MR. SPEAKER: The hon. the Member for the District of Port de Grave.

MR. BUTLER: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I want to stand today with a petition with regard to unregulated and gravel pit campers. We have received petitions signed by over 2,000 people to date and there are more coming in.

Seeing this is the first time I will read the prayer of the petition

WHEREAS unregulated, or gravel pit camping has been a long standing recreational tradition for families in Newfoundland and Labrador; and

WHEREAS residents of our Province have engaged in gravel pit camping for up to forty years; and

WHEREAS government has not typically targeted gravel pit campers for contravening the Province’s Lands Act due to the cultural uniqueness and historical meaning of the practice for the people involved; and

WHEREAS government has now rapidly moved forward to enforce its own legislation in gravel pit camping sites in a relatively haphazard fashion, without consideration of the impacting costs of their actions; and

WHEREAS many gravel pit campers are seniors that lack the resources to haul their campers and trailers out of gravel pit sites before the sixty-day removal order currently being imposed by officials within the Department of Environment;

WHEREUPON the undersigned, your petitioners, humbly pray and call upon the House of Assembly to re-evaluate government’s heavy-handed approach to gravel pit campers and consult with them to work out a long-term solution to problems with the practice that government finds unacceptable.

AND, this is presented duly bound by your petitioners who ever pray.

Mr. Speaker, you might be able to say well why would you come forward with such a petition when we have so many parks and private parks and provincial parks in the Province?

Mr. Speaker, I can stand here today and say that there are over 5,000 people who take part in gravel pit camping in various locations throughout this Province and not one of them can get into a provincial park. I have tried this year many times, our parks are full and no one has to tell me any more than that because I do the camping myself; they are filled to capacity. I am going to tell you one thing – and I stand here today and I hear people talking about the Whiskey Pit. I agree, Mr. Speaker, there are different scenarios in all of those locations that have to be cleaned up – they have to be cleaned up.

Mr. Speaker, I am calling on this government to do what they did before and my hon. colleague, the Minister of Transportation and Works; he knows full well the situation I am going to discuss. There were trailer owners and cabin owners in Wolf Pond up in Fox Marsh and they were told they had to get out. We met - both the minister, his officials and I - met with officials within the department for many months. You know what government did? They did not tell them they had sixty days to get out; you are left on your own. What they did, they moved up the road a very short distance. Made roads for those people, cut out sites for them so they could have a park.