Bow Valley Archives - Alberta Views

Wildfire in the Bow Valley

Adrienne Mason — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:01 +0000

Across the valley, on the slopes of the Colin Range, Jasper National Park is burning—and my boyfriend is helping to ignite it. Using a torch dripping a flaming mixture of diesel and gasoline, he and his park warden colleagues set a line of fire that’s snaking up the slope.

I’m watching from a pullout down on the Yellowhead Highway. As a young keener with a summer job as a park interpreter, I’m tasked with explaining to people why a national park is purposely lighting its much-beloved forests on fire. Visitors are confused, sometimes angry, almost always annoyed that the smoke now swelling up the slope in menacing black plumes threatens to ruin their holiday.

It’s May 1989 and this purpose-lit fire—a carefully planned prescribed burn—is an early effort by Canada’s national parks to bring wildfire back into a landscape where for over a century it’s been largely banished. Fire is as natural as wind and rain across most of Canada’s forests, which have evolved to be recycled and renewed by periodic burns. Trees such as lodgepole pine, for instance, require heat to melt the resin that tightly binds the scales of their cones, releasing the seeds inside.

Since the 1980s, Jasper National Park has been a leader in reintroducing fire and in acknowledging that fires are necessary—and inevitable. It’s a challenging choreography, since what can renew can also destroy. In addition to letting some wildfires safely burn and lighting others purposely to reduce fuels and break up similarly aged stands of densely packed trees, Parks Canada has been actively mitigating wildfire risk around the built environment. They have created fire breaks, thinned and limbed trees, and removed deadfall and woody debris. During my time in Jasper in the late 1980s, for instance, Parks Canada cut trees on the Pyramid Bench behind the townsite, hauling the logs out by horse and snowmobile.

In July 2024, over 35 years after the Colin Range prescribed burn, my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I watched—from a distance and through digital screens—as Jasper burned again. On the evening of July 22, in the forest alongside the Jasper–Banff Parkway about 22 kilometres south of town, lightning struck three times in three minutes. Fire hazard was extreme, following a month-long drought and with temperatures reaching 38°C. Within 10 minutes fire had reached the crowns, rendering it virtually unfightable. Gusts of wind as strong as 87 kilometres per hour energized the blazes, and they soon merged into one fire and advanced north up the valley. In the end, the inferno covered about 33,000 hectares—about 40 per cent the size of Calgary—and destroyed 358 structures in the Jasper townsite.

I’m tasked with explaining to people why a national park is purposely lighting its much-beloved forests on fire.

The Jasper wildfire held national and international attention—for a while. Almost two years on, other news floods the airwaves, even as our fire risk persists. In 2025 more than 6,000 wildfires burned across this country, making it Canada’s second-worst wildfire season. (Only 2023, the year before Jasper, was worse.) The threat continues to resonate, however, south of Jasper, in the Bow Valley. If a wildfire could so quickly reach one mountain town, despite decades of preparedness on the ground, could it do the same in Banff?

For Marie-Pierre Rogeau, there’s no question. She is a Banff resident and wildfire research scientist who for over 30 years has studied Alberta’s fire history, including that of Jasper and Banff national parks. “We’ve gone so far without having any fire at all,” she says. “[It] isn’t just a probability; it’s a 100 per cent chance.”

Rogeau’s fire history studies, along with those of Cliff White—a leader in fire management, both regionally and nationally, now retired from Parks Canada—show that until around the 1880s, forests and grasslands in the Bow Valley burned about every 20 to 200 years, depending in part on the elevation. The valley bottom burned regularly. Intervals were longer on cooler, moister slopes.

While lightning did ignite wildfires, this wasn’t as prevalent as is often assumed. A band roughly 20 kilometres wide on the east side of the Continental Divide, including the Bow Valley, is in a “lightning strike shadow.” Instead, human-lit fires were prevalent land-management tools. They were part of the “seasonal rounds” as Indigenous people moved across their territories to hunt and gather, explains White. “[The strategy was] to burn early and burn often,” he says. Regular, low-intensity fires, usually ignited during the spring or fall, were used to herd bison or other wildlife, renew grazing meadows and berry patches, open areas for easier travel, and for dozens of other applications.

The fires created a medley of habitats with different species and ages across the landscape. Natural fires—often igniting during the hotter days of summer—might then burn less intensely, since fuel hadn’t accumulated. Trees with multiple fire scars, for instance, reveal they’d seen many fires but none severe enough to kill them.

Colonization doused the flames. Settlers used fire initially to clear the land, and construction of the national railway sparked the occasional blaze. But once crops were planted, fences were built, homes and businesses became permanent settlements and forests started to be seen as a resource to extract, fire was deemed a menace. With the creation of Banff National Park in 1885, Indigenous cultural fire was banned.

Fire threatened “pristine wilderness.” Fire detection and suppression became a primary duty of the national park warden service, which was established in 1909. The men hired as fire and game wardens rose to the task and fanned out across parks to help protect the forests and “their primeval charms.”

“Culturally, we flipped so fast,” says White. In just a century, after generations of living with wildfire, humans effectively took it away. In a study of wildland fires in Banff National Park, White tracked their decline. In the decade 1880 to 1889, an estimated 37,050 hectares burned; by 1980 to 1989, it was down to zero.

Now, after more than a century of fire suppression—compounded by more droughts and erratic weather thanks to climate change—fire is back with a vengeance.

Instead of burning in a patchwork landscape with varying levels of flammability—grasslands and open meadows, willow fields, stands of leafy green aspen and balsam poplar, clusters of lodgepole pine or Douglas fir—21st-century fires feed off densely packed, fuel-rich forests dominated by 125–175-year-old lodgepole pine primed to burn.

This is what happened in the forest around Jasper. Hot and dry conditions; a continuous source of fuel, including mountain-pine-beetle-killed trees; rapid ignition; and strong convective winds sent the fire into the crowns, where it spread rapidly tree to tree. The fire generated its own weather, including tornado-like winds of nearly 200 kilometres an hour, in places ripping centuries-old Douglas firs out by their roots and levelling the forest, wrenching metal fire grates and bear-proof garbage cans from their concrete pads and even levitating a 3,000-kilogram construction waste bin and tossing it into the Athabasca River. Instead of a mixed-severity fire with the flames moving between the ground and crowns—calming down in places, flaring up in others, burning with varying intensities throughout—fires like Jasper’s level the forest, replacing entire stands, in places incinerating the soil and exposing bedrock.

Today, we’re in a worst-case scenario, says White. After removing human-caused fires, “Now we’re walking into climate change.”

“Fire has a way,” says Rogeau. “It’s like a wick. It will find whatever path… can burn.” The challenge for communities built in the middle of fire-shaped landscapes—such as the Bow Valley towns of Lake Louise, Banff and Canmore—is to employ strategies that trim the wicks and reduce the pathways.

But how do you fireproof a valley?

For one, you can fight fire with fire. About 75 years after the creation of the Park Warden Service, which had so effectively removed fire from wildlands, it was also park wardens who started bringing fire back. Cliff White helped write Banff National Park’s fire management plan and was on the ground at the park’s first prescribed burn, three hectares in size, near Two Jack Canal in 1983. Since then, the park has burned about 31,000 hectares.

One of the largest burns was in the Fairholme Range in 2003. It was a gutsy move. The prescribed fire was on the eastern edge of the national park, near the highway and between Banff and Canmore. Ecologically, the fire aimed to restore the historic landscape by reducing dense lodgepole pine growth and expanding meadows, and to get ahead of a beetle infestation. It also provided protection for Harvie Heights, a small cluster of homes on the park boundary. The project took years to plan and included an extensive fuel break about 500 hectares in size—larger than the Banff townsite. Within the burn, the forest was thinned and grasses and understory—including highly volatile juniper—were burned off.

The Fairholme Fire was a success. For White, it stands as a great example of how agencies and communities can work together to both restore fire-dependent ecosystems and protect communities.

But 23 years later, there’s still so much work to be done. As we walk the fuel break in October 2025—now a field of dry, golden grass and post-fire regrowth of shoulder-high lodgepole pines studded with large old-growth Douglas firs that were protected—White explains that prescribed fires aren’t just “one and done.” Follow-up burns remove the charred wood and dense stands of pine that regenerate in the fire’s wake. “The first [fire] is interesting,” he says. “But it’s the second one that’s really something.” Burning sooner, and with some regularity, maintains a break’s functionality. The longer you wait, the more challenging the job, says White. “If you wait 30 or 40 years, it will be huge.”

Parks Canada has had a reburn of Fairholme on the books as a priority for years, but, to date, it hasn’t occurred. The agency’s communications team says only that “the project is currently under expansive planning and will proceed once conditions are met.”

Despite the success of the initial Fairholme fire and a management plan that supports burning, prescribed fires haven’t been used extensively in the front country of the national park in recent years. A small area was burned near the Banff airport in 2022 and another nearer to town in 2023—controversially so, as it escaped containment—but other than that, there hasn’t been a prescribed fire in the Bow Valley since 2014.

With prescribed fire seemingly on the back burner, another tool has rolled into the valley to help reduce fuel and “cool” the landscape, one that not long ago would have seemed incongruent with the philosophy of parks: logging equipment.

Above the Lake Louise village, Parks Canada is constructing a community fire guard. Averaging 400 to 500 metres wide, the guard stretches from behind the Chateau Lake Louise down to the village and across the highway to the parking lot of Lake Louise ski hill. The lake on one side of the valley and the tree-free alpine of Whitehorn Mountain on the other anchor the guard with two fire-resistant landscape features.

In the upper section of the guard, completed in the winter of 2024–25, a lone tree stands in a snow-covered clearcut. Left as a bird perch and habitat for cavity nesters, the snag is a sign that logging—or mechanical tree removal, as the agency prefers to call it—within a national park comes with a particular set of rules.

Shelley Tamelin, the wildfire risk reduction project manager for Lake Louise as well as for Yoho and Kootenay national parks, explains the strict parameters for the company contracted to do the work—everything from leaving wildlife trees and buffers around wetlands to working only when the ground is frozen. Roads are carefully planned, constructed and mitigated, and contractors are required to place spill trays under equipment that’s not in use, to catch fuel or oil drips.

Despite their name, fuel breaks or fire guards can’t be counted on to suddenly stop a fire. “The guard gives our operations folks a place to work,” says Tamelin. This can mean laying down sprinkler lines to wet the forest or assets such as critical infrastructure, or lighting a fire in the direction of the approaching fire, consuming the fuel in the process.

The Lake Louise Community Fire Guard is just one of several along the Bow Valley within the confines of Banff National Park. In addition to the guards already built, “risk-reduction projects” involving forest thinning and log hauling were completed over the winter of 2025–26 on Tunnel Mountain and the Spray Valley–Middle Springs area near the Banff townsite as well as in multiple smaller sites within a 15-kilometre radius of the townsite.

Jasper’s wildfire held national and international attention for a while. Now other news floods the airwaves.

Farther down the valley, the Town of Canmore, Municipal District of Bighorn and the Kananaskis Improvement District are building the Bow Valley Community Fireguard. Construction started in winter 2024, with support through the Forest Resource Improvement Association of Alberta Community Fire Guard Program. When completed, the guard will surround Canmore, the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park and the communities within the Municipal District of Bighorn, including Harvie Heights and Deadman’s Flats. The program has had full co-operation from the province to allow logging within provincial parks.

Despite the idea of logging in parks being anathema, White suggests we might need to do even more of it to protect the Bow Valley and the towns and infrastructure within it. He proposes the creation of a not-for-profit society to oversee the ongoing work of maintaining fuel breaks and fuel-reduction programs just beyond community boundaries under the guidance of professional foresters and in concert with community fire departments. Income generated from log sales would go back into the program to maintain it over the long term. In time, he says, these areas could be maintained through periodic burning. Carefully done, this could serve as a prototype for how to both live with wildfire and protect communities from it.

Ultimately, though, efforts to mitigate and hopefully minimize the impact of wildfire on towns like Banff and Canmore lie within those communities themselves. Wildfire will come; there’s no doubt. Fire guards may or may not help slow fires’ approach. And while “fear is a good starter, [it’s] a poor finisher,” White said in a recent presentation. The key for people is to put their fear into action.

The Jasper townsite didn’t burn because a wall of flames surged into town. It ignited after an aerial ember attack. Flaming branches, burning pinecones, moss, bark and other firebrands rained down like an assault of arrows. Wooden rooftops were the first to ignite, then decks, debris-filled eaves, bark mulch, fences, trees. Soon multiple buildings were aflame and the fire was spreading from structure to structure.

Ember showers are one of the most frightening aspects of wildfires. Fuelled by strong winds—fire weather generated by the blaze itself—embers can leap ahead by as much as 17 kilometres. They’re the reason an otherwise natural wildland fire can morph into a disaster. We wouldn’t be talking about the 2024 Jasper fire today if embers hadn’t ignited the town.

In Banff ember showers could come from any direction, but Sulphur Mountain is a commonly cited vector. White often refers to the mountain on the south side of town as “Banff’s volcano.” If fire coming from the Spray Valley breaches Sulphur Mountain, it could volley embers onto the community below.

The threat of ember showers in communities on the edge of wildlands is the impetus behind the FireSmart program. The national initiative gives dozens of actionable steps to reduce the wildfire risk to homes and properties.

Wildfire will come to Banff; there’s no doubt. The key will be for people to put their fear into action before it’s too late.

Chris Worobets has lived at the base of Sulphur Mountain for almost 30 years; the threat of wildfire is quite literally in his backyard. For several years he’s been helping to reduce the wildfire risks in Valleyview, the townhouse development in Banff where he lives. He’s clear-eyed about his chosen home. “We [built] in a forest,” he says. “This isn’t an urban centre.” As such, he sees homeowners as critical partners in fire prevention.

Worobets chairs the FireSmart committee at Valleyview and has been helping with mitigation since 2006, when the townhouse replaced its highly flammable cedar shingle roof. Volunteers have since moved combustible items away from structures, removed and limbed trees, planted low-risk deciduous trees, purchased sprinklers, held work bees to remove debris such as cones and needles and are working on making all decks and outbuildings built to FireSmart standards. It’s a slow process, though, even for a neighbourhood that’s largely onboard with the idea.

The Town of Banff is a booster for the FireSmart program and is implementing the program’s protocols, including tree removal, on municipal property. The town’s full-time FireSmart coordinator, Chris Pottie, provides free FireSmart assessments to homeowners—conducting over 150 in 2025—after which residents can apply to the town for discounted rooftop sprinklers, $1,200 roof-replacement rebates and financial support for coniferous tree removal. Pottie says there was a definite uptick in interest in the FireSmart program after Jasper townsite burned, and in 2025 the rebates were fully utilized.

While this is something, on the ground it means 120 sprinklers installed, 15 roofs replaced and 173 trees removed. Some private citizens do their own hazard reduction work even without the rebates, including Rogeau, who replaced her deck and removed trees. But for a town with almost 3,000 residences, it’s a long way from being well protected from flaming embers.

Effectively fireproofing a community requires widespread buy-in from residents, something that can be a hard sell in places famed for their natural beauty. And it’s frustrating to spend time, money and effort fireproofing your property if your neighbour does nothing. To date, the “stick” used by municipalities like Banff is more like a pool noodle—focusing on education and nudging people into doing the right thing.

The approach is toughening, though. Any new construction in Canmore and Banff is subject to building and landscaping requirements that mitigate risk from wildfires, including use of Class A roofing materials, which have the highest fire resistance. And Banff revised its community standards bylaw to mandate the removal of fire hazards such as dead trees, long grass, bark mulch and other combustibles within 10 metres of structures. In the end, insurance companies may provide the incentive that inspires action. Claims from wildfires are increasing, insurance premiums are rising, and money talks. Co-operators, for instance, offers a discount in Canada for FireSmart-certified properties.

Even though the loudest narrative coming out of the 2024 Jasper fire is that one-third of the community burned, it’s important to emphasize that two-thirds of it didn’t, including the critical infrastructure such as wastewater treatment needed for the town to function and rebuild. An extensive Natural Resources Canada report detailing the event acknowledged that more than 20 years of hazard-reduction treatment by Parks Canada around the townsite had moderated fire behaviour. It specifically noted that the town had made more fuel mitigation efforts than any other Canadian community under threat of wildland fire. (Although the report specifically mentions Parks Canada, FireSmart measures have been ongoing for over two decades.) These treatments helped reduce fire intensity in parts of town, knocking it out of the crowns and onto the ground, where it was easier to fight, ultimately reducing the spread of embers and saving structures.

The resounding message to be learned in Banff from understanding the history and role of fire on the landscape, and from the analysis that has come out of Jasper, is that the world of today isn’t the world of a century ago—or even 20 years ago. Wildfire suppression has only made our forests more combustible. Now, with the climate warming and becoming less predictable, fire seasons are longer and fires are more intense and harder to control. The risk to Banff is urgent.

Fire historian Stephen Pyne has coined a term for our era: the Pyrocene. “We’ve made an alliance with fire,” he writes. “It took us to the top of the food chain and now threatens to unhinge the planet.”

Adrienne Mason is a former Jasper National Park interpreter and now a full-time science writer and editor living in Tofino.

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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.

MELTDOWN

Lynn Martel — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:00:24 +0000

The mood was celebratory. The smoked salmon appetizers were scrumptious, washed down with wine. Oohs and aahs filled the gallery as the buzz intensified while a lineup waited outside the Whyte Museum in the winter air. The launch event of MELTDOWN: A Drop in Time, an exhibition of large-scale photographs of glacial landscapes, was a resounding success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Terminus.” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Battered Hero” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“After the Heat Dome” Jim Elzinga and Roger Vernon

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

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

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

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

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Senescence / Travels Up the Creek

Jenna Butler — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 08:00:22 +0000

by Amal Alhomsi
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2024/$20.00/184 pp.

by Lorne Fitch
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2024/$25.00/232 pp.

Both Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies, by Amal Alhomsi, and Travels Up the Creek: A Biologist’s Search for a Paddle, by Lorne Fitch, published by Rocky Mountain Books in the fall of 2024, are thoughtful and passionate engagements with the mountains and prairies of Alberta. Although Alhomsi and Fitch are devoted to similar landscapes, their approach to the land and to the environmental concerns at the centre of their books, as well as the language they employ in connecting to place, couldn’t be more different.

Senescence explores the process of aging and setting down new roots in a place when one has come from another landscape entirely. Alhomsi is a Syrian writer and artist who has lived in Banff since 2018. His debut book is written in layered, lyric dialogue with the land and water; at the same time, it is in constant conversation with other writers and thinkers whose work explores the natural and the spiritual. Considering the state of a heat dome summer, the Bow Valley landscape around him turning sere and brittle, he reflects, “Nearly 40 degrees C. Nearly Riyadh’s weather. I would look at a tree and wonder: How is it not on fire Is it not just dry sap and timber I have never seen things rattle without being touched by wind. Natalie Rice writes, ‘Grass is a fire / before it knows it is a fire.’ So are the mayflies, so is this body; lumps of damp mud left until they turn into tar, until they’re burnt out of their clinging.” The language in Senescence is exquisite, delving into the intimate connections between the human and the more-than-human, forging elegant links between the aging body and the land suffering through the climate crisis.

Alhomsi’s language may be rich with image and sound play, but it loses none of its power to convince. This is a book exploring the gorgeousness of the earth, but it’s also one that looks clear-eyed at the devastation wrought upon the land—in particular, by those nations whose primary drive is to consume, and at the more-than-human world that pays the price of that hunger. Alhomsi warns, “Since the 1500s, over 140 species of birds have gone extinct, 80 mammals, 10 per cent of all insects, and around 600 plants. There seems to be not enough world for what we want from the world. These horrifying statistics are not, as many believe, an accidental consequence of industrialization or pollution. They are as purposeful and methodical as tides.” As readers, we find ourselves drawn in by the sensuousness of the author’s language, and we quickly come to understand that it is underlain by a keen intellect constantly aware of the larger world.

Similar in focus but vastly different in register, Lorne Fitch’s Travels Up the Creek uplifts both land and community from the perspective of a professional biologist and co-founder of the riparian stewardship organization Cows & Fish. Over his long career in Alberta, Fitch has forged deep connections with communities of ranchers, farmers and researchers. Travels Up the Creek is both a celebration of the land—from places such as Hidden Creek in the eastern slopes through to the prairies and forests into which the mountain streams and rivers flow—and an unveiled look at the impacts of the climate crisis and the devaluation of scientific inquiry. Fitch is equally adept at recounting stories of the lands he’s known and worked with much of his life as he is at calling for awareness of political grandstanding and social media misinformation; the book blends research and narrative with aplomb. A story well told and intelligently and accurately sourced, he argues, can prove compelling to those who have not yet decided to take action in their own lives in support of the land: “Stories tell truths about place and the ways place can affect us. Our minds are shaped by place, as they are by our genes. Stories are the threads that connect our intellect, locate common ground and find the linkages between our history and our future. Richard Kearney wrote, ‘Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.’ Maybe they can help us treasure the place where we live and treat it kindlier.”

Toward this, Fitch recounts many of his own experiences with community (both human and more-than-human), from the rivers and fish to those whose work is intimately linked to the health of the nearby waterways. He’s generous with his stories of learning from the land and from the farming and ranching communities around him, and realistic in terms of the impacts of the changing climate on these same lands and communities. But he doesn’t leave the reader in the gloom without rescue. The book itself is the proverbial paddle in its title, an informed and thoughtful steering mechanism to help us right ourselves and move toward a more sustainable future. “If the contents of this book help educate you on environmental issues, inspire you, anger you and ultimately motivate you to act,” he writes, “my job is temporarily done.”

Alhomsi’s and Fitch’s books take different approaches and stem from different communities, but both are deeply grounded in engagement with the more-than-human world. Ultimately, both authors alight on the same point: that close attention to the world is imperative, and that even at this late date, there’s still time to lean in, attend and change.

Jenna Butler is an author and scholar near Barrhead. Her most recent book is Revery: A Year of Bees (Wolsak & Wynn).

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Should National Parks Have Entrance Fees?

Kevin Van Tighem and Ian Urquhart — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 10:00:57 +0000

Kevin Van Tighem says YES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian Urquhart says no

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

kevin van tighem responds to ian urquhart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ian urquhart responds to kevin van tighem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Dark Gospel

Jeff Gailus — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 10:00:23 +0000

You’d never know it from the coverage by mainstream media and even left-leaning pundits, but Tucker Carlson’s rally at Calgary’s Convention Centre on January 24, 2024, began like a Monster Truck Jam or a WWE SmackDown, then quickly devolved into something darker than a George Romero horror movie.

It started with a couple of Tucker fanboys whose companies sponsored the event, one of whom was the president of the Bow Valley Credit Union, paying homage to the ostracized Fox News host by assuring him that “We’re here because, just like you [i.e., the Crowd], we share your values. And we care about what’s going on in our province.”

Then a giant screen lit up the dark conference room, and a larger than life virtual Tucker imparted some timeless wisdom: “The second you decide to tell the truth about something, you are filled with this supernatural, this power from somewhere else” that “makes you stronger.”

Down on the stage itself, the actual Tucker strode confidently out of the shadows, engulfed in the deafening rhymes of “American Badass” by “his friend” Kid Rock, whose songs contain a litany of dog whistles and catcalls for the titillation of the alt-right: “No Rogaine in the propane flow / The chosen one, I’m the living proof / With the gift of gab from the city of truth / I jabbed and stabbed and knocked critics back / And I did not stutter when I said that”…

The Crowd of roughly 4,000 stood in unison and showered the honoured guest with adulation. I had committed to myself that I would not stand for this man, but my neighbours’ glances at my seated position and the growing fervour of the Crowd, along with my trepidation at being outed as a MAGA-opposed journalist, weakened my resolve, though I did manage to refrain from clapping.

Tucker Carlson’s attestations are some combination of stupid, spurious and unfair. They’re also dangerous.

“Thank you, truly, for having me,” Tucker said with a cackle and a smile. “That was the wildest intro I’ve had, ever.”

As a professional propagandist, Tucker centred his message on “Truth,” but his first order of business was to butter up the crowd. He started by confessing something he had “never” shared publicly: that he was, in fact, part Canadian. This, he said, explained his long fascination with and concern for Canada, and the reason he had come to “liberate Canada” from the clutches of our dictatorial prime minister.

“I’ve been everywhere in your country, and I think it’s a remarkable place.” That includes Calgary, a city he apparently has visited many times, “because of your mountains, which I found just beyond belief, really the prettiest places I’ve ever been. This is the prettiest country I’ve ever been in.” The Crowd, sufficiently flattered and fawning, despite the backhanded compliments about Canada and Canadians, were now ready to hear the gospel according to Tucker.

The most impressive thing about Tucker’s “Liberating Canada” rant was just how many right-wing talking points, massaged for a Canadian audience, he was able to cram into such a short speech. He relentlessly attacked Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who he said was a “weird little cross-dresser” and the audience’s “enemy,” and whose government should be opposed to the “maximum extent of your ability.” (Rousing cheers!)

He complained about the federal government’s alleged erosion of our civil liberties, “not the ones granted to you by the Crown, but the ones granted to you by God.” (Nodding heads, a smattering of applause.) These included not only freedom of speech, but also freedom to own guns to protect ourselves from rising crime rates. (Big applause!) He claimed that all media in Canada was state media, and therefore biased toward the left. “I can tune in any hour of the day to learn that I’m racist for driving an SUV and not being trans.” (Knee-slapping and hoots of laughter.)

Such attestations, of course, are some combination of stupid, spurious and unfair; they’re also dangerous because of the context in which Tucker embeds them. Tucker made it very clear in his introduction that afternoon how divisive the meta-message was going to be. “The main thing that I want to say in the short time I’m allotted today is that you should recognize what is happening to you. This is not a political debate to which you’ve been invited to participate. This is a destruction of you and your culture and your beliefs and your children and your future as a country.”

The appropriate response to such utter BS might have been silence punctuated with the odd hoot of “You’re nuts!” Instead, the Crowd lurched to its feet, thousands of hands clapping in a collective appreciation of a man who, it would seem, expressed their “shared values.”

This is when the darkness became darker. Tucker turned the opportunity to critique BC’s safe injection sites policy into a tale of the government giving fentanyl to your kids. And “if they are giving your children fentanyl without telling you, they’re trying to kill your children, which are your inheritance, so the only meaningful thing you will ever produce on earth.”

He then moved on to the federal government’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program, which, he maintained, is encouraging Canadians that are not actually terminally ill “to submit to being killed by the government, who won’t release the statistics. Like, what is that What is that!?”

“Murder!” yells a voice from the crowd.

“Yeah, it’s genocide, that’s exactly what it is. It’s killing large groups of people.”

At this point, my friend Jim and I turned to look at each other with total disbelief. I had invited Jim to accompany me to Tucker’s Calgary stop on his “Sworn Enemies Tour” for a little companionship and moral support in what I knew would be a challenging environment. Jim lives in Canmore and is a retired American environmentalist who cut his teeth as a young activist in Utah by standing in front of ultraconservative John Birch Society meetings and explaining why the Vietnam War was wrong. Later, he would tell me he had felt more afraid in the Convention Centre that night than he ever had at a John Birch meeting.

“I felt like a Jewish tailor at a Hitler rally,” Jim said.

“And who are those people [being killed by the government], by the way?” Tucker asked. “Again, we don’t really know, because the government hasn’t released the stats. What percentage of those were born in Canada I bet right around 100 per cent.”

Where is he going with this?

“How many people who arrived in Canada in the last 10 years have opted into the MAID program I don’t know, but I bet it’s right around zero.”

The Crowd is very silent now, in that you-can-hear-a-pin-drop sense of the word. Can you hear the dog whistle?

“I bet there is zero conversation about that in this country, because I know this country, I know what it’s like. It’s too horrible. No one wants to talk about it. You should talk about it. But more than anything, you should internalize the message of that, which is: They hate me. They hate me to the point they are willing to kill me, which they are.”

Welcome to the great replacement theory, reimagined for the Canadian mind.

We had to stand in line for an hour and a half to get into the rally, which gave me ample time to observe those who would become the Crowd, and they appeared to be a totally normal gathering of Calgarians, the kind of people you might encounter on a late Friday afternoon stroll down Stephen Avenue Mall. A few attendees wore their hearts on their sleeves: three “Proud Member of a Small Fringe Minority” sweatshirts, some Christian private-school T-shirts, and the usual “I Heart Alberta Oil” swag, but mostly it was fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and couples, mostly older men paired up with (much) younger women. The overwhelming majority of the audience were white men, of course, typically macho guys in upscale ersatz cowboy outfits, as well as numerous snappily dressed business casuals on long lunch breaks, decked out in their uniforms of white button-downs, crisp blue blazers and pointy brown shoes.

And now, here they are, cheering as Tucker attacks the CBC as part of the “woke crowd” that “hate[s] you, that’s what they’re saying. They hate you. They are saying, you are bad. That’s exactly what they’re saying, don’t lie to yourself.”

There were many more outrageous claims, ludicrous innuendoes and pernicious dog whistles: about how immigrants were diluting the voting power of (white) Canadians “who are vested in that country, people who were born there, who have lived there long-term, who understand the history of the culture of the country, who are bought in,” and how (white) Christians are similarly being persecuted. All of this persecution is being done, apparently, under the guise of public safety, “a euphemism for hard-edge fascism, actually,” said Tucker. “And frankly, I’m a little more comfortable with the old-fashioned variety, where guys in tight uniforms goose-step through your towns. At least you know who you’re fighting, and you know what it’s going to take to liberate your town.”

When I first heard that our premier had agreed to join Tucker on stage, I, like every Albertan I knew, was appalled.

I remember being dragged by my father to the Billy Graham Crusade at McMahon Stadium in the summer of 1981 as a 13-year-old boy. I don’t remember being affected one way or another, but over seven nights, more than 164,000 people came to listen to what the Calgary Sun called Graham’s much-needed gospel of “belief and hope” during an economic downturn that saw increasing rates of divorce, suicide and crime.

But Tucker is a proselytizer of a very different kind. And the mainstream media in Canada consistently underestimates him. Most coverage of the January 24 rally ignored Tucker’s hateful rhetoric in favour of what Premier Danielle Smith had to say in her interview with him. CBC’s The National framed the story around the political risk to Premier Smith for consorting with what Erin Collins referred to as a “peddler of misinformation,” a rather weak label for someone that Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and the author of How Fascism Works, has unreservedly branded as the latest in a long line of American fascists.

Like every good storyteller, Tucker constantly circled back to the beginning, where educated elites and leftist ideologues are trying to castrate our children or kill them with fentanyl. “They are not people who are trying to help; they are people who are trying to hurt you. Anyone who goes after your children, anyone who encourages you to have fewer children, is trying to make you extinct. It’s literally that simple.”

And the only appropriate response is violence. “How do you think [“attacks” on children] would fly in Serbia?” he wondered aloud. “You wouldn’t even get to the next sentence before you got shot.” (Laughter.) “Because you’re trying to kill someone’s kids! Your average Serb, whatever you think of them, doesn’t have generations of therapy talk that acts as a logical intermediary [to] seeing what’s actually going on. They’re trying to kill my kids, I’m the father, I won’t allow it, I will lay my life down to prevent it. It’s literally that simple.”

The Crowd stands, wild with applause, while Premier Smith waits in the shadows offstage to join Tucker for an interview.

When I first heard that our premier had agreed to join Tucker on stage, I, like every Albertan I knew, was appalled. But upon reflection, Tucker and Smith do have a lot in common. Indeed, before she entered provincial politics, Smith was the host of a Tucker-inspired radio talk show that, in the words of former Conservative MP Lee Richardson, “stoked division, hate and fear in listeners, with negative rhetoric, culture wars and conspiracy theories. The more provocative, outrageous or extreme the views expressed, the higher the ratings.”

Shortly after she became leader of the UCP, and thus premier, Smith gave an address to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce and then sat down for a chat with the chamber’s president. She joked that her principal secretary had “a Ph.D. in propaganda” but only “the good kind of propaganda.” She must have been referring to the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars the Alberta government invests in pro-oil, anti-climate and anti-vaccine nonsense.

Since then, Smith has demonstrated a half-hearted commitment to the truth, a tendency to misrepresent history and a propensity to align herself with questionable characters such as David Parker and his Take Back Alberta movement. “Alberta is the heartland of conservatism in this country and the last stand against what we’re up against,” Parker told the CBC before the January 24 show, “which is this totalitarian creep of socialism.”

Today, however, Smith would be on her best behaviour, the genteel Thatcher to Tucker’s chilling Goebbels. She started off by defending her right to sit down with a hate-spewing and divisive propagandist because she doesn’t agree with every word of any of her interviewees, and then batted away any questions about the “human rights” violations represented by the arrest of the Coutts Four for allegedly conspiring to kill RCMP officers. She did use the moment to say what she apparently wanted the world to hear, that “I think we should just double down and double our oil and gas production”—this, less than a month after the end of the hottest year on record.

But what possible benefit did Premier Smith stand to gain by partaking in an interview with a hate-spewing fascist And why did she volunteer to introduce him again at the Edmonton show that night, a show she wasn’t even scheduled to attend?

The obvious answer is that she and Tucker (and fellow travellers W. Brett Wilson, Jordan Peterson and Conrad Black) are birds of a feather, and that the Alberta leg of Tucker’s “Sworn Enemies Tour” was the perfect trial balloon to test extreme ideas in the hope that they might one day become mainstream, a popular strategy among populists that allows leaders to slowly but surely instill a new vision of what is possible and acceptable.

Three days after the Tucker rallies in Calgary and Edmonton, Premier Smith promised Albertans a new “parental rights” policy that not only discriminates against trans and gender-diverse children and youth but is, in the estimation of two MRU professors published at The Conversation, “the most extensive, draconian and unbalanced proposal of any conservative province to date.”

Coincidence I think not.

A couple of days after surviving Tucker, I sent a short summary of what I had experienced to a bunch of friends and colleagues. Predictably most were outraged, but a few responses surprised me. A friend from high school in the 1980s who had attended the Calgary rally suggested “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions.”

Another long-time friend from Calgary, while acknowledging that it’s “chilling that guys I think I share values with are falling under that spell,” also admitted, “I’m angry about some things too… and the radical left can be just as repulsive in a less obvious way.”

On the way out of the event I asked a few folks what they thought about the rally. The response was unanimous: “Great!”

Who might he align with When pressed, Friend B reminded me that “Canada has all the extremes. A normal dude like me feels somewhat separated from reality with some of the things being pushed down my throat. This is a minor example… but there is now a basket of menstrual products on the counter in the men’s room at work… I won’t be rioting, but it’s a minor aggravation that seems unnecessary to me and it’s the pushback against the ‘wokeness’ of it all that appeals to the Tucker crowd.”

Perhaps the most informative response was from Ruben Nelson, who grew up in Calgary and became an internationally recognized futurist who has spent the better part of his adult life trying to understand the forces that are now reshaping our lives, our world and our future. “I now conclude that what we are seeing is not simply an example of extremists having a night on the town. Rather, we are caught up in a long-term, stealthy effort by committed folks to ‘groom’ Albertans (and any others who will play) so that, voluntarily, more and more of us come to tolerate these folks as ‘somewhat offensive, but within what is now normal.’ Once Albertans accept these folks as part of the normal, and therefore legitimate, discourse, these folks own us.

“They’ve been at it for decades, and to date there is not enough in sight, let alone public outrage, to create an effective defence against them.”

On the way out of the Convention Centre I asked a few folks what they thought about the rally. The response was unanimous: “Great!” One young business casual, wearing the standard-issue pointy brown shoes and white button-down, this time under a tortoise-shell jacket instead of a blue blazer, gushed “I could have sat there for another two hours!”

Outside, in the disinfecting sunlight and fresh air, Jim and I ran into a lone protester in a well-worn red hoodie. He refused to provide his name, and as we chatted for a bit he confided to me that he was going to college and hoped to become a journalist. His sign explained why: “PREMIER SMITH’S MENTOR TUCKER CARLSON IS A LIAR.”

Two older men, well dressed and silver haired, overheard us and scoffed, “Enjoy the pedophilia.”

Journalists scoured the milling attendees for quotes. Two older women, who also withheld their names, told the Toronto Star that everyone needed to listen to Tucker because he wasn’t afraid to tell the truth. One of them paraphrased part of Tucker’s conclusion that “your timidity needs to be replaced by bravery…. [Cheers and applause.] The first thing that you need to do, before changing anything in your country, is to change everything about your heart. You have to be—right?!—ready for a contest where the stakes are existential.”

A light came on in her eyes and she said, “If I can make a difference with one person and that one person tells another person, it’ll just do this.” And then she spread her arms wide and twinkled her fingers, suggesting how Tucker’s fascistic ideas could travel by word of mouth until they consumed the entire world.

Jeff Gailus grew up in Calgary and now lives in Montana. He is the author of Little Black Lies (RMB, 2012).

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The post The Dark Gospel appeared first on Alberta Views.

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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The post Valley of Gold appeared first on Alberta Views.

Goth Girls of Banff

Steven Ross Smith — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 17:12:49 +0000

By John O’Neill NeWest Press 2020/$19.95/208 pp.

Fear not, this book isn’t—despite its title—a collection of goth fantasies or undead horrors. The setting is the Bow Valley and surroundings, and the 10 stories well capture elements of this mountain environment: its peaks, forests, creatures and human characters who evoke humour and pathos.

In the compelling opening story, “What is Written or Talking to Keep the Bears Away,” we roll toward the mountains in an old Volkswagen van on the voice of hitchhiker Don, a man with a less than savoury past. He is picked up by a family—mom, dad and two daughters. Mom Gale is sharp-tongued and blunt, dad Bob is crude but caring, the young sisters are frank. There is little polite correctness in their snappy yet affectionate repartee. Narrative tensions emerge through Don’s internal and external observations, cleverly rendered here—the reader motors along unwittingly, on an undercurrent of tension, to a startling end.

O’Neill is a skilled stylist. His use of language and image is vivid and crisp, the narratives are deeply imaginative and unpredictable. He is adept at point-of-view, shifting convincingly—first person to omniscient, past to present and to male or female gender. The title story, “The Goth Girls of Banff,” for instance, depicts the “career” rise and fall of sisters Linda and Jessie, who hire out as decorative companions, goth in attire and attitude, to clients with varying agendas. One of these clients, Will, tells a touching story that breaks through the girls’ fabricated aloofness. As a mountain hike unfolds, we learn that the characters—and we readers—have been (spoiler alert) fooled. Will’s story is just that—a tale—within a tale.

“From Castle Mountain” is a hybrid narrative that juxtaposes imagined scenes drawn from historical reality with a contemporary story. It’s set in the First World War internment camp at the Cave and Basin above the Banff townsite. The camp held Ukrainian, German and other Eastern European men—deemed threats—who were, in essence, forced labour. A present-day thread features an adult son and his father on a visit to the camp’s site, where a family member had been held. The father–son relationship, both grating and tender, is rendered convincingly, and the 1916 scenes in the camp—the characters and prisoner conflicts—feel revealingly authentic.

The further terrain of the collection includes the Athabasca Glacier, aching reflections at the scattering of a loved one’s ashes, and more. One annoying tic for this reader was the recurrent dropping of the personal pronoun in both dialogue and exposition. In everyday speech this does occur, but, overused, it jolts like potholes. The trails and trials navigated by O’Neill’s distinctive cast are gravelly enough on their own.

—Steven Ross Smith is a poet, fiction writer and arts journalist

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Uplift: Visual Culture at the Banff School of Fine Arts

Ben Fullalove — Sat, 01 May 2021 22:11:43 +0000

by PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall UBC Press 2020/$34.95/352 PP.

Poised on the side of Tunnel Mountain with fabulous views up the Bow Valley, the Banff Centre is not only spectacularly located but is also one of Alberta’s most internationally recognizable institutions, hosting arts and cultural events, celebrating mountain culture and offering a venue for business development and conferences of all kinds. Today it is facing, in a time of pandemic and government austerity, what some consider to be an existential crisis. In this context, PearlAnn Reichwein’s and Karen Wall’s rewarding new book Uplift is especially relevant.

Founded in the mid-1930s under the leadership of the charismatic Donald Cameron (who would remain its director until 1969) and with support from the Carnegie Foundation, the Banff School of Fine Arts developed into a central part of the University of Alberta’s Department of Extension and eventually a free-standing institution within the province’s post-secondary system. From its first course in eurythmic movement in 1935, the school quickly expanded to offer courses in a variety of fields, including theatre, dance, business and visual art. It is on the last of these that this book is focused. It does so through a critical examination of place and representation—how was the Banff School framed as a cultural institution in “the wilderness,” and how, in turn, did the unique situation of the school in the Canadian Rockies affect the kinds of experiences and representations that were created there In seven chapters, the authors consider topics such as the marketing of the school as an idealized geographic imaginary (“the Salzburg of North America”) through the use of carefully managed publicity and promotion; the contested question of its physical presence in a national park; and the problematic relationship between the school and the Stoney Nakoda, who were stereotyped as picturesque portrait subjects. In particular, respective chapters on the architectural history of the campus and on the varied experiences of students at the Banff School highlight the extensive archival research of the authors.

Uplift concludes with a consideration of a shift in the status of the Banff Centre over the last four decades, from its origins in an ideal of culture as both marker and generator of engaged democratic citizenship towards a contemporary globalized context in which the value of the arts is primarily determined by the market and where passively absorbed spectacle overshadows active participation. This is a thoughtful, at times entertaining book which provides a valuable lens through which to view not just the history of the Banff Centre but also the complex and vital relationships between culture, education and the state.

Ben Fullalove teaches art history at AUArts.

The post Uplift: Visual Culture at the Banff School of Fine Arts appeared first on Alberta Views.

Doctors Depart

Tadzio Richards — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 15:43:19 +0000

Alberta physicians are closing family clinics, withdrawing from hospital services and even leaving the province. Since the start of 2020, according to the Alberta Medical Association (AMA), physicians at some 400 clinics have announced they’re closing, considering closing or laying off staff in municipalities as disparate as Ponoka, Pincher Creek, Lac La Biche, Calgary, Edmonton and Cold Lake. It’s an exodus of medical expertise, in part the result of a breakdown in negotiations over doctor pay and compensation, but more, as one BC-bound Drayton Valley doctor put it in an August 9 letter to patients, it’s about UCP legislation that allows for more privatization of the public health system and has created “a continual stream of fear and uncertainty for us working in healthcare.”

The relationship breakdown started shortly after the UCP formed government. In September 2019 the Blue Ribbon Panel on Alberta’s Finances recommended that the government consider legislating doctors away from the traditional fee-for-service model, which would make Alberta the only province to do so by fiat. In October the UCP introduced and later passed Bill 21, which gave Health Minister Tyler Shandro the power to kill the compensation agreement with the AMA.

In February 2020, citing an impasse in mediation, he did just that—Shandro cancelled the existing contract and gave his office full authority to set doctor’s fees, stripping the AMA of the power to veto fee changes. A new fee structure was announced, including a cap on the number of patient visits per day and a reduction in fees for visits over 15 minutes with complex patients. In response, the AMA filed a lawsuit against the ministry of health.

The UCP argues Alberta physicians are among the highest paid in Canada and “the $5.4-billion budget for physicians represents about 10 per cent of the entire government’s expenditures. Given the economic crisis the province is in, it is not unreasonable to seek a greater ability to control future increases in the physician compensation budget.” Further, “there is no need for a formal agreement to allow government to compensate physicians.”

Immediately following Shandro’s decision to rip up the contract, some doctors felt they were in an untenable position. On February 24, Dr. Cathryn Zapf, a family doctor in Canmore told The Bow Valley Crag & Canyon that she would have to close her clinic. “Overheads are high in Alberta,” she said. “We have to pay for leases, staff and equipment. A large proportion of our fees go to pay for this, so with an income cut between 30 and 40 per cent it is not feasible to continue working in Canmore.”

Doctors in Fort McMurray, Claresholm, Grande Prairie and elsewhere also made plans to close their clinics. In April, in response to public outcry, Shandro announced that the fee changes would be permanently reversed in rural areas and paused in urban centres during the COVID-19 pandemic. The meaning of “pause” was clarified in May, when Premier Jason Kenney said doctors’ pay would be addressed again when the pandemic is over. Neither Kenney nor Shandro agreed to return to the negotiating table with doctors.

Physicians at 400 clinics said they’re closing, considering closing or laying off staff.

CTV News reported in July that Dr. Annelies Noordman had left the 2,200 patients in her Bragg Creek practice, uprooted her family and moved back to the Netherlands, saying government policies made her concerned about the future. She said her only option was to leave: “Go somewhere else and provide care in a way I think it should be provided… or I sacrifice my own values and give lower quality of care because that’s going to be the only way to keep the clinic open,” she said.

In July the UCP introduced Bill 30. It was aimed at overhauling the healthcare system by making it easier for private companies to offer medical services and allowing the government to contract directly with physicians. In late July an AMA survey found that 42 per cent of Alberta doctors are so unhappy with the government’s approach to physician funding that they “are considering uprooting their practices and homes to another province or country.” The loss of trust was expressed by one of those departing physicians, Dr. Don Wilson, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the South Health Campus in Calgary, in his resignation letter posted online in August: “I feel the conflict between the current government and the medical profession in Alberta has become too toxic and too unstable for me to remain here,” he wrote. “Pursuing profits over patients is simply a terrible recipe for bad medicine, and I cannot support this drastic change and the dismantling of the public healthcare system in Alberta.”

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