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President Donald Trump was wreaking havoc on the centuries-old American traditions of the rule of law and the accommodation of the tired, poor, huddled masses “yearning to breathe free” from persecution in their native lands. His administration unleashed an army of masked ICE agents to round up and deport non-citizen residents, both legal and illegal, to prisons in countries run by dictators. Even green-card-holding permanent US residents like myself were suddenly being denied re-entry or detained and threatened with expulsion.

I’ve made Montana my home for 20 years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Calgary in 1993. I was drawn here by the chance to attend graduate school on a scholarship, then grew enraptured by the immensity of accessible wildlands, the progressive vibe of an American university town, and the beautiful and smart Swedish American mycologist I’d met. We married in 2011 and I happily set down roots for good.

Suddenly I’d be risking everything—first by trying to cross into Alberta, and then by trying to get back into my adopted US.

As a permanent resident I have most of the rights of a citizen. Because I can’t vote, I take seriously my other rights and responsibilities, namely the freedom to critique, challenge and condemn the government. In the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, who said in 1918 that “it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about [the president] than about anyone else,” I’ve protested the new regime and stood up for the victims of its extrajudicial decisions. A homemade “Free Mahmoud Khalil” poster is taped to my front window and a “MAGA is American Fascism” banner hangs on my house in Missoula.

I work for a small conservation organization to restore wildlife connectivity along a transportation corridor between Glacier National Park and the vast Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, the only wound in the otherwise intact transborder Crown of the Continent ecosystem that stretches from Crowsnest Pass to Missoula’s doorstep. This work is both practical and symbolic to me, a way to knit a tiny bit of the world together at a time when it’s falling apart.

In late April, Banff was hosting a wildlife connectivity conference, Canada’s first, and I wanted to meet up with colleagues and old friends. But I feared the not insignificant chance that the capricious Trump administration would separate me from my lovely wife and my adult daughter, who lives in Arizona. It might prevent me from ever again seeing the 115-year-old home in Missoula I’d just renovated—painting it Falu red in honour of Sweden’s successful experiment with social democracy, a subtle rebuke to Trump’s lurch into autocracy.

Stuck on the American side watching the chaos unfurl, I began to have serious second thoughts. For the first time, I felt a tinge of the anxiety, insecurity and fear that millions of people around the world live with every day.

Premier Smith announced a new border security team—51 sheriffs with dogs and drones and the power to make warrantless arrests.

I’ve crossed the Alberta–Montana border more times than I can remember. It must be at least 100 times, maybe 150. It started when I was a young boy in the mid-1970s. My mother and father moved my brother and me from the blandness of Scarborough, Ontario, to a booming Calgary in 1971, the beginning of the glory days of Alberta’s enrichment and bedevilment by oil.

My father, when he wasn’t selling Sweda cash registers, became obsessed with slo-pitch. As a German refugee, his eastern Canadian childhood hadn’t included much fun. Life was simply work, school and church in the ghetto that was Cabbagetown. The move cross-country freed my father from the judgments of aging German relatives and sparked a new life in the thrall of southern Alberta slo-pitch.

Between the ages of 6 and 14 my brother and I spent more time at ballparks than in school, and every summer we’d travel to Great Falls, Montana, for the Can-Am Slo-Pitch Tournament. For my father and his middle-class, middle-aged teammates on the Calgary Jaycee men’s slo-pitch team, to cross the Medicine Line and defeat the Americans at their own game, on their own soil—this was their World Series. For my brother and me, it was a chance to chew grape Bubble Yum, which we smuggled back to Canada, and to stay in a hotel with a cloverleaf indoor pool, where we escaped the unrelenting Great Plains heat and played tag with the other slo-pitch orphans.

On one these trips, we got stuck at the border behind what would now be considered a vintage early-’70s Ford Econoline van painted tangerine. Four men with long hair and jeans—“hippies,” Dad called them—were standing on the tarmac laughing while the US border agents inspected their credentials. The hippies asked if I’d take a photo of them leaning against the van, as if they were going to be frisked; in mid-shutter, three border guards interrupted their fun.

“You think this is a joke?” one of the guards said, wresting the camera from my hand, while the others cuffed the hippies’ hands behind their backs and took them who knows where. “Do you think this is a joke?!”

But as the years and crossings passed, it seemed to me that traversing “the world’s longest undefended border” was, if not a joke, a mere technicality. As an adult looking much like those long-haired hippies, I’ve crossed the border in three vintages of Volkswagen vans (1968, 1974, 1991), and the only time I was ever checked for drugs was by the Canadians. The border agents wiped the blade of my pocketknife and the entire inside of the front window and then tested the dusty cloth for drugs. It was negative—and a warning to never smoke pot in my vehicle.

It wasn’t until September 11, 2001, that I realized how seriously the Americans take our common border. On that day, some colleagues and I, after a conference in Kalispell, were checking out of our hotel. There were many guests and too few staff, and I grew impatient, so I wandered back up to my room and turned on the TV. United Airlines Flight 175 had just turned the World Trade Center’s South Tower into a pillar of flame and billowing black smoke. I slumped on the bed and gaped. A replay of the first attack on the North Tower made it clear these were no accidents. The world had changed.

We drove three hours to the Sweetgrass border crossing, a place I knew well. But it was now occupied by Humvees and body-armoured soldiers, probably from Malmstrom Air Force Base outside Great Falls. And there was a Black Hawk.

It’s a peculiar fact that the American military names their combat helicopters after Native Americans, purportedly as a sign of respect for the peoples and cultures the American military tried to wipe off the face of the earth. Of the five helicopters named for Native Americans, only the Black Hawk is named for an individual: a highly respected Sauk war chief who for decades battled his American antagonists. He fought for the British in the long War of 1812, which saw the White House and the Capitol burned to the ground.

It’s reasonable to doubt that Black Hawk would have approved of his name being attached to a flying fortress of war and a menacing symbol of American military might, but one thing is certain: Black Hawks are impressive to behold. I’ll wager that few Canadian civilians have experienced the ferocious visage and the deep, earth-shaking sound of a heavily armed Black Hawk in action, and fewer still at an Alberta border crossing.

On this day the Black Hawk—machine guns visible in both side doors, its rotors thumping out the sound of doom—hung about 50 feet off the ground, precisely over the crosshair created by the last yards of Interstate 15 and the 49th parallel. It pronounced, unequivocally, how easily the longest undefended border in the world could be militarized.

The line was long, the going slow. We were tense and uncertain, and anxiety—ours and theirs—hung thick in the air. Usually it’s the Canadian border guards that size you up when you’re travelling north. Now, in 2001, the Americans wanted to know who was leaving their country. But on that particular day of infamy, a car full of aging white men, one of whom had renounced his US citizenship and moved to Canmore in protest of the Vietnam War, didn’t sufficiently alarm them.

A six-metre-wide cutline comprises much of the Canada–US border, including between Alberta and Montana. The border has been undefended, but our provincial and federal governments are now spending big to “secure” it against trumped-up threats.

A week before the Banff conference was to start in spring 2025, I decided I would cross the border. I knew there was some risk of being denied re-entry into Montana. Trump’s raging hadn’t ended with illegal mass deportations. The US Border Patrol was harassing visitors and legal residents as they tried to enter the US; even unflattering opinions of the president on your smartphone could get you in trouble. But I wasn’t about to let some wannabe dictator in the White House determine whether I, a lawful, taxpaying citizen, could return to my country of birth to attend a conference among good people doing good works.

Besides, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to investigate premier Danielle Smith’s new interest in international border security. Traditionally, nation states secure their own borders against illegal incursions, but Trump was blackmailing the Canadian government with tariffs unless Canada “beefed up” its security to “protect” Americans against what he claimed was a scourge of fentanyl and illegal immigrants flowing across the border. Anyone with even a cursory understanding of America’s border problems knew Trump’s allegations were preposterous. Smith, however, jumped at the chance to impress a pathological liar who, we now know, was going to impose tariffs no matter what Canada did to solve a problem that didn’t exist.

Ever keen to encroach on federal jurisdiction and embarrass prime minister Justin Trudeau, premier Smith announced, on December 12, 2024, a $29-million “investment” in a brand new border security team. Fifty-one new provincial sheriffs would use dogs and drones and be given the power to make warrantless arrests to help make America safe again. Eventually Canada’s federal government acquiesced to the premier’s request to outfit the Alberta RCMP with one of Black Hawk’s eponymous war machines. All of this, supposedly, to appease Trump’s threat of tariffs by securing the Alberta–Montana border against an alleged wave of fentanyl and illegal immigrants.

“If we succeed and maintain proper border security,” Smith said in a live announcement, doing her best to imitate the head of state of a nation at war, “I expect we’ll have a very strong relationship with the United States, as we always have.”

I got a late start from Missoula on April 22, Earth Day, and when I approached the Carway crossing the late afternoon was already casting long shadows. It looked deserted. No cars or trucks. No border guards up and about on the US side. I crossed the line onto Canadian/Albertan soil and pulled up to the window. I pushed my sunglasses onto my forehead and handed my Canadian passport to a kindly female federal border agent.

“Where are you headed?”
“Banff National Park, for a conference.”
“How long will you be staying?”
“Five days.”
“Do you have any guns, alcohol, tobacco or marijuana?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Here you go. Have a nice day.”

I drove north into my homeland, the rugged rangelands of the Blackfeet Nation fading into green circles of irrigated cropland. Not a sheriff, dog, drone or helicopter in sight.

There are actually six crossings along the 298-km Alberta–Montana border. Most people use Carway–Piegan or Coutts–Sweetgrass, or, in summer, Chief Mountain in Waterton Lakes National Park. Few people live along either side of the border, where Coutts, with a mere 300 souls, is the biggest urban centre. On the US side, just east of Sweetgrass, a 10-mile stretch of Border Road connects to local roads in Alberta and Montana as if the border doesn’t exist at all.

Yet the area is now being described like a war zone. Trump said in his first Oval Office press conference in 2025 that Canada, like Mexico, was allowing a plague of fentanyl to cross the border, “killing Americans” and “destroying families.” He said Canada was allowing “mass numbers of people” across the border. As a consequence, he announced a plan for a crippling 25 per cent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico.

Trump’s words have little relationship to reality. Between 2022 and 2024, the US Customs and Border Patrol seized 61,900 pounds of fentanyl at the Mexican border, which is massive. At the entire Canadian border, a measly 59 pounds was found—less than 0.1 per cent of Mexico’s. The same pattern goes for unlawful border crossings. The number of illegal entries into the US from Canada has increased, from approximately 110,000 in 2022 to 200,000 in 2024, but this pales in comparison with the 2.3 million crossings per year from Mexico.

If US border agents were to search my computer, they could at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me.

A 2022 report of the US’s Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking concluded that “Canada is not known to be a major source of fentanyl or other synthetic opioids or precursor chemicals to the US.” The US Drug Enforcement Agency, with its $2.6-billion budget and some 5,000 special agents, doesn’t even mention Canada in its 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment; Mexico, however, is mentioned 85 times. Likewise Canada isn’t cited in the US Customs and Border Protection’s May 2025 report America’s Frontline Against Fentanyl—but we do learn that the US spends $7.3-billion per year to “secure” the Mexico border, and has invested in “123 large-scale drive-through X-ray systems… to significantly increase vehicle and truck scanning rates across the southwest border.”

In spite of the facts, our own federal government at the time—with an election on the horizon and Pierre Poilievre claiming he’d follow Trump’s lead and send thousands of Canadian troops, agents and helicopters to “take back control of the border”—decided it had to do something. “Whether some of the allegations about what is going on at the border are accurate or not, or credible or not, I don’t have the luxury not to take it seriously,” Marc Miller, Canada’s immigration minister, grumbled in an interview.

A month after premier Smith had beaten them to the punch with her $29-million “investment,” the federal government announced its own $1.3-billion enhanced border security plan, which included 60 drones equipped with thermal cameras and two Black Hawk helicopters, one of them allocated to Alberta. It tightened requirements for the temporary visas that some visitors were using to arrive in Canada legally but then enter the US illegally. It introduced its Strong Borders Act to anoint a so-called “border czar,” presumably the first such czar in Canadian history.

Carway is Alberta’s second-busiest crossing: 4,000 vehicles daily.

Premier Smith, not to be outdone by the feds, threw in an additional $15-million to set up three more Check Stop-like vehicle inspection stations in Alberta, two of them kilometres distant from the border. She then channelled a maxim from historical US oil magnate John D. Rockefeller—“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing”— and invited Fox News to come up “to enjoy some world-class Alberta beef” and to show Trump—and sympathetic members of her own UCP—how quickly she’d done Trump’s bidding. “That’s what I think the president wants to see,” she said. “That we’re taking this seriously, that we’re going to stop the flow of drugs and guns and people across the border.”

Canadian security experts were underwhelmed. There is a degree of “border security theatre,” said Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Waterloo, Ontario-based Centre for International Governance Innovation. “We’re putting up hardware into the sky [such] as Black Hawks. We’re promising 24/7 surveillance designed to appease the United States.”

“If the premier wants to send sheriffs to the border, well, good on [her],” added Richard Huntley, who managed southern Alberta’s Inland Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) office in Calgary for 30 years. “But I can almost bet, in a year, they won’t have caught too much. I doubt it, sincerely.”

Predictably, both Smith’s and the federal government’s expensive efforts failed to appease Trump. His tariffs on Canadian goods not covered in the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement increased to 35 per cent on August 1. Why Because, according to a “Fact Sheet” seemingly conceived in an alternative universe, Canada deigned to retaliate with tariffs of our own (now cancelled) and continued in our “failure to arrest traffickers, seize illicit drugs, or coordinate with US law enforcement.”

It’s unclear how long Alberta’s border farce is meant to last, but it’s already proved fruitless and expensive. If Alberta’s sheriffs prove as adept at finding contraband as Canada’s federal border agents (which is doubtful), Smith’s “crackdown” will cost the public about $5-million per pound of fentanyl recovered. Alberta might also manage to detain and return a few terrified refugee families fleeing into Alberta, so that masked ICE agents can send them to whatever lawless hellhole the Trump administration has in mind.

The 24/7 Coutts crossing is Alberta’s busiest, especially in summer.

The wildlife connectivity conference in Banff was excellent. I asked my Alberta colleagues what they thought of their province’s foray into international border security. Most of them, if they knew anything about it at all, just rolled their eyes and sighed. Some expressed dismay at the similarities between Trump’s and Smith’s relentless performative politics. As I left, they wished me luck getting back across the border. Some offered me a place to stay if I couldn’t return to my wife and Falu-red home.

I tried to clear my digital devices of disparaging remarks about Herr Trump. The task proved impossible. As an amateur scholar on the rise of fascism in my paternal family’s Germany, I’m acutely aware of—and have researched and documented—America’s slide toward authoritarianism and the Trump administration’s use of fascist strategies to foment fear and consolidate power. When I moved to Missoula 20 years ago, I became acutely aware of the racism, militarism and jingoism that imbued American society, not to mention the trove of military-grade firearms that have been stockpiled by civilians. I began to warn my American friends that their homeland was ripe for an authoritarian turn. They mostly said I was nuts.

I’ve sent countless messages and emails and made innumerable social media posts about the dangers posed by Trump and his ilk. Before I left Banff I stored as much as I could on the amorphous “cloud” and deleted most apps from my phone. My laptop, however, held an enormous trove of “treasonous” material I was loathe to part with.

The problem is that by the time you get to the US border agents, you’re already in US territory. You can’t just turn around and go back if you sense trouble. If agents were to search my computer, there’s every reason to think they would at best deny me entry. At worst they could detain me. And they might choose to teach me a lesson, to strike more fear into me or anyone who learned of my situation—which, after all, is why authoritarians stoke fear in the first place.

I wanted to try to cross at Coutts. Ironically, this is the site of the trucker protests in 2022, when 1,000 trucks blocked cross-border traffic for two weeks, and where the RCMP seized guns, body armour, a machete and a hoard of ammunition and high-capacity magazines. All of this was far more dangerous than a trickle of drugs and illegal immigrants. Yet premier Smith not only condoned the Coutts blockade but supported it.

Just as Highway 4 bends from south to east and I caught sight of the town of Coutts, I entered the Red Zone, a 596-km² quasi-military area within two kilometres of the border, along the entire Alberta–Montana border, where sheriffs on Alberta’s new Interdiction Patrol Team can make their warrantless arrests, just like ICE does in Trump’s America. Legal experts say the Red Zone—enabled by provincial legislation in January 2025—is unconstitutional. “How did we get here?” asked professor Shaun Fluker on the University of Calgary’s law faculty blog. “This is the stuff of authoritarian dictatorships.”

Coutts mayor Scott MacCumber said some of his neighbours share Fluker’s concerns. They’re worried they could be apprehended while out for a walk or riding their quad. “What will constitute suspicious activity to the sheriff patrols and what will not?” MacCumber asked.

As I turned south, the border crossing looming, my amygdala fired up like a welding torch. My heart rate quickened. I looked at myself in the rearview mirror and thought about those fun-loving hippies being cuffed and dragged away.

And then, finally, there he was—a US border agent who had the power to ruin my life. I slowed to a stop and looked into the booth. My heart sank. With his long bushy beard and dark uniform, the man sitting before me looked like a Three Percenter hooligan in the insurrectionist mob that broke into the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, hoping to hang Mike Pence.

I smiled and handed him my passport, my green card tucked between its pages.

“Howdy,” he said. “Where do you live?”
“Missoula.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Twenty years.”
“You have any alcohol or tobacco?”
“No, sir.”
He handed back my identification.
“Have a good day.”
“You too.”

A mile or two on, once I’d passed out of sight, I pulled over and leaned my head on the steering wheel. My cheeks streamed with tears. Not from the stress of the moment or the joy of making it back over the line, but because of the embodied knowledge that those bastards on both sides of the border are only just getting started.

Jeff Gailus is the author of Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil (RMB).

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The post Crossing the Line appeared first on Alberta Views.

The images were downright jaw-dropping. Giant prints—some wider than many living room walls—featured sculpted, polished and glimmering blue glacier ice, some resembling splendid precious gems. Others showed no ice at all. Dry rock, bare, sharp ridgelines, rubbly moraine slopes, naked cliff bands. Dark, dirty, dry and withered ice. Dying ice. On one hand, the ultimate eye candy for a glacier lover; on the other, a bitter aftertaste of reality.

MELTDOWN was conceived by Jim Elzinga. A groundbreaking Rockies-based alpinist since the 1970s, Elzinga led the 1986 team that supported Canmore’s Sharon Wood to become the first North American woman to summit Mount Everest, climbing a never-repeated route. Elzinga followed up with a 25-year international career as an organizational development consultant.

Now, with his hardest climbs behind him, the glacier-draped peaks and ice cliffs he ascended are diminishing too.

The loss of these inspired him to found Guardians of the Ice, a non-profit focused on the steadily shrinking Columbia Icefield as indicator of the worldwide climate crisis. Spanning approximately 200 km² atop the Continental Divide where Jasper and Banff parks meet, that icefield is a significant bellwether of Earth’s warming climate.

“One of the many reasons I want still photography to be part of the Guardians project is the ability to make large high-quality prints that immerse the viewer, like an IMAX film,” Elzinga said. “I feel this is the best way to create an emotional connection with the viewer and provide an experience as if they’re actually in the mountains. Our purpose is to effectively engage the public to build support for a low-carbon future.”

Using a high-resolution Phase One medium format camera, Elzinga partnered with friend and cinematographer Roger Vernon. To create each image required three people—one to hold the camera, another to recalibrate the settings on a laptop, and a third to pilot the helicopter.

Leanne Allison, Jim Elzinga, Roger Vernon and Tiffany Shaw. Whyte Museum

That January 2025 night at the Whyte, however, was more than a photo exhibit. It was also the official launch for the Canadian branch of the 2025 United Nations International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation. The IYGP was proposed in 2022 by Tajikistan, whose 13,000 glaciers supply the mountain headwaters for Central Asia and some two billion people downstream.

The IYGP Canada co-chair is long-time Canmore resident Bob Sandford, senior government relations liaison on Global Climate Emergency Response at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. Most of the world’s glaciated countries are participating, and with Switzerland’s glaciers having lost 10 per cent of their volume in two years alone—2022 and 2023—that country and France have announced major commitments. “But even countries without glaciers, like Holland, are participating in the full realization of how much glacial ice contributes to the thermoregulation of the entire global climate system,” Sandford said.

The purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system.

Western Canada’s mountains (combined with the US northwest) comprise one of 19 regions around the world represented in the IYGP, alongside New Zealand, Greenland, Antarctica and the southern Andes. The Year’s purpose is to raise awareness of the vital role glaciers, snow and ice play in the climate system and water cycle, as well as the far-reaching impacts of rapid glacier melt.

A full quarter of Earth’s remaining ice is found in Canada, with some 18,000 glaciers in the mountain west. Alberta’s Rockies hold more than 1,100, including the best-known and most accessible glaciers in the country. This makes Alberta the natural centre for the Canadian IYGP initiative. “The latest scientific research regarding the state and fate of our glaciers originates here,” Sandford said. “As Parks Canada rolls out its 2025 UN Glacier Year program, Canadians all across the country will learn what the Dutch already know: that even if there isn’t one nearby, glaciers contribute enormously to the stability of the global climate.”

Canada’s IYGP objectives include promoting Canadian snow and ice research to improve scientific understanding of climate change impacts and recognizing snow and glacier ice as more than just water resources, with an emphasis on artistic and Indigenous perspectives.

“Terminus.” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

MELTDOWN’s image titles speak volumes: “Terminus,” “The Black Hole,” “Battered Hero.” The latter depicts Mount Athabasca, a peak that’s been trod by countless crampons since J. Norman Collie and Herman Woolley were most likely the first to stand on its summit in 1898. Reaching the mountain back then took 19 arduous days on horseback from Lake Louise; nowadays it’s a two-hour drive. From that summit, they viewed the massive Columbia Icefield, noting that its meltwater flows to three oceans—the Arctic via the Sunwapta, Athabasca and Mackenzie rivers; the Atlantic via the North Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan and Nelson rivers; and the Pacific via the Columbia River.

More ice melted from the glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years.

Compared to historical photos in the Whyte’s bookshop showing Athabasca’s slopes blanketed in plush white snow and ice during Collie’s time, the MELTDOWN image shows dingy ice clinging to rocky slopes like a threadbare sheet.

Climbers and tourists remain drawn to these peaks. The Columbia Icefield Centre (CIC), located where the Athabasca Glacier terminated a century ago, now hosts nearly a million visitors annually, with more than 400,000 riding specialized snowcoaches onto the glacier. Hundreds more join walking tours, whose guides safely lead them to peer into crevasses and experience coursing meltwater streams close enough to get splashed. MELTDOWN images are now on display at the CIC’s Glacier Gallery having left the Whyte.

Jasper is one of seven national parks—along with BC’s Glacier National Park—where hundreds of glaciers are carefully monitored by Parks Canada. Geological Survey of Canada and Parks Canada researchers recorded more ice melt from the Athabasca Glacier in 2023 than in any of the 10 previous years. In Glacier, as of 2018, 129 glaciers remained, down from 337 in 1978. The next survey is planned for 2026. Scientists estimate that if all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, the area’s creeks and streams would carry one-third less water. Many could disappear completely.

“By partnering in the IYGP, Parks Canada can encourage hundreds of thousands of Canadians to reflect on the importance of glaciers and the role of protected areas,” said Louis-René Sénéchal, a Parks Canada manager. “We want to inspire them to do something about climate change and share with them the knowledge to make a difference.”

If all the glaciers in Glacier National Park melt, local creeks and streams could carry one-third less water.

The 2023 NFB film Losing Blue was playing continuously behind a privacy screen at the Whyte. Visually exquisite, poetic and soul-stirring, the 16-minute film by Canmore’s Leanne Allison (whose previous award-winning films include Being Caribou and Finding Farley) posed the question “What does it mean to lose a colour?” The narrator references how the world’s glacier-fed lakes are losing their beguiling turquoise hues as glacial content declines. Drone imagery brings viewers seemingly close enough to touch the glaciers, soaring mere centimetres above an ice cave—which I recognized as Peyto Glacier’s toe, which has since melted and flowed onward to Hudson Bay.

“The ancient bond between glaciers and lakes is ending—the bond that gives the lakes their otherworldly blue,” states the narrator.

A smaller gallery presented an exhibition of images by Canmore’s Glen Crawford titled Etched in Ice. The photos shared perspectives captured by drone at his backcountry lodge in the Rockies north of Golden, BC. Intimate and abstract, their subtlety balanced the raw power of the MELTDOWN images. Dull-grey ice, bisected by a long, skinny strand of whitish snow dribbling into a dingy-green meltwater pool. Pebbles and dirt filling the creases of dark, scrawny ice. Ice resembling hammered metal, scratched and beaten.

“I’ve been very fortunate to live in the Bow Valley and explore the nearby mountain wilderness for 50 years. Glaciers are an integral part of this landscape,” Crawford told me. “They’re also key in helping understand how climate change has an effect worldwide. With potentially 15,000 years of climate record stored in glaciers, they’re a natural archive that is now endangered. I hope the UN IYGP promotes awareness, discussion and motivation that help enact change.”

That hope is shared by other IYGP partners, including Tim Patterson, an IYGP Canada ambassador. A member of the Lower Nicola Indian Band of the Interior Salish-speaking peoples of BC, Patterson is a hiking guide who owns and operates Zuc’min Guiding—the name means “red ochre,” with which Indigenous people painted their faces before entering the mountains.

By sharing Indigenous perspectives with his clients—including during walks on the Athabasca Glacier—Patterson aims to foster Indigenous perspectives and knowledge of Canada’s glaciers, water, ice and snow among international travellers and Canadians alike.

While many of the IYGP Canada team members are Albertans, Québécoise ambassador Caroline Côté shares perspectives as a polar expedition guide. Long before her first Arctic expedition, she was awed by remnants of an ancient glacier, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of Canada 20,000 years ago.

“Glaciers are at the centre of my life,” she said. “But I also believe that they are, and must be recognized as, the centre of every Canadian’s life. If you head east of Baie-Comeau, you can still see traces of the last glaciation. What struck me the most was the sheer power of ice, its ability to move mountains and carve valleys, leaving its mark on the rock. Our world, as we know it, was shaped by glaciers thousands of years ago.”

“Battered Hero” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

Early in her career, Côté dreamed of exploring Antarctica, a dream she felt fortunate to fulfill. But she later realized Canada was home to more than 20,000 glaciers, and she needn’t travel so far. “To protect glaciers, my goal in the coming years is to reduce my travel and make more conscious choices.”

During the formal launch of the main UN IYGP in Geneva, Switzerland, on January 21, Canmore resident John Pomeroy, director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Centre for Hydrology and its Canmore-based Coldwater Laboratory, spoke in his role as IYGP advisory board co-chair. He laid it bare. “Global concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen from 315 to 425 parts per million, and as a result winter temperatures in northern Canada have risen over 6ºC during my lifetime. Counterfactual industries and regimes around the world would deny these measurements, but they can’t deny their culpability in the destruction of glaciers that’s occurring before our eyes. Glaciers don’t care if we believe in science; they just melt in the heat for all to see. The International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation provides a mechanism to kick-start renewed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the science and adaptation necessary to prepare for a warmer, less icy world. There is still time to turn this around.”

This statement brought me to a MELTDOWN image titled “After the Heat Dome.” Dark, severe, rough broken rock dominate the frame, with a thin layer of glacier ice resting on the highest ridgetop, its days obviously numbered.

A 2015 study established that western Canada could lose 60 to 80 per cent of its glacier ice by 2100, and the bulk of the melting would happen between 2020 and 2040. Since then I’ve had one question. What would the melting look like?

For decades, I’ve skied across glaciers and icefields in winter and hiked among them with my camera in summer. The 2021 heat dome that engulfed Alberta and BC was a regional gamechanger, breaking temperature records and being cited as a leading cause of some 600 deaths. It accelerated the deaths of our glaciers too.

On June 30, 2021, Jasper reached 40.8ºC, its hottest temperature ever recorded. The resulting flooding caused by rapidly melting snow and ice resulted in catastrophic damage to trails and bridges in the area; the Berg Lake trail in Mount Robson Provincial Park is still under repair. Heat-absorbing soot from wildfires—including the 2024 Jasper fire—coats glacier surfaces and accelerates melting. Globally, 2024 was the hottest year ever recorded—after 2023, which had set the previous record—all directly caused by humans burning fossil fuels.

In a handful of years, glacier loss has become visible to the naked eye.

Western Canada’s glaciers had been gracing paintings since before the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885. In decades since, photographers, filmmakers and writers have shown us this icy landscape. Adventurers have skied across glaciers for days, weeks, sleeping in tents or snow caves. Guides earn their living on glaciers. We create memories on them.

As they melt, we can honour glaciers by sharing these stories and artworks.

“In this coming year, we will celebrate Canadian researchers and institutions studying snow and ice, and honour writers, poets, artists and photographers working to help us understand what the loss of glacier ice means,” Sandford said. “The UN Glacier Year allows us to halt backsliding in terms of climate action by learning more about what we face, and provides an opportunity to shine on the world stage as an example of everything we stand for.

“After the Heat Dome” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

“We want to be able to tell the world that we as Canadians listened for an entire year to what the disappearing ice was trying to tell us.”

At the Whyte Museum that night, I listened as Alberta-based Métis artist Tiffany Shaw explained how she created her glass sculptures from casts taken from the Athabasca Glacier. “I think these will last longer than the glacier,” she said, “which is really sad.”

Lynn Martel is writer in residence for IYGP Canada, an accredited hiking guide, and the author of three books about local mountain culture, including Stories of Ice (RMB, 2020).

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Read more from the archive “Goodbye to Peyto Glacier” September 2022.

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Kevin Van Tighem says YES

Alberta-born author, naturalist and former Banff National Park superintendent (2008–2011)

Over four million people visited Banff National Park in 2023. Some got lost or hurt and had to be rescued. Others fed bears and had to get straightened out. All flushed toilets, drove on roads and parked in parking lots. Campgrounds had to be maintained. Signs, picnic tables and boardwalks had to be repaired. The list goes on. It’s costly.

A lot of Canadians, however, didn’t visit Banff or any other national park—either because they couldn’t afford to or weren’t interested. It’s not clear why their tax dollars should finance holidays enjoyed by others.

Should the occupants of all those vehicles streaming into the park each day pay their own way Of course they should; they get to enjoy a costly privilege that others don’t. But the core costs associated with national parks should be funded through the public treasury. That’s not a contradiction, because it’s not the same thing.

National parks are institutions that represent the part of our Canadian identity defined by our nature and our history. Parks ensure we’ll always be able to know ourselves, because we’ll always be able to find ourselves. That mandate is a benefit to all—visitors or not—and a legacy to future generations. Like our national archives, military, treaty obligations and other institutions, it makes sense to fund our parks with tax revenues.

And, in fact, every Canadian should be welcome to visit and be inspired by their national parks without paying a fee. The parks are ours, by virtue of citizenship. But here’s the problem: when we choose to visit by means of a vehicle, that creates costs unrelated to protecting heritage—and compromises that very mandate. Without cars, we wouldn’t need to replace wildlife habitat with kilometres of paved highway lined with noxious weeds. Without cars there wouldn’t be bear jams and traffic gridlock. Snowplowing, parking lots, fencing, roadkill—all are in service of vehicles and those of us who insist on using them.

When I was responsible for Banff National Park I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation and found that well more than 75 per cent of the park’s budget went to providing for the use of—or mitigating the impacts of—vehicles. Recently congestion has brought parts of that park to a virtual standstill. An added irony: the exhaust gases spewing from those engines contribute to a climate disaster that makes park protection increasingly hopeless as glaciers melt, fires burn and wildlife comes under growing stress. In Banff’s case the problem is compounded by a species of mandate creep that has turned a protected heritage place—dedicated only to future generations of Canadians—into an international tourism resort. More vehicles.

So here’s my idea: the basic costs of protecting parks—our national birthright—should be fully funded by tax revenues. Canadians arriving on their own two feet should get in for free. But anyone who comes by vehicle should pay a substantial fee that accounts for the full cost of that privilege. No free rides.

Ian Urquhart says no

U of A professor emeritus and former editor of the AWA’s Wild Lands Advocate

Free admission to Canada’s national parks was a gift Ottawa gave Canadians in 2017 for this country’s 150th birthday. It was a good idea then; it’s a good idea now.

Entrance fees are a revenue source for Parks Canada, albeit a small one. In 2022/23 the agency spent $1.28-billion; entrance fees paid for $91.5-million, or 7 per cent, of those expenses. Why get rid of these fees I recently posed this question to Catherine McKenna, the federal minister who delivered free admission to national parks in 2017. Today she strongly believes parks should be free “because we need people to understand the value of nature,” and that spending time in the outdoors may be the best way to do that. She suggested free admission helps parks promote many values, including health, equality, biodiversity, climate change mitigation and Indigenous partnerships. I agree, and I’ll just address two of them.

Research into the nature–human relationship clearly shows the health benefits of spending time in nature. Greenspace exposure reduces high blood pressure, high HDL cholesterol and cardiovascular mortality. Nature delivers similar mental health benefits. Connectedness with nature reduces stress while increasing happiness and cognitive abilities.

The research demonstrates parks are essential health care institutions. Dr. Melissa Lem agrees. She’s the director of PaRx, Canada’s prescription for nature program. Parks Canada has partnered with Lem’s program to enable registered health professionals to prescribe an annual park pass to patients. Alberta doctors who register with PaRx can prescribe this access to Alberta’s outstanding national parks. Calgary physician Andrea Hull regards PaRx as “an exciting way to showcase the health benefits of time in nature.”

Inequality is another important foundation for opposing entrance fees. User fees discourage people with lower incomes from participating in outdoor activities. Personally, $22 for a day pass to Banff isn’t going to stop me from visiting, but I’m lucky. The cost of a family day pass or annual pass ($151.25) puts time in national parks beyond many people’s reach.

I couldn’t support abolishing entrance fees if I thought it would mean damage to the parks. Maintaining and restoring ecological integrity is the first priority of managing the national parks. But the experience of 2017, when entry was free, allays my concerns. Parks Canada used other measures, such as buses and area closures, to manage the increase in visitors.

Banff National Park’s assessment of the 2017 season argued that McKenna’s decision was ultimately justified. Free passes “allowed more Canadians… to connect with these wonderful places that are actually their places.” The feared additional damage to nature from more visitors didn’t arise.

As minister of environment and climate change, McKenna favoured this tagline for our parks: “Discover. Connect. Protect.” Today let’s adopt it and add the word “Free.”

kevin van tighem responds to ian urquhart

Ian Urquhart argues that national parks should be free to Canadians because of parks’ health benefits. It’s hard to disagree with that view, but to an unfortunate degree it’s an idealistic one that doesn’t reflect the actual park experience for many visitors. It’s hard to see how sitting in a traffic jam on Banff Avenue or jostling with the crowds that throng the Lake Louise shoreline is good for health. If anything, the tension experienced by visitors during crowded times—which, increasingly, is most of the time—frays tempers and exacerbates the social stresses those visitors went to their parks to escape. That’s not healthy.

Minister McKenna’s 2017 decision to provide free access to Canada’s national parks was not the painless success that Urquhart suggests. Yes, in many less visited parks and historic sites, Canadians did connect to their heritage. But Alberta’s already crowded mountain parks saw worse traffic, bigger crowds and the diversion of budgets from priorities such as trail maintenance and wildlife management to crowd-control.  When a national park visit becomes an exercise in navigating traffic cones, being directed into emergency parking lots by safety-vest-clad employees, crowding onto buses and waiting endlessly, something has gone wrong. It certainly wasn’t good healthy fun for anyone, including those harried park employees.

Yes, Parks Canada scrambled to mitigate the challenge by setting up public transportation. But those buses, signs and flag-people came at a cost. Nothing is free, after all. Somebody has to pay. In 2017 it was Canadian taxpayers who picked up the tab. I’m not sure how this was fair to the large percentage of those taxpayers who chose not to visit a park that year—partly because of the well-publicized crowding issues.

Nothing guarantees a right to private vehicle use in the parks. Kilometres of pavement compromise nature.

Social equity challenges don’t just involve the cost of getting into a park. People who can’t afford a park pass generally live far from national parks. The economic challenges involved in enjoying those parks include the cost of transportation to get there, finding accommodation and paying inflated prices for meals and other amenities in parks that have been taken captive, to a considerable degree, by a tourism industry that targets well-off motorized travellers. Low-income Canadians unquestionably deserve the opportunity to experience their national parks, but the cost of admission is often the least of the barriers they face.

For all those quibbles, I generally agree with Urquhart. National parks are meant to benefit every Canadian; every Canadian should be able to enjoy them for free. But the traditional emphasis on private motor vehicles can make parks less than enjoyable.

Public transportation is one way to democratize access to the national parks. For that truly to work, it has to include not just internal options such as Banff’s Roam bus service but also services to help Canadians get to their parks from the cities and towns where most of us live. That’s a costly proposition, given that the country’s infrastructure is built around the private vehicle. It was no accident, after all, when Greyhound folded. Cars rule.

But the value of good, affordable public transportation to and in our national parks would go beyond social equity; it’s a critical part of any meaningful response to the climate crisis—a crisis that threatens both human health and the natural environment.

So how could we pay for it Collect high fees from those who insist on driving their vehicles to the parks. Progressive economic policy requires that those who demand special benefits that work against the public good should pay dearly for their privilege.

Nothing in the Canada National Parks Act guarantees a right to private vehicle use in the parks. As Urquhart points out, parks’ first priority is the protection of ecological integrity, something inevitably compromised by the kilometres of pavement covering what was once wildlife habitat; the hundreds of birds, mammals, amphibians and insects killed each year by vehicles; and the climate chaos engulfing us because of all the CO₂ those cars release.

National parks are dedicated to future generations of Canadians as places that provide for the benefit, education and enjoyment of people. Private vehicles aren’t required for that; just the opposite. Nature is off-pavement.

Anybody who doubts the need to challenge conventional car-centred logic in the management of national parks should take a trip to Banff on any summer weekend. Yes, national parks should be free to all Canadians. But not to our cars. If we charged private vehicle users the full cost of their privilege, we’d start generating the kind of revenues needed to fund public transportation for all. We might also restore the peaceful enjoyment of nature—the kind of real national park experience that is rapidly becoming roadkill.

ian urquhart responds to kevin van tighem

Kevin Van Tighem believes that anyone using a private vehicle to visit national parks should pay a “substantial fee.” Why Because such visitors compromise Parks Canada’s heritage protection mandate. He uses Banff National Park to make the point that vehicle congestion can produce gridlock. Banff again is used to argue that managing private vehicles costs a lot of money. Such costs are compounded, in the case of Banff, by the park’s alleged transformation from “a protected heritage place” into “an international tourism resort.”

Much of his argument is Banff-based. Banff is unique, and we should be wary of generalizing from what we think is best for Banff to all national parks. That said, I believe his prescription is wrong even for Banff.

Before I critique the former superintendent’s position, readers should know he misrepresents Banff’s history. Tourism, not heritage protection, motivated the establishment of Canada’s first national park. Sir John A. Macdonald concluded Banff could be “a great place of resort” that would attract people from across North America and Europe. Banff was created to be an international tourist destination. Decades later, parks commissioner J.B. Harkin wanted the parks to serve all Canadians. Ironically—given this dialogue—he saw roads and the automobile as the way to do that. Promoting tourism is a constant, not a novelty, in Banff National Park’s history.

We agree, however, that tension between human desires and heritage protection is another constant in the history of our mountain parks. Today’s volume of vehicle traffic to Banff attests to this.

But all visitors, including those in cars, are more than simply threats to heritage protection. They are potential allies to promote that mandate. Their support for parks is an important political resource in the annual competition for Canada’s tax dollars. Building public support for Parks Canada is especially important now. The agency benefited from the 2021 federal budget’s $2.3-billion investment in nature conservation. But the funding was temporary. It will dry up in 2026–2027, and with it will go an important chunk of the agency’s budget.

All visitors are potential allies to promote heritage protection. Support is more likely when entry is free.

Parks Canada needs our support to try to secure dollars to invest in its core mandate. Support is more likely when nearly all visitors say they would recommend their experience to others. In 2022–2023, 95 per cent of visitors to Canada’s national parks surveyed said this. A new, substantially increased entrance fee, a form of double taxation, might damage or kill that support.

A substantially higher fee would also make access even more challenging for lower-income Canadians. Today, as a century ago, the car offers the most practical and affordable means of travelling to Alberta’s national parks. The least expensive round-trip bus option for a family of four going to Banff from Calgary is just under $95, or $117 with a day pass. If the same family’s SUV uses 8 litres per 100 km, the fuel cost will be less than $35.

A bus trip to Jasper is a non-starter for a family of four living in Edmonton. The only commercial bus service to Jasper would cost them $344.44—one way. And if you live elsewhere in Alberta… An automobile is your only practical means for visiting.

The report of the expert advisory panel on moving people sustainably in the Banff Bow Valley (2022) saw pricing as one of its eight key strategies. But the panellists wrote that if a pricing strategy didn’t consider income it could “create equity issues and discourage lower-income persons from experiencing the  park.” Van Tighem’s position sounds like it would do exactly that.

Do vehicles produce gridlock in parts of Banff National Park Absolutely. But the panel suggested that serious transportation issues arose only “in a relatively small portion of the park. [Some] 97 per cent of the park is declared wilderness, where development is prohibited.” When gridlock occurs, it likely arises in the town of Banff, Lake Louise or Lake Minnewanka.

I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon in July while looking at the Town of Banff’s traffic cams on my computer. The cameras show considerable traffic entering, leaving and driving around town. But while I’d be annoyed by this traffic if I lived in Banff, I can’t conclude the cars I’m watching constitute gridlock or pose a serious threat to heritage protection.

Without tourists, especially Canadian ones, the future of our national parks would be dim. Canadians’ support is vital to the heritage protection mandate that Van Tighem and I both value. Slapping a substantial fee on visitors who drive threatens that support. Instead of higher fees, Parks Canada should do what it does already for youth, members of the armed forces/veterans, and new Canadians—offer free entry. And let’s all join the fight for additional tax dollars.

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Fast forward to February 28, 2024: the pause was ended—sort of—as premier Danielle Smith and minister of affordability and utilities Nathan Neudorf outlined some of the regulator’s key findings in a report with the windy title “AUC inquiry into the ongoing economic, orderly and efficient development of electricity generation in Alberta, Module A”, dated January 31, 2024.  (Insomniacs can find that on Google; it beats sleeping pills.) A number of conditions would have to be met: for example, protection against losses to the agricultural land base and threats to farming operations would be the number one priority. Rural municipalities were also insisting on being properly consulted on new projects and having a seat at the table when decisions were made by the regulator. And they also wanted assurance that developers would post bonds and agreements to assure reclamation of wind and solar sites when project life was ended. The latter condition is essential in Alberta, where the preferred form of reclamation (think orphan oil and gas wells) is to declare bankruptcy.

As a former talk-show host, premier Smith knows how to give good phone to soothe any rumbling in the belly of the beast, by which I mean her base, which is mainly rural. “Protecting Alberta’s land,” she said sternly, “is also why we will establish buffer zones of 35 kilometres around protected areas and pristine viewscapes as designated by the province.” In a statement that seemed to single out TransAlta’s Riplinger proposal in Cardston County, which would have sited 47 turbines, each 195 metres tall, close to Waterton National Park, she said: “You cannot build wind turbines the size of the Calgary Tower in front of a UNESCO World Heritage site or on Nose Hill or in your neighbour’s backyard. We have a duty to protect the natural beauty and communities of our province.” Now that is some skookum wawa that should thrill the UCP base.

Was Smith not impressed by TransAlta’s claim that Riplinger could produce enough energy in an average wind year to power 138,000 homes or boil 3,960 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water TransAlta’s CEO John Kousinioris responded to the new buffer zone in May of 2024 by cancelling the Riplinger project and (cheekily) putting several other green projects on “pause,” citing the buffer zone and a general lack of clarity coming from the Alberta government in his decision.

I can imagine some readers saying “This is all just batshit crazy,” while others, more sanguine, might opine “It’s about bloody time!” The renewable energy industry, however, has been left in confusion, trying to figure out what qualifies as a pristine viewscape. The map released by our government implies that they mainly consider the viewscapes along the mountain front as pristine. Minister Neudorf mentioned a desire to protect “tourist landscapes” as part of the rationale for his government’s decision, but when pressed by media he admitted “there is no universal definition of a pristine viewscape; however, many use that term to refer to areas that are unobstructed natural landscapes.” The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

The AUC’s opinion echoes the minister, though it prefers the term “valued” viewscape instead of “pristine.” And yet the commission left the door open for excluding other industries in the buffer zone, maintaining that protection of viewscapes should be “industry agnostic and apply equally to all forms of development.” They didn’t swallow Danielle Smith’s Kool-Aid targeting renewables. The AUC also naughtily pointed out that from 2019 to 2021 the largest driver of land loss in Alberta was the “expansion of pipelines and industrial sites,” not solar or wind development.

Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the coal mine.

Full disclosure: I’m a ratepayer in the MD of Pincher Creek No. 9, a founding member of the Livingstone Landowners Group and no fan of the current political regime. I’m worried about climate change, so I support renewable energy. But I’m also one of many people here who think that nine wind farms in this MD are more than enough for one jurisdiction to deal with. You might expect, given this, that I would welcome a more cautious approach on wind power hereabouts. Not so fast. I’ve found that a steady state of paranoia is the prudent way to deal with the ready-shoot-aim policy shifts of Alberta’s right-wing politicians.

The term “pristine viewscape” trips uneasily from a Tory’s lips. There’s nothing too pristine about their beloved oil sands mines, toxic tailings ponds or clear-cut logging operations. Such things elicit a kind of earth-ravished angst that many Albertans don’t care to contemplate—or even look at. So what has happened to Danielle Smith’s sense of the aesthetic Perhaps some pixie dust from the chemtrails sprayed on her base by the US Department of Defense has expanded her awareness of nature’s grandeur Does she really care about any scenic splendour that has not already felt the caress of a bulldozer blade or the embrace of a feller-buncher?

So many questions, so few answers.

After all, she heads a government that seems hell-bent on resurrecting a zombie coal mine, the Grassy Mountain project just north of Blairmore, that had multiple stakes driven through its heart by the Alberta Energy Regulator, the federal environment minister and the Alberta Court of Appeal. Yet it staggered back to unholy life on November 16, 2023, when energy minister Brian Jean suggested the same AER should take a new gander at Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart’s favourite dead coal project. By the way, the Grassy Mountain open pit proposal, which includes a “350-tonne load-out bin” and a new railway loading spur next to the Blairmore hospital, is well within Smith’s 35-kilometre buffer zone. Perhaps wind turbines would spoil the view of the mine or fan up too much coal dust in the Crowsnest Pass. Those whirling blades might distract hospital patients from enjoying the lullaby of train whistles and shuttling coal cars being loaded, clang-bang, 24-7.

Further, minister Jean could be feeling nervous about the multi-billion-dollar lawsuit his government is facing from four mining companies after former minister Sonya Savage reinstated the Lougheed coal policy and closed the mountains to new open pit mines in 2022. And worse, Jean’s old political enemy, former premier Jason Kenney, is a senior adviser at Bennett Jones, the firm handling the lawsuit. And lo—that’s the same Jason Kenney who presided over the attempt to overturn the Lougheed coal policy in the first place. “No worries, mate. Just throw Brian Jean on the barbie.”

Good old UCP, still steering Alberta by a broken moral compass. This government suffers from a terminal case of irony deficiency—and from constantly being “hoist by its own petard.”

The new “no-go” zones for renewables include “viewscapes” and “visual impact assessment zones” plus agricultural land. But not all new energy development is banned; the UCP seems to believe coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills or solar panels.

Long ago, in a different time and a different world, I wrote: “Each mountain/ its own country/ in the way a country must be/ a state of mind.” I could easily have said there are as many mountain moods as there are mountains. They are that changeable, both welcoming and threatening when you live among nature’s uncompromising cathedrals, these water-towers of the West. When not admiring the constant play of light and cloud-shadow rippling across their ridges, I love to view them from a distance. The Piikani people called them “the backbone of the Earth”; they were known as the “Shining Mountains” to 18th-century fur traders. I can see why their classic profile appears on Alberta’s flag and provincial shield. Something worth protecting, one would assume, and some of us definitely try.

But the shining mountains are no longer the only towering images above southern Alberta’s plains and foothills. White wind turbine towers, some as high as 90 metres from ground to hub, with a rotor diameter of 100+ metres are steadily upstaging the view.

The Municipal District of Pincher Creek was home to Canada’s first commercial wind farm, at Cowley Ridge, in 1993. Its 52 windmills, outlined against the mountain backdrop, predicted how the industry would relate to the “pristine viewscape.” These first latticed towers, some 25 metres high, were replaced in 2017 by a row of 15 turbines measuring 46 metres. According to the US Department of Energy, hub heights of land-based windmills have increased by 83 per cent since 1999. “In 2023,” the department notes, “the average rotor diameter of newly installed wind turbines was over 133.8 meters… longer than a football field, or about as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza.” The reasons are simple enough: wind shear increases with a gain in height while surface friction (by trees, buildings, grass etc.) is diminished. And the longer the rotor blades, the more energy they capture for the turbine.

In two decades, the mountainous scene west of Fort Macleod and Pincher Creek, from Chief Mountain north to Crowsnest Mountain, and from the Porcupine Hills west to the Livingstone Range, that thrilled many a first-time visitor to this place, has been rapidly transformed by wind turbines as this part of Alberta became the centre of wind farm development. Most locals supported the industry. In Alberta’s free-wheeling energy market, there’s a lot of money to be made by vandalizing the view, both for the developer and for the landowner. I could not obtain information on current leases, but in 2017 Evan Wilson of the former Canadian Wind Energy Association told the Calgary Herald that “every 150 MW of new wind power represents $17-million in lease payments… over a 20-year period and $31-million in property taxes to municipalities.”

Historically, the Alberta Utilities Commission paid little more than lip service to those citizens or local politicians who objected to the pace of development or to turbine placement. The most glaring example of unregulated growth begins a few kilometres west of Brocket, where huge steel transmission towers and a maze of high-tension power lines frame a tangled view of multiple windmills, their huge blades slicing at the sky. Windmills and transmission lines, due to sheer numbers, have become a man-made geographic feature, a creeping industrialization of the signature Alberta landscape that appears on Alberta’s provincial flag. The effect for a long-time resident is a solastalgic assault on the nervous system, a cognitive dissonance where cherished memory meets current realities.

Of course, most of these space-age marvels are well within Danielle Smith’s buffer zone and are grandfathered-in from her newfound pristine obsession.

When it comes to new wind-power development hereabouts, however, the honeymoon phase is probably over. According to the The Western Producer, a survey conducted in 2006 found 90 per cent of MD residents favoured wind-power development. But as development increased, a new survey in 2017 showed only 54 per cent were still in favour of more turbines. The industry is looking farther afield for new sites these days. The local development officer, Laura McKinnon, told me there has not been a new wind-power application here for three years. Right now the biggest windfarm in Alberta so far is the Buffalo Plains facility, and it’s well out on the prairies of Vulcan County. Personally, I think the industry would be more popular here if it had just showed more sensitivity in siting its turbines, sacrificing some height in return for more social acceptance and goodwill.

A “pristine” pumpjack near Longview, in the foothills of the Rockies, on the Cowboy Trail (Highway 22) south of Calgary.

Criticizing wind power during this disastrous era of climate change is like criticizing mom’s pumpkin pie. Calgary politicians have touted the fact that the CTrains run on wind power. But the electrons from wind-powered or gas-powered turbines flow through the same wire. Since urban residences and industry use most of the electricity, why not put the windmills closer to main consumers, thus cleverly reducing material expense and line loss of power over long transmission distances. Why not insist on solar panels on city rooftops, which is becoming the norm in Europe Could it be that city folks might find such installations (especially wind turbines) not to their liking if they were forced to look at them day and night, while watching their electrical bills increase despite all the new infrastructure that comes with new power generation?

While two feuding entities, the Green Genie and Youseepee No-vax, are cudgelling their wits for a social media assault on yours truly, let us slip into a handy thicket of etymology. The word “pristine” derives from the Latin pristinus, meaning “former,” according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Over time the meaning evolved from “ancient, primitive” to “1: in its original condition; 2: fresh and clean, as if new; and 3: unspoiled (pristine wilderness).”

We’re all familiar with current usages, as in “used F-150 in pristine condition,” “pristine bottled water,” “pristine starter-castle for the millionaire handyman”—whatever. None of these meanings apply to either the viewscape of the Rocky Mountains or the condition of its myriad peaks and river valleys. You may hike up to see the untouched marvels of Window Mountain Lake north of Coleman, for example, but don’t drink the water unless you are hankering for a dram of polycyclic aromatic compounds found in the coal dust blown into it from Teck Resources coal mines just across the Great Divide.

You could also argue, based on several factors, that there is no pristine wilderness to be had in these latitudes, let alone a pristine viewscape.

The view west of the windmills, as I write this, may not be pristine, but as the dwarf birch turns crimson and the aspen leaves go to yellow, the foothills and mountainsides are a watercolour artist’s dream, and that includes the battalions of round hay bales, the yellow fields of canola, the still-green grasslands topping high foothills and the distant ranch-houses and barns backed by the blue-grey walls of the mountain backdrop with endless cerulean skies above. There is a word for a view like this that stirs our heartsprings with love for our native place: sublime. Sublimity is what meets the eye when you leave the wind turbines behind.

As a young park warden in Jasper, I once endured a lecture by a Canadian Forest Service officer who liked clear-cut logging and summed it up: “I love to see the hand of man upon the land.” You can see the hand of man at work in the Alberta Forest Reserve just about anywhere you care to look. It’s there in the roads, in thousands of kilometres of seismic lines, in deeply eroded ATV trails, in clogged-up trout streams, logging clear-cuts and abandoned coal mines and slack piles. There are also pipeline rights-of-way, gas flare stacks and transmission lines criss-crossing and scarring the mountains. Even the tree cover today has greatly increased from what it was before European contact, the result of billions of dollars spent on wildfire control to preserve wood fibre for loggers, or in the case of national parks, to protect the scenery. That accounts for the massive fuel loads that feed today’s forest fires.

But in truth, the hand of man cannot be avoided. Even before European contact, the hand of man was at work doing cultural burning to improve the range for deer, elk and bison, to encourage food and medicinal plant growth and to keep some of the trees in check. Historical photos taken by the early surveyors in places like Waterton National Park show a less forested landscape far different from today—at least before the Kenow wildfire of 2017, that is.

Writing in the anthropology magazine Sapiens, Claudia Geib cites the work of geographer William Denevan, who speaks of the “pristine myth”—the belief that all of nature was once a sparsely populated wilderness where humans had little or no influence. She quotes Kawika Winter, an Indigenous biocultural ecologist at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa who says: “I loathe that word pristine. There have been no pristine systems on this planet for thousands of years.” Such scholars are part of a growing consensus against the old tenets of “fortress conservation”—the Eurocentric notion that “pristine wilderness” can only be protected by excluding human beings, particularly Indigenous people, from within its boundaries.

What we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage.

In Canada, First Nations people were pushed outside the boundaries of our national parks when the parks were founded. Recently Parks Canada has been striving to undo some of the harm by reaching out to Indigenous people and involving them in programs such as the reintroduction of bison into Banff National Park. That effort was marked in October 2024 by sponsoring a ceremonial bison hunt by members of the park’s Indigenous Advisory Council in which eight bison were to be “harvested” and used by First Nations members.

The Parks effort is a tentative move towards a conservation approach that includes humans as part of the landscape and biodiversity that ecologists are striving to protect. Danielle Smith, whose former claims to Cherokee ancestry qualify as “pretendian,” should stop pretending that coal mines and pipelines are somehow prettier to look at than windmills and solar panels. I doubt the public will be convinced by this petrostate gaslighting of pristine viewscapes, distorting the term “pristine” as a means of simply slowing the inevitable rise of renewables in favour of the fossil fuel lobby. It’s a fallacy that Alberta can have both unspoiled natural beauty and unchained industrial development at the same time in the same landscape—everybody going everywhere doing everything all the time.

The oil well access roads, gas wells and clear-cuts that scar Alberta’s east slope are not visible at a distance of 35 kilometres. In fact, what we describe as a pristine viewscape is a kind of political mirage. The concept that mountains are pristine landscapes is a myth. Yet the ranges of mountains on Alberta’s western horizon are sublimely beautiful. They still inspire awe, and I hope that someday, for all Albertans, they will inspire respect for the forests, the peaks and the rivers that lie behind that famous skyline.

Sid Marty is the inaugural winner of the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize for Oldman’s River: New and Collected Poems (NeWest Press, 2023).

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Read more from the archive “Where to Put a Solar Farm” November 2023.

The post Youseepee No-Vax vs. the Green Genie appeared first on Alberta Views.

by Kevin Van Tighem,
Rocky Mountain Books, 2024

Kevin Van Tighem retired as superintendent of Banff National Park in 2011, and since then he has shared his expertise on Alberta’s flora and fauna through books and columns, including in this publication, which, he writes, “gave me the chance to write about things that I believe make Alberta what it is. Things that aren’t just about oil and money.” In short, evocative essays, Van Tighem discusses the impact of industrial development on Alberta’s landscape, the state of wildlife across the province and the ethics of hunting. This updated edition also includes a preface detailing his experience running for the NDP in Livingstone-Macleod during the 2023 provincial election.

by Premee Mohamed,
ECW Press, 2024

“We tell the kids, Never travel alone. We tell them, Go where you like. But don’t go alone.” In the second installment of Premee Mohamed’s post-apocalyptic series, following The Annual Migration of Clouds, Reid Graham has biked from a ruined Edmonton campus across a dangerous Alberta to attend Howse, a university hidden in the Rocky Mountains. Her new community survives by sharing resources and supporting those sick with the mysterious Cadastrulamyces. At Howse, Graham is surrounded by relative opulence—Howse has no gathering places such as cafeterias or study halls, but also no death board because there are “not just days but weeks, months when no one dies. For [Graham’s community] it’s every day.” In exacting prose Mohamed questions the extent of our responsibility to family, community and personal survival.

The post Briefly Noted January/February 2025 appeared first on Alberta Views.

So are many of the birds. A walk through my old neighbourhood shows that the yards and gardens are as lush and well vegetated as they were 60 years ago, but birds seem fewer. Once-common species are missing; the cheery “chi-bik!” call of the least flycatcher, for example, is rarely heard now. But new birds that are there weren’t even in Alberta bird books back then.

Alberta has changed dramatically over the decades. Inevitably wild rose country’s birdlife has also changed. Our decisions, after all, shape their destinies too. The changes among the birds we live with amount to a sort of ecological report card on our ability to create what novelist Wallace Stegner once described as “a society to match the scenery.”

Where scenery is concerned, my old hometown has eaten a lot of it. Once confined to the sheltered confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers, Calgary now sprawls across most of the wild prairies, sloughs and shrublands where I once built my lists of prairie birds. Urbanization has eliminated long-billed curlews, Baird’s sparrows, meadowlarks and ferruginous hawks. Other birds, however, now thrive in the urban forest that has grown up along city streets. We still have birds, just different ones.

Calgary’s estimated seven million trees provide habitat for a host of bird species virtually unheard of back when a much smaller Calgary lacked that sheltering canopy. Baltimore orioles forage in the tops of the elms that arch over residential streets. Blue jays chatter in back alleys, vireos sing through the long summer afternoons. House finches and Eurasian collared doves—recent immigrants to the province—nest in backyard spruce trees and feast at bird feeders. Calgary’s forest has turned an otherwise hostile urban environment into a place where at least some woodland birds have found new homes.

Cleve Wershler, a Calgary-based ecologist, lists off some of the birds that thrive in his urban landscapes: house wren, yellow warbler, American robin, northern flicker, black-capped chickadee, cedar waxwing, chipping sparrow, red-breasted nuthatch, common grackle, black-billed magpie. It’s a similar story in most of Alberta’s older cities and towns. As trees, parks and yards matured, birds moved in. Some are as fascinating as they are relatively unknown. Northern saw-whet owls, for example: round little birds whose distinctive repetitive call sounds like a saw being whetted with a file. If you live in Edmonton, chances are these little owls are your neighbours.

“Saw-whet owls appear to be quite common in the Edmonton river valley,” says Geoff Holroyd, a former Canadian Wildlife Service endangered species biologist who now chairs the Beaverhill Bird Observatory, east of Edmonton. “But in the historical records, they weren’t there at all. If you look at pictures of Fort Edmonton from 150 years ago, there’s not a tree in sight. They were all chopped down for firewood and building materials. So that means our forest is only 150 years old.… Those regenerated forests now allow flickers and pileated woodpeckers to build their cavities, which are then used by secondary cavity nesters like saw-whet owls. In the 1990s, when we made a concerted effort to find owls on the Christmas bird count, we got the highest count in North America.”

Growing Populations (Clockwise from top left): Robin, peregrine falcon, Northern saw-whet owl, raven, white-faced ibis. Alberta’s cities have urban forests where some woodland birds can now thrive. Irrigation reservoirs have produced new lake and shoreline habitats in Alberta, helping some water bird populations grow dramatically.

Holroyd hastens to add that, where forest birds are concerned, cities aren’t all good news: “A lot of the forests in the Mill Woods area have been cleared and are now subdivisions. The forest tracts I used to know south of Edmonton are gone. So we’re still chopping forests down, but where we haven’t it’s recovering and more diverse than it used to be.”

Holroyd points out that birds need more than just nesting trees in order to thrive in an urban environment. “When I moved to Edmonton there were nighthawks and purple martins in the city, but within a few years they were gone, and they’ve been gone for decades now. They were able to tolerate the initial invasion of humans, but the growth of the city wiped out their feeding habitats, and of course the spraying for mosquitoes interrupts the food chain for both of them.”

Myrna Pearman, the public face and voice of the Ellis Bird Farm near Red Deer until her retirement in 2020, says it’s not just urban birds that are doing well in Alberta. She notes that water impoundments such as irrigation reservoirs have produced new lake and shoreline habitats in parts of the province where they were once scarce. “Some water bird populations have increased dramatically—white-faced ibis, American avocet, black-necked stilt, American white pelican, osprey and black-crowned night heron. Ducks that benefit from nest boxes, especially common goldeneye, have also increased.”

But for all that some species have benefited from the new habitats we’ve created, the overall bird conservation picture is grim. A comprehensive analysis released in 2022 by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative shows that three billion fewer birds survive on this continent than when I was a young birdwatcher. Among those facing the strongest headwinds are grassland birds and aerial insect-feeders such as swallows and nighthawks.

Our native Alberta prairie birds are now less than half as abundant as they used to be. Swallows and other aerial insectivores are down by almost 60 per cent. It would have been inconceivable in the 1960s to imagine barn and bank swallows ever becoming scarce. Today both are listed as species at risk.

“Burrowing owl, long-billed curlew, ferruginous hawk, loggerhead shrike, chestnut-collared longspur and upland sandpiper all used to nest commonly in the Calgary region as late as the 1960s and early 1970s,” says Wershler. “With the loss of native grassland habitats, these are all now rare or non-existent.”

Pearman says the most discouraging land use trend she has seen in her time as an Alberta naturalist is the spread of canola farming and other monocrop agriculture. “Old farmyards are gone, fencelines are gone; there’s no more habitat.”

Declining Populations (Clockwise from top to left): Barn swallow, long-billed curlew, burrowing owl, common nighthawk. These prairie birds used to nest commonly in the Calgary region as late as the 1960s and early 1970s. But with the loss of native grassland habitats, they are now rare or non-existent.

Where prairie birds and insect-eating species are concerned, it’s not just the loss of nesting habitat and shelter that’s causing trouble. Poisoning is an even more insidious threat. Bald eagles, peregrine falcons and other raptors, as well as some songbird species, became endangered in the 20th century because of a highly toxic pesticide, DDT, that accumulated in the ecosystem to the point where birds could no longer produce young. Public concern led to that pesticide being banned. The renewed abundance of those birds is one of the great conservation successes of the past few decades.

But the agrochemical industry found replacement pesticides that are devastating in other ways. Neonicotinoids are a class of biotoxin even more effective than DDT at killing insects. Neonics are widely used now, not only as sprays but as seed treatments. Nearly every canola and corn seed planted in Alberta is painted with the new poisons which, being water-soluble, quickly wash into wetlands and streams.

Geoff Holroyd points out that neonics have been banned in Europe, and were the subject of a proposed ban here. Under pressure from the agrochemical industry, Health Canada backed down. “Research on the prairies has shown that the highest level of neonicotinoids in ponds is in the spring. They are in the soil; the snow melts, that flushes them into the ponds, and you get the highest levels and it’s still lethal. It’s killing the midges and aquatic insects that are the food of aerial insectivores such as tree swallows.”

“It’s one thing to have neonicotinoids available for treatment if you have an insect problem,” says Holroyd. “But just to prophylactically have them on every seed is irresponsible.”

He, Pearman and Wershler all agree that intensive prairie agriculture accounts for a lot of the harm to native Alberta grassland and wetland bird species. Some of the effects are obvious—vast monocultures that no longer provide habitat for prairie birds—while others are more subtle and unexpected.

“Tree swallows eat aquatic insects that are getting hit by neonicotinoids,” Holroyd says. “But barn swallows eat larger insects such as flies that would normally live in cow manure. Producers treat livestock with ivermectin to get rid of parasites. It remains active in their bodies and droppings for about six months. Cow pies, within six months of cattle being treated with ivermectin, aren’t used by insects. So cow pies no longer produce dung beetles and other large insects that feed barn swallows, burrowing owls and other species.”

The poisoning problem is a fairly straightforward fix. Banning DDT brought back endangered birds of prey. Banning the prophylactic use of neonics and ivermectin would help bring back insect-eating birds that have only recently become rare. But solutions to other challenges facing Alberta birds are more elusive. Climate change is the big one.

On the upside, Holroyd points out, a changing climate brings new birds into the province. “With climate change, birds are going to keep moving farther north. We’re seeing an increase in egrets, for example. The first white-faced ibis was at Beaverhill Lake in 1999, and now you can see flocks of hundreds.”

But for most birds, climate change offers a new set of problems. Pearman’s decades-long monitoring of mountain bluebirds shows that, because of earlier snowmelt, they now return to Alberta weeks earlier than before. That can create what Holroyd calls a “climate trap”—the sudden spring blizzards that birds used to avoid simply by staying south now cause many of those birds to freeze or starve. “Around Ellis Bird Farm,” says Pearman, “mountain bluebird populations have never recovered from the catastrophic spring storm of 2008.”

Meadow voles often breed under the snow. As snow-free periods become more frequent in winter, vole populations decline. Returning birds of prey no longer have a key food source. On the other hand, rivers that used to freeze over in the winter now support large wintering flocks of ducks and geese which in turn help sustain bald eagles, prairie falcons and other birds of prey that no longer need to migrate from the province at all.

Climate change yields winners and losers, just as landscape changes and the use of agricultural chemicals do. Sadly, many of the losers are songbirds, shorebirds and other native species that give our province its unique nature. The winners include ravens, magpies, gulls and other scavenging species that are able to profit from others’ losses.

The dawn chorus of birdsong is an experience that seems to be fading into Alberta’s past.

Awakening to a dawn chorus of native songbirds can feel like the whole world is shouting for joy. Sadly, among the many changes to Alberta’s birds, that morning chaos of birdsong is an experience that seems to be fading into the past.

Myrna Pearman says she no longer hears hermit and Swainson’s thrushes or ovenbirds on morning rambles near her home at Sylvan Lake. “While walking the woods, the spring birdsong of years past seems to be much quieter.”

Geoff Holroyd concurs: “The dawn chorus isn’t there. I was just out at Gregg Lake [northwest of Hinton] and you’d have to stop and listen, hear one bird, and then go on and hear another species and another—there isn’t the cacophony of song that there used to be.”

We could get it back—if enough Albertans cared enough about birds to demand better pesticide regulations, reformed land use policies and action on climate change. And in fact both Holroyd and Pearman see encouraging signs that this could happen.

Interest in birding exploded during and after the pandemic. Pearman’s Backyard Bird Feeding: An Alberta Guide sold out its first printing in less than six months. The second is almost sold out too. The Beaverhill Bird Observatory can barely keep up with public demand for its talks and nature walks. Holroyd says that nighttime owl adventures attract 70 people at a time, and the observatory hosted over 1,700 visitors in 2023. The off-site 2024 Beaverhill Snow Goose Festival drew 1,500 participants.

People who experience birds in their lives care about their well-being, Holroyd says, but they also need knowledgeable coaches who can take the experience and tease the meanings out of it. That’s what the Beaverhill Bird Observatory tries to do with its public programming, and it’s why Holroyd and Pearman deliver dozens of talks to thousands of curious Albertans every year.

“We need people to care about and understand every bird species, not just the most colourful or charismatic ones,” says Pearman. She’s right. As Alberta continues to change, so will its birds. How diverse and abundant they will be is entirely up to us. The first step is simple. Go outside, meet some birds, fall in love.

Kevin Van Tighem is an author, naturalist and former superintendent of Banff National Park (2008–2011).

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The post The Wings of Change appeared first on Alberta Views.

Canmore’s transformation story started over 50 years ago, which makes it a very long and convoluted tale. Let’s start in the early 1970s, when Canmore (pop. ~1,500) was still a coal-mining town, its residents waiting with trepidation for the inevitable closing of the mine, which would happen in 1979. Seeing the end of coal, the responsible men in Edmonton began to execute a plan to maintain the Bow Valley’s role as the little economic engine that must.

In 1973 the provincial government held public hearings about the future of what was then known as the Canmore Corridor. It is unclear how much of the local public knew about the hearings or what the locals thought they wanted, but according to the Calgary Herald, “individuals and groups eager to cash in on what might become Alberta’s Golden Valley” had submitted more than 30 different development proposals. “If even half of the schemes become a reality,” the Herald opined, “the narrow corridor of semi-wilderness would be transformed into a commercial jungle.”

In the 50 years since those words were printed, Canmore (pop. ~14,500) has been transformed from a drive-by town Calgarians only stopped at on their way to and from Banff if they’d forgotten to fill up with gas, into an international tourist destination bending inexorably to the will of wealthy jet-setters and the people who serve their interests. (This probably explains why it’s the most expensive place to live in all of Alberta and much of Canada.) When Tucker Carlson came to Alberta in late January 2024, it was Canmore where he dined with our illustrious premier, Danielle Smith. Whose house they visited is unknown, but I’m guessing it was no one opposing what has certainly become a jungle of the most commercial kind.

The cumulative social, economic and environmental effects of this jarring transformation are largely why, in the spring of 2021, Canmore Town Council turned down two development plans, known formally as the Three Sisters Village Area Structure Plan (ASP) and the Smith Creek Area Structure Plan. These were brought forward by the latest of several iterations of the company that owns the Three Sisters lands, which sit below the photogenic eponymous mountains in the southwest corner of Canmore’s jurisdiction. The main rationale for council’s rejection was that the enormous scale and scope of the developers’ new plans looked nothing like the project that was initially proposed and then approved with conditions by the Natural Resources Conservation Board in 1992, and so all six councillors deemed the plans “not in the community’s best interests.”

The original vision for the property, boldly declaimed in the original company’s name, Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc., was a grandiose proposal for luxurious hotels and several 18-hole courses, a commercial development that would have provided the owners with fat profits and the town’s residents with jobs and a meaningful commercial tax base, as well as housing for a few thousand new, mostly part-time residents. Three Sisters and the Town worked out an agreement to guide development and, in 2004, council approved the Smith Creek and Resort Centre ASPs, which reflected the commercial golf resort nature of the NRCB approval, along with 2,729 housing units, roughly the same number as in all of the Banff townsite.

Alas, it was not to be. After a decade of financial mismanagement and bankruptcies—when just a few dozen houses, including Three Sisters Golf Resorts owner Blair Richardson’s 11,000-ft², $11-million “European-styled castle,” and two golf courses had been built—the original owners repurchased the company out of receivership for pennies on the dollar and began a years-long campaign to amend the originally approved ASPs. Fast forward to 2021, when Three Sisters Mountain Village, the new company, proposed something wholly different: a largely residential development of up to 7,000 units of mostly trophy homes, basically a second townsite roughly equivalent to the size of three Banffs. The extra 4,000+ homes would be built on an area previously set aside as a “wildlife buffer.”

The Town can’t stop a private landowner from building 7,000 mostly trophy homes.

Shocked at such temerity, a small army of Canmorites, many of whom had lived there for 20 years or more, decided this change was too much. The proposed development would consume the Bow Valley’s last remaining viable wildlife corridor and double the population of Canmore, making it unrecognizable from the already busy and insanely expensive though still somewhat authentic community it is today.

People were also concerned about the economic consequences of the proposed expansion, which presented significant long-term financial risk for the Town of Canmore. Roderick de Leeuw, a current Canmore resident who worked for Three Sisters in the late 1990s and served as the chief financial officer for the Town from 1999 to 2010, said the proposed new ASPs could create “significant net negative fiscal impact for the Town’s finances (that) continue to put pressure on the municipal tax rates.” A big part of the reason why the town had approved the initial Resort Centre ASP was the commercial tax base it would create. Construction and maintenance of residential infrastructure—roads, sewers, water—is expensive, and without the additional revenues from business taxes, the municipal taxes paid by residents, already high, would only increase.

De Leeuw’s comments came as part of a seven-day public hearing where more than 200 very engaged residents provided 110 hours of testimony, 95 per cent of which was critical of, even hostile to, the Three Sisters Mountain Village proposals. So, it’s perhaps not surprising that when the time came, Canmore’s town council overwhelmingly rejected first the Smith Creek ASP, in April 2021, and then, a month later, the Three Sisters Village ASP.

“I have to agree with my fellow councillors; I will not be able to support this,” said Esmé Comfort, a 40-year resident of Canmore and the oldest member of council. “We have to keep our heads clear and set aside our bias and look at the facts…. I tried to do that. I tried to approve this plan in my own mind, because it would get rid of the uncertainty. But it felt like putting on a pair of shoes that were too small. There were too many things that were not addressed.”

The lone supporter was a shocked Mayor John Borrowman, a potter and small businessman who had moved to Canmore in 1974 and who wanted desperately to bring an end to three decades of tumult. “I’m disappointed, of course. I saw this as an opportunity to bring some balance to our community…. The growing imbalance, particularly the social imbalance that we experience today in our community is, in my opinion, going to get worse. But I certainly will support the decision of council. Council’s decision is always right, whether or not I voted the same way as the rest of council.”

Many Canmorites celebrated as if they’d just won the World Cup. Karsten Heuer, a long-time Canmore resident and wildlife biologist for Parks Canada, said he was elated at the development’s rejection. “We were reminded that democracy still works in Canmore,” he told the Calgary Herald. “It was a huge outpouring of concern in the last five months.”

By the time I moved to Canmore in the late 1990s (pop. ~10,500), hoping to settle down and raise my soon-to-be daughter there, the benches above the valley bottom where the old town sits were a sea of brand-new, mostly fancy houses (of which I rented one of the most modest). The infamous Peter Pocklington had built Rundleview Estates on the west side of the valley shortly before the world arrived on Canmore’s doorstep for the 1988 Winter Olympics. Over the next decade, construction continued non-stop on the benches along the northeast side of the valley, with obligatory names reflecting the natural values that were literally being torn up and paved over: Silvertip, Benchlands, Eagle Terrace, Cougar Point (and Creek) and so on.

Meanwhile, the growing population of Canmore—including and especially the concerned environmentalist types, which included me—was spreading out in every direction. Not content with enjoying the views and counting the birds, we experienced the forests and mountains by foot and wheel and ski, running and rolling and gliding on a network of trails that seemed to grow exponentially each time the earth made its way around the sun.

At around the same time as provincial government officials started eradicating trails and closing some areas to recreation to ensure the wildlife corridors remained functional, unknown monkey-wrenchers, armed with more than passing knowledge of the workings of heavy machinery, poured sand into transmissions and hydraulic lines, and corrosive chemicals into fuel tanks. They ruined eight backhoes, loaders and bulldozers on Three Sisters land, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, slowing (but not stopping) the construction of the next subdivision to be added to Canmore’s ever-expanding waistline.

A big part of the conflict was that the provincial government had never bothered to develop a long-term land-use plan for the Canmore Corridor or conduct a meaningful environmental assessment on any of the developments, except for Three Sisters. The Bow Valley became the same kind of free-for-all that also plagued other areas during Ralph Klein’s tenure as premier, most notably the reckless expansion of the oil sands in the 1990s and 2000s.

For locals such as Ron Casey—who moved to Canmore as a young electrician in 1973 and would eventually become a town councillor, the longest-tenured mayor in the town’s recent history and an MLA of the Progressive Conservative persuasion—the rapidity with which the provincial government sold land to developers made it almost impossible for the local government to keep up with the onslaught of development proposals.

“Certainly, in the late ’80s, early ’90s, there was almost the sense of being under siege. You had people coming in that had way more capacity than anyone locally had ever dreamed would show up on our doorstep,” he said, in a frank interview with Jeremy Klaszus on the Sprawlcast. “And there was a bit of concern in the community that we were being outweighed, that these people were all politically connected… and they had way more capacity to deal with the province, to manipulate some of the outcomes that the community wouldn’t have the same say in.”

Although nothing was ever proven, the fire sale of Bow Valley public land after the 1988 Olympics reeked with the stench of corruption.

It has become the same kind of free-for-all that plagued other areas in Klein’s tenure.

In 1989, the year Ralph Klein was elected as an MLA and became environment minister, the Canmore Alpine Development Company bought “a remarkable piece of [public] land” just north of downtown Canmore, on the lower slopes of Mount Lady Macdonald. The majority owner of CADCO happened to be Hal Walker, a major PC fundraiser and Klein’s political adviser and dear friend, who would later go on to become a key figure in the rise of the Wildrose Party. Klein apparently exempted Walker’s SilverTip golf resort, located right on the boundary of Banff National Park, from an environmental review, even though the Three Sisters golf resort would need to undergo a review by the Natural Resources Conservation Board that Klein had recently created.

Walker, who was the president of Klein’s Calgary-Elbow constituency at the time, denied that his political connections had anything to do with his get-out-of-environmental-review card. In the 1992 Legislature, NDP MLA John McInnis asked the now-premier about this apparent conflict of interest and said “this sort of half-baked, piecemeal approach will result in numerous lawsuits and possibly another federal environmental review at the end of the day.” Klein just shrugged it off. “The hon. Member for Edmonton-Jasper Place is talking about a fine gentleman, one of the finest gentlemen to walk the face of the earth, which is a lot more than I can say for this individual,” Klein said. “With respect to Canmore Alpine Development, that project was initiated in 1986, long before the NRCB was a notion. The proponent played by all the rules of the day. This member would have that proponent go back and be subjected to rules that were put in place long after he received all the permits and the necessary regulatory approvals that were required at that time.”

Klein’s contempt for the injustice of retroactivity, however, was apparently one-sided. Meanwhile, Three Sisters investors, 66 of what the Calgary Herald called “powerful and politically well-connected business people”—including Richard Melchin, whose brother Greg would become a three-time PC MLA and energy minister; one-time mining minister Bill Dickie; and Calgary Olympic Committee president Frank King—had become worried the Town might interfere with their ability to develop the lands. So in 1995 Klein’s government decided to provide some much-needed security for the Three Sisters cabal, amending the Municipal Government Act (MGA) by adding section 619, which gives the province, not the town, jurisdiction over projects that have been approved by the NRCB. Although the NRCB’s Three Sisters decision had been made three years earlier, s. 619, now known as the Canmore Clause, was made to apply retroactively to all NRCB decisions.

Just like that, the Town’s ability to determine its own fate had been neutered.

In rejecting Three Sisters’ 2021 development plans, Canmore’s councillors understood what many of the more strident opponents of the development didn’t: this wasn’t the end of the battle, not by a long shot. The issue was not development or no development. Three Sisters still had approvals from 2004 for the Resort Centre and Smith Creek, and they were well within their rights to bring amended versions back to council again and again until a mutually beneficial compromise was reached. One of the sentiments expressed time and again by the councillors was that they weren’t opposed to development, but the size and scope of the proposal was overwhelming. The development needed to meet the needs not just of the developer but of the community, to make the community, as it saw itself today, better.

Blair Richardson and Don and Dave Taylor, the owners of Three Sisters, didn’t see it that way. Surely aware of their privileged position in Alberta’s oligarchical tradition, they must have decided they’d already made their final offer and were done negotiating. They immediately appealed council’s decision to the Alberta Land and Property Rights Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body much like the NRCB. They also filed a $161-million lawsuit against the Town of Canmore. Named in the suit were all the councillors who voted against the plans—Esmé Comfort, Jeffery Hilstad, Joanna McCallum, Karen Marra, Vi Sandford and Robert Seeley. Even mayor Borrowman made the list, though he was the only one to vote to approve the Three Sisters Village ASP.

The rest was a foregone conclusion. Six months later, in May 2022, the Tribunal reversed Canmore council’s decisions and mandated that the two Three Sisters ASPs be allowed to go ahead. The Town appealed, but the Alberta Court of Appeal eventually concurred with the Tribunal. Canmore could not prevent a private landowner from building a large residential development that would double the size of the town, because, the logic went, the NRCB had assessed and approved a golf resort 30 years ago.

In Canmore, October 24, 2023, will go down in infamy. On this day the newly elected councillors gathered to approve, against their will, the court-ordered Three Sisters ASPs. It was like a scene out of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. First, the members of the previous council who had been re-elected—Joanna McCallum, Karen Marra and Jeff Hilstad—recused themselves and left the room because they are still being sued by Three Sisters Mountain Village, and their lawyers had told them the less said the better.

Sean Krausert, a long-time resident and the new mayor, who, when the ASPs were rejected in 2021, had opined that “the right decision is being made!,” gave a longish speech to, in his words, “reflect on how we got here.” Specifically, Krausert, a lawyer, wanted to express his concern about the locals who were complaining the process had been “undemocratic” and those who suggested the mayor and council should resign rather than approve the ASPs.

That’s “easy for someone to say who has not been elected and [doesn’t have] a fiduciary duty to the municipality to uphold,” said Krausert. “It’s also easy for someone who is not subject to a code of conduct or obligations under the MGA; it’s easy for someone who does not face legal ramifications, whether that be contempt of court or potential civil liability or bolstering lawsuits already against the municipality. And what would be accomplished by such Nothing. The ASPs would still get implemented, but only after Municipal Affairs comes in to handle things, which will serve no one.”

Each of the three remaining councillors said their piece. Two of them, Jeff Mah and Wade Graham, were reluctant to vote yes but knew they had no choice. When it was time to vote, Mayor Krausert suggested they use “a little bit of a different system” this time. Instead of hands or speech, which would be captured forever in the video record, they would use their microphone lights, which would not be visible. “Light on if you’re in favour, leave it off if you’re not.” Lights on won.

Canmore’s inability to fend off unsustainable development is the norm in this province.

Canmore’s giant new development is “the biggest bait and switch ever,” wrote Jacob Herrero in an email to me. Herrero’s family moved to the town in the 1970s, when his father started studying grizzly bears in Banff National Park, and he still lives there today. He’s an environmental scientist and engineer, and has crunched the data in the various ASPs. “It starts out as Three Sisters Golf Resorts Inc. proposing multiple golf courses, conference facilities etc.… and morphs into plain-vanilla urban development, something the NRCB isn’t even supposed to review.”

Last October a group of about 20 Canmorites with Bow Valley Engage, frustrated at the undemocratic nature of the regulatory process that approved Three Sisters Mountain Village’s new plans, drove to Calgary and parked themselves in front of Don Taylor’s Mount Royal mansion with signs reading “Stop TSMV” and “Save Grizz Corridor.” Five police cars soon showed up.

Karsten Heuer was among the demonstrators, and he knew they were well within their rights to protest against the negative impacts of the project. “We’ve been pushed to the extent that we feel it’s time to actually air this thing out for what it is, and who the people behind it are,” he told The Narwhal. There are bronze statues of grizzly bears and elk on the Taylors’ lawn, he pointed out. “Those are the very things they’re putting at risk” by shrinking wildlife corridors, he said. Heuer is backed up by recent research in the Bow Valley, which shows connectivity has already been reduced to 21 per cent for grizzlies.

The Canmorites’ exercise of their Charter right “to participate in peaceful demonstrations and protests,” including on public streets, sent Blair Richardson into a paroxysm of outrage. “It’s essential to ask who these people are and whether they respect the principles of the law and unbiased court decisions,” he wrote in an open letter published in the Rocky Mountain Outlook. “Given the immense contributions of the Taylor family to Alberta and Canada, such treatment appears immoral, unjust and unethical.”

And then Richardson threatened his fellow Canmorites with a reminder of Three Sisters’s $161-million lawsuit that has “the potential to severely impact the financial stability of the town”—above and beyond the residential-heavy, commercial-light development he has foisted upon Canmore—“and residents’ tax obligations. With the benefit of the previous legal decisions in favour of Three Sisters, it is likely that financial damages will be awarded to Three Sisters.”

This sort of rhetoric sounds suspiciously old-fashioned and authoritarian, a frustrated Lord of the Manor chastising his peasant underlings for daring to challenge his wealth and authority. It also reveals a great deal about Richardson’s values and the rationale for the $161-million lawsuit against the Town and its councillors. University of Calgary law professor Shaun Fluker characterized the lawsuit as a SLAPP (or “strategic lawsuit against public participation”). According to the U of C Public Interest Law Clinic, filing a SLAPP is “a common tactic employed by claimants with superior resources or relatively easy access to the courts to force political opponents into a legal battle and intimidate them away from participation in political dialogue.”

“I think it’s noteworthy that the individuals named in the claim abstained from the council deliberations,” Fluker told The Narwhal. “So right there you’re seeing, seemingly, a connection between the litigation and [councillors’] ability to perform their public responsibilities. It’s highly problematic.”

It’s also an illustration of the privileged Conservative political culture that has evolved in Alberta over the last 50+ years, the same period of Canmore’s transformation from small town to billionaire wilderness.

I’ve lived in Canmore and written much about the political and economic machinations of Alberta’s conservative approach to economic development for the last three decades. It comes as absolutely no surprise that a grandiose real-estate mega-development that will largely benefit anonymous rich people, most of whom only spend a few weeks in town in any given year, prevailed over balanced economic development, a healthy landscape and a sustainable community.

Canmorites, especially those nature-lovers who moved to town long ago for the slow, quiet life of a former mining town on the edge of a national park, shouldn’t be ashamed at having lost the battle. They aren’t alone. The Town’s inability to fend off unsustainable development is the norm in this province. Decades of entrenched neoliberal rule has ensured that economic development and corporate interests always trump other aspects of the public interest. It’s the cardinal tenet of the Alberta Advantage.

Just listen to Chris Ollenberger, director of strategy and development for Three Sisters Mountain Village, rationalize the scheme. “This project falls into a category of provincial significance. It was deemed to be a project in the interest of the province, and so it has an order-in-council approval from cabinet that says this project will proceed,” he told Jeremy Klaszus. “The intent behind it was [that] if the entire province kind of thinks it’s good from the provincial government point of view, [then] a more localized subset of individuals wouldn’t be able to say ‘But we still don’t want it.’ ”

Alberta’s entire legal and regulatory regime has been specifically designed to both facilitate expedient development, be it of a subdivision or a coal mine, and provide the façade that it’s being done in a manner that is socially and environmentally responsible. This charade is necessary because, from the provincial government point of view, every major industrial project ever proposed—with the recent exception of much-needed clean-electricity infrastructure—is both “good” and “deemed to be in the interest of the province.” Inevitably “some localized subset of individuals”—a First Nation, say, that doesn’t want toxic leaks of effluent in its water supply, or a federal agency responsible for upholding federal laws, or the residents of a town that wants to salvage the last vestiges of a meaningful wildlife corridor—would prefer that, for once, their government account for the negative externalities of its reckless economic policies, but their concerns almost always fall on deaf ears.

Here are just a few of many examples during the same 30-year period that Three Sisters has been trying to build a golf resort, er, residential housing development, against the wishes of much of Canmore’s local population.

Against fierce opposition by the Piikani Nation and a host of Alberta environmentalists, the provincial government built the Oldman River Dam in the late 1980s and early 1990s to increase irrigation for commercial crops. Like development in Canmore’s Valley of Gold, it did so without an adequate environmental review or sufficient consultation with First Nations. The province also didn’t bother to get the necessary federal permits, and so one of the “localized subset of individuals” that didn’t want the dam because of its enormous adverse environmental impacts called the government’s bluff and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. And won.

Inconveniently for the provincial government, which fought the case all the way, the SCC ruled that the federal government had to conduct an environmental impact assessment, and when it did, the panel concluded “that the environmental, social and economic costs of the project are not balanced by corresponding benefits and… that, as presently configured, the project is unacceptable.” They recommended the dam be decommissioned “by opening the low-level diversion tunnels to allow unimpeded flow of the river.”

The Alberta government, even without the putative legal might of a Sovereignty Act, refused. Last winter the reservoir behind the dam dropped to its lowest level in 30 years, and, unlike during the pre-dam natural river flows, the MD of Pincher Creek couldn’t pump water from the depleted reservoir, which looked more like a desert than a waterbody.

Here’s another one, from about the same time. Against fierce opposition from First Nations and the residents of Athabasca, the Alberta government approved the construction on the Athabasca River of North America’s largest pulp mill, despite the fact the province’s Environmental Impact Assessment Review Board in 1990 recommended “that the proposed pulp mill should not be approved at this time,” because there already were several other polluting pulp mills on the Peace–Athabasca river system upstream from several First Nations communities. Premier Klein, ever generous to large corporations, also provided a $264-million interest-free loan as part of what he himself referred to as a “sweetheart deal.”

At the announcement of the multi-million-dollar gift, Klein, heckled by protesters over what they perceived as a gross injustice, clenched his left fist and gave them the finger with his right. He was sending the same message that any “localized subset of individuals” receives from the Alberta government when they oppose a damaging industrial project, though generally the message is translated into more genteel language, such as “nonetheless, it’s deemed to be in the interest of the province.”

Dozens of such stories emerge from the Klein era, but he is perhaps most famous for “revamping” Alberta’s environmental regulatory regime while a minister and then, as premier, loosing a largely unplanned and unregulated oil sands industry that turned northeast Alberta into one of the biggest and most polluting industrial sites in the world (though you’d never know it from industry and government propaganda).

Even Alberta’s reluctant mainstream media report on the gargantuan levels of pollution, the unsecured cleanup liabilities, on yet another cover-up of pollution leaking into the Athabasca River and risking the health and well-being of yet another of those pesky “localized subsets of individuals,” this time First Nations, whose constitutionally protected treaty rights have most assuredly been broken.

How was this allowed to happen According to James Heydon in Sustainable Development as Environmental Harm, it’s because Alberta’s regulatory system is designed to maximize economic growth at the expense of all other interests. As part of his research Heydon interviewed 33 current and former senior officials in the provincial bureaucracy and the oil sands industry. He anonymized the interviewees so they could be more open and honest, which allowed for some of the quiet parts—usually hidden behind a smokescreen—to be said out loud.

Participant B, for instance, from the Alberta Energy Regulator, made it very clear that once a major project gets to a hearing, it will be approved. “And none of that… [is] actively transparent. It’s not in the hearing room, we don’t issue notices, we don’t tell people this is going on. It just happens.” Participant F, a senior member of the energy regulator, explained it this way: “We’re a development regulator. We do want development to take place, we believe that’s inherently in the public [interest].”

For anyone who follows these issues in Alberta, Heydon’s book confirms what we already know by now—and helps explain how a proposed coal mine on the Eastern Slopes, which was publicly opposed and rejected by both the federal and the provincial governments, a decision upheld by three different courts, is still alive and well when it should be “legally dead,” as Nigel Bankes, a University of Calgary emeritus professor of resource law, put it. Instead the Danielle Smith government has decided that the mine deserves another hearing—just the latest workaround to ensure “development takes place” no matter the costs.

All of this should sound familiar. The irony for Canmore is that Klein’s philosophy, which created enormous wealth for oil sands companies and a great many of the people who have recently moved to or invested in Canmore, is also at the root of Canmore’s development dilemma.

Klein’s legacy lives on in the likes of Premier Smith, who, at Tucker Carlson’s Calgary event, proudly introduced herself as a defiant libertarian conservative. She was delighted in 2023, the hottest year in the last 125,000 years, to curtail clean wind and solar projects in Alberta while pledging to double production in the oil sands.

Canmore’s fate, I’m afraid, is sealed.

Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is the author of Little Black Lies: Corporate and Political Spin in the Global War for Oil and is now writing a memoir.

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The post Valley of Gold appeared first on Alberta Views.

“Taupe should be banned from all colour palettes associated with paint,” she said, laughing, as she looked around the room. “Lovely colour for clothing, but it’s a bit much on every piece of furniture and every wall.”

Although her observation was valid, I suggested the offices still had to be better than those formerly dedicated to the Opposition inside the Annex, the big green outhouse-inspired building northeast of the Legislature proper, a crumbling Stalinist eyesore that was torn down last winter.

“Fair enough, though it had nice windows,” she said. “Anyway, the office I really want back is my old one inside the Legislature itself. I quite liked the Premier’s Office. Let’s just say that I’d like that one back.”

Notley’s likability is still there, but she’s going into this campaign with a much stronger team.

Notley may want that office back and she might even get her wish soon. But a lot has changed since she first sat behind that desk. In fact, the entire Alberta political ecosystem has undergone such radical realignment since her ascension as premier that it’s instructive to cast an eye back simply to realize how much is different.

Just six months before the 2015 election, in mid-October of 2014, Premier Jim Prentice was the leader of a Progressive Conservative party that held 61 of Alberta’s 87 seats. Danielle Smith was the embattled leader of the Official Opposition Wildrose Party, which held 16 seats. Prevailing wisdom was that Prentice was in a strong position for the upcoming 2015 election and that Smith was struggling to retain the support of her own party, let alone that of Albertans at large. Smith herself must have shared that belief, given that she (and 10 other Wildrose MLAs) defected to the PCs later that year, only to then lose her PC nomination in the spring, prompting her to move to talk radio.

And the NDP in the fall of 2014… On October 17, Brian Mason was the leader of a party that held four seats in the Legislature. No significant reading of politics at the time suggested the NDP were a force to be reckoned with. Mason, while honourable, was uninspiring and had announced he was departing as leader. David Eggen and Rod Loyola, two long-time NDP stalwarts, were running against a third candidate for a leadership vote to be held on October 18 in Edmonton.

Which is when everything changed, because that third candidate was Rachel Notley.

In the months following Notley’s winning the NDP leadership, her direct manner and manifest competence caught the attention of an Alberta population that was rapidly tiring of Conservative entitlement. Notley’s timing turned out to be impeccable, though it wasn’t yet apparent when the writ was dropped for the 2015 election. Prentice still looked the part of premier. But the experienced Calgary pollster Janet Brown thinks back to those days and believes Notley’s rise to power was rooted in the failures and foibles of the PC leaders who came before Prentice, particularly Alison Redford.

“Expectations were so high that when [Redford] wasn’t living up to those expectations, it was doubly problematic,” says Brown. Redford’s popularity cratered amid controversy after controversy, and she was summarily ousted by her own party, just as her predecessor had been. “We had Ed Stelmach and then we had Redford, and then suddenly Albertans started to wonder whether the PCs were capable of providing stable government,” says Brown.

In other words Albertans were starting to experience niggling questions about something they’d never questioned before, namely: Are the PCs automatic Do I actually need to think about how I might vote Stelmach didn’t inspire. Redford imploded. Other options then began to worm through the cracks in the dam, such as Danielle Smith’s Wildrose. “And then it’s late 2014,” says Brown, “and suddenly people were, like, ‘Oh, when did the NDP change leaders Oh, that’s interesting.’ And then they started to get to know Rachel Notley.”

The favourable introduction contributed to her winning the election. But Notley’s problem, once she was in the premier’s office, was that Albertans also started to get to know her team. “Going into that election, the NDP had a lot of NOBs,” says Brown, thankfully choosing to elaborate. “Names On the Ballot. People who just perpetually ran, never expecting to win.”

The NDP team sorely lacked experience, a naïveté that showed. Even Notley admits as much. “I did a lot of delegating to my minister of health when I was [premier],” Notley tells me. “But I would say I was awfully controlling about a lot of other files.”

That, however, was two cycles ago. An eternity. And here we are, preparing for an election in the spring of 2023 after an endless series of surprising and even shocking events. Prentice died in a plane crash on October 13, 2016. Jason Kenney left federal politics to throw his hat in the provincial ring. The PCs merged with the Wildrose in the summer of 2017 to form the UCP. Kenney was elected UCP leader in the fall of 2017. He and his party won the 2019 election. He ruled for three years, during much of which he was the least popular leader in Canada. Kenney was then defenestrated by his own party in 2022, only to be replaced by the political wildfire no amount of controversy seems able to extinguish, that being Danielle Smith. And, of course, Alberta, like everywhere, was simultaneously afflicted by two horrific viruses, COVID and Donald Trump. One of these ripped a hole in the social fabric and damaged our collective psychological well-being, and the other one was related to the flu. Alberta is, in short, an entirely different social and political setting than it was eight years ago. Nothing is the same.

Oh, with one exception, that is. Notley is still around, still leader of the Alberta NDP, and still wants the premier’s chair. The question is: Has she changed, or has Alberta changed, enough that Notley has another shot?

Left: Speaking to the Calgary business community. Right: With Calgary-Buffalo MLA and fellow runner Joe Ceci. The NDP need to win most Calgary ridings if they are to form government.

“Actually, I would hope I haven’t changed that much as a person,” Notley says when asked how she’s different going into the 2023 election. “But I’d only been on the job [as NDP leader] five or six months when we went into the 2015 election. In opposition, the decision-making is fairly clear. You’re an advocate. But then when you get into government, you quickly learn that you must become a decision-maker.”

Notley recalls how one of the first calls she got after assuming office was from former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. They had hardly been political allies, but he wanted to congratulate her. “He gave me a very sage piece of advice,” says Notley, “which I held on to. He said, simply, ‘People are going to be lined up outside of your door, day in, day out, pushing you to make decisions. Don’t make any decision you’re not ready to make. Don’t let them push you into doing that.’ ”

Leah Ward worked with Notley in the premier’s office. “Some things about Rachel will never change,” she says. “She’s steadfastly and immovably committed to the plight of working people and marginalized people. But she’s grown as a leader. I think the success of the NDP is directly related to her putting into practice lessons about how to connect with folks in other parts of the province. But she’s a rural Albertan herself, so it’s not like these things don’t come naturally to her.”

“Success” means not just strong poll numbers for the NDP but the fact that Notley has a more impressive team today than ever before. The party is an entirely different animal, according to Brown. “I don’t know that I can point to too many things that have changed about Rachel Notley,” she says. “But one of the things I kept hearing going into the 2019 election was, ‘I like Rachel, but she’s got a weak team around her.’ What’s changed is that Rachel’s likability is still there, but she’s going into this campaign with a much stronger team around her. You know, the NDP used to have their conventions and whoever drew the short straw was the leader. They’d have an overabundance of baristas on their slate of candidates. But now there are businesspeople, lawyers… I don’t think in 2023 people are going to say Rachel’s got a weak team.”

“We’ve got a much more seasoned team now,” says Notley. “Both in terms of the people who were elected and the candidates stepping forward for us now. That will be good. We’ll be able to move into a less centralized means of governance.” In other words, it will be less about Rachel Notley than about the NDP team, a team no longer full of NOBs. Nagwan Al-Guneid, running in Calgary-Glenmore, is the director at the Business Renewables Centre Canada and has a master of science in sustainable energy development. Court Ellingson, running in Calgary-Foothills, is former vice-president strategy of Calgary Economic Development. Karen Shaw, running in Morinville-St. Albert, is a former four-term councillor for Sturgeon County. Kevin Van Tighem, running in Livingstone-Macleod, is a former superintendent of Banff National Park. These are just a few of the new faces, and there is not a barista among them.

Notley’s decentralized governance strategy only holds, of course, if all goes according to plan. The evidence suggests as much to date. The fall 2022 NDP convention drew a huge crowd. Fundraising is through the roof, with the NDP raising more money than the UCP in 2020, 2021 and 2022 ($5-million, $6-million and $7-million respectively). Most NDP MLAs have returned to run again. Many ridings saw hotly contested NDP nomination races, in some cases for the first time ever.

Broader growth across the province has also helped Notley ward off the far-left-radical tag that conservatives have long tried to pin on both her and the   party. “Oh, sure,” she tells me, from her too-taupe Opposition offices. “We hear that. But we just tell people we’re listening to their concerns and putting forward evidence-based ideas about how to move forward on the issues that matter.”

Is “evidence-based” perhaps a shot at Smith Notley just smiles when asked about her chief opponent’s disorienting relationship to reality.

“What I will say is that we’re hearing from many lifelong conservatives who are now telling us, ‘This just isn’t for me anymore,’” she says. “Some aren’t sure what they’re going to do. Some say they’ll vote for us. But they’re definitely saying, ‘I’ve been a conservative my whole life, and I don’t see myself in this party anymore. I don’t know what they’re up to.’”

“And that’s not me misremembering three people over the course of three years saying it,” Notley adds. “Every single day people are saying that.”

Leah Ward says one of the great mistakes of the Kenney/Smith stance is to assume that Albertans welcome “extreme right-wing experiments.” Albertans, she argues, are in fact quite progressive. Identifying as conservative is more of a habit, part of one’s cultural identity, rather than a belief system. Prentice got it wrong. Kenney got it wrong. And Ward thinks Smith is getting it wrong.

Notley says many centrist conservatives will feel pushed so far by Smith that they’ll simply step over the line into the NDP. And she’ll welcome them and work with them. “I just think we’re stronger as a province when we work together. Many Albertans agree on that. Healthcare, public education, infrastructure.… when we pool our resources, we can accomplish more. And, quite frankly, conservative governments in the past would agree with that statement. But that’s just not what’s going on right now in the current iteration of the conservative party here.”

The Alberta political ecosystem has undergone a radical realignment since Notley’s ascension as premier in 2015.

The question of what is going on in the UCP at the moment is difficult to answer. Smith’s activities contain elements of farce, brinkmanship and calculation. Her political strategy appears to consist of finding as many walls as possible to throw spaghetti at to see what sticks. She’s going to do what she’s going to do, and Notley can’t do anything about that.

But what Notley does control is how she reacts to Smith’s performance. Finding the right response pitch will be crucial. The reality is that Notley must walk a very fine line when trying to comment on Smith’s suspect judgment. Does Smith occasionally say things that are irrational Absolutely. In mid-December, for example, Smith spoke in the Legislature about the Sovereignty Act and compared the way Ottawa treats Albertans to how Indigenous people have been treated under the Indian Act, demonstrating an insensitivity matched only by a profound lack of insight into the history of her province and country. She met with Indigenous leaders the next day. Afterwards those leaders said, “It was clear from our discussions that Premier Smith does not understand treaty or our inherent rights, nor does she respect them.”

Smith can be counted on to showcase her tenuous grip on reality, but the danger for Notley in pointing out every gonzo pseudo-fact and unconstitutional throat-clearing is that if everything is crazy then nothing is crazy. Just as the Orange One down south made it his daily business to keep the outrage machine working non-stop, thereby diluting the impact of any single scandal, so too will the voter tire of Notley and the NDP pointing out daily whatever new ridiculous thing Smith has done or said.

Janet Brown acknowledges that such a path would be strewn with landmines for Notley, and she thinks discipline is called for. “Notley will be making a bad tactical decision if she goes after every gaffe, every puddle that Smith steps in,” says Brown. “She’s got to look like the government in waiting. Because if she just stands up there and says Danielle Smith is crazy, people might turn around and say, hey, you know what, maybe we need a little crazy. Please excuse my language, but before the last election we did a set of focus groups with conservatives, NDs, undecided, and in every focus group they all used the same language to describe Kenney. The NDs said, ‘He’s a dick.’ The conservatives said, ‘He’s a bit of a dick.’ And the undecided voters said, ‘He’s a dick, but maybe that’s just what we need right now. Maybe we need someone to go be a bit of a jerk in Ottawa.’ If the message is just that Smith’s crazy, that’s not going to be enough, because maybe people like her kind of craziness. To me, it’s whether or not her crazy is going to be detrimental to the economy.”

Notley has certainly demonstrated a degree of restraint between the time Smith won the UCP leadership and today, but the temptation will be strong in the election campaign. “I would hope they’re cautious,” says Leah Ward. “It’s got to be about a focus on NDP priorities rather than a focus on Danielle Smith. The reality is that Smith is using tactics and techniques used by Trump, and people will see that for themselves. The task will be to call her out while always offering an alternative.”

For her part, Notley says her focus will be on offering predictability and stability. “It’s about trust and competence,” she says. “We have this fabulous opportunity, which is new, a once-in-four-generations opportunity for an opposition party to say, ‘We’ve been in government, and, looking back, we had no scandals. We did what we said we’d do. We were careful with your money. We led you through times that none of us expected. And so you don’t have to be worried about us being at the helm, and you can trust us.’”

“[People] might not always agree with us. …I’m not suggesting we’re all things to all people. I think debate and disagreement about certain policy issues, that’s the heart and soul of politics. The key is to do it with honesty, integrity and facts, common facts, that people agree are real.”

The facts reference, to tie Smith to Trumpian tactics, is no accident. But this election will be about much more than Notley vs. Smith in a battle of styles and rhetoric. Notley is up against certain electoral realities. Smith’s words since winning the UCP leadership make it clear she’s intensely aware of her path to victory—sweep the rural ridings and pick off as many Calgary ridings as possible. Smith knows how to read the numbers and understands that Route One to an election win is to create an amped-up end-times either/or scenario, so that the rural vote is cowed into voting overwhelmingly UCP and enough Calgary conservatives just can’t bring themselves to vote NDP.

Say what you want about Danielle Smith, she does not incite fence-sitting. She creates significant distance between her and her opponents, expressly for the purpose of differentiation. She wants Them or Us. It’s less about policy than picking your team. She has clearly observed the Republican party in the US, where all manner of unpalatable activity is deemed tolerable to voters so long as their team wins (evangelical Christians, for instance, voting for a vulgar serial philanderer only because they knew it was their best chance to have Roe v. Wade overturned).

If the election devolves (in Smith’s eyes) into a nuanced policy debate, she will be exposed as a lightweight running a party whose only policy is confrontation. But if she can make the election a fire and brimstone cultural earthquake with the very foundation and future of our province at stake, then she stands a much better chance. Why Because fear and anger work. Fear motivates. Anger provokes. And Smith knows the numbers don’t favour her unless she can provoke a certain portion of the electorate (rural and urban white voters) into fearing the loss of true Albertan culture (whatever that is) and being angry at those who are trying to take it away.

Ward believes rural voters aren’t that much different in their concerns than urban voters, and that NDP policies and messages in areas such as healthcare, affordability and the economy are in fact in line with rural thinking. The issue isn’t the message but the messenger, and when the messenger—Notley—is being painted as a radical left-winger intent on stripping you of every individual right you’ve ever had and collectivizing the economy Soviet-style, it makes it somewhat more challenging to get that message heard.

Rachel Notley, MLA for Edmonton-Strathcona, launches her campaign to become leader of Alberta’s NDP, June 16, 2014.

The advantage Notley has, however, is that she has increasingly become a known quantity who Albertans believe is rational and steady. People all over the province, no matter their stripe, like Notley. The disadvantage is that they don’t like her party as much as they like her. Ironically, says Brown, “when we ask people where they identify on the left–right spectrum and ask questions about values, people tend to overestimate how conservative they are. Maybe this is where Danielle Smith has us all outsmarted. Yes, we have growing urbanization in the province [which favours the NDP], but when you look at the distribution of seats, Smith could easily win a majority government with a lower popular vote than Notley.”

The NDP’s most pressing electoral issue is that most of their growth has come in areas where they’re already popular. It doesn’t make any difference in terms of seats if you win a riding in Edmonton by 5,000 votes or 25,000 votes. Smith has made no secret of the fact that she’s concentrating her energy in rural ridings and in Calgary, in which city the UCP held 21 of 24 seats at the time the legislature was dissolved. She doesn’t need votes anywhere else. So, can Notley counter that baked-in UCP advantage?

If the expected patterns hold, the NDP will have to sweep Edmonton and immediate vicinity, as well as the Lethbridge ridings and Banff-Kananaskis, and then hope Calgary has enough doubt about Smith to break 15 or so seats the NDP’s way. The 14 Calgary seats lost by the NDP in 2019 are close enough to be very much in play in 2023, as are a handful of other Calgary seats—particularly given that the Alberta Party could be less of a vote-splitting factor this time around and the Alberta Liberals, a relative non-factor in 2015, are effectively extinct today.

Notley recognizes the challenge. “I think we’re just going to have to continue trying to connect with Albertans where they are, in their communities and on their doorsteps,” she says, “listening to their priorities and convincing them that they can count on us. It’s not rocket science, really. Do we need 50 per cent of the popular vote Probably not. But really, it’s just about offering up realistic, genuine solutions that we’re capable of delivering on, and hopefully convincing people that’s why they can trust us to deliver.”

A lot will depend on Smith’s performance too. Brown feels Notley’s chances improved the day Smith won the UCP leadership. “Her prospects are better against Danielle Smith than they would’ve been against any other UCP leadership candidate,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s a sure thing for the NDP. Rachel is very popular, but it’s going to be hard for the NDP to crack 40 per cent of the vote. It’ll take a lot of traditional Tories deciding the UCP just isn’t their party anymore. For Smith, with all the baggage she brings, it’s going to take a lot of people deciding to overlook what they dislike about her. I see both an NDP victory and a UCP victory as very plausible.”

When pressed about how she might run the upcoming campaign, Notley offered a hint at how she may try to back the UCP into an ideological corner. It all has to do with her theory (not hers alone) that the UCP is built solely to make a short-term run at power and isn’t set up to operate as a functioning party capable of governing responsibly. “The UCP is very inward looking,” says Notley. “There’s a lot of navel-gazing going on. Whereas if you look back at what conservatives were like under Peter Lougheed, they were outward facing, connecting with Albertans, saying, ‘We are you, you are us. We are the same thing.’ And there was that real, strong connection. I don’t think that’s what you get with this current party. The things the UCP is talking about are not what matter to Albertans.”

The Sovereignty Act, an Alberta police force, an Alberta pension plan, an obsession with protecting anti-vaxxers. These are not issues that most Albertans are particularly interested in (or would even trust the UCP with if they were). And yet that’s what the UCP insists on talking about, she says, unless they’re talking about even more bizarre things.

“My own personal theory,” she says, “is that they want power for the sake of dismantling government. Even if they embarrass themselves, their overall objective is just to dismantle government. As a result, they’re not measuring success by whether they make life better for Albertans; they’re measuring it by how close they get to their ideological goalposts.… We’re being led by a government that hates government.”

Notley laughs when she describes as rather “boring” her insistence on dealing in such curiosities as facts and logic. She says her staff teased her in years past about the inherent lack of excitement around her predictability and stability mantra. In this regard, she hasn’t changed. But she resolutely believes Albertans are shedding old habits. She says most of us see things differently now and are more like her than like Danielle Smith.

She ended our conversation by telling me that every time she attends the Calgary Stampede or the Edmonton Folk Music Festival or even various rural events, people continually approach her and say something to the effect of “You’ve got to win!”

“I know!” she always says back to them. “But this is a group project!”

Curtis Gillespie has written five books of fiction and non-fiction and somewhere north of 100 magazine articles.

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The post What’s Past is Prologue appeared first on Alberta Views.

Southern Alberta has a colourful electoral history—people in the Crowsnest elected communists in the 1930s—but for a few decades the region has been solidly Conservative or Wildrose blue. Lethbridge is the exception, with Liberals holding Lethbridge-East from 1993 to 2011, and the NDP’s Shannon Phillips representing Lethbridge-West since 2015 (and widely expected to hold the seat in 2023).

Livingstone-Macleod: Cracks in a conservative stronghold

Main candidates in 2023:

– UCP: Chelsae Petrovic is the mayor of Claresholm and a former nurse.

– NDP: Kevin Van Tighem is a biologist, former Banff National Park superintendent, writer and former Alberta Views columnist.

Livingstone-Macleod is a riding where people were furious at the UCP for proposing new coal strip mines.

This riding extends from High River in the north to Waterton Lakes in the south, with the Rockies forming its western edge and the Blood Reserve running down its right. One-time local MLA and Wildrose leader Danielle Smith famously crossed the floor in 2014 and subsequently lost her PC nomination race here. Voters stuck with Wildrose in 2015. In 2019, with new boundaries and with conservatives briefly reunited, Tim Hortons franchisee Roger Reid won the riding for the UCP over rancher and NDP candidate Cam Gardner (71 per cent vs. 21 per cent).

Things may be changing. Just a short walk south of the diner owned by now-premier Smith in High River is the town library, which on the night of November 29, 2022, saw its meeting room overflowing with NDP supporters. Many declared they were former conservative voters. This might seem surprising. But the Kenney government’s attempt to reinstate open- pit coal mining in the eastern slopes was fiercely opposed by local ranchers and town dwellers alike (also: Corb Lund). After Reid said he wouldn’t run again, Nadine Wellwood was acclaimed for the UCP. She was then promptly disqualified by her own party for equating vaccine passports with the Nazis and expressing support for Vladimir Putin. Reid said he wouldn’t vote for her. Even the founder of the far-right Take Back Alberta denounced Wellwood: “We can’t begin praising tin pot dictators.” Claresholm mayor Chelsae Petrovic eventually won a new, contested UCP nomination race.

The NDP has an active and organized local constituency and a strong candidate in Kevin Van Tighem. Resentment about the UCP’s coal plan continues to smoulder, with Smith in late 2022 refusing to specify whether she supported new or expanded coal mines, saying only: “I’ll meet with the involved ministers and discuss all the available options.” Poll aggregator 338 is calling Livingstone-Macleod a “safe” UCP seat. But that party seems to be trying as hard as possible to give conservatives in the area a reason to make a statement in 2023—to vote NDP perhaps, or just to stay home.

Lethbridge-East: Could this riding flip again?

Main candidates in 2023:

– NDP: Rob Miyashiro is a two-term Lethbridge city councillor.

– UCP: Nathan Neudorf is the incumbent MLA and a deputy premier. He formerly worked in commercial construction.

Nathan Neudorf was the infrastructure minister and one of two deputy premiers.

Lethbridge-East stretches from the city’s northern edge to its southern outskirts and from downtown to the east industrial fringe. Like a typical Alberta riding, it has old and new communities and lots of commercial activity. But it’s notable for its independence from oil and gas. The average riding in Alberta has four times as much employment in energy as Lethbridge-East does, which in turn has twice as many manufacturing jobs per capita. Big employers here include Sunrise Poultry, Southland Trailers, Kawneer (windows and doors) and Cavendish Farms, McCain and PepsiCo (fries, fries and Doritos, respectively). Concerns about oil and gas and “just transitions” don’t resonate the same way in Lethbridge-East. With food-processing instead so vital, the UCP government announced in 2021 it would spend almost a billion dollars on irrigation canals to expand the 4.2-million acres of farmland east of the riding in what is branded as “Canada’s premier food corridor.”

Oil and gas concerns don’t resonate the same way here.

The race to represent the NDP was hotly contested. Rob Miyashiro won against three other candidates. MLA Nathan Neudorf was then named by Danielle Smith as Infrastructure Minister and one of two deputy premiers—an indication, perhaps, that he needs all the extra profile he can get.

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