People in Abernethy, Sask., are urging the federal government to reconsider budget cuts to the national historic site honouring a former Saskatchewan and federal agriculture minister.
Motherwell Homestead will next year become a self-guided site after a $29.2 million budget cut to Parks Canada takes effect.
William R. Motherwell was the province’s first agriculture minister and later federal minister in the Liberal government of prime minister William Lyon MacKenzie King.
He homesteaded near Abernethy in 1882 and in 1966 the farm was designated a national historic site.
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Motherwell Homestead offers agricultural programming that is meant to depict a prairie homestead. Horse-drawn implements show how the land was broken and worked. A large garden is planted each year in the backyard of the distinctive stone house and bread is baked in the summer kitchen.
Friends of the Motherwell Homestead Inc. board member Donna Wilkes said seeing those demonstrations go will be difficult.
“You can stand there and watch them seed the crop with horses. You can look across the road and see how it’s done today,” said Wilkes. “I think it’s educational and I don’t think that taking that away is going to be better in any way.”
Katherine Patterson, superintendent of the Saskatchewan South Field Unit, said the cuts at Motherwell are particularly sad and come at a poor time.
A new management plan had just been developed, the Friends group had worked through the fall, winter and spring on a new trail, and the site was featured on a reality show called Operation Unplugged.
Patterson said 32 Parks Canada employees were affected by the budget cuts. Twenty-one jobs were cut and 11 were offered reduced seasons.
Of those 32 jobs, 25 are in her unit.
And of those, five are at Motherwell and five are at Grasslands National Park.
Laureen Marchand, a member of the Friends group there, said people in Val Marie, where the park is based, are concerned about job losses.
The park is a major employer in the town of about 100.
Patterson said the park will continue its conservation and research work into bison, grazing, prairie dogs and other species but it will likely refocus some of its efforts if a species in the park is at the northern edge of its range.
The parks and historic sites will operate mostly as usual this season.
