Linking Culture and the Environment

98 Tourism, Sustainability and the Social Milieux
and management of tourism was a requirement of their support for any
expansion. Although they were not able to agree on the appropriate means
to effect management, they did prefer local forms over corporate and (senior)
government varieties. When one compares their ideas and concerns with
our adopted view of sustainability, local people in the region seem to be
addressing tourism from a sustainable point of view. Their concerns centre
on ecological, social and even economic dimensions of sustainability. Left to
themselves, local people may well be able to implement a sustainable form
of tourism in the region.
Neither the local people nor the region will be left to themselves, nor
should they be. Recall that the Charter on Sustainable Tourism emphasized
that not only local people, but also governments should cooperate to achieve
sustainability. In Ontario at present, there are indications that the provincial
government does not take sustainability seriously as a public policy goal.
Consider the evidence:
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The Ministry of Natural Resources was taken to court by a coalition of
environmental groups over its sustainable forestry plans for the Temagami
region of north-eastern Ontario and was judged to be at fault because
it had not included, as required, measurable indicators of sustainability
(Algonquin Wildlands League et al., 1996).
The Ontario government, as part of its campaign to reduce red tape and
to open Ontario to business development, has weakened or eliminated
environmental laws and regulations since 1995 (Canadian Environmental
Law Association, 1998a).
The Ontario government has pared government employment drastically
since 1995, including a reduction of 2500 jobs in the Ministry of Natural
Resources (Canadian Environmental Law Association, 1998b).
Elsewhere, Payne et al., (1999), argued that these policy directions will defeat
sustainability even though the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR)
has recently undertaken a large-scale land-use planning exercise which aims
to reconcile conflicting land uses such as forestry, mining (remote) tourism
and protected areas in northern Ontario within a sustainability framework
(Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, 1997; National Round Table on the
Environment and the Economy, 2007). While the land-use planning exercise
was completed (in 1999), the government’s actions to weaken the regulatory
regime and to reduce government employment have emasculated the OMNR’s
capability to implement such wide-ranging land-use plans. What is more, the
conclusion of the Lands for Life process saw the Ontario government sit down
with both the forest industry and environmentalists to hammer out a deal for
allocating forest resources and new parks and conservation reserves. Local
communities, both native and non-native, were cut out of these discussions.
Without the provincial government’s active and effective participation as an
‘honest broker’, achieving sustainability in any sector (e.g. forestry, tourism)
or in any region in northern Ontario will continue to be extremely difficult.
Despite this pessimistic picture, recent developments in the region show
that environmental protection efforts, at least, are moving forward. The