Park People’s Executive Director, Erika Nikolai, has been honoured with the Distinguished Individual Award from World Urban Parks—an international recognition that celebrates her leadership and the growing national movement Park People has helped build here in Canada.
Why are events in parks important? How do grants fit into Park People’s larger goals for creating change in city parks?
TD Park People Grants support local leaders to organize environmental education, sustainability or stewardship events that bring people together across Canada.
A guidance and resources to measure the impact of your park work on community health and wellbeing, integrating a social equity lens.
Learn more about green social prescribing, an evolving practice that encourages individuals to reestablish connections with nature and one another to enhance their mental, physical, and social wellbeing.
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City parks staff steward some of our most vital yet undervalued public assets: urban parks and green spaces. These areas are far more than patches of grass, they are dynamic community hubs, crucial environmental infrastructure, and essential public health resources.
The annual Canadian City Parks Report (CCPR) equips municipal park staff, community advocates, non-profits, and the public with data and stories that make the case for parks. Between 2019 and 2024, the annually released report illuminated trends, challenges, and opportunities in how we plan, manage, and experience our shared green spaces. Forty-six municipalities participated over these years, collectively representing 48% of Canada’s population.
This report synthesizes the major findings from the CCPR over these pivotal years. It serves as a curated and thematically organized index of data and stories from across the years, with comments on the trends we witnessed through that time.
1- Health Imperative: Parks as Essential Public Health Investment
One of the most consistent trends across the CCPR data is the growing use and recognition of city parks as essential public spaces, a shift dramatically accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. What were once considered amenities are now firmly recognized as critical spaces that support the mental and physical health and well-being of city residents.
2- The Funding Gap: Resources and Capacity Constraints
Despite documented increases in park use and public valuing of parks, municipalities report ongoing financial and staffing constraints that limit their capacity to maintain and enhance park systems.
3- Environmental Function: Climate Adaptation and Biodiversity
Urban parks serve important environmental functions, particularly in climate adaptation and supporting urban biodiversity, roles that have gained increased attention as climate impacts intensify. Parks are more and more understood as ‘upstream solutions’ for the environmental and economic impacts of extreme weather events.
4- Equity and Access: Addressing Systemic Barriers
Participating municipalities reported on their efforts to address equity, inclusion, and reconciliation in park planning and management, reflecting broader societal reckonings with systemic barriers to park access and enjoyment.
5- Evolving Practice: Community Engagement and Complex Operations
Park management now encompasses complex social dimensions beyond traditional maintenance, including community engagement strategies and navigation of challenging urban issues that intersect with public space.
How the park sector can meet today’s complex challenges through partnerships and collaboration.
How Addressing Conflict and Reframing Challenges as Opportunities Can Create More Equitable and Sustainable Parks.
How collaboration, mindfulness, and power-sharing in parks can help nurture and repair relationships between ourselves, our communities, and the wider natural world.
How parks can help create more equitable, resilient cities—not only as we recover from COVID-19, but as we address another looming crisis: climate change.
Trends, challenges, and leading practices in Canadian cities to inspire action, share learning, and track progress in city parks across the country.
Park People launches the first Canadian City Parks Report, highlighting park trends, challenges, and leading practices in Canadian cities.
The Canadian City Parks Report finds tight parks budgets, increasingly extreme weather events, and changing use of parks by residents are challenging cities across the country. But it also finds many cities are leading the way on solutions through an increasing focus on collaborative partnerships, proactive parks planning, and inclusive engagement practices.
In the report, we share:
Budgets tight while populations grow
Cities across Canada are experiencing budget constraints at the same time as growing populations and changing demographics create demand for more parks, amenities, and programming.Resilience must be scaled up. As instances of extreme weather increase, additional pressure is placed on park systems to absorb effects, like flooding. While cities are piloting green infrastructure in parks, there is a need to scale up and standardize these efforts. We found only 48% of cities have citywide green infrastructure strategies that includes parks.
The future is connected
Population growth and urban development is necessitating a focus on proactive parks planning and creative methods to expand and connect parks. Currently 70% cities have updated park system master plans.
Partnerships are powerful
Cities are developing non-profit partnerships and collaborations with resident groups to bring creative programming, alternative funding, and specialized knowledge to help meet new demands on city parks. We found 74% of cities currently have at least one non-profit park partnership.
Inclusion means going deeper
Cities are beginning the work of ensuring parks foster inclusion by exploring their own policies and practices, increasing accessibility, and developing programs for newcomers.
Happy reading!
Park People launches the second annual Canadian City Parks Report, highlighting the trends, challenges, and leading practices in Canadian cities to inspire action, share learning, and track progress in city parks across the country.
As we worked on stories about biodiversity, creative park development, community engagement, and homelessness, the world changed around us. But it quickly became apparent that these stories were not made irrelevant, but more urgent than ever.
This year, the report highlights new city park insights to shape the future of biodiversity, creative park development, community engagement, and approaches to homelessness in city parks.
In the report, we weave together the themes we heard from conversations with city staff with the data we gathered from our surveys of 27 municipalities and nearly 3,500 residents of Canadian cities.
How urban biodiversity improves our well-being and why that matters even more during COVID-19.
How we can both deepen the conversation about biodiversity and broaden it to include more people
Why habitat corridors are important for urban biodiversity and what cities are doing to make sure parks large and small are connected
As populations and development boom in many cities, finding space for new parks is creating challenges—and spurring innovation
How creative community groups and city support are growing connections through food in parks.
Park People launches the third annual Canadian City Parks Report on Centring Equity and Resilience: How parks can help create more equitable, resilient cities—not only as we recover from COVID-19, but as we address another looming crisis: climate change.
Park use during the pandemic spiked across the country as people flooded into outdoor spaces to seek safe ways to connect with others, experience nature, and get some exercise. Parks became more important to Canadians in their daily lives, but cities also faced new challenges with rising demands and public health considerations.
In the report, we weave together the themes we heard from conversations with city staff with the data we gathered from our surveys of 32 municipalities and nearly 3,500 residents of Canadian cities.
Dive into the pdf to read about our key insights on trends and challenges in city parks:
How climate change is impacting how we plan, design, and maintain parks.
Whether converting streets to cool green oases, designing parks that celebrate water, or re-naturalizing the mouths of entire rivers, these eight Canadian projects point a way forward to more climate resilient cities.
How using an environmental justice lens can help tackle climate change resilience and inequity in parks.
Moving more towards nature-based solutions that view parks as key pieces of green infrastructure.
How Canadian cities can harness the power of park philanthropy—and address some of its challenges
How BIPOC park leaders are centring conversations of justice and power in parks
This case study is part of the 2022 Canadian City Parks Report, showcasing Inspiring projects, people, and policies from across Canada that offer tangible solutions to the most pressing challenges facing city parks.
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As encampments grow across the country, parks departments face a unique challenge: parks have become a highly visible site of the housing crisis, but permanent housing solutions lie outside the scope of what parks can offer.
However, as convenors, land stewards, and providers of public amenities, parks departments can lean into their strengths to play a positive role in addressing houselessness—from adopting a human rights approach to service provision, to deepening relationships with encampment residents.
“Since the start of Covid-19, encampments have proliferated and increased in size,” said Dr. Alexandra Flynn, a University of British Columbia professor who has studied cities’ responses to encampments during the pandemic. “It’s put more pressure on Canadian cities to have to engage with encampments.”
In our survey of municipalities, 90% said houselessness is a challenge—one unlikely to end anytime soon.
Experts including frontline workers, people with lived experience of houselessness, and public health professionals all emphasize the urgency of planning for these realities.
“Hopefully it’ll be an ending problem, but for the foreseeable future I can still see there being people sleeping in parks. And it’s sad, but it’s a reality we have to face,” said Matthew Huxley, an advocate with lived experience.
Diana Chan McNally of Toronto Drop-In Network agreed, noting “Even when the intentions are good, there’s always the push to move unhoused people out of parks. You have to abandon that altogether. You just do, because I think the reality is that… there’s absolutely nowhere else for people to go.”
Public health experts echo this advice. Experts urge cities to plan for encampments to enhance the resiliency of parks systems, as unsheltered houselessness is projected to grow in light of climate change, including more people turning to green spaces for relief during heatwaves.
As we wrote about in the 2020 Canadian City Parks Report, displacement-oriented approaches—ranging from defensive design to encampment evictions—cause harm in a number of ways. Pushing unhoused people out of parks can force them to seek shelter in more isolated spaces where they are subject to increased safety risks, and make it more difficult for outreach workers to stay connected with people they’re supporting.
Further, in a context where Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately affected by housing insecurity—representing 28-34% of the unhoused population despite accounting for just over 4% of the Canadian population—displacing people from parks represents ongoing colonial violence and land dispossession, undermining reconciliation efforts.
While there is a widespread perception that encampments prevent others from enjoying parks, our survey of over 3,000 Canadian city residents suggest this is not the case for most.
62% of respondents who noticed encampments in local parks said they had not negatively impacted their park use, pointing to an openness among park goers to share space with unhoused neighbours.
Encampments are often managed through an operational lens, with a focus on park upkeep. While this work is important, it is insufficient to address the complex needs of people sheltering in parks.
Vancouver is deepening their approach through the creation of a new position within the Park Board called the Director of Urban Relationships. A first-of-its-kind role in Canada, the position will focus on building relationships with encampment residents and community partners.
Donnie Rosa, General Manager of the Vancouver Park Board, said that the new position sends a clear message that “this is a line of business that we have” as city park professionals. Having this dedicated staff with appropriate expertise will alleviate pressures on the parks operations team, who often are tasked with responding to houselessness issues.
The new position comes after the Park Board led a process in partnership with the City of Vancouver and BC Housing to move residents of a large encampment at Strathcona Park to indoor accommodations in spring of 2021. However, new encampments that have arisen since then highlight the ongoing need for this work.
In engaging with the Strathcona Park encampment, the Park Board’s approach was guided by four key values: harm reduction, trauma-informed response, reconciliation, and collaboration. In practice, these values looked like relying on social workers rather than police officers, having Park Board staff participate in a ceremonial fire protocol led by Indigenous Elders when entering the encampment, and being mindful of language—for instance, recognizing objects in the park as people’s belongings rather than garbage.
Staying true to these values was not easy within colonial systems, Rosa acknowledged. Meetings with encampment residents could run for several hours on some days, as people had important stories to share with parks staff.
“That’s not how we work. We go from meeting to meeting to meeting,” Rosa said, but these moments were critically important for them and their team.
“As colonizers, but also as the institutions we represented, and we needed to hear it, we needed to spend that time.”
Rosa emphasized that in order to do this work thoughtfully, it’s necessary to be flexible with structure and timelines. “We need to support each other in saying, it’s okay to take this approach, it’s okay to put somebody’s wellness ahead of a deadline.”
Many cities are beginning to adopt a human rights-based approach to houselessness, which focuses on ensuring unhoused people have access to essential amenities and services in parks. For example:
Parks staff, who are often trained in areas like recreation, natural resource management, or landscape architecture rather than social work or community development, may feel ill-equipped to respond to houselessness, Rosa noted.
Indeed, through our survey of 30 municipalities, 56% identified a lack of knowledge or training about houselessness among parks staff as a barrier. Some cities, like Gatineau and Toronto, mentioned recent initiatives to train parks staff in understanding houselessness.
However, Rosa encourages parks staff to recognize the strengths that they do bring: “we’re community developers, we’re community connectors, and we need to use that in this setting to bring people together, create space for that dialogue.”
Fostering a culture of humility, dialogue, and collective learning has been crucial for the Vancouver Park Board in upholding these guiding values. “I learned more … through this process than I could ever have learned going to any sort of course or training,” Rosa said. “Just living those values and making mistakes. And then holding those mistakes up and saying, how can we be better?”
One of the Park Board’s missteps, Rosa noted, is that after campers moved out of Strathcona Park, staff cleared the remaining tents and belongings, thinking they were abandoned. In retrospect, Rosa wishes they had allowed more time for the process to consult with campers and ensure they were only removing items campers were ready to part with.
Taking the opportunity to involve campers in the park remediation process through a peer employment model was another learning for next time. Former encampment residents wanted to be a part of healing the park after their departure, Rosa noted.
A recent York University report highlights that cities have two sets of powers to address encampments: formal legal powers, like bylaws, and soft powers, like city messaging that shapes how the public thinks about encampments.
Parks departments are well positioned to leverage these soft powers to reframe the narrative on encampments. This work is especially important given that 70% of cities reported managing public complaints as a challenge they encounter in responding to houselessness. By cultivating parks as places of public education, cities can not only increase awareness and comfort around sharing space, but also help curb public complaints and alleviate the burden they place on parks staff.
In Gatineau, for example, the city’s recent houselessness action plan identifies “Improving the way we share space and facilitating cohabitation in public space” as a key area of focus. Their efforts so far have included forming neighbourhood-based ‘cohabitation committees’ that work with local stakeholders including social service organizations, residents, and businesses to promote public education on issues related to houselessness.
“What we do on the cohabitation committee is destigmatization,” said Julie Sénéchal, Community Development Coordinator in the Recreation, Sports and Community Development Department at the City of Gatineau. This focus came from unhoused people who participate in the committee, who identified “the issue of prejudice and how they experience it” as an important priority, Sénéchal said.
The first committee was formed in the Île de Hull neighbourhood where a green space co-managed by the National Capital Commission, ministère des Transports du Québec, and City of Gatineau is used as a campsite for unhoused residents. A high school adjacent to the green space was one of the key partners on the committee. The students surveyed their peers to understand their questions and concerns about houselessness. Based on the students’ input, the cohabitation committee is creating informative video clips to educate neighbours to increase their comfort in sharing space.
Public space programs are also helping to support inclusion. The city hosts clean-up activities in partnership with community organizations and residents of the campsite. They are also planning an urban agriculture work program that would hire unhoused people as gardeners in partnership with a local service organization.
The plan is still in its early stages of implementation, and Sénéchal noted that meaningful, ongoing engagement with unhoused communities will be crucial to its success.
“You have to meet people where they are, that’s my working method,” Sénéchal said. She is optimistic that the plan will help to lay the groundwork for stronger collaboration with unhoused communities, noting that it “allows [the city] to put in place tools that will promote real participation and to include people experiencing houselessness in the planning process.”
“[Unhoused people] know the city from a different perspective than us,” Sénéchal said. “[They] have things to say and we want to be sure to hear them.”
In Montreal, the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough is moving in a similar direction with its new plan for social cohabitation and sharing of public space*. The plan includes an accompanying information tool that outlines realities of houselessness and encourages residents to form friendly relationships with their unhoused neighbours by saying hello or sharing a coffee.
Community-led programs can also help reshape public perspective. In Montreal’s Martin-Luther-King Park, community organization Exeko hosted a photo expo* featuring portraits of unhoused residents to help spark conversation among park goers.
Park programs can be especially helpful in addressing controversial issues related to encampments. Initiatives like a stigma reduction event hosted in honour of International Overdose Awareness Day in Thunder Bay’s Kaministiquia River Heritage Park can help community members develop a more compassionate outlook on the issue of discarded needles in parks, for example.
Programs like these offer inspiration in moving toward a future where parks, and parks departments, are seen as part of the solution to houselessness. For Donnie Rosa, the challenge moving forward is to think about “How do we make this [park] something that is enjoyable and not just a respite? How can we make your stay, your time, your life here one that works for you the best way possible?” of people who care very deeply and passionately about these issues.” When communities and cities commit to working together better, it’s a powerful pairing for parks.
Park People launches the fourth annual Canadian City Parks Report on Nurturing Relationships & Reciprocity: How collaboration, mindfulness, and power-sharing in parks can help nurture and repair relationships between ourselves, our communities, and the wider natural world.
This year’s report begins to move beyond the impacts of the pandemic to explore how the lessons we’ve learned over the last two years can point the way toward more equitable and creative ways of planning, designing, and programming parks.
In the report, we weave together the themes we heard from conversations with city staff with the data we gathered from our surveys of 30 municipalities and over 3,000 residents of Canadian cities.
How leaders from across the country are using different methods to promote a sense of connection to nature by meeting people where they’re at
How we can foster a greater sense of connection to nature through awareness, reciprocity, and gratitude—and why that matters.
How the pandemic has impacted park budgets and sparked a heightened focus on the importance of equity-led investment.
How park engagement can lay the foundation for relationships that last well beyond the end of a consultation period
How investing in ongoing trust-building beyond one-off consultations can help to repair relationships, redistribute power, and reimagine parks.
The unique opportunity of parks departments to play a positive role in addressing houselessness
Examining Prairie cities’ efforts to decolonize park spaces and honour the Indigenous histories of the land they are built upon
How collaborative funding approaches, and investment from other levels of government, are opening up new ways to support parks.
Abundance, the theme of Park People’s 2022 Conference, is an invitation to radically reimagine city parks. For three days, September 21-23, the virtual event will focus our collective attention on the transformational park work charting a new path forward in cities.
Community park groups, park non-profits and park professionals are recognizing parks as essential urban infrastructure and building new approaches to collaboration, community engagement and nature connections. The Park People Conference is an invitation to engage with the incredible people, places and projects that manifest abundance in our city parks.
We’ve identified 4 key pathways to generating abundance in parks: decolonizing practices and narratives, engaging in power sharing, recognizing parks as sites of healing and justice, and cultivating human/nature connections.
Indigenous leaders and allies are calling for settlers to reckon with colonialism and decentre settler approaches in park work. We’re hosting numerous sessions during the Park People Conference that feature people and organizations that are leading the movement to collectively decolonize Canada’s city parks.
How can municipalities, community groups, non-profits and residents meaningfully work together to create spaces that address community needs in parks? The Park People Conference features several sessions that approach collaboration as an act of power-sharing where the process is just as important as the project itself.
What would parks look like if we saw everyone as equally worthy of having their needs met in shared spaces? Inclusion and access look much different from the perspective of those who are too often viewed as outsiders. But, their experience in parks tells us much about our communities, our cities and ourselves.
Several Park People Conference presenters demonstrate how centring nature builds both community and ecological resilience.
Check out the whole agenda, and 100+ speakers bringing together the incredible people, places and projects that manifest abundance in city parks.
See you at the Park People Conference!
This case study is part of the 2020 Canadian City Parks Report, showcasing inspiring projects, people, and policies from across Canada that offer tangible solutions to the most pressing challenges facing city parks.
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While small-scale biodiversity projects are important, there’s no question that when it comes to nature, size matters: larger spaces allow for a greater diversity of plants that in turn support a greater diversity and number of species. They also provide critical ecological services, such as cleaning the air, managing stormwater, and mitigating urban heat—all of which only become more important as climate change increases environmental stress.
Cities use different policy and planning levers to protect sensitive urban ecosystems or important habitat links, often designating them as Environmentally Sensitive/Significant Areas. For example, Toronto expanded its ESA’s by 68 areas, Montreal instituted an Ecosystem Management Program for its large parks, and Fredericton released two new large park management plans.
However, with 19% of cities reporting citywide biodiversity strategies in place, and a further 52% who have biodiversity objectives embedded in other environmental plans, there’s a need for more holistic citywide planning that examines key species, develops education and stewardship plans, and identifies habitat corridors.
It’s not enough to have habitat patches—even large ones—if they are isolated.
Whether it’s an urban landscape or a pristine natural area, you need connected networks for ecosystems to function properly, said Pamela Zevit, Surrey’s Biodiversity Conservation Planner.
Connectivity ensures wildlife are not confined to what Zevit called “habitat islands,” which can easily become degraded by pollution, disease, or disturbance, leaving wildlife with nowhere else to go.
This is why Surrey has spent so much energy planning what it calls its green infrastructure network: a series of cross-city habitat corridors connecting larger habitat hubs. While important at the city scale, planning must also connect within regional networks—after all, animals don’t stop at city borders—so Surrey has made sure their network matches up with the natural systems of neighbouring cities.
“Surrey has a very strong desire to be a leader,” Zevit said. “So we made this effort early on to connect a lot of the dots and we’ll be able to fit into whatever happens over time at the regional level.”
Within its own borders, the city is also working towards approving its first biodiversity design guidelines. The guidelines will cover not just natural areas but places in what Zevit referred to as the “urban matrix”—all those other land uses outside of parks and natural areas that have an impact on biodiversity.
“The [guidelines] are this long overdue, comprehensive approach to linking all the existing design guidelines and construction documents and everything that we have around us and saying how do we integrate biodiversity objectives into everything that the city does,” said Zevit.
Calgary is another city that has been working hard at restoring natural spaces and ensuring connectivity through a biodiversity strategy the city approved in 2015.
Over the past two years, the city has identified and evaluated the components of its ecological network so it could prioritize restoration and enhancement projects. It has even produced a guide on how to naturalize existing parks.
Until this evaluative work was underway, Calgary didn’t have “a mechanism to set citywide priorities for biodiversity conservation or habitat restoration,” with actions largely done as needed over time, said the city’s Landscape Analysis Supervisor, Vanessa Carney. Like many Canadian cities, she said, urban development happened neighbourhood by neighbourhood, meaning environmental planning has occurred largely at the local scale, rather than comprehensively across the city or region.
“While this approach helps to conserve highly biodiverse and landscape diverse parcels of land as public, we’ve been missing that ecological backbone that allows us to look at how neighbourhood development contributes or constrains citywide and regional connectivity,” Carney said.
To perform its evaluation, the city examined the permeability of landscapes for wildlife movement, the size of habitat areas and their adjacent land uses, and how integral the space was to the functioning of the overall ecological network.
Despite the citywide view, Carney said that both small and large parks play a role in connectivity. The larger parks serve as “biodiversity reservoirs,” while smaller parks—whether natural or manicured—provide habitat for smaller species, serve as stepping stone habitats, and allow people to connect with nature in their everyday lives.
At this smaller scale, cities can turn to development policies to preserve and enhance connectivity. For example, through its Greenway Amenity Zoning, Langley Township ensures every community includes green corridors and buffers to support biodiversity and Red Deer creates Ecological Profiles for new subdivisions to ensure natural features are protected.
Riparian areas (habitat along waterways) are particularly rich areas for biodiversity and can help create important habitat connections. They are also important for climate change mitigation as flood protection from increased extreme weather damage.
Surrey’s Nicomekl River Park project will restore and enhance unique riverfront ecological zones into a 3km linear park, aiming to combine nature with art, heritage, recreation, and social space. The city has released a heritage plan and public art strategy, along with a management plan that highlights opportunities for recognition of Indigenous history, practices, and plants through programming, signage, and naming.
Led by Waterfront Toronto, Toronto is also undertaking a massive restoration project in naturalizing the mouth of the Don River, which flows into Lake Ontario. The project, which also includes creating biodiverse “park streets” as part of new neighbourhood development in the area, will create flood protection and restore lost landscapes.
At a smaller-scale, Vancouver is moving ahead with daylighting a creek through Tatlow and Volunteer Parks, restoring a waterway into English Bay. The creek is one of many that have been buried throughout Vancouver’s development—something many cities did as part of urbanization.
The project acts on priorities in Vancouver’s new parks master plan, VanPlay, for restoring wild spaces and increasing connectivity. Restoring the creek to aboveground will create new aquatic habitat, manage stormwater, improve water quality, and create habitat for birds and pollinators.
The often large swathes of mowed grass in hydro corridors that cut for kilometres through cities are also increasingly being seen as areas ripe for habitat connections.
Take The Meadoway, a project of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority in partnership with the City of Toronto, Hydro One, and philanthropic funder The W. Garfield Weston Foundation.
Already partly constructed, the plan will naturalize a 16km hydro corridor across Scarborough connecting two large natural areas on either side: Rouge National Urban Park and the Lower Don Ravine. When finished, The Meadoway will feature hundreds of acres of meadow habitat with restored wetland areas, a connected trail, and social gathering spaces. An online visualization toolkit showcases the potential of the project, which is expected to be completed by 2024.
Montreal has also announced plans for a biodiversity corridor in a Saint-Laurent borough hydro corridor. “Climate change issues are requiring us to act quickly with innovative solutions,” said the borough’s mayor, Alan DeSousa, calling the project a “laboratory” from which others can learn. Ultimately constructed on 450 hectares of land, the project will include native habitat, trails, and green roofs installed on neighbouring buildings.
Here’s what other Canadian cities are doing to create and enhance large nature parks and increase habitat connectivity:
In the lead-up to the Park People Conference, taking place virtually September 21-23, 2022, Park People met with Lewis Cardinal, a communicator and educator, who has dedicated his life’s work to creating and maintaining connections and relationships that cross cultural divides. Lewis is Woodland Cree from the Sucker Creek Cree First Nation in northern Alberta, Canada. His consulting company, Cardinal Strategic Communications, specializes in Indigenous education, communications, and project development. Currently, Lewis is Project Manager for “kihciy askiy–Sacred Land” in the City of Edmonton, Canada’s first urban Indigenous ceremony grounds.
Lewis Cardinal: Listen, building relationships takes time. Nobody’s done a project like this before so there’s no blueprint. The City of Edmonton didn’t have policies and processes to do something like this. We had to make these things up as we went along and, naturally, that slowed things down.
I mean, the city’s not in the habit of giving land back to Indigenous people.
It took a lot of community consultation to make kihciy askiy happen– with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. The elders made it very clear, that we have to move forward in a good way, and take the time to build the relationships that need to be built.
We said, let’s just keep moving forward with this and try to be as patient as we can because the process is the product. If we want this to be a sacred site that is built on love, trust, respect, and understanding, that’s what we need to embody in the process.
LC: The city and community had to approach learning from each other with an open heart and an open mind. We start with ceremony, respecting our relationship with the city, and respecting the individuals we are working with because, at the end of the day, we’re all just human beings trying to do something to benefit people in our community.
We had to bring the City into how we do things and we had the opportunity to work with the City to learn how they do things too.
To do that you each need to have a clear vision of what you’re trying to build together. From there you share that vision with colleagues, friends, and partners. Then they each start to see themselves in that vision, that story. It is not just our vision, as Indigenous people. It’s a shared vision.
Working in a good way is also about being respectful, even during disagreements. Our Indigenous tradition teaches us that it’s all about relationships, and these relationships are critical to moving anything forward.
I mean, we’re all human beings, right? We lose patience. But when things start going sideways and you’re starting to feel the tension, you have to slip back into the ceremony to bring yourself back into a sense of balance so you can continue to move forward in a good way.
One thing I’ve learned from this process is that you really can’t drag anybody along to where you want to take them. They have to come willingly. And that’s why the vision needs to be shared so everyone involved sees themselves in that story.
LC: Yes, that’s right. We could have pulled all kinds of political cards and tried to force the City to do what we wanted to. But, kihciy askiy would have taken longer than 16 years or it may not have happened at all.
We continuously remind each other that we are in a good relationship, and it becomes almost like a mantra to continually remind us why we’re doing this.
Picture a young man standing with his mom and his little sister at a bus stop in Edmonton with a towel underneath his arm. Somebody asks that young man: “Where are you going swimming?” He responds: “I’m not going swimming. I’m going to a sweat lodge. I want my mom and my sister to see it too.”
When you share that kind of vision, it shakes loose some of the rigidity we may have built up. It cuts through the titles that we have as individuals, and it puts it into the heart of the human being that you’re working with. And I think that’s what works because it’s consistent, it’s like ceremony.
Consensus is a ceremony of communication. Consensus is the sacred process of honouring each person’s vision so that they can connect themselves to an idea in their own way.
When communication fails it creates shadows. Those shadows create doubt and confusion. Then, the process becomes a playground for individuals who might want to take advantage of that communication breakdown. So being consistent in speaking together and building a shared vision is very important.
LC: We always begin with ceremony, prayer, and mindfulness, because they take us back to the essence of what it is that we’re trying to do. Creating consensus can be unnerving at the beginning because people aren’t used to working with it, and they may stumble and fall. But once you get used to it, things move really quickly. Suddenly, everybody’s agreeing to the same vision.
We always make sure to celebrate and honor our partners. Whenever I get a chance to talk to the media or groups of people, I always say what a wonderful relationship we have with the city and how honoured we are to work with the City of Edmonton. This is an act of reconciliation.
By honouring your partners you’re reinforcing the relationship and strengthening it.
Every relationship has its dark side. That is our flaw as human beings –we always tend to muddle things up more than they need to be. We can become controlling and destructive. But the opposite is also true. We can become very creative and very loving and very open and we can make positive changes for a lot of people. So working within this context of consensus and relationship building is foundational.
LC: Over the last 18 years we’ve had the Edmonton Urban Aboriginal Accord, the Edmonton Declaration and the new Indigenous framework. This has helped the city rethink how it works with other communities, beyond Indigenous communities. It’s created a freshness of possibility.
In Cree tradition, we have the word tatawâw, which means you are welcome. It expresses openness to embracing all the people and communities who make Edmonton their home. It says “there is room for you here.”
Here are some resources to help you learn more about Lewis Cardinal and his work:
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Park People, Canada’s national city parks advocacy organization, is extremely concerned that efforts to scrap the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation will take away from much-needed work to meet the park needs of the city’s communities.
“There are major challenges facing our parks,” said Masheed Salehomoum, Park People’s Manager, Vancouver.
“Maintenance budgets are falling behind, new park development is challenged to keep up with growth, changes in park use and changes in our climate are putting severe strain on our park system. Blowing up the century-old structure of how we deliver vital park services will result in a complex, lengthy and ultimately distracting process.”
Masheed Salehomoum
A debate was opened during the recent election on the future of the Park Board, but Mayor Sim firmly closed the door on that debate and committed to keeping the Board. Now, there is an effort for the Council to vote on this issue with only one week’s notice. Restructuring and amalgamating park services in other Canadian cities has resulted in many years of disruption and confusion, taking a toll on park staff who are already pressed to deliver services. Park People believes the primary focus should remain to safeguard Vancouver’s parks and to ensure they remain accessible, well-maintained, and vibrant spaces for all.
The Park Board is working on some Canadian-leading initiatives, from park equity efforts in VanPlay to ongoing decolonization work through initiatives like the Local Food Systems Action Plan. Let’s not lose momentum for that important work in pursuing better parks and stronger communities. Let’s prioritize the needs of the people over structural changes and ensure that Vancouver’s parks continue to thrive, providing solace and joy to all who enjoy them.