If Parks Canada’s Library Goes Quiet

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In a recent post, Tina Loo informed NiCHE readers that Parks Canada was ending its library services and decommissioning its library collection, and encouraged researchers to speak up. Thanks for your action on this, Tina; here’s my take.

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At the end of the last century, I was doing research at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) for a postdoc on Parks Canada’s history. Once a month or so, I’d walk across the bridge to Gatineau – in my day, kids, we called it “Hull” – to Parks Canada’s headquarters. Or, more specifically, the headquarters’ library. Or, more specifically, its free photocopier. I would wander the library’s shelves, perhaps pull down a century-old volume bearing the signature of the agency’s first director, James B. Harkin, and photocopy what I needed.

One day I walked across the bridge and the library was … gone. Much of its collection had apparently been shipped to LAC. What remained in Gatineau was elsewhere in the building and no longer available to the public. I always wondered what happened to Harkin’s books. In 2012, Parks Canada announced that it was closing the Gatineau library and four other regional ones across the country, consolidating them all into one in Cornwall.

So on reading Loo’s post, what surprised me most was that the agency had retained public-facing library services until now! (Well, I was also surprised to learn that this had included access to unpublished internal material. After all, the agency’s own website only mentions – briefly and vaguely – helping the public access LAC’s published Parks Canada holdings.)

Even as the Canadian national parks system has grown considerably this century, with twelve new parks and reserves, Parks Canada has been squeezed terribly. In 2014, I helped a group of retired Parks Canada employees called the Second Century Club donate a collection of published parks material to Western University. What I remember most about that experience was visiting the site where the collection was stored, a Parks Canada facility in an Ottawa industrial park. It had once been the national centre of the Interpretation Branch – providing costume support, for example, for 1000 costumed interpreters across the nation. By the time I visited, the 50,000 square foot building had a staff of … two. As of 2026, it seems to have been sold to a wholesaler. It now faces an Amazon Warehouse.

Parks Canada’s library service has experienced a similarly slow death and, to be honest, I find it difficult to mourn, or fight, its very last light winking out. We – scholars, parks staff, Canadians – have let this government service come to this.

And scholars will do ok, at least for now. The decline of library services this century has been counterbalanced somewhat by digital collections of internal parks material in Canadiana Héritage and of published material in ParksCanadaHistory.com, the absurdly generous pet project of American Randall J. Payne, who has been buying and borrowing and scanning and uploading Parks Canada material for years – and took the trouble to have his site licensed by the agency. (I hope readers know just how deep ParksCanadaHistory.com runs. For example, most if not all of the documents making up the photo banner to Loo’s recent post are available at the site.) When lobbying Parks Canada to restore its library services, it would be productive to also ask that it grant Payne’s request for permission to eventually migrate his website’s content to another platform, such as Internet Archive.

I am not so troubled by the loss of Parks Canada’s library services for university researchers. I am much more troubled as to what the move signals about the loss of knowledge retention and production within the agency itself.

It means, for one thing, that it will be harder for staff to retain institutional memory of the agency and of the places under their charge. They will be able to access digital collections like the rest of us, but if the collection is decommissioned, they will lose easy or outright access to at least some internal material. More importantly, the end of a commitment to maintaining a library signals the end of a commitment to amassing one – having staff continue to research and write material related to the parks’ cultural and natural past, present, and future. Stretched thin, Parks Canada now produces far fewer such reports than it did in the latter part of the last century, and it is difficult to imagine that trend improving.

But the agency needs to be producing such work. I got into writing about the history of national parks because I love the inescapable irony: having been created to be permanent, they become preserved in amber, a monument to the moment of their creation. (Banff is very much a product of the 1880s, Fundy of the 1950s, and so on.) Parks Canada has never liked to admit that, though, because it has spent its entire history trafficking in timelessness. It’s easier to convince Canadians – and yourself – that a place should always be a park if you can forget that it ever wasn’t a park. As a result, even while Parks Canada eventually generated a great deal of knowledge about their places’ histories before they were parks, they have done little to communicate how those places have changed since becoming parks, let alone because they’ve been parks.

Environmental historians – and simply the passage of time – have only just started to convince Parks Canada that it must grapple with its own history. It is more important than ever that it do so: having trafficked in timelessness for almost 150 years, Parks Canada in the future will need to be much more about change. Take Jasper National Park, which sustained a horrific wildfire in 2024. Nature will restore its forests, but they won’t be the same forests of pre-2024, let alone of the park’s 1907 creation, because Jasper’s environmental circumstances – from atmospheric CO2 concentration onward – have fundamentally transformed over time. Canadian national parks are some of the most well-documented protected places on the planet, so they offer an incomparable opportunity to track such change. Rather than be about timelessness, Parks Canada has a responsibility to Canadians and to the planet to bear witness to that change. To do so requires not just maintaining a library in some real or virtual form, but constantly contributing to one as well.

Feature Image: “National Parks Canada” logo, with beaver, from mid-20th c.
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Alan MacEachern

Professor at Western University
I am the author of Becoming Green Gables & the companion website GreenGablesDiary.ca (2024), The Summer Trade (with Edward MacDonald, 2022), & The Miramichi Fire (2020). I'm also the editor of the print/open-access Canadian History & Environment series at University of Calgary Press. I was Director of NiCHE, 2004-15. Contact me at amaceach@uwo.ca.

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