John Sandlos

John Sandlos. “Federal Spaces, Local Conflicts: National Parks and the Exclusionary Politics of the Conservation Movement in Ontario, 1900-1935″

Professor John Sandlos has written an engaging and thought-provoking article on Canadian national parks and the conservation movement in Ontario during the early 1900s. Making use of a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Professor Sandlos demonstrates the complex interaction between federal and provincial officials, organizations, local commercial and recreational interests, squatters and aboriginal hunters in creating and developing these spaces. Using Point Pelee and Georgian Bay Islands National Parks as models, the result is an engaging examination of parks policy that encourages readers to look at these deliberations from the perspective of a ‘policy community’; that is, a construct that accounts for state and local actors in formulating a regulatory regime.