Monday, April 24, 1967

ropriate security, but the fact is the loan has no bearing, no legal authority for the oan.

Henry W. Wedge: (Remark inaudible). Honourable M. Lorne Bonnell: You got a mortgage. Henry W. Wedge: You have a first mortgage.

Honourable M. Lorne Bonnell: I just have my doubts. The legal advisors advise that we might have trouble trying to collect these loans because they were given out

without power of this legislature.

Now as far as tourist loans are concerned we have brought in an Act this year to increase the amount from $40,000 to $60,000, and we are trying to give a planned program for the next five years. We are trying to put these accommodations where they are needed, and to give some to Prince County and Kin County to try to expand the tourist trade into those farther away areas away from t e Central Queens areas.

The second roblem which I encountered in the Department of Tourist Develop- ment was that although we had heard the name provincial parks on many occasions, we didn’t have a provincial park in Prince Edward Island. In the year 1969, under the Matheson Administration, an Act was passed called the Provincial Parks Act. At that time the park was at Strathgartney and since then the new administration built many areas which they called parks and expanded others, but these areas were nothing more than Crown Lands, Crown Lands which were used for camping or tenting or picnicing. I had to immediately have a survey made of these lands and have them all designated as parks under the Parks Act so that they could come under this legislation. The next thing I found was that there was no protection for the caretaker, no protection for the visitors or the campers, there were no highway regulations; you could drive seventy miles an hour over the lawns, between the tents or between the trailers and there was no way to regulate this. First, they were not parks, they were nothing but Crown Lands, and secondly, there was no authority set up to regulate the speed of traffic in these parks, to regulate the protection of the caretakers or of the campers. So immed- iately I had to set up regulations under The Provincial Parks Act so that now, in our Provincial Parks this year, we will have regulations protecting the campers, protecting the caretakers, we will have speed zones and parkin zones, slow areas, one way traf- fic. We will state that you cannot remove certain o jects from the park, you cannot cut down trees, lumber, pulp without prior approval, so that our parks can now be protected, our citizens can be rotected, our visitors can be protected, and our care- takers can be protected under t e new Parks Regulations, which are covered under the gcti‘The parks are now designated so that they are all covered and are all Provincial

at s.

Now the tourist industry in Prince Edward Island at the present time is our third industry, and I contend that in the very near future it will be our second industry. I feel it is our duty as a Government to, first, give our tourists 0d accommodation, and secondly, to give them good food. hit thirdly, we must give t em something to do while they are here in Prince Edward Island. I think it is im rtant that we do proper advertising to get them here and along that line, Mr. Spea er, we have changed our advertising in the papers this year to what we used to have in the regular ads. We called Prince Edward Island, in all our advertisements, “Holiday Island.” I brought along with me one of the ads in MacLean’s magazine. I don’t know just what issue it is — April issue — it is a picture of Prince Edward Island, called “Holiday Island” and I would like to just pass it around for the members to take a look at it. This is a new concept and I might state further, Mr. Speaker, that with this type of advertising we are getting 75% more inquiries than we got last year. The biggest jump in the his- tory of the tourist industry in Prince Edward Island. (Applause)

L. George Dewar: That ad didn’t appear in the Financial Post supplement over the weekend.

Honourable M. Lorne Bonnell: It didn’t appear? L. George Dewar: It didn’t appear. Honourable M. Lorne Bonnell: Was it supposed to?

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