Cape Breton Highlands war statue study process panned by critic

A critic of a proposed war memorial in Cape Breton Highlands National Park says there's too little time for public comment on an environmental assessment prepared for the project.

The Never Forgotten Memorial Foundation is raising $25 million to put a giant statue called Mother Canada in the park to commemorate Canada's war dead.

Parks Canada has released a draft environmental study and the public has until June 5 to submit comments. But that timeframe is far too short, says Martin Willison, a retired Dalhousie University professor of environmental studies.

"This is the first opportunity for the public across Canada to have input," he says. "All we've got is 10 days, something like that, and a several hundred page document to assess. It's not a proper process."

A copy of the impact assessment is available online, and at four Parks Canada offices in Cape Breton. An official with Parks Canada says a 14-day period for public comment is standard with this kind of review.

Willison also criticizes the approval process and says Parks Canada has studied only the first phase of the project, which includes clearing the site and erecting the statue.

He says the agency has not looked at four more phases, including an interpretive centre and an observation platform, and believes that's deliberate.

"Well that's typical of the way that environmental assessment is done, when you want something to go ahead and you know that if the whole thing was assessed, it wouldn't go ahead," he says.

But Parks Canada project manager Eddie Kennedy says at this point it's not clear how many phases will proceed.

"They're not actually on the mark to actually be built, until such time as they'd have a better understanding of what their fundraising capability would be to build them," he says.

Kennedy says any subsequent phases of the memorial would have to have its own environmental assessment.