News in the Parks

A party boat in the form of a double-decker, Mississippi-style sternwheeler isn’t what comes to mind when I think of transport to Georges Island in Halifax Harbour. But it is indeed a reservation aboard the Harbour Queen that gets me there. And yet, maybe it’s the perfect conveyance to help celebrate the opening of the island to the public after a 55 year wait. While Georges was declared a National Historic Site in 1965, it wasn’t until 2020 when Parks Canada installed a new wharf on the north shore that it became accessible.

The title of Marlis Butcher's new book is intriguing — Park Bagger: Adventures in the Canadian National Parks. We've asked the Burlington, Ontario-based author where the term comes from and what led her to visit all of Canada's national parks and then transform her travel journals and photography into a book.

With so many units in the National Park System, there’s always something going on. Here’s a roundup of recent parks news as of June 25, 2021.

Parks Canada historian Meg Stanley has a succinct and evocative way of describing her job: “It’s the art of fitting a story into a space, and taking a story and expressing it in a three-dimensional way.”