should be rolled out.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com