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Parks Canada has been working on the submission for more than two years, since the Canadian government first suggested the Rideau Canal be declared a World Heritage Site. And if you think all the documentation in the casket is overkill, an earnest attempt at going-ridiculously-over-the-top with effort, it’s not. The guidelines from the United Nations, to apply for world heritage status, are more than 150 pages.
“I was amazed at how much detail they wanted,” says Ms. Buell, who became project manager for the submission in 2004. “Even defining what the Rideau Canal was, to the standards set by the UN, it was tricky some days.”
To get the job done, the former history student immersed herself for more than two years in everything about the Rideau Canal—its history, design, the 47 locks and 25 lock stations, the people working there, the people who used to work there. She read books, looked at maps and travelled the 202-kilometre length of the canal, from Ottawa to Kingston, more times than she can easily recall.
Along the way, she kept poring over the guidelines. She saw you could submit under various categories, using different criteria. A World Heritage Site could be declared of “universal importance” for cultural, scientific or historical reasons, or a combination of the three.
To prove your assertion—this place is important to the world—you needed to meet detailed criteria.
In time, Ms. Buell became convinced, as did the government, that the Rideau Canal should be submitted under the cultural category (most World Heritage Sites are in this category). The Canadian government defends the choice by claiming the canal meets three of the mandated criteria.
One: “The Rideau Canal is an outstanding example of a technological ensemble, which illustrates a significant stage in human history.”
Two: “The Rideau Canal exhibits an important interchange of human values over a span of time with a cultural area of the world, on developments in technology.”
The third criteria is actually the first, the one that leads off the submission, an early sentence in the thousands of pages that have been sent to Paris, and an argument Ms. Buell has a special fondness for these days, after all her research.
“Imagine,” she says, “coming here at the start of the 19th century, and out of sheer wilderness, for the most part, you build a 200-kilometre canal system. Imagine standing at Entrance Valley, looking up at the cliffs, knowing you had to do that.
“It never should have worked. But John By pulled it off, and he did it by designing a slack-water canal, something that had never been built before in Europe. He used the rivers, in other words. He looked around him, saw he was in a new world, and instead of digging his way to Kingston, he used the water that was all around him.
“It was brilliant. We are submitting the Rideau Canal under the criteria that it is a masterpiece of human creative genius.”
Unless you have a boat, to reach Entrance Valley you need to take a path behind the Chateau Laurier. On most days, even during the height of summer, there are few people on the path, even though it is quite beautiful, with overhanging hardwood trees and a spectacular vista onto the river.
The path twists and turns as it descends to the river. To the right are the eight locks that begin the Rideau Canal: eight sections of water rising as a terraced stream to Wellington Street. To the far right, on the other side of the locks, there is a Celtic cross, almost hidden in the shadows of a maple. Were you to cut off the path and stand before the cross, you would see it is engraved “In memory of 1,000 workers and their families who died building this canal 1826- 1832.”
The path continues to snake toward the river, following the contours of a small valley cut out of the cliffs nearly 175 years ago. The deaths would have started here, right along the shores of the Ottawa River, although the true slaughter would come further south, near the villages of Newboro and Westport. Strange how many times you can visit those villages, so peaceful in the summer, and never think of that.
Finally—and if you have walked this far you have gone farther than most—you come to a small bay in the river, Sleigh Bay as it used to be called. It was here, on Sept. 26, 1826, that the city of Ottawa began.
The history of what happened on that date, on this spot, is part of the Canadian government’s submission to the United Nations; part of the reason the UN is being asked to declare the Rideau Canal a World Heritage Site.
It was here, Ms. Buell will argue to the inspection team when it arrives, that something took place a long time ago, something important to people in the world today. Here that a story of human courage and perseverance began to play out, a story “universal” in its narrative, that says something about all of us. Here, for the first time, a river was created not by God, but by man.
The price for that was extreme. The deaths of a thousand men. The disgrace of the man who led them. Perhaps it was hubris, taking its toll in secret, for by what mockery of the gods would you attempt such a thing?
What was left behind, though, after this grand overreaching, is a marvel to this day—a river built from pick, shovel and a high point of land. A testimony, we will argue to the United Nations, to “human creative genius.”
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I have been tracking the progression of the Rideau Canal as a possible World Heritage Site for two years, ever since the Canadian government first included it on a shortlist of possible sites.
Back then, the canal was up against 10 other sites in Canada, in the race to be the first chosen for formal submission to the United Nations. This was the first Tentative List for World Heritage Sites the government had drawn up in 24 years (there are already 13 sites in the country) and the competition to be first included Grand Pre in Nova Scotia; Red Bay in Newfoundland; and the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon.
When the canal was selected, it was a source of pride for many people in Eastern Ontario, although even those spearheading the campaign to have the Rideau Canal declared a site of world importance were a little taken aback.
“When I first started this, I’ll admit I wondered about it from time to time,” says Ms. Buell. “Yes, the canal is beautiful, and historically significant for the area, but is it important to the world? I mean, it’s not Quebec City. It’s not Louisbourg. Was it really the sort of place the world should notice?”
Her eventual answer to that question would be yes, an unequivocal yes, although the UN inspectors will be asking pretty much the same thing when they arrive. To find their answer, they will tour the Rideau Canal, from Ottawa to Kingston. They will then return to Paris, where they will mull over their decision for the winter, then make an announcement next year.
I have become fascinated with the process. How do you determine a thing like “human creative genius?”
What do you have to see, and hear, before you become convinced a place is of “outstanding universal value?” The Pyramids and the Acropolis (both World Heritage Sites) would seem to be obvious, but how do you measure everything after that?
Earlier this month, I went back to Entrance Valley, not by taking the path that descends from the Chateau Laurier, but by putting a small boat I had borrowed onto a trailer and driving to the Hull Marina, where I put it into the water and taxied across the river, to where the wooden gates of Entrance Valley were waiting.
Stored in the bow of the boat were a tent, sleeping bag, rain gear and enough steno pads to write a full and proper UN report. I would set out eight weeks before the UN inspection team arrived, and travel the waterway, asking the same questions they will ask. Is this a place of universal importance? Is it a testimony to human creative genius?
I had no idea how to answer those questions, but imagined the inspection team would have the same struggle. Somewhere on the water, or in the history of the Rideau Canal, I was hoping the answers would come to us.
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Entrance Valley, Sept. 26, 1826
The men gathered beneath the cliffs, a strong wind blowing across the river from the northwest. Most had arrived in Wrightville the day before, coming from various points in the colony. In the small lumbering village on the north shore of the Ottawa River, they had spent the night, then taken a ferry to this small bay on the river.
One of the men gathered on the shore that morning was the Governor-in-Chief of British North America, the ninth Earl of Dalhousie, who had come upriver from Quebec with an entourage of eight, including his wife and her maid. Next to him were Col. Durnford, the Commanding Engineer in the Canadas, two captains from the Royal Navy, a commissaries general, a footman for the Earl, and a man just returned to the colony, recently remustered into the Royal Engineers.
Six months earlier, John By had been retired and living on his country estate in Sussex, England, a 20-year military career under his belt and two young children running through his gardens. He had started a family late in life—his first wife had died of cholera—and was looking forward to retirement. The only books the veteran of the Napoleonic Wars read anymore were on farming. The only guests at his dinner table were his wife and two young daughters.
Then came the letter, telling him to report back for active duty, and to sail with all haste to the Canadas. He arrived in Quebec City—where he had been posted for eight years—on May 30, 1826. His retirement had lasted less than four years.
In front of By that morning was a cliff of pre-Cambrian rock that soared 25 metres into the air. One hundred metres upriver along the Ottawa were the Chaudiere Falls. Less than a league downriver were the Rideau Falls. The sound of water was almost deafening that morning. It surrounded him.
The day before, he had gone to the top of the cliffs (he had arrived in Wrightville before the Earl) and surveyed the land. The Rideau River was impassable, he saw, a series of rapids that got faster the closer the river came to the falls. The bush around the river was equally impassable, so dense you could not even slip between the trees. Where the trees started to thin, there was a great swamp. It was not a pleasant survey.
Now, he stood below the land he had surveyed, and knew the men were waiting for him to speak. This was going to be his project—the largest construction project every undertaken by the British government—and to officially begin he was the one who needed to make a decision.
What would follow after that decision, there was no way of knowing. That the toil of six years would end in disgrace; that the high land they sought to the south would become a killing field; that on these cliffs would one day rise the seat of government for a new country; none of that could be known.
All that was to come. On that day, the men simply needed a place to start the story.
“Here,” Lt.-Col. John By eventually said, pointing at the cliffs in front of him.
“We’ll begin here.”
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UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Canada
The World Heritage List includes 820 properties; 13 of them are in Canada.
– L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site (1978)
– Nahanni National Park (1978)
– Dinosaur Provincial Park (1979)
– Kluane/Wrangell-St Elias/Glacier Bay/Tatshenshini-Alsek (1979, 1992, 1994); (partially in U.S.)
– Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (1981)
– SGaang Gwaii (Anthony Island) (1981)
– Wood Buffalo National Park (1983)
– Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks (1984, 1990)
– Historic District of Quebec (1985)
– Gros Morne National Park (1987)
– Old Town Lunenburg (1995)
– Waterton Glacier International Peace Park (1995); (partially in U.S.)
– Miguasha National Park (1999)
Source: whc.unesco.org
© The Ottawa Citizen 2006