Amid Heavy Industry, Canada’s Newest (and Tiniest) National Park
The beach is more about broken glass from generations of illicit parties than sand. The roar and squeal of a nearby railway locomotive compete with the birdsong. The wind carries a sweet chemical scent from a cooking oil processing plant to the west.
And just across the Detroit River, the skyline offered up by the United States is dominated by a sooty factory puffing out clouds of steam and intermittently shooting orange flame from a chimney as it turns coal into coke for steel mills.
But amid all this blight peeks out a most surprising sight: familiar yellow signs sporting the beaver logo of Parks Canada.
In a country with national parks set amid majestic mountains and vast expanses of wilderness, this unprepossessing stretch of land in Windsor, Ontario, is set to become part of Canada’s newest national park.
“People were really excited to see the first signs,” said Mike Fisher, a member of a volunteer group that has long promoted the idea of a national park here. “It’s essentially the beginnings of the tiniest national park in Canada.”
Despite more than a century of industrial and urban encroachment, the area that will form the core of the national park is covered by some of the last remaining tallgrass prairie that once dominated the southern landscape of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Living within the area, currently called the Ojibway Prairie Complex, are more than 3,000 species of plants and animals, including 200 or so that biologists have categorized as being at risk.
But the planned park is in a city that like its American neighbor, Detroit, is best known for automaking, and it is about more than protecting a natural area.
It is one of six urban national parks currently under various stages of development that are also an attempt by Parks Canada at reconciliation with the country’s Indigenous people.
For much of its early history, the parks agency forcibly removed Indigenous people from their lands and excluded them from management of the resulting parks.
For example, Point Pelee National Park, about an hour’s drive from Windsor, was established in 1918 on land that was once the home of the Caldwell First Nation. It was not compensated for the loss of the land until 2011.
Back in Windsor, that the future park’s patchwork of grasslands and woods survived into 2024 is largely thanks to an event that happened almost 100 years ago: the Great Depression.
Before the Depression, United States Steel had announced it would build a major factory here, with jobs for 16,000 workers and an adjacent model city to be called Ojibway.
But then the economic collapse came, and the complex was only partly built before the land was sold for underground salt mining, though remnants of the project lingered. Sidewalks leftover from the company town that never was remain, in a distressed state, although the rusting fire hydrants that once accompanied them are gone.
The land has been preserved, informally and formally, since then. The area along the Detroit River shoreline was owned by the federal government, which passed it last year to Parks Canada from the port authority. A large municipal park and a tract of mostly open grassland belonging to the Province of Ontario will also be incorporated into the national park.
What the proposed park lacks in epic grandeur, it more than compensates for with biodiversity, said Catherine Febria, a biologist who studies the restoration of freshwater areas at the University of Windsor. “Ultimately, it’s not science that’s going to restore this,” Dr. Febria said. “It is people coming together over time.”
Particularly important, Dr. Febria said, will be the area’s Indigenous people.
Some of what the Indigenous involvement may look like in the national park was previewed in an area of the future park known as Spring Garden, where three young people from the Walpole Island First Nation, which is about 55 miles upstream from Windsor, had recently done traditional, low-intensity controlled burns to keep invasive grasses from taking over.
This area also illustrates the competition between the urban and the natural that the park must resolve.
A large pond, ringed by a rusting chain-link fence, has been cleared of invasive plants by Parks Canada and is now filled with waterfowl and lined with local species of water plants. Nearby, residents were walking dogs through the area, and horses and their riders from the nearby Rowdy Girls’ Ranch often came down the path, as did cyclists.
All of those uses will continue in the national park. But Karen Cedar, a coordinator at the City of Windsor’s nature center, said that the national park status would help prevent less-welcome activities. She pointed high up a tree where the ears of some recently hatched great horned owls poked above a crumbling, plastic laundry basket.
The basket, Ms. Cedar said, was placed in the tree a few years earlier by “well-meaning, but misguided” residents after a wind storm blew down the owls’ nest. “The great horned owl is notorious for being not much into nest building,” she said.
The name of the new park has yet to be finalized. But it has the jump on the other five urban national park candidates with its official designation.
Brian Masse, who represents the area in Parliament, introduced a bill to establish it. With backing from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, the bill has passed the House of Commons and is in the unelected Senate. Mr. Trudeau’s current budget bill includes money to set up and operate the park.
In addition to the park’s name, many other questions remain, including exactly what land will be included.
One parcel of city-owned land is of particular interest to the Caldwell First Nation.
Surrounded by an expressway exit ramp, as well as by the main thoroughfare leading to the bridge to Detroit and by a residential subdivision, the parcel, known as Aboriginal Park, is not much to look at. It is mostly a lawn with a single basketball net, two benches and some playground equipment, including a swing set. Overgrown bush, where someone has placed crudely built shelters for feral cats, rings two sides of it.
In a chilly drizzle, Zack Hamm, an archaeologist who works for the Caldwell First Nation, pointed to where streams once led up to the site, which had been long used for burials by Indigenous people.
From the 1930s to the late 1980s, he said, archaeologists found about 30 buried remains in the area. The last of those archaeological surveys, in 1989, exhumed some of the bodies and then reburied them without recording their location, Mr. Hamm said. His guess is that they are within an unkempt area next to the expressway ramp, but he added that it was quite possible that they were beneath the playground.
Not only does Chief Mary Duckworth of the Caldwell First Nation want Aboriginal Park incorporated into the new national park, she also wants it transformed.
“I want a memorial to the bodies that are buried in here that we know nothing about,” Chief Duckworth said. “It’s like us going to a cemetery and taking down the headstones and us putting a playground on top of your grandfather.”
She acknowledged that the neighbors were unlikely to be happy about losing their only playground, but said that she was confident they would come around.
“Most people, if they knew the truth, would understand why we’re doing what we do,” she said. “Windsor is a real industrial town. It’s a dirty town. So can we leave something nice for everybody? Do we have to fight about it?”
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