Bears Archives - Alberta Views

Buffalo Lessons

Pamela Banting — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:55 +0000

How Bison Returned to Banff National Park
by Karsten Heuer;
foreword by Leroy Little Bear;
introduction by Harvey Locke
GREYSTONE BOOKS
2026/$28.95/192 PP.

Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once said he believed that “Books find their writers.” A book will come into being when it finds the writer most likely for the story. Viewed from this perspective, the Porcupine caribou herd found Karsten Heuer to tell their story in his 2007 book, Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd, and his life partner, Leanne Allison, to film it in Being Caribou. “Karsten,” writes conservationist Harvey Locke, “was an adventurer with an enormous capacity for rough travel and an appetite to initiate big projects.” Heuer’s big project to hike and explore the possibility of a wildlife corridor running north–south through the west resulted in his first book, Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears’ Trail. In his latest, Buffalo Lessons, he writes: “Y2Y’s vision to connect and protect reserves along the Rocky Mountains with wildlife corridors was so meaningful to me that I decided to hike its 3,400-kilometre distance, as a wolf or grizzly might, to see if the concept was possible. I discovered it is.” From the start, then, Heuer’s biology degree and his desire to see the world from the points of view of other animals coalesced to make him the perfect warden for the reintroduction of buffalo to Banff National Park, and an ideal storyteller for northern caribou and plains bison. As Leroy Little Bear writes in his foreword, Heuer and Allison were first “cariboued,” and then they were “buffaloed.”

The chapters are sequenced chronologically as the project unfolds and are titled as a series of the “lessons” Heuer and his small team learned both from experienced buffalo managers and from the animals themselves. Some of the titles sound managerial (“Seize Opportunity,” “Leverage Your Success”) and others more like insights into bison psychology (“Embrace Individuality,” “Make Your Idea Their Idea”). Given that an attempt in the 1970s by Parks Canada to restore bison to Jasper National Park failed when the animals dispersed way beyond the park, Heuer undertook a lot of research and preparation in advance. While the book might work too as a manual for wardens and ranchers, its scientific, ecological and even spiritual material makes it a compelling read akin to the works of Alberta naturalists Andy Russell and Charlie Russell, former park warden Sid Marty and UBC forestry professor Suzanne Simard. It also reminded me powerfully of Freeman House’s Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species, another rich account of species restoration.

For a book that details the reintroduction of these animals, it is surprising when the prologue begins with Heuer having to shoot one of the buffalo whose life story he had been party to from its birth. But it has ventured beyond the invisible, largely unfenced boundaries of the park, a trespass the Alberta government will not forgive. Even prior to the first chapter, then, two deaths, both premature, have been recorded or anticipated: that of this young wayfaring bull and that of the author himself. Heuer wrote the book during the final months of his life, and it has been published posthumously. The loss of this man who, together with Allison, in essence apprenticed himself to other-than-human animals to understand their specific ways of being, is deeply tragic.

Throughout, Heuer details the remarkable amount of labour involved in this ambitious project. I was blown away by the physical work, skill range and stamina demanded of the wardens, and the logistics. Heuer had to plan for everything from age, number, biological sex and genetics right down to rubber tubing for the animals’ horns so they would not gore one another during transport from Elk Island to Banff National Park. First Nations’ managerial and spiritual expertise with the buffalo were also integral to this project of ecological restoration and reconciliation. Heuer writes that when not sorting animals “I helped erect teepees, partook in pipe ceremonies and listened to prayers, speeches and songs to bless the animals and the upcoming transfer [from Treaty 6 to 7]…. Looking across the teepees and feeling the drumbeats of Native singers in my chest, I saw I was just a Parks Canada pawn in something much larger about to play out: the prophecy of bison returning from the sky and the mountains.” Anishinaabe writer Richard Wagamese characterized humility as “the ability to see yourself as an essential part of something larger. It is the act of living without grandiosity.” This sense of humility with which Heuer approached the world, allowing him to enter at times into profound relationship with the land, also finds ironic expression in his mildly self-deprecating humour about his role in parks bureaucracy and playing “poker” with wily bison.

Buffalo Lessons does not aspire to didacticism but to be a gift to those who come after in the same way as the buffalo are a gift to the land and the people who live here. Printed on FSC-certified glossy paper with lots of photographs of the bison and some of the wardens, including Heuer, who reintroduced the animals into their ancestors’ territory and witnessed how they transitioned to a free-roaming life in the mountains, this book represents only part of Karsten Heuer’s legacy of science, activism and commitment to the multispecies world we inhabit, whether we realize it or not. Buffalo are now living wild in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta!

Pamela Banting writes articles about park warden literature, multispecies studies and ecocriticism.

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Black Bear

Conor Kerr — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:56:14 +0000

by Trina Moyles
KNOPF CANADA
2026/$36.00/328 PP.

Dear reader, first I have to tell you this is a biased book review. I met Trina Moyles in a non-fiction workshop for our Master of Fine Arts degrees, where she wrote a piece that discussed the stupidity of pheasant hunting. As someone who self-identifies as a pheasant hunter, I took great affront to this insult to both my heritage and my life calling. So, to counter her making fun of my life’s passions almost a decade ago (but I hold a grudge), I will tell you all about why you shouldn’t read her latest memoir, Black Bear.

When Trina was 5, her wildlife biologist father brought home an orphaned black bear cub before sending it south to the Calgary Zoo. This sparked her lifelong fascination with bears. When young, she also revered her older brother. But as they grew up, and he went to work in the oil patch and partied, this relationship grew difficult. If you like books that soft-pedal a delicately balanced conversation about addiction and the toll it can take on family relationships and dynamics, as well as how we can perhaps better understand those going through struggles, then don’t read this. Trina says she wasn’t sure who she understood less, her brother or the bear. Her writing about these relationships is provocative, yet tuned to moments of joy, and as the book unfolds you can see how thin is the line we all walk between heartbreak and love.

Don’t read this book if you like stories that seek to bridge the urban and rural divides of life in Alberta. Trina counters her upbringing in Peace River and the facets of life in a resource-extraction-driven town with her young adult years in Edmonton. But there’s not a lot of overlap. As someone who spent his formative years trying to be funny in Drayton Valley and then significantly less funny in Edmonton, I was brought back to the way the transition to the city can be jarring for those who know a very different style of life than an urban existence. To the book’s benefit, Trina doesn’t sugarcoat rural life but instead tells it like it is, allowing the reader to gather their own information about imposed machismo, the inherent fear and expected roles that women are often placed in, and the rampant abuse of booze and drugs that exists. But with all of that, Trina also shows the reader the beauty and complexity of the boreal forest and the characters, both human and bear, that inhabit it.

Throughout the book there’s a constant sense of impending climate catastrophe, whether that’s loss of wildlife, habitat, the changing weather systems, fires, human–wildlife conflict. Trina weaves her observations and research on these subjects into the personal narrative in a way that’s accessible yet articulate. She includes scientific terms but doesn’t twist the story to push an agenda. So, if you want a book that is thought-provoking and hard to put down, then I guess this might be your thing.

Trina is well known for her previous memoir, Lookout, about her experiences working in a fire tower in northern Alberta, scanning the forest through a spotting scope while also navigating challenges in her love life. Black Bear expands on that immersive experience but in a different way. Trina forms a relationship with a mother black bear and her cubs at the lookout tower. As I read about the similarities of that relationship to the one with her brother, I thought of my own past and the connections I probably misread. Maybe I misread that initial encounter with Trina and she didn’t actually make fun of pheasant hunting (she did). But maybe I was wrong about holding a grudge and you should definitely read Black Bear.

Conor Kerr is a Métis/Ukrainian author in Edmonton. His novel Prairie Edge was shortlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize.

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Catch You on the Flipside

Catherine Owen — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:00:57 +0000

by Lee Kvern
ENFIELD & WIZENTY
2025/$27.95/252 pp.

At first glimpse the plot of this fast-moving novel seems to lack promise: 1980s casinos, the last days of the Ferdinand Marcos regime, a creepy stalker called Regrettable Russell. Not my cup of chai, per se. But Lee Kvern’s perspective-shifting potboiler, with its punchy chapter titles and unexpected weavings of past and present, Manila and Calgary, assassinations and card counting, proves engaging.

The thriller begins with a sadly typical scene: the careless brutality of a murdered woman’s burial, fortunately rendered atypical via its “narration” by a grizzly bear. The book whips with caffeinated pace between 1983 Philippines, where a pig farmer is framed as the purported killer of a prominent politico, and a 1984 Cowtown casino, where one of the slaying’s witnesses, Amado, is hiding out. The novel also showcases other complex characters. These include Elle (whose daughter, feminist studies barista Jeliane, is featured in the 2017 coffee shop chapters, their fate linked by the above-noted slimeball), Moose, Erik the Dutch, Billy Jacked and The Crier. Catch You on the Flipside deftly tosses the problems of duplicity from hand to hand like a scalding potato.

The text does, however, struggle with editorial concerns. Along with typos, they include syntactical and spacing issues and odd constructions of verbs, such as a column that reaches “from the vaulted ceiling down” to the carpet, and many instances of adjectives presented incorrectly: “blue pale shirt” or “black slick hair” (the order is always qualifiers first, then colour) along with sloppy repetitions of nouns, such as she “cupped Aquino’s earnest face in her hands and kissed his smiling, laughing face.”

But Kvern’s style at its best is as taut and peppy as that found in Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction with a splash of Haruki Murakami’s deadpan delivery, especially in her depiction of characters such as journalist Ken Kashiwahara: “there were things you could not capture in a photograph… you had to be there to feel it deep in your breastbone. The guard’s bamboo flute seared Ken’s grief.” Or Lina, Rolando’s justice-questing wife: “Lina held Rolando’s pillow to her chest, his pig farmer scent embedded within [and] tried not to cry in the black morning.”

By the close of this fast-paced rollick in espionage, shoes, paid weepers, misogyny, java and blackjack, a range of shocking flipsides has been exposed, some of them even lovely ones. Most vitally, criminals are slithered towards their inevitable ends, the novel concluding with a snake’s own flipside, in a potent symbol of how nurturance can twist into murder.

Catherine Owen is the author of Moving to Delilah (2024).

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August 11-15, 2025

Alberta Views — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:08:36 +0000

Monday, August 11: The provincial government begins taking pre-orders for the fall COVID-19 and influenza vaccines. Because of UCP government changes, Albertans now need to order the COVID-19 vaccine in advance and pay for it out of pocket (at least $100). The province has also ordered 240,000 fewer doses of the vaccine than it gave out last year.

August 11: News circulated over the weekend that the UCP government quietly changed expense disclosure policies for senior officials. The premier, ministers and deputy ministers no longer need to publicly disclose receipts for expenses over $100. Eight years of expense reports previously available on the government’s website have been removed.

Tuesday, August 12: An Alberta Infrastructure document reveals that one of two involuntary drug treatment facilities planned as part of the UCP government’s “compassionate intervention” strategy will be built next to Calgary’s Royal Oak neighbourhood. The area hosts the Calgary Remand Centre and the Calgary Correctional Centre.

The Road to Appledore

Jay Gamble — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:00:39 +0000

by Tom Wayman
HARBOUR PUBLISHING
2024/$26.95/312 pp.

Tom Wayman’s The Road to Appledore is a gentle narrative about how the author came to be the steward of a rural property near Winlaw, BC. The memoir of property, work, nature, home and self opens with Wayman and his partner, Bea, travelling from Vancouver to the Kootenays with his possessions crammed into a moving truck that has no reverse: a perfectly symbolic vehicle for Wayman crossing his own personal Rubicon. His move alone to a nearly nine-acre property is prompted, in part, by his desire to reassess his relationship that has become “comfortable, but not satisfying,” as described by their marriage counsellor.

However, this is not a maudlin, introspective book. Indeed, the reader may be left with a desire for more personal revelations, but that is not the book’s central aim. Instead, it is outward-looking and focuses on the labour of making and maintaining a home, that Sisyphean task. Appledore—the name Wayman gives his property, after a poem by A.A. Milne—becomes a home through labour, and the labour itself becomes a kind of home.

The second part of the memoir is divided into chapters named after seasons and elements. Wayman captures the personality of Appledore in its different seasonal expressions in prose and, on occasion, poetry. At times the details become overwhelmingly specific: the gravity-fed water system and its parts and problems, for instance, are described in minute detail. But the gentle humour of Wayman is present throughout, as he encounters roaming bears, amusing characters, even a talkative cloud (the cloud heard with pharmaceutical assistance).

Although the book is not explicitly a personal memoir, the character of Wayman is revealed slowly, piece by piece, through passing references to, for example, his teaching, his anti-war work and his union activities. The careful and sensitive eye of the author—as he describes the animals, trees and gardens of Appledore—reveals a studious and keen observer. At times, he also brings his observational powers to bear on larger topics: “Or maybe,” he astutely notes, “lack of curiosity is a by-product of how our society generally doesn’t encourage us to pay attention to where things come from: to learn about the working lives of those who feed, clothe, house us and more.”

The book, though, does exactly that: it encourages us to pay attention to how things such as water, food and community come to us. He does so unassumingly, with well-crafted, precise writing, good humour and an obvious deep affection for the land. This is a meditative reflection on home that captures well both the joys and the struggles of rural life, and we come to understand the labour of home is ultimately a labour of love.

Jay Gamble teaches English at the University of Lethbridge.

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How to Quash a Mine

Ted Morton — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:00:26 +0000

Most accounts of a minister’s career are based on what he or she achieves in terms of new policies. But what the public usually doesn’t see—which is often just as important—are the policies or decisions a minister prevents. For me, this was the proposed Micrex Mine—a proposal to build an open-pit magnetite mine on the flanks of the Livingstone Range. The Micrex file came across my desk the first year I was at SRD (Sustainable Resource Development)—2007—and, as it turned out, was the last thing I did going out the door in December 2010.

Magnetite is a heavy magnetic iron ore used for coal upgrading and steel production. It is not in short supply and so is relatively cheap. To be profitable, a magnetite mine needs to be large to benefit from economies of scale. That is what did not make sense about the Micrex proposal. Their original plan called for a mine to cover 13 kilometres of public lands in the Livingstone Range. But by the time I became minister, the proposal had been scaled down to just 5.5 hectares—barely larger than a football field. It wasn’t too difficult to figure out why. At that reduced size, it did not trigger a legal requirement for an environmental impact statement (EIS) under the Public Lands Act. However, Micrex had actually purchased 36 square miles, or 56,909 acres of land. The smaller, revised proposal looked suspiciously like a toe-in-the-door strategy that would lay the foundation for future expansion.

There were good reasons for Micrex to avoid any type of EIS. The Livingstone Range is certainly the steepest and arguably the most dramatic front range in all of Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. If you’ve never expeOttawa

More Alberta, Less Ottawarienced it, view the online video provided by the Livingstone Landowners’ Group. Or drive down the North Burmis Road, just to the west of Highway 22. Better yet, go for a hike there, or take a trail ride with one of the local outfitters.

The proposed mine was in the middle of the designated DU Ranch Heritage Viewscape. It provides home habitat to a prolific mix of bighorn sheep, elk, moose, deer and the usual mix of predators that feast on them—grizzly bears, black bears and cougars. The proposed smaller mine site was adjacent to the spring lambing grounds of a resident herd of 200 bighorn sheep. The access roads required by the mine would destroy native grasses that would be difficult if not impossible to restore. Storing topsoil on slopes that regularly experience 100-kilometre-an-hour winds would be either impossible or very expensive. The new access roads would also increase hunting pressure on the wildlife mentioned above—especially by Indigenous hunters who are not subject to legal limits or seasons and can hunt year-round. And of course, there are water issues. The Micrex properties cover much of the headwaters of the Connelly Creek watershed, a significant tributary to the Crowsnest River, which flows into the Oldman and then the Bow. Erosion from the mine and the access roads would inevitably degrade water quality.

It quickly became evident that Micrex did not make sense either economically or environmentally. Even at full production, the proposed mine would pay virtually nothing in Crown royalties—several million dollars a year—and create fewer than 10 full-time jobs. The bottom line was neatly summarized by a letter to minister Knight, myself, and other ministers, signed by 125 local residents in the Livingstone Landowners Group: “There is a proven economy in this area already…. It is based on ranching, home businesses, tourism, hunting, fishing and equestrian outfitting—all things that would be negatively impacted by a mine, no matter its size.”

I agreed! And so it’s time again for full disclosure. I know this area and many of its landowners quite well. My colleague and friend Rainer Knopff has lived there on and off since 1992. Through Rainer I met Dan and Puff McKim, who operate the historic DU Ranch, a purebred Hereford bull operation just off North Burmis Road. With Rainer and his sons, I have hunted the Livingstone slopes for elk, moose, deer and grouse. In the summer my wife joins us for hikes above the DU Ranch and fly-fishing in the Crowsnest River. The McKims are active in the Livingstone Landowners Group.

In the 2008 Alberta election, many of these same people helped to elect Evan Berger as the new MLA for Livingstone-Macleod. I had met Evan during my 2003 “More Alberta, Less Ottawa” speaking tour, and he had helped in my 2006 leadership bid. Evan, a third generation Alberta rancher, runs a mixed livestock–grain operation west of Claresholm. I immediately appointed Evan as my parliamentary assistant because I knew he could be a constructive bridge to the rural landowners as we implemented the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan, which included all of Livingstone-Macleod. Evan was an effective advocate for his constituents, almost all of whom opposed the mine.

In my mind’s eye, when I imagined the Micrex Mine, what I saw was a second industrial scar on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes—like the Lafarge limestone quarries and cement plant in Exshaw. The Lafarge plant is located 80 kilometres west of Calgary, at the gateway to Banff, Lake Louise and the Canadian Rockies, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the largest cement plant in Canada. It’s located less than a mile from the Trans-Canada Highway, so you can’t miss it as you approach Canmore. And it is just plain ugly and totally out of place—a huge scar on the face of the Rockies, with large stacks belching smoke.

In 1906, when the mine and plant were first opened, it made good sense. Alberta was the poorest of all the Canadian provinces, with a mostly rural population of less than 200,000. And the Lafarge plant has served Alberta well, providing most of the cement that has built the province into the wealthiest province in Canada with a population of 4.8 million. One hundred years later, however, you would never build the same plant at the gateway to a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So I decided that such a thing damn well wasn’t going to happen again on my watch.

The question was how. While I could have engaged either or both the energy and the environment ministers (there was overlapping jurisdiction), I decided the path of least resistance was simply to rope-a-dope it to death with one administrative delay after another. Without initial public-lands sign-off from SRD, it couldn’t go anywhere. While most of the delays were achieved simply by foot-dragging on administrative technicalities, there were two potential deal-stoppers for Micrex. One was the then-pending South Saskatchewan Regional Plan (SSRP), being developed under the newly adopted Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA). The SSRP encompasses all the watersheds feeding the Bow, Elbow, Sheep, Highwood, Crowsnest and Oldman rivers—basically everything south of Calgary and the Trans-Canada. The advisory committee for the SSRP, which I had hand-picked, would never recommend approval of project like Micrex, as it failed both the Act’s environmental (water and wildlife) and economic criteria.

When I imagined the Micrex Mine, I saw an industrial scar on Alberta’s eastern slopes.

The second trump card that I could have played was to refer the entire project for a full cost-benefit analysis by Alberta’s Natural Resources Conservation Board (NRCB). The NRCB reviews non-oil and gas natural resource development projects and any other development projects referred to it by cabinet. At a minimum this would have added at least another year to the approval process. It was also highly unlikely that Micrex could ever pass a full NRCB cost-benefit analysis, and the Micrex team knew this. Just the referral would have been enough to kill the project.

While I never played either of these cards in my multiple meetings with the Micrex lobbyist, I made her aware that I considered them as viable options. This worked as long as I was minister, but that came to an end in January 2010, when I was moved to Finance. My replacement at SRD was Mel Knight. Mel was a northerner and had little interest in either ALSA or conservation issues in southern Alberta. In the thinly populated north, when someone wants to invest millions of dollars in a new mine, they are welcomed. The Micrex promoters were alert to the opportunity presented by a new minister and were quickly in Mel’s office lobbying for SRD sign-off.

For the rest of 2010, I was much too busy at Finance to pay any attention to the Micrex file. I spent 12 months trying (unsuccessfully) to build a two-step budget process to get us “back in the black” by Budget 2012—an election year. In addition to four painful weeks lost to shingles in May, I was immersed in budget meetings with my officials and Treasury Board. But as December approached I was informed by Evan Berger, now minister of agriculture, that Mel was getting ready to approve the Micrex licence. Mel subsequently confirmed this to me, stating that the government could not and should not stop all development in the province until the land use planning process was completed. I responded that while this was true in the abstract, it was completely unacceptable in the specific context of Micrex. But Mel was not persuaded.

I received an angry phone call from minister Knight. What the hell did I think I was doing?

The Federal, Provincial, Territorial (FPT) Finance Ministers semi-annual meeting was in Kananaskis on December 19 and 20. So, as I prepared for my second (and presumably last) FPT meeting, I decided to do something I had never done before—leak a self-serving story to the media. There were several cabinet ministers who did this regularly to curry favourable treatment by the legislative reporters. We all knew who they were, and I held them in contempt. However, given that I had already made my decision to resign from cabinet the following month, I figured I had nothing to lose.

I phoned Kelly Cryderman, then the legislative reporter for the Calgary Herald. Kelly is a cousin of Sonia Arrison, whom I knew through her public policy work at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver. I had developed a cordial professional relationship with Kelly, so I was comfortable asking her for a favour: Would she mind asking me a question about how minister Knight was handling the Micrex file She responded, correctly, that this had nothing to do with the FPT meeting and would violate the unspoken rule of ministers not publicly commenting on each other’s work. I replied simply that I was asking a favour.

The FPT meeting in Kananaskis went according to schedule. As is customary at the end, there was a joint media scrum. Most questions focused on the about-face that federal minister of finance Jim Flaherty had done on Canada Pension Plan reforms—now favouring Alberta’s position of allowing private sector alternatives rather than increasing CPP premiums. But, just as the scrum was breaking up, Cryderman asked me about Micrex. She then did me the favour of quoting me verbatim in her subsequent Calgary Herald article: “Morton said, ‘It would be premature to approve a project like this before the regional plan for the South Saskatchewan region is finalized. … If you look at the policy document for the land-use framework, it identifies the Eastern Slopes in terms of priority use, as watershed and recreation—not mining.’ … Morton suggests the company’s application may be subject to review by the province’s Natural Resources Conservation Board.”

Less than 24 hours later I received an angry phone call from minister Knight. What the hell did I think I was doing I replied that I was just repeating what I had told him before the Christmas break. He was not impressed. While this tactic unfortunately cost me my friendship with Mel, it did get the policy results I wanted. Cryderman’s article triggered a flood of phone calls and emails to both Knight’s office and the premier’s office—all opposing the Micrex mine. It took several months to grind through the formal process, but in April SRD announced cabinet approval of an order-in-council mandating a full NRCB review of the Micrex proposal. But it never happened. Knowing that it could never pass the NRCB review, Micrex placed the project on hold.

So how was I able to block the Micrex mine I’d like to say because it was so clearly without merit. But we all know that governments routinely enact poor policy. Just look at the Stelmach government’s New Royalty Framework and North West Upgrader. The primary factors in the Micrex defeat were that it did not have any champions in the cabinet, in the civil service, or in any influential business stakeholder groups. Contributing factors were the lobbying and public relations efforts of local residents—the Livingstone Landowners Group—which were effectively communicated by their MLA, Evan Berger. While these factors probably would not be enough to establish a new program, they were sufficient to allow a motivated minister—me—to block a project that clearly violated our government’s stewardship and conservation goals.

After the 2012 election, in which both Evan Berger and I were defeated, Micrex almost succeeded in resurrecting their mining project. They applied for a mining permit on a piece of property adjacent to their earlier proposal. Since it was a different block of land, the requirement for the NRCB review did not technically apply to it. The Livingstone Landowners Group communicated this to me in November 2012, and I immediately passed on their concerns to Ken Hughes, the new minister of energy in the Redford government. Ken was a long-time friend of mine. He had grown up on a ranch near Longview, where his family had settled in the 1890s. He knew and loved the Foothills. I pointed out that the “new” Micrex proposal was not new at all, but just a clever attempt to bypass the requirement of the NRCB review. All the environmental issues were the same. Once Ken became aware of this, the permit was denied.

Ted Morton is a former Alberta MLA, cabinet minister and political science professor at U of C. This piece is an excerpt from Strong and Free: My Journey in Alberta Politics, U of C Press, 2024.

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We Could Prevent A Mass Shooting

Evan Osenton — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 20:52:37 +0000

At just after 10:15 a.m. on January 23, 2024, a 28-year-old man wearing a black security guard uniform exited his vehicle in the Edmonton City Hall parkade and headed into the elevator armed with four Molotov cocktails, 150 rounds of ammunition and a semi-automatic rifle. Upon reaching the second floor, he headed toward the mayor’s office, then the councillors’ office. Finding these locked, he lit his explosives, threw them, and began firing his rifle, hitting walls, windows and the ceiling. Edmonton’s mayor, several councillors, the fire chief and some staff were in a meeting nearby. One councillor thought a caterer must have dropped a tray of cookies. Another imagined a stack of chairs had tipped over. Then a real security guard ran into the room, saying: “This is—we’ve got a live shooter.” The door was locked from the inside. Within minutes the gunman was subdued by an unarmed on-duty security guard.

It’s impossible to say why the incident ended as it did—why, in the words of Edmonton Police Chief Dale McFee, “We are incredibly lucky that there are no reported injuries and no lives have been lost,” including those of a visiting class of Grade 1 students. It’s impossible to say why, 10 months after the fact, we’re not talking about downtown Edmonton as the site of a mass murder, or about how “Edmonton City Hall” has become synonymous with “Sandy Hook” and “Columbine” and “École Polytechnique,” or living with the knowledge that Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi was the first Canadian politician in over 50 years to be assassinated. City police and the RCMP have released no details about why the incident ended so quickly. Gun users speculated online, based on watching security footage, that the shooter’s rifle jammed. “He’s using a higher capacity magazine, but for some reason… stops shooting at the third or fourth pull,” one man writes. “[This] indicates a malfunction. He fiddles with the handle but then drops the rifle.”

If we hadn’t been “incredibly lucky”—if the gun (perhaps) wasn’t a cheap SKS variant and hadn’t (probably) jammed, or if the shooter had brought a second gun—Alberta today would be different. We might be remembering front-page photos of blood streaked across the marble zigzags of Edmonton City Hall’s foyer, or mourning the murders of a dozen Edmontonians, or sickened at the thought that a class of schoolchildren witnessed everything. And almost immediately after the massacre we’d have become livid at our provincial government.

One of the first things most civilized people do after hearing about a mass shooting in their country is demand a ban on the type of gun used. This is what happened after mass shootings in Port Arthur, Australia (1996: 35 dead), and Dunblane, Scotland (1996: 17 dead, most of them kindergarten students), and Utøya, Norway (2011; 68 dead), and Christchurch, New Zealand (2019: 51 dead). The public in each case was strongly in favour of tougher restrictions, as were police, and support came from across the political spectrum. A wide array of guns—automatic, semi-automatic, “military-grade” and, in the UK, most handguns—were eventually banned. Close to a million guns were surrendered through buybacks. Norway already had some restrictions but added the Ruger Mini-14 model used to slaughter dozens of children at a summer camp to its list of prohibited weapons.

“We are incredibly lucky that there are no reported injuries and no lives have been lost.”

Canada is not so different. After the massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, when a gunman murdered 14 women, our federal government reacted to the public’s horror by passing legislation that included mandatory registration and licensing for gun owners, a national registry, background checks, and verification processes and controls on ammunition sales. The legislation had support across party lines. It took years to create, however, and didn’t preclude Canadians from owning the semi-automatic rifles still associated today with mass shootings. (Canada in 1977 had banned fully automatic guns: those “with the capability of discharging projectiles in rapid succession during one pressure of the trigger.” Think machine guns or the Rambo movies.)

Canada has now banned “assault weapons” as well—or is trying to. Our federal government, borrowing from the US Department of Justice, defines these as “semi-automatic firearms with a large magazine of ammunition…designed and configured for rapid fire” (i.e., the trigger must be pulled repeatedly, but an experienced shooter can get off at least one shot per second). It announced its ban in the aftermath of our country’s worst mass shooting, April 18–19, 2020, when a 51-year-old man impersonating an RCMP officer and armed with two semi-automatic rifles roamed rural Nova Scotia from Portapique to Shubenacadie and murdered 22 people, including a pregnant healthcare aide and a 23-year-veteran RCMP constable.

For nearly 50 years advocacy groups and police in Canada have been calling for a ban. As far back as 1977 the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police had argued “semi-automatic firearms are basically designed as an instrument of war” and have “no sporting use either in the cultural or the recreational sense.” And the federal Liberals had already promised more gun controls following the 2019 Danforth shooting in Toronto (two dead; 13 injured). Portapique jolted them into action. On April 20, 2020, then-public safety minister Bill Blair declared his government would prohibit “military style assault weapons.” “There have been far too many incidents of gun violence in our country,” he said, promising “measures… that significantly reduce those incidents and keep people safe.”

The public was behind him. According to an Ipsos poll that May, compiled after Portapique, 82 per cent of Canadians supported a ban, including 77 per cent of Albertans. A concurrent Angus Reid poll put support across the country at 78 per cent for “a complete ban on civilian possession of assault weapons.” That survey found 60 per cent of conservative voters supported a ban, as did 70 per cent of former gun owners and even 45 per cent of current gun owners. And Portapique didn’t much change public opinion. A year before that mass shooting, Angus Reid had found 75 per cent support among Canadians for an assault weapons ban.

On May 1, less than two weeks after the rampage in Nova Scotia, Blair announced a ban on “over 1,500 models and variants of assault-style firearms” as well as certain components and magazines. The list included the Ruger Mini-14 used at École Polytechnique, Utøya and Portapique, and the AR-15 used in hundreds of US shootings, including Sandy Hook and Columbine. These can no longer be legally used, imported or sold in Canada.

The restrictions came with a two-year amnesty (until 2022) and a promised buyback to be overseen by the RCMP in which owners would be compensated when surrendering their weapons. Gun control advocates celebrated. It looked like Canada was belatedly following the lead of countries that outlawed weapons used in mass killings. But four years later the ban is in limbo.

On the same day that Canada banned assault weapons, then-premier Jason Kenney issued a statement. “The Government of Alberta is concerned about all crime, including the illegal use of firearms,” he said. “[But] today’s order by Ottawa does little to target criminals. Instead, Ottawa is singling out law-abiding Canadians who purchased their property legally, have owned these items safely for years, and who have committed no crimes.” In the years since then, the UCP government has continued to oppose federal efforts to ban guns—which Kenney has called “legally purchased inanimate objects.”

Advocates on all sides of the debate have long argued about what constitutes an “assault weapon” or “military style.” Owners of these guns dismiss such terms as fear-mongering akin to referring to chef knives as “stabbing tools.” But no one disputes that these “inanimate objects” were first designed for soldiers to use to kill other soldiers (e.g., the AR-15 was mass produced for American troops in Vietnam). And ads in archived newspapers remind us that gun shops in Edmonton and Calgary were advertising the likes of AR-15s as “assault weapons” only a few decades ago. Gun advocates in Canada pivoted to calling them “sporting rifles” after École Polytechnique.

For nearly 50 years advocacy groups and police have called for an assault weapons ban.

The Alberta Chief Firearms Office (ACFO)—created by Kenney in June 2020, and which has taken on much of Alberta’s pro-gun advocacy work—responded to questions about the ban by saying “ ‘assault-style’ is not a type of firearms classification for the purposes of regulation under any federal or provincial legislation that governs firearms such as the Criminal Code or the Firearms Act.” This is true. So, in addition to banning 1,500 specific makes and models, the federal government is trying to restrict “assault-style” guns based on a certain level of muzzle energy (thus encompassing sniper rifles) and bore diameter (the threshold captures the most powerful shotguns).

Unlike Americans, Canadians have no enshrined right to keep and carry guns. This has been so since Canada’s founding, and the distinction has been upheld many times by our courts. In summer 2024 a group of UCP members from Medicine Hat, calling themselves the Black Hat Gang, asked premier Danielle Smith to add the right to keep and bear firearms to Alberta’s Bill of Rights. In October Smith said she’d introduce legislation to do just that. Canada’s Charter, however, is unclear.

Gun proponents’ strongest objection is that some guns Canada would ban are used by hunters, including Indigenous people. Even as the ACFO is advising Albertans about how to comply with a ban, it will “continue to stand up for Alberta’s law-abiding hunters.”

Canada’s list of 1,500 “assault weapons” was made by executive order. Four years later it isn’t finalized. Facing opposition from Alberta and other provinces, hunters, gun makers, gun collectors, property rights advocates, various MPs and the Assembly of First Nations, in March 2022 the federal government extended the amnesty until October 2023. In November 2023 it extended the amnesty again, until October 2025. It has withdrawn amendments to legislation that would have clarified which guns are banned and why. Today our politicians are still arguing over which guns are uniquely well suited to killing moose at a distance and which can too easily slaughter a crowd of civilians up close.

Guns seized by police at the Coutts border blockade in 2022, including a semi-automatic rifle modified to shoot 30 rounds in nine seconds.

The debate doesn’t fall neatly along partisan lines. Some NDP MPs call the list overkill. The federal NDP says Canada can’t impede “those who use long guns for hunting and farming, and can’t hinder the treaty rights of Indigenous peoples.” But former federal Conservative leader Erin O’Toole supported the ban. “I want to make my position on firearms perfectly clear,” he said during the 2021 election. “First, the ban on assault weapons will remain in place. Second, the present ban on a number of other firearms that were reclassified in 2020 will remain in place.” He called for “taking the politics out of” the discussion. The Trudeau government in May 2023 said it would re-establish an independent committee to review gun classification. Then-public safety minister Marco Mendicino said this would “take the misinformation out of these debates.”

The federal Conservatives, now under new leadership, might kill the ban. Pierre Poilievre calls the policy a failure, saying last spring about the prime minister: “He has spent 40 million tax dollars that could have secured our ports and our borders, and he has not taken in a single, solitary gun.” (He didn’t elaborate on who’s responsible for delaying the buyback.) At a rural Ontario rally last June, Poilievre, asked by a gun owner his intentions should he become PM, said “We [will] just reverse everything Trudeau has done.”

Regardless, the UCP government says it will prevent the RCMP in Alberta from taking part in an assault weapons buyback. If need be, it will replace the RCMP with a provincial force, and prevent local police from taking part by stopping them from making funding deals with Ottawa.

In the meantime, gun-control advocates are frustrated. “Instead of working on the law, we find ourselves fighting about details and disinformation and procedures,” said Heidi Rathjen, coordinator of PolySeSouvient, whose organization formed in response to the École Polytechnique massacre. Gun owners are in limbo. And some gun makers are proceeding as though the ban isn’t real. “While sales were no doubt initially dampened by the Liberal government’s [changes], the Black Creek Labs SRV2 Siberian semi-auto rifle is in production,” reported Calibre magazine in 2023. “Now, with the Liberals removing those amendments… presumably more shooters are emboldened to put their money down on one of these made-in-Canada rifles.”

Other complications include that no one can say how many guns might be affected by Canada’s ban. According to a 2018 federal report, “Because ‘assault weapon’ is not a legally defined term, providing a count of how many are held in Canada is not possible. However, there are about 100,000 legally owned non-handgun firearms—usually rifles and shotguns—registered to individuals. Some of these could have features consistent with what is described as an assault weapon.” ‘Features’ is a telling word. Guns can be made more powerful, or modified with aftermarket parts, potentially turning a legal gun into an illegal one. Even gun-control advocates acknowledge that an “assault weapon” is not so much a standalone, standardized item, like a baseball bat, but a collection of integrated parts, not all of which are easily controlled or banned. (Magazines and ammo are regulated separately.) Similarly we don’t know how many “assault weapons” are in Alberta. The ACFO says, “[We have] received estimates from the federal government that approximately 30,000 firearms in Alberta meet this criteria.”

A further twist is that the federal government hasn’t only banned “assault weapons.” On December 15, 2023, Bill C-21 received royal assent. The law toughens penalties for gun smuggling and trafficking, adds new offences for “ghost guns” (which lack serial numbers and are 3D-printed or made from parts) and creates new “red flag” laws and licence revocation provisions to address domestic violence or self-harm. Most notably the bill bans the sale, purchase, import or transfer (but not ownership) of handguns in Canada.

Shotguns and hunting rifles may have “historic and cultural importance.” AR-15s do not.

Even the UCP government can get behind tougher smuggling penalties or a crackdown on ghost guns. But a handgun freeze—whatever its merits or drawbacks—is another kettle of fish. Canadians seem to believe that handguns represent less of a threat to them or their kids than do the weapons used in Canada’s worst mass shootings. The people who responded to pollsters after Portapique declared overwhelming support for ridding the country of AR-15s. They didn’t feel quite the same way about pistols and revolvers. Ipsos and Angus Reid both found at least 10 per cent less support for a handgun ban than for an assault-weapons ban, with support falling to as low as 43 per cent in Alberta.

An ordinary Canadian, following the debate through headlines and soundbites, could easily conflate efforts to ban “assault weapons” with a push to eliminate other guns. Handguns are more commonly used in gang violence, domestic and intimate partner violence, suicides and accidental shootings. Compelling arguments can be made for banning them, but reducing mass shootings isn’t on top of the list. When the UCP says “Trudeau’s policies won’t stop gangs,” they’re talking about handguns.

For that matter, when the UCP evokes the “historic and cultural importance of firearms” to our province, they mean shotguns and bolt-action hunting rifles, not AR-15s or their equivalents. Indeed, while something like a quarter of Canadians own a gun (mostly traditional rifles and handguns), few have owned anything resembling an “assault weapon.” But everyone is a potential target for the man who would use an assault weapon for its original purpose.

The arguments opposing a ban on assault weapons are that the federal government’s “ridiculous firearms agenda”—in the words of Kenney—is an affront to law-abiding property owners, including hunters, and that we’ll waste a huge amount of money buying back 100,000 scary-looking but otherwise harmless inanimate objects. If the ban goes ahead, many hundreds of collectors in Alberta will be made to surrender treasured property, even guns that don’t work or haven’t been removed from a locked cabinet in years. Heirlooms handed down from parents will be caught in a gun-grabbing driftnet. Some collectors will choose to keep contraband, becoming criminals with the stroke of a pen, left to worry about when the RCMP will come to inspect their collection.

Many recreational shooters—those who don’t use handguns or smaller shotguns—will have to change their hobby. Some gun ranges will lose business. At Calgary’s Shooting Edge, for example, four of 16 ranges were dedicated to “centrefire rifles,” which include AR-15s and AK-47s (specifically, a Chinese-made descendant of Russia’s famous Kalashnikov). The Shooting Edge shut down in October, blaming the federal ban.

Many hunters will find that weapons they have used safely for years are now illegal to own. They’ll lose lawfully acquired property. They’ll be forced to surrender trusted tools in exchange for compensation they believe is unfair. Some of their new guns will be different—more expensive, harder to operate, less powerful.

Indigenous groups—who know a bit about government mass confiscations—haven’t been assuaged by promises that the final list of banned guns won’t impact subsistence hunting. Nunavut Tunngavik vice-president Paul Irngaut told Canadian senators in 2023 that Inuit hunters face unique dangers and can’t always access search and rescue services. “Semi-automatic rifles are effective and necessary as a humane method to quickly dispatch animals, and as defence against polar bears, grizzly bears and wolves,” he said. If the federal government gets its way, some Indigenous Canadians will be forced to trade higher-powered guns for traditional rifles and deterrents such as bear spray.

The argument for a ban on assault weapons, however, is more compelling: Canada could prevent a mass shooting.

Surveys show that many gun owners support an assault-weapons ban. Some even argue in online forums that a ban on AR-15s is neither a slight on law-abiding gun owners nor the start of a slippery slope toward outlawing hunting or sport shooting. Canadians—Indigenous and otherwise—will continue to hunt, albeit some with new guns and different precautions. Following their assault weapon bans, people in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Norway continue to hunt, using guns. Shooting ranges will sound a bit different, but many will survive.

When most of Canada’s assault weapons have been carted away and destroyed, Canadians will not only feel safer, they will in fact be safer. The correlation between lower rates of gun ownership and less gun violence is backed by research. A 2000 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery concluded: “Across [26] developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides.” Other factors such as the effectiveness of mental health supports and gun-owner screening contribute. But the simple fact is that where there are more guns, there are more deaths from guns.

Australians appear to have less to fear from gun violence today following their 1996–1997 buyback, when over 650,000 guns were taken out of circulation (by a conservative government). From a 2006 article in the journal Injury Prevention: “In the 18 years before the gun law reforms there were 13 mass shootings in Australia, and none in the 10.5 years afterwards.”

The rate of gun crime has fallen in the UK since its government banned civilians from owning most guns, and the country’s homicide rate is the lowest in the OECD (and one-sixth of Canada’s rate).

“[One] thing to remember is that the people who are shot, injured or killed have rights too,” said Calgary-based surgeon, hunter, self-identified conservative voter, and assault-weapons-ban proponent John Kortbeek in a 2021 interview with Cold Steel: Canadian Journal of Surgery Podcast. “They didn’t ask to be shot, they didn’t ask to be killed, and they didn’t ask to be disabled. And that’s a pretty stiff price to pay for ready access to handguns and military style assault weapons.”

Shotguns and hunting rifles may have “historic and cultural importance.” AR-15s do not.

last January at Edmonton City Hall, premier Danielle Smith appeared onstage at events in Calgary and Edmonton with former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson. Carlson owns guns, including an AR-15, and has likened gun control in the US to “class warfare.” As he told the NRA, “The Left hate that guns are tools and that millions of normal people own them. They hate that guns are also a metaphor for true individual freedom.” Neither Smith nor Carlson mentioned the previous day’s incident in Edmonton, nor did Smith’s government issue a statement.

That shooting is largely forgotten. In March the gunman was charged with two terrorism offences and nine other charges. In July he pleaded not guilty. City Hall was closed to the public for two months, then was reopened with metal detectors and other new security measures. Albertans moved on.

Edmonton mayor Amarjeet Sohi is now doubtless safer. But that city also has the Legislature. Alberta has other government buildings, and malls, nightclubs, country music festivals, political conventions, church gatherings. It has schools and daycares and children’s camps. Both my 10-year-old daughter’s public elementary school and my 5-year-old’s preschool in Calgary now do lockdown drills, where they bolt the doors, turn off the lights and take silent cover under desks and tables “in case the bad guys come” (my 5-year-old’s words).

A mass shooting leaves a permanent scar on society. “Certain dates are written into our country’s story as defining days,” Norway’s King Harald said on the 10th anniversary of Utøya. Then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern called the Christchurch massacre one of her country’s “darkest days.” “We are suffering,” said Colchester County, NS, mayor Christine Blair in spring 2024, four years after Portapique. “It’s huge here, and it has affected everyone.”

But the flipside is true too. Gun restrictions reinforce and shape cultural values and norms, in the same way other legislation has long-term effects (e.g., seat belt laws). If mass shootings can traumatize a society, reasonable gun restrictions can inspire a more peaceful one.

The Mass Casualty Commission that was struck following the 2020 massacre in Nova Scotia recom-mended in its exhaustive report a ban in Canada on “all semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that discharge centre-fire ammunition and that are designed to accept detachable magazines with capacities of more than five rounds.” It did so after concluding that mass shootings pose a “significant though rare” threat to Canadians.

But a mass shooting almost did happen in Alberta last January. It may have been prevented only by dumb luck. If a mass shooting does happen here, and three or seven or 22 people are killed, including schoolchildren, a horrified Albertan and Canadian public will immediately demand a ban on the assault weapons used in the massacre. And then we’ll find out that we already did ban these guns—or tried to, before opponents, including Alberta’s government, decided that the chance to prevent a mass shooting wasn’t worth the price.

Evan Osenton is the editor-in-chief of Alberta Views.

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Valley of Gold

Jeff Gailus — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 15:28:08 +0000

Alberta is not what most Albertans think it is, and the drama unfolding in Canmore is a perfect illustration of this delusion.

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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Where Sad Animals Are “Happy”

George Colpitts — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:00:48 +0000

Polar bears are back at the Calgary Zoo. Their enclosure is different from any offered here in the past. The Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo announced that the new $11.5-million Taylor Family Foundation Polar Bear Sanctuary constitutes a “world class polar bear habitat,” offering “exceptional” care, with programs providing bears an outlet for “natural behaviours,” “cognitive challenges” and stimulating “play.”

The enclosure exemplifies the zoo’s new approach to polar bears. Interim chief operating officer Jamie Dorgan in July 2023 said that in the past the Calgary Zoo wasn’t “so concerned with animal well-being,” and was “more worried about showing animals to people. Now for us it’s critical, if we’re showing those animals to people, that [the bears] have got everything they need and they’re able to be well-adjusted.” The enclosure aspires to that promise. As part of a larger sampling of Wild Canada habitats, the bears have more than two acres to roam. They have grassy meadows interspersed with trees, rock outcrops, pools of various depths and a wading stream. Hilly topography gives them long views of their surroundings.

Most notably, this “refuge” will keep only naturally orphaned bears. The zoo hopes that by protecting them, they will educate the public while helping save an iconic species threatened by rapid climate change.

But the bears will also draw crowds and business. The Alberta government in 2021 provided $15.5-million for the new “Wild Canada” complex in the expectation that it will raise the zoo’s annual revenues by $13.4-million and increase its annual contribution to the local economy by more than $140-million. Then-Minister of Culture Leela Sharon Aheer said “revitalizing the Canadian Wilds habitat is an important investment that will continue to elevate the zoo as a world-renowned conservation facility.” Those hopes have already been borne out with the zoo’s record-breaking attendance in 2023, when Wild Canada’s opening, and undoubtedly the polar bears themselves, helped draw 1.54 million visitors.

The Calgary Zoo has had polar bears since 1938. Only in the 2000s were bears absent. In their long history in the prairie city, polar bears have lived in very different circumstances. There really isn’t anything new, however, in the zoo’s claims to be meeting the animals’ needs and ensuring their well-being. In the past, zoo officials, zoo experts and Calgary’s media have all reassured visitors that Calgary’s polar bears were happy. And zoo visitors themselves have wanted to believe it too. Perhaps more importantly, each generation of zoo authorities has been confident that the enclosures they built for polar bears were more humane than previous ones.

C. 1918 Banff Zoo

Not many visitors went to a zoo in the 20th century to taunt or torment animals as they commonly did in earlier times. Anti-cruelty movements in the 19th century confirmed that animals, like humans, suffer pain and emotional distress. Later in the century, experimental animal psychology began revealing high degrees of animal intelligence. Early 20th century bestselling storytellers such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles G.D. Roberts and Jack London anthropomorphized animals, attributing to them human-like thinking and feelings. The convergence of animal humanitarianism, psychological studies and popular stories prompted zoo visitors to look differently at captive animals. They wanted to gain insight into the animals’ thinking and emotional state by interpreting their behaviours, and sought reassurance from zoo authorities that the animals weren’t suffering.

Few animals can appear as intelligent, curious, complex in behaviour and happy in captivity as polar bears. William T. Hornaday in the 1920s, drawing from his experience at the New York Zoological Park—one of the largest zoos in the world—said bears were the most popular of zoo animals, after chimpanzees and apes, because of their facial expressions, vocalizations and complex body comportments. Highly intelligent, a bear would constantly change its repertoire of behaviours. Given the opportunity, it interacted with visitors, often to solicit food treats. A bear also ingeniously exploited its enclosures and manipulated novel objects introduced to them. It typically, ceaselessly, sought a means of escape. Famously, Barbara and Sam, two polar bears at the London Zoo, did exactly that in the early 20th century.

Each generation is confident their enclosures are more humane than previous ones.

Calgarians gained first-hand experience with polar bears early in the city’s history. They saw them in 1910 when the German showman Herr Albers showcased his six trained polar bears at the Victoria Park Grandstand. The crowds loved it when Albers had a large water basin rolled onto the stage and prompted the bears, one after another, to jump in to cool off.

But it was at the zoo in Banff that city folk really got to know polar bears. Canada’s Parks Department traded some mountain goats to the London Zoo to bring two bears to Banff in 1914. From the start, Banff visitors wanted to see these bears, clearly out of place, happy in their new mountain home. When one of them was holed up in his “capacious” den, a reporter stated that “at first sight [he] would appear a most forlorn creature, facing the north, with his head wagging from side to side…. But wait awhile and see him dive into the swimming pool, turning somersaults and playing with an old whiskey keg, and then decide whether after all captivity to him is so irksome.”

When the Banff bears died, after the First World War, they were replaced by cubs, one from the western Arctic, not living long, and another in 1922 from Chestermere Inlet on Hudson Bay. Calgarians got to know the latter, Buddy. Buddy grew up at the zoo learning clownish behaviours conditioned by visitors tossing him peanuts and other treats. Buddy’s complex behaviours generally reassured visitors that he was happy. Young Buddy likely played to experience happiness. But at other times his hyperactivity surely owed to his auditory and visual overstimulation, as well as the anxiety he experienced with throngs of visitors pressed nearby. With keen olfactory senses, Buddy could likely smell each visitor around his enclosure—their perfume, body odours, even the scent of hotdogs on their breath. Since many visitors tossed him treats, Buddy behaved to please people, yet was perpetually uncertain about inconsistent rewards. That most of his behaviours were interpreted as expressing happiness is hardly surprising. Animal humanities scholar Erica Fudge believes that humans want to see captive animals as happy because that makes us happy too.

As years went by, Buddy slowed down. He exhibited behaviours typical of polar bears aging in captivity. The utter monotony of the enclosures drives them to repetitively pace, chew the bars, or swim back and forth in their pools. Bears are most susceptible to boredom, defined by Dutch captive-bear expert G.M. van Keulen-Kromhout as a “disharmony between the natural, internal experience of time and the objective period of time” passed in an enclosure. A bored bear invariably exhibits one or two forms of “neurotic tics.” In 1930 a reporter wrote that Buddy “keeps walking back and forth from the stone house to the iron bars of his cage. The manner in which he swings his hind legs and turns up his flat, hairy paws reminds one of a comedy in the movies.” However comical it all seemed, Buddy still stopped to “entertain his admirers” and beg treats by “sitting on his haunches in front of the bars.”

Calgarians should have questioned why their zoo suddenly deemed the old cages inhumane.

In 1938, shortly after the park closed its zoo, the 16-year-old Buddy was moved to Calgary. By this point, Banff park planners felt that public sentiment was changing, at least among visitors to a “wilderness” park. Visitors wanted to drive slowly in cars to see animals in nature. They didn’t want to see “the confinement of animals in small spaces,” as Banff’s own town advisory council concluded. But the Parks Department had found it nearly impossible to find a zoo to take Buddy. Few could afford to accommodate the 1,000-pound animal. Buddy’s diet was enormous. And he needed a pool. Calgary’s Zoological Society, however, rushed to add a polar bear to its collection. The cage in Banff was disassembled and rebuilt in Calgary. A pool was hastily constructed. Calgary’s Arctic Oil Company paid for Buddy’s feeding in his new “palace.”

In Calgary, Buddy initially remained listless and morose in his cage. The Herald reported that the “glum” bear stayed in his den, much to the disappointment of visitors, but reassured readers that the animal at least rallied at feeding time. When Buddy glimpsed zookeeper Tom Baines coming with a bucket of fish, “he almost tore the cage down to get to them.” Even animal cruelty advocates found evidence that Buddy was happy. “Aunt Marian,” writing a weekly newspaper column for the city’s Junior Humane Society, asked her young readers: “Have you wondered, as I often have, why the polar bear swings his head from side to side as he walks?” She explained she’d learned from authorities that the bear’s behaviour derived “from training his eyes to look for fish in the icy waters of his native land.”

Other zoo officials reassured Calgarians that their captive polar bear was content, even in a cramped, barred cement enclosure and enduring Calgary’s hot summer temperatures. The Herald reported that in Oakland, the Animal Shelter League had raised concerns about Wrangel, a listless and apparently unhappy polar bear at the zoo in 1930. The zoo appointed five veterinarians to look him over; they checked his blood pressure, took his temperature, listened to his lungs. These experts concluded that Wrangel was “not sick or mistreated, but treated too well.” Discovering the bear suffering from eczema, they simply removed all meat from his diet. More reassuring were London Zoo authorities, who, in Calgary’s wire service news reports, stated, “Polar bears in captivity enjoy the heat of summer almost more than the other animals.” The Colorado Springs zoo director similarly claimed “the polar bear does not like cold weather. The warmer it is, the better the polar bear likes it if they have plenty of water.”

In 1949 the Calgary Zoo expanded its enclosure, as the one built in 1938 now seemed too small. With support from a local bridge-building firm, the zoo constructed a 40×40-foot barred cage (basically double the minimum regulated size of a two-car garage in Calgary now). The bear moving into it had a “palatial cage and swimming pool all of his own,” and the Herald reported him “happily splashing in his new pool.”

in 1938 when the Calgary Zoo acquired its first polar bear–16 year-old, 1000 pound Buddy–from the Banff Zoo, visitors consistently found evidence to reassure themselves that the cramped cage humanely imprisoned this animal.

But how were the bears faring, really? Buddy lived only a year in Calgary before dying of pneumonia. Sonya, his intended mate from the Chicago Zoo, lived less than a year, after she “simply lolled about, listless and panting” in the bear cage. After her death, another bear arrived as a cub: Carmichael. Though female, Carmichael was named after radio comedian Jack Benny’s fictional pet polar bear. Carmichael died in Calgary after seven years from a lung infection. Within a year she was replaced by a male, Carmichael II, a cub that lived until the 1970s (so long that one Calgarian remembered him pacing constantly to the point that “he wore grooves back and forth and at the turning points” of his cage). Carmichael II survived other bears introduced to his cage, including Mary Livingston, a cub that lived only three years.

If current measures had been used at the time to rate the Calgary Zoo’s care for polar bears, it would have failed on most counts. The animals were beset with stereotypies (repetitive behaviours), they only inconsistently reproduced, many deteriorated in physical condition, and they often didn’t exhibit “ecologically valid behaviour” (i.e., they didn’t act like polar bears naturally do). Zoo authorities, Calgary media and the public itself, however, interpreted these bears’ physical condition and behaviours positively. Even into adulthood, Carmichael II was deemed the “Calgary Zoo’s polar bear clown.” He was apparently happy to share space with Mary when she, at four months old, was introduced to his cramped space. When photographed splashing around a hole in their frozen pool in December 1958, the Herald saw “Icy Fun for Polar Bears” at the zoo.

Similarly reassuring the public, the zoo published visitor guides showing an early photo of Carmichael II, still a cub, standing on his hind legs “in a playful mood.” Years later, another photo showed the adult bear standing up to receive food at the end of a long pole over his cage bars. The cutline still read that he was “in a playful mood.” One guide stated that polar bears “are more easily acclimatized to our varying seasons than are the tropical animals,” while “they thrive in Calgary’s moderate climate.”

The Calgary Zoo has always counted on the support of local newspapers to promote visits, most of the coverage confirming the happiness of its polar bears. The Herald ran a photo of an apparently smiling Carmichael II in July 1956, describing him as a “hot weather animal.” When the bear apparently didn’t enjoy the warm April of 1970, he still found “consolation in the still chilly concrete floor and iron bars of his cage.” Numerous newspaper photos show the bear chewing his bars. One that ran in the Herald in February 1951 shows Carmichael II gnawing on his bars, apparently saying, “Ah-h-h-h … six weeks more,” in respect to Groundhog Day. Another shows Carmichael in 1963 doing the same thing: “Zookeepers say polar bears, who are as tough as nails in their native environment, like to keep their teeth in condition by chewing on hard objects.” When another bar-chewing bear was photographed in 1965, the Herald mused whether the animal was “trying to gnaw his way out, or he has a toothache…. Or perhaps he just likes the taste of iron bars?”

Almost any evidence was used to show the bears enjoying their cramped cage or their monotonous diet. Carmichael II was pictured enjoying his “turkey dinner” at Christmas 1963 when a zookeeper was feeding him a handful of “juicy pieces of meat.” Candy, another bear, splashing water from her pool toward a photographer in 1968, seemed to say, “Come on in, the water’s fine.” Yet another bear was later photographed “shooting the curl” as the zoo’s resident “surfing polar bear.” The bear “hangs ten on the biggest wave he can muster up within the confines of his pool,” a newspaper said. During a heat wave in 1971, another photographed bear gripped the bars of his enclosure while floating in his pool, his enclosure deemed Calgary’s “Polar Bear Hilton.” In June 1972 a photo of two bears wrestling each other in their pool said it all: “Play-Time,” the cutline read. “Though they’re far south of their arctic home, these inmates of the Calgary Zoo seem to be enjoying life in the city’s warmer climate.”

1971 The Calgary Zoo during a heat wave in July.

Zoos changed course in the 1970s, aiming to offer animals habitat instead of cages. The enclosures now offered more space for animals and naturalistic features. In the blueprint planning, these spaces met the needs of visitors as much as animals. Their layouts obscured fencing by hiding it in shrubs and behind screens of trees; visitors on winding paths could pass these enclosures and feel as though they were among the animals rather than separated from them by bars.

But Calgarians really should have questioned just why the Calgary Zoo in the 1970s suddenly deemed the old and “unsightly” bear cages to be inhumane and was now raising money to build new ones. To help pay for a new polar bear enclosure, the zoo launched its “ban the bars” campaign in 1972 to “remove the last vestiges of a now-frowned-upon part of its history.” A news photo shows the zoo’s director using a welding torch to cut the bars of the old polar bear cage.

Many Calgarians will remember the “polar bear complex” that opened in 1973. Calgary would now serve as a refuge for a species threatened in the destructive circumpolar bear pelt and trophy hunt. Offering more space, the enclosure would also accommodate more bears—its aim being to make Calgary’s collection one of the largest in North America. The enclosure offered unprecedented ways for visitors to view the animals through windows, overhead galleries, even from underneath the bears’ pool. The windows allowed visitors to stand “nose-to-nose” with the bears—an experience touted as “the first of its kind in the world.” With their new “room with a view,” animals inside would “live a bit of the ‘good life’ in more spacious surroundings without bars,” as the Herald reported. Especially when bears were underwater, visitors would get “a clear view of their submarine tricks as they plunge from dry dens and exercise areas above.” All this would be “heartening… to zoogoers used to seeing the same animals do little but pace back and forth out of sheer boredom in small, square iron cages.”

Visitors were indeed enthralled. “Those bars and cramped quarters were, I thought, degrading,” a Calgarian wrote to the Herald, “but with that beautifully designed complex completed, the animals can enjoy more natural and spacious living. Hurray for the people of Calgary.”

But visitors had to stretch their imaginations to see the bears happy in the enclosure, really a big bowl of cement with all its surfaces painted to simulate Arctic ice. A Herald editor said that one bear, likely bored and lying prostrate across a cement barrier—the enclosure was all cement—was having a “poolside snooze.” Here was “one Calgarian [that] didn’t have to go to Hawaii to lie outside by the pool.” Another bear was later photographed “at play” in the basin pool, affirming that “Some folks travel as far as Hawaii or Florida for a wintertime dip. But this polar bear gets his kicks from an icy frolic in his pool at the Calgary Zoo. Retrieving his [toy] hoop from the brink is not only fun—it also gives him his exercise and
daily bath!”

Despite their larger space, the increased number of bears created overcrowding, and the bears acted aggressively. Initially there were Candy and her female offspring, Snowball, and a bear arriving from Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park Zoo in 1971 named (again) “Carmichael.” Soon joining the three bears were two recently acquired from Hudson Bay’s Southampton Island, Sue and Ralph. Two orphaned bears from Cape Dorset then followed. In 1974, in front of horrified children, Carmichael drowned one of the newcomers, Ri, in a shallow pool. The scene was forgotten a little later when a Herald photo showed two of the bears at their pool, “A refreshing dip on a hot day is always one of the great sensual delights for man and beast,” read the caption, but a swim was “double the pleasure” in the polar bear complex, since one of the bears was “licking away at traces of dinner left on his paw. Zoo officials say the bears find their meals finger-licking good.”

But all fun was gone only a year later when, at two years of age, Ralph killed Sue by tearing out her throat. As a dominant male in the enclosure, Ralph became so aggressive towards the females that he was kept separate from them most of the time. In 1979 the zoo had a dentist grind down Ralph’s canine teeth, to give the females a better chance when he attacked them and to teach him “not to be a bully.”

In the long term, the polar bear complex’s “expert” design dearly cost the bears’ psychological well-being. Stereotypic pacing became the norm. The worst affected was Snowball, who repetitively paced or swam in the pool 60 per cent of her waking hours. Snowball made international headlines when the Calgary Zoo tried putting her on Prozac before her death in 1997. The zoo’s last bear, Misty, aged 24, died in 1999.

1973 Calgary’s Polar Bear Complex when it was opened.

Given its poor planning, and apart from a couple of loaned cubs in 2005, the Calgary Zoo’s polar bear complex remained empty throughout that decade. The zoo announced in 2005 a new enclosure in the works, “something new and modern that is going to position the organization to go into the next millennium with a huge added attraction to the city.” As part of its “Arctic Shores” section (to also include beluga whales), and to provide a refuge for polar bears in the context of climate change, the new enclosure promised a large and deep aquatic “facility” in which bears could catch live fish. Projected to be 10 times the size of the polar bear complex, this enclosure would offer an ice cave, refrigerated rocks for the bears to walk on, and a hill high enough that they could see Memorial Drive. A bridge would allow visitors above to watch the bears below.

But many Calgarians remembered the polar bear complex. Zoowatch, doing an independent survey in 2006, found that 71 per cent of Calgarians thought the best way to learn about polar bears was in the wild, and 58 per cent didn’t want to see them return to the city. The zoo dismissed the survey as biased, but lawn signs popped up across Calgary protesting polar bears coming to the zoo’s Arctic Shores. Petitions reached City Hall. A Zoowatch-funded billboard on Memorial Drive decried the zoo’s plan to have polar bears and belugas swimming in the city. By 2013, citing rising costs, the zoo shelved immediate plans for the reintroduction, but promised the bears’ return in its “Twenty-Year Planning.”

Today the Calgary Zoo is reassuring Calgarians that its new polar bear enclosure is planned carefully around current animal science. The problem, however, is that bear science only partially translates into “zoo biology,” the latter factoring in human and non-human animals and their interactions, balancing the necessary modifications of artificial environments to please visitors and animals alike. Fundamentally, enclosure design cannot anticipate an animal’s psychology, since an animal’s mental worldview and emotions can never be known conclusively. More to the point, can humans even relate to an animal’s emotions, whatever they are Does a bear feel happiness like humans do?

There was little foresight in 1938 when the zoo acquired its first polar bear. The zoo and its visitors consistently found evidence to reassure themselves that the cramped cage, expanded in 1949, humanely imprisoned these animals. In 1973 the zoo unveiled the polar bear complex as an effective alternative. The complex still casts a dark shadow on the history of polar bears in Calgary. The 2004 design, never realized, offered a refuge space that other experts promised would keep bears and their human visitors happy. (What bear wouldn’t feel content looking at traffic jams on Memorial Drive?) Whatever passions, hubris, civic pride and science have gone into hosting polar bears in this prairie city—and whatever the best of intentions of the zoo and its visitors—polar bears still find themselves in a foreign habitat and alienated from their own natural history.

Ultimately the Calgary Zoo is accountable for the health, both physical and mental, of these Arctic creatures. Beyond what they now learn from zoo authorities about the welfare of these animals, Calgarians, as zoo visitors, should be as circumspect about their own perceptions of the bears in their newer, larger, “world class” enclosure.

George Colpitts is an environmental historian at the University of Calgary interested in human encounters with the wild world.

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The post Where Sad Animals Are “Happy” appeared first on Alberta Views.

An Orchid Astronomy

Dianne Chisholm — Mon, 01 May 2023 09:00:04 +0000

by Tasnuva Hayden
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2022/$24.99/196 pp.

Calgary author Tasnuva Hayden’s debut book of poetry defies every convention of written verse with inventive new forms of visionary lyricism. Eluding structural description, An Orchid Astronomy charts thinking’s scrambled, non-linear course as “Sophie” (as lyrical subject and conceptual persona) processes traumatic memories of mamma’s suicide, an illicit affair and a suspicious death, in the wake of larger, existential crises such as circumpolar melting, mass extinction, dying oceans and universal entropy. How, Sophie implicitly, insistently asks, can one make sense of one’s enigmatic mortality in the Anthropocene, where life, love and death bind so intimately with cosmic chaos?

Sophie probes the world’s dark mysteries by the light of northern Norway’s sky, where Polaris, the moon and aurora borealis illumine the sunless landscape of polar night. The poem divides Sophie’s quest/questioning into five reiterative sections of hermeneutic refrains, each headed by a page of luminary words, printed white-on-black in the arrangement of constellations Corona Borealis, Ursa Minor, Lyra, Cassiopeia and Cygnus. Sarvvis, the reindeer asterism by which the nomadic Sami navigated the solar year, appears as a recurrent motif, as does the star-petalled boreal “orchid.” Together, they signal the astronomical spiralling of Sophie’s thoughts around a metaphysical black hole. (The book’s cover features both against a Sami star wheel.)

Troubled by fragmentary traumatic memory as much as by climate calamity, Sophie’s quest for (self)understanding grasps inchoately at all available knowledge systems: Sami cosmology and cosmic physics, animistic shamanism and evolutionary biology. Her thinking occupies parallel realities (Indigenous/cosmopolitan), just as her narrative reiteration of mourning and longing juggles ontological skepticism and mathematical truth. At times, Sophie disappears altogether in a space-time continuum too galactic and too atomistic to fathom: “between nebulae to the centre of a cesium atom….”

What fascinates is the nebulous array of refrains, culled from the quest literatures of childhood fantasy, narrative romance, astronomical physics, Sami mythology, evolutionary theory, climate science (and more). If the poem fails to solve those mysteries generated by Sophie’s polymath soul-searching, it more than succeeds in composing a zeitgeist of inscrutable haunting. There is a beauty, a terrible beauty, to this fragmentary assemblage where orchids and constellations, polar bears and underage affairs, suicide, murder and global warming share the same collision course with mass extinction.

Dianne Chisholm is a professor emeritus of English at the U of A.

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