Marijuana found in Gatineau Park

[Cosmic ChrisC]

So a Chelsea man found marijuana in Gatineau Park...and he didn't keep it secret. Hmmm...now who's lacking brain cells?! Read below...

Chelsea man finds marijuana in Gatineau Park

NCC's failure to snuff it out 'defiles' memory of former landowner Sparks

Dave Rogers

The Ottawa Citizen

August 12, 2004

CREDIT: Jean Levac, The Ottawa Citizen

Jean-Paul Murray wants the NCC, as the Gatineau Park operator, to put an end to marijuana cultivation that's taking place near the visitor centre at Chelsea.

The National Capital Commission is "defiling the memory of the father of Gatineau Park" by failing to stop marijuana cultivation in the heart of the region near a road the prime minister takes to his Harrington Lake residence, a park advocate says.

Chelsea resident Jean-Paul Murray, a Senate speech-writer, said he stumbled on about 60 marijuana plants last week during a walk near Chelsea Creek off the north loop of the Gatineau Parkway.

The plants are near a parking lot up the creek from the Gatineau Park Visitor Centre and close to Meech Lake Road, used by Prime Minister Paul Martin and thousands of others.

Mr. Murray said the plants are in a valley once owned by Roderick Percy Sparks, a man he said played a far more influential role in founding Gatineau Park than prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who is still more widely regarded as the park's founder.

Mr. Murray complained to NCC officials on Saturday after he found the marijuana, bags of fertilizer, watering cans and empty bags of a soil mixture for starting seedlings. The carefully tended plants were still there yesterday.

NCC spokeswoman Cath-erine Fortin said park conservation officers searched twice for the two marijuana patches, but were not able to find them.

Ms. Fortin said NCC officials won't report the grow operation to police until they locate the plants.

Mr. Sparks dedicated 25 years of his life to the creation of a national park in the Gatineau Hills and for 10 years was chairman of the Federal Woodlands Preservation League, a lobby group that encouraged the first government purchase toward forming Gatineau Park.

During the 1930s, Mr. Sparks and other members of the league argued there should be a national park in the Gatineau Hills.

They said the widespread cutting of trees for firewood endangered the area's scenic beauty. The government created Gatineau Park in 1938, but it is not a national park and has no legal protection as a park.

Mr. Sparks wrote the master plan for development of the park in 1952. The plan recommended that all private property in the area, including his home, be expropriated.

Mr. Sparks' vacant house on Meech Lake Road in the park burned under mysterious circumstances in 2001, two months after Mr. Murray, the former managing editor of the federalist Cite libre magazine, began asking questions about its owner.

There was no electricity or combustible material -- other than the building itself -- to create a fire risk, nor was there evidence of fire starting in the nearby woods.

No cause for the fire was ever made public. The police did not release a report and the report from the fire authorities was almost a blank. There was no cause, no suspect and little investigation.

The NCC demolished the burned remains of the Sparks house after the fire, Mr. Murray said.

Percy Sparks was unpopular with federal Liberals because he helped to bring down the Mackenzie King government and in 1926 advocated expropriation of private property within the park.

"The way I see it is Percy Sparks made a lot of enemies by denouncing rum runners in the 1920s," Mr. Murray said. "I think this is almost a repetition of history. There are people defiling the memory of Percy Sparks by doing illegal things around his place.

"Percy Sparks was an outstanding Canadian and a role model for future generations. I think this kind of neglect is not respecting his memory or his legacy which is Gatineau Park."

The NCC has hired a pair of Outaouais historians to study the origins of Gatineau Park after it received information that contradicts the popular notion that Mackenzie King was the father of the park.

The $23,000 historical study of the park's origins by Michel Filion and Serge Gagnon, two Universite du Quebec en Outaouais professors, is to be released this fall.