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[–] 3 points 18 hours ago

Many of those frustrating queues and booking systems are operated not by the parks themselves but by a tech company called Camis Inc., run out of offices in Michigan and Wisconsin. In addition to its national contract to operate Parks Canada’s reservation system, it has contracts with six provinces and two territories: Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Go camping at your provincial or federal parks, they're beautiful, inexpensive, and they have their own websites

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  • [–] 3 points 18 hours ago

    There is a campground 25 mins from my house that used to be free. It's absolutely gorgeous and I was rather put out that it was free for a very long time. I'm glad they finally started charging for it. $4 a night is still a bit low but at least it's something to use to reinvest.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    People really need to wake up to how this works. This isn't an unfortunate exception. It's the natural and desired result of free markets and free trade pushers (neoliberalism more general.) You need something done for the government (or private enterprise,) tender some offers, choose the lowest, regardless of ownership or location. For the intents and purposes of using market forces to distribute goods and services - that's a perfect outcome. We gotta make more and more people understand this isn't some strange outcome but the system working as intended by its designers. And if they want different outcomes, the system design has to change.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    Quebec’s park management agency, the Société des établissements de plein air du Québec, operates its own system

    Is Québec really the only government in Canada that made the right choice? Maybe they should offer to run things for Parks Canada too, if the federal government has fallen so far into neoliberal neglect that it's incapable of doing it on their own.

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  • [–] 1 point 18 hours ago

    Given the government of Quebec's recent upgrade of their driver's license website, costing $1.1 billion, with a similar amount expected for their upgraded health services portal, I'm not sure we can define that as the right choice.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I assumed it's because the crown corp running the park system was a huge cost to the government, which would come under fire in other provinces. But from Sépaq's 2025 financial statment (PDF, in french) their income was $261.8 million and their expenses were $261.3 million giving them a profit of $459,000 which they say they reinvest into parks. Even small government advocates would have a hard time arguing this crown corp should be privatized.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    This is why for the most part, post-2020, I’ve stopped going to government campgrounds and usd forestry service sites instead.

    It’s been really annoying that this closes off large chunks of backcountry camping as well; however, there’s still lots of backcountry where you pay to park your vehicle, not per-person in the backcountry, so the solution there is: park outside the park and walk/bicycle in to the trailhead.

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