Have you ever heard of the Rideau Canal Scum Patrol?!

OK, ladies and gentlemen... who out there has heard of the "Rideau Canal Scum Patrol" before? Anyone? A quick Google search yields nothing of consequence and putting the search terms in quotation marks gets you the following result: "Your search - "Rideau Canal Scum Patrol" - did not match any documents."

Why am I asking what seems to be such an inane question?

It's a bit of a long story, one that began on Friday, July 27th. Barbara Lajeunesse was walking her furry friend Molly along through the Arboretum in the Central Experimental Farm. As she does every day, she wandered over to the path looking out to the Rideau Canal. A strange smell overtook her and upon closer inspection, she found a dead animal floating ten feet off the shoreline. It appeared to be a small dog.

Not exactly impressed with the fact that someone's pet met with such a fate, Barbara wanted to have something done about it - largely having it removed from the water and having it dealt with appropriately. How it got there nobody will ever know, but it should certainly not stay there.

When she arrived at her office, she immediately reached for the phone and called the City of Ottawa. The kind operator pointed out to her that the Experimental Farm was National Capital Commission (NCC) property and that they would be the right people to call. Barbara reached a pleasant individual who said that the NCC "had people for that" and that the problem would soon be rectified. Satisfied knowing that she had completed a job well done, of she went to tackle the rest of the day.

To her horror, the dog was still in the water early on a weekend morning. While it was possible that "the people for that" were busy on Friday and didn't work weekends, she hoped it would be gone come Monday. Not wanting to see it again, Barbara and Molly went to another part of the Farm for their morning walk. Surely it would be gone by Tuesday.

Wrong.

It was still there.

In what seemed to be as close to a fit of rage as I had ever seem Barbara display, she flew up to her office to call the NCC one more time. The person who answered this time had no idea what she was talking about and was quite adamant that there was nothing that she could do. Her advice was to call Parks Canada. The NCC is responsible for the grounds of the Experimental Farm, but because the dog was in the water, in the Rideau Canal, the problem was not "in their jurisdiction".

Not to be discouraged by this setback, Barb called Parks Canada. One might remember that the Rideau Canal was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site on June 27th, a mere month before this story began. Well, the Parks Canada staff person who Barb spoke with had no idea where the Rideau Canal was!!!

Calls to the Ottawa Humane Society went nowhere (to be fair, we didn't expect much from them because clearly this wasn't their domain) and so Barbara was back at square one.

When the dog was still there on Wednesday morning - we're now looking at day six since this situation was first discovered - a call was made to the Ottawa Citizen who eventually dispatched a photographer. Barbara made a few more calls and this time managed to get someone from Parks Canada who was helpful. This person did know where the Rideau Canal was and was able to note where the dog was located.

Shortly before time came to head out to meet the photographer, a call came from a guy who identified himself as being with the "Rideau Canal Scum Patrol". Barbara thought he was joking, but he was quite serious. It turned out that these patrollers are employees of Parks Canada and their job is to remove algae and debris from the Canal. Their headquarters are at the Chartwell Locks and, evidently, they go up and down the Canal, cleaning it as well as they can.

The story was that they would shortly be on their way to pick up the dog and do whatever was necessary. Unfortunately, as of 12:10pm, nobody had shown up. Perhaps they were still paddling over from their home base when we had to leave.

Why nobody knows about the "Rideau Canal Scum Patrol" is a mystery. I am writing about it today so that someone searching for it on Google will actually get a useful hit. To go one step further, the telephone number to reach them is at 613-235-2644. If you see something that needs to be tended to, the "Scum Busters" will spring into action. I am assured that they do indeed refer to themselves by that name.

UPDATE: While this cannot be confirmed at this time, a message was waiting for Barbara at 12:30pm. It said that they had "taken care of her problem". The timing of the message was odd, for nobody was there at 12:10pm... it's possible that we just missed the Scum Busters, but we'll wait until our hero Barbara Lajeunesse walks by again tomorrow morning to see if the deed has been done. In the meantime, let there be online documentation about the Scum Patrol from here on in!!!!