Oral History Project
Park Warden Service Alumni Society of Alberta
Oral History Project Phase 14 – 2024
Interview with Dave Dalman
Canmore, Alberta
November 19, 2024
SH: Good morning Dave.
Dave: Good morning, Susan. So nice to have you back in Canmore.
SH: Aww. So, Dave, what was the place and year of your birth?
Dave: I was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario in 1949.
SH: Wow, 1949. Where did you grow up?
Dave: I grew up mostly in Niagara Falls, but I also spent two years in around Grades 6 and 7 in New York City.
SH: Really. What were you doing there?
Dave: Well, I was going to school in Grade 6 and 7. It was quite a cultural change for me.
SH: What made your folks go down there?
Dave: My dad had a job change.
SH: So, from New York City, what made you want to join Parks Canada?
Dave: It was a long journey because we moved back to Niagara Falls after NYC, and when I graduated from high school I went to the University of Waterloo. One of the professors there that I took a course from in second year, an ecology course, was John Theberge. John was a passionate and inspiring kind of guy. I did a project on a black spruce bog and I really connected with John and his passion for national parks. John, you may recall was a very strong advocate for national parks and was probably the father of Kluane National Park. He put a lot of time and effort into getting that park established.
SH: Really? And he was a professor at the university?
Dave: Yes, and through those Waterloo days I went to grad school and was probably one of the earlier members of the National and Provincial Parks Association back then, which is now CPAWS today. I was providing comment on park plans and park agendas at that time as a Director for the Ontario Society for Environmental Management. The Ontario Society for Environmental Management promoted integrated, inter-disciplinary work and I was able to bring that to some of the comments about Parks Canada.
In Grad School I met Jillian Roulet who was also in the same faculty at the University of Waterloo; I was in Geography and Jillian was in Planning.
Jillian lived in a house right beside the engineering company where I worked. I worked three jobs while attending school full time because I didn’t have any money. I had to do that. I did eventually meet her and played hockey with her partner and others in Planning as well.
SH: With Myles.
Dave: Yes, Myles. He was a great guy. So, I was in Grad school and some undergrad students that I was teaching were getting jobs in Parks Canada. I thought at the time, that’s a place I’d really like to work, but I have to back up a couple of years.
When I first went to university and met John Theberge, I didn’t even know governments hired people. It never even crossed my mind. My focus was clearly in the private sector, and always had been. So when I realized that, I thought, Parks Canada is a place I’d really like to work. Having seen the organization from the outside, being a critic, I wasn’t sure that that was necessarily possible. But when I got to grad school I did get a scholarship from Parks Canada to do some research, and that became my thesis on the planning and management of national parks using aerial photography and remote sensing. I did case studies at Georgian Bay Islands National Park and several at Point Pelee National Park.
Jillian by that time was working for Parks Canada and wrote the management plan for Point Pelee. Jillian has written the two best plans in Canada’s National Park system. The first one was Point Pelee and years later she wrote the 1997 Banff National Park Management Plan based on the Bow Valley Study. Those two plans are the best plans that have ever been written in this organization in my opinion.
In the summer before going to grad school, I also worked for one of John Theberge’s grad students. I camped and did field work for a full summer in Pukaskwa National Park and that was a terrific and eye-opening experience for me. So that added another Park to places I had done research, including Pukaskwa, Point Pelee and Georgian Bay Islands. A few years later Mary and I assisted another one of John Theberge’s grad students on the Burwash Uplands in the Yukon, looking at predator-prey relationships, counting caribou, doing phenology plots, etc., in and adjacent to Kluane National Park.
After Grad school, the first job I went to was with the Ontario Ministry of the Environment. There was a young upstart group just starting with environmental assessments, under the Ontario Environmental Assessment Act. I was in the adjacent unit, the Land Use Coordination Section of the Ministry of the Environment. One of the fellows I met there was a guy named Bob Hodgins. Well I knew his brother Doug, and Doug Hodgins was the Chief of Resource Conservation in Cornwall at the time, and eventually he moved to be Superintendent of Pukaskwa.
Five years later, and five years of looking for a job in Parks Canada, without even getting a crack at an interview, I finally figured out what the problem was. I went down to the Public Service office in Toronto, and learned that, yes, they received my application but no I wasn’t qualified. I asked how is it that people who have worked for me, and people that I have taught at university are getting interviews? They said, “Let’s see your resume.”
They pulled out my resume and said, “You didn’t use any of the words that are in the Statement of Qualifications”. And I said, well my resume states what those words in the Statement of Qualifications mean. “Oh, we don’t know that. You have to use those exact words to get screened in”. So, I’d been screened out twice in a job competition, and they said “Well this competition closes tomorrow night. Get your resume back in here …. rewrite it.” So I did. I used the same words and they screened me in and then the Regional Office in Cornwall screened me out. They phoned me to tell me that they were screening me out because my degrees were in geography and not planning. So I said “Okay well this is the last time I’m going to try, but I want you to know that when I went to the University of Waterloo every one of the courses I took were cross-listed with planning, my Master’s thesis is about planning and management in national parks and I have been working as a planner for the past 5 years. So you can decide whether that qualifies me as a planner or not. Weeks later I got a phone call and they said, “We want to interview you on the telephone.” They had gone across the country three times, they’d flown people to Cornwall for interviews, and they spent all their money, so they were going to do a telephone interview with me.
SH: You must have felt so special.
Dave: So very special. I could have driven from Toronto, but anyway we did a telephone interview and then I did an in-person interview and eventually got the job in Cornwall, so that was quite a process.
From there of course, I wanted to move out of Toronto, because we had a baby by then.
SH: You were with Mary by then?
Dave: Yes, I first met Mary at Point Pelee, but we didn’t’ connect for a couple of years after that. I finished my thesis commuting by train back and forth from Toronto to Point Pelee. Mary then moved from Point Pelee to the Rideau Canal. We got married, had a baby and were living in Toronto, but I wanted to move to Cornwall with the job for Parks. Mary also got a job in Cornwall. She was one of the very first people to job share in Parks Canada. It was a huge sexist challenge for her as you can imagine.
