There are times when I think life would be easier if I carried a chainsaw and knew how to use dynamite.
This is not because I'm a violent person. I don't harbour any Fight Club-style male empowerment fantasies.
It's just that for the second time in three years, I've learned my freedom to move around the pristine woodlands of Manitoba and northwestern Ontario has been restricted by the fact I do not earn a living cutting down trees or blasting through bare rock.
During the summer of 2006, five friends and I were planning to paddle the Bloodvein River, a celebrated ribbon of whitewater flowing through Manitoba's Atikaki Provincial Wilderness Park.
We booked a floatplane for our canoe drop. We took whitewater paddling training courses. We even rented a satellite phone, given the roadless and relatively remote nature of this particular canoe trip.
Unfortunately, only weeks before our slated departure, Manitoba Conservation closed off the entire eastern third of the province to back-country travel. An unusually dry summer created an unusual forest-fire threat, and the fire-prevention people thought it best to close the boreal forest to human beings.
But not all human beings, mind you. Just hikers and paddlers and anglers and cyclists and other people whose stated aim was simply to enjoy the wilderness.
Loggers and miners, however, were free to enter the forbidden fire zone, as any business engaged in resource extraction could still move around the restricted area.
The irony of this situation was exacerbated by the stupidity of the fire ban. Essentially, Manitoba Conservation used the broad side of a meat cleaver to swat a mosquito.
In almost every other jurisdiction in North America, back-country travel restrictions are limited to places where forest fires are actually burning, not places where they might burn. Manitoba Conservation's basic assumption -- that you can't trust a canoeist or fisherman not to spark a blaze -- amounted to paternalistic governance at its worst.
I was angry at the time, but I only grew angrier at the province after switching my canoe trip to Ontario and learning that Quetico Provincial Park -- which was actually drier than Manitoba's Atikaki -- was still welcoming paddlers as usual.
In Ontario, back-country travellers were merely banned from building open fires and entering area that were actively burning. The Ministry of Natural Resources did not see ecotourists as an evil threat.
On my way out of Quetico, our Atikokan-based floatplane operator gloated he grossed approximately $100,000 in extra fares that summer because of Manitoba's back-country travel ban. Who knows how many other tourism dollars fled the province in 2006 because of an idiotic ban that favoured resource extraction over ecotourism.
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At the time, I thought Ontario was a far more progressive jurisdiction. But my bubble burst this week when I tried to gain permission to use a restricted gravel road to launch a canoe into a small lake southeast of Kenora, home to some of the best flatwater paddling on the planet.
The answer from the Ministry of Natural Resources: A flat no, since the route is reserved for logging and mining operations. Anyone who wants to paddle, hunt or fish in the semi-pristine territory simply can not use the road.
I offered to chop down a few pines and detonate a granite cliff or two during my weekend paddle, but the woman on the other end of line didn't think I was very funny.
But who was I trying to kid? In government parlance, "conservation" of "natural resources" means protecting the land for commercial entities who make a living tearing it up.
Back here at home, are there any rules preventing the degradation of pristine areas outside national or provincial parks? Judging by the jet skis that maraud the marsh near my family cottage and the ATVs that tear up beaches and terrorize forest trails, not so much.
When a big chunk of Sandilands Provincial Forest went up in flames, presumably due to a hot exhaust pipe on an ATV, Manitoba Conservation announced it might rethink the way it deals with motorized vehicles.
It makes sense to restrict ATVs to designated trails and keep them away from beaches and other sensitive areas. Hunters tend to use these machines responsibly, but other users can be complete morons. Nobody should have the freedom to scar the landscape just for the sake of a joyride in an ATV.
Comparatively speaking, my hiking boots and my canoe paddle aren't much of a threat to anyone or anything. And there are far more tourists like me than there are people who want to come to Manitoba to destroy the place.
But we seem happier to be a redneck province, where chainsaws and blasting caps rule the day.
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
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