It may sound strange to a Calgarian who grew up skiing in Banff but ski areas don’t really belong in national parks. This is not simply my opinion. Although I rather like the idea it isn’t mine. It’s Parliament’s.
When Canada’s most powerful collection of elected officials put their heads together and passed the new and improved Canada National Parks Act in 2000 the act expressly forbade the development of any new ski resorts in Canada’s national parks.
Alas as most Calgarians already know there are already several ski areas in some of our national parks — Marmot Basin in Jasper and Mount Norquay Sunshine Village and Lake Louise in Banff — so Parks Canada decided to publish ski area management guidelines to provide a “clear and consistent approach” to managing these unwelcome but extant historical anomalies.
When the ski area guidelines were updated in 2006 Parks Canada made it explicitly clear that downhill skiing places exorbitant pressures on the sensitive alpine and subalpine environments. The guidelines also point out that turning winter-only ski areas into four-season pleasure palaces was even harder on the natural resources and natural processes Parks Canada has been charged with protecting. It turns out that the ecological impacts of summer use at ski areas are potentially greater even than the winter use that makes ski hills as inappropriate as clear cuts and oil wells.
One presumes it was for these reasons that Parks Canada — way back in 1989 when protecting ecological integrity in our national parks was on the rise — brokered a deal with Mt. Norquay that precluded any and all summer use in exchange for expanding its winter operations. Despite the added impact of a larger winter footprint Parks Canada felt that the ecological benefits of prohibiting summer use was an adequate tradeoff and compromise. And so it was written into Mt. Norquay’s long-range plan.
Ten years later when Mt. Norquay was sold the new owners took Parks Canada to court to allow them to operate during the summer. The judge on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen sided with Banff’s superintendent of the day who had denied a permit to operate a chairlift during the summer. And so it was enshrined in law.
Until it was erased. Twenty-two years later Parks Canada appears to be encouraging ski hills to expand their operations and embrace summer use. In particular Parks Canada as part of the recently approved Mt. Norquay Site Guidelines for Development and Use recently granted Mt. Norquay the opportunity to remain open during the summer allowing as many as 16000 visitors to descend on an area that is invaluable summer habitat for a host of sensitive species — including mountain goats wolves lynx bighorn sheep and grizzly bears — in a part of Banff that is already egregiously overdeveloped.
The cornucopian technocrats at Parks Canada justify their decision by claiming that Mt. Norquay is making yet more tradeoffs that provide a net environmental gain but this notion is spurious at best. Twenty-two years ago Parks Canada granted Mt. Norquay the right to expand its winter operations as long as it gave up on its summer activities. Now it has both and owner Peter Suderman is smiling all the way to the bank while the “natural resources and natural processes” Parks Canada is supposed to protect continue to suffer.
The real reason Parks Canada has changed its tune has nothing to do with ecology and everything to do with economics. Recent policies including Mt. Norquay’s site guidelines indicate that Parks Canada has assumed responsibility for the “long-term financial sustainability” of Mt. Norquay and other Banff businesses. Peter Kent federal environment minister and the man responsible for Canada’s national parks said as much on CBC’s Cross Country Checkup recently.
As if channelling Sir Sanford Fleming the CPR engineer who crowed that Canada’s first national park would become a wonderful “source of general profit” Kent explained how important national parks are for attracting foreign tourist dollars and then lamented how hard it is for commercial operators to turn a buck in our national parks.
“There are those who would protect almost to the pristine extreme a space but which would almost be inaccessible to most Canadians” he said. “So there needs to be a balance. There needs to be you know we need to protect the various lichen and snails the plant and animal habitat areas while at the same time making these places wonderful spaces Canada’s national treasures available to Canadians.”
What Kent and Banff’s bureaucrats seem to forget is that our national parks are already “wonderful spaces Canada’s national treasures” — that’s why we protected them from voracious capitalists like Fleming in the first place. They don’t need to be improved with more gift shops and restaurants more value-added amenities that have become the worthless beads and baubles of the modern age. There are already more trails in the Rocky Mountain national parks than anyone could hike in a lifetime and they’re already freely available to all Canadians and our visitors.
Please leave the parks alone. Don’t destroy a good thing by trying to make it better. Surely enough is enough.
Jeff Gailus is an award-winning author from Alberta whose book The Grizzly Manifesto was a finalist for the 2011 Alberta Readers’ Choice Award. His essay on the state of Canada’s national parks will appear in the December issue of Alternatives Journal.
