“A Lake is More Unifying than a Common Roof”: The Mont-Orford National Park Expansion Project and Conservation Discourses at Lac-Montjoie, QC

Abstract

Since 2006, the Province of Quebec’s Ministère des Forêts, de la Faune et des Parcs (MFFP) is leading an expansion project at Mont-Orford National Park, which aims at adding 4300 hectares of land to the park, representing a 172% increase. The project raises concerns among the riparian population of Lac Montjoie, the case study of this research, whose shores and islands have been partially acquired by the Government of Quebec. These lands are expected to be integrated to the Mont-Orford National Park and operated by the Société des Établissements de Plein Air du Québec (Sépaq), a state agent responsible for operating Quebec’s national parks. While the MFFP, the Sépaq, and the riparian community all claim to seek to preserve the lake and its surroundings, these three actors express different views on conservation. As such, this thesis analyzes the variations in the conservation discourses of the MFFP, the Sépaq, and Lac Montjoie riparian dwellers in the context of the Mont-Orford National Park expansion project. I identify the conservation discourses of these three actors and explore their favoured conservation processes, practices of power and purposes. Accordingly, I apply a Foucauldian critical discourse analysis to examine official documentation as well as the data gathered from 23 semi-structured interviews with riparian households. I employ Feldman’s (2017) conceptual framework to situate the discourses of the MFFP, the Sépaq, and riparian dwellers in the conservation literature by comparing them to the 'fortress,’ community-based, ‘back to the barriers,’ and neoliberal conservation discourses. The research concludes that the MFFP and the Sépaq share a similar narrative that primarily contains characteristics of the ‘fortress’ and neoliberal discourses, while Lac Montjoie riparian dwellers put forward a vision that I label as ‘unenforceable disciplinary conservation.’ The Mont-Orford National Park expansion project entails a renegotiation of governance at Lac Montjoie that exposes tensions between neoliberal and disciplinary conservation in the creation of environmental subjects, as well as different interpretations of the notion of ‘heritage’ as the cornerstone of the supposed intrinsic relationship between humans and nature.