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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Over the past five years Dr. Tyler May has noticed what he calls a “sizeable uptick” in sightings and interactions with grizzly bears in the area surrounding Manning, a town on Highway 35 next to the Notikewin River, approximately 600 kilometres northwest of Edmonton. May, born and raised in Manning, grew up on a small grain farm. His grandfather was a hunting outfitter and ran a trapline in the Chinchaga, an expanse of boreal forest directly west of Manning. After graduating from medical school in Dublin, Ireland, May moved back to the north in 2013 to work as a physician at the Manning Community Health Centre. Today, with his family, he manages a grain and cattle operation, raising 250 head on pastures adjacent to the boreal forest. “We’re seeing more signs of grizzly activity closer to where we live,” May says, citing regular sightings of tracks along the creek that runs through their cattle lease, bears caught on his neighbour’s trail cameras and a grizzly preying on a neighbour’s horse.

Most concerning to May, however, is an increase in livestock loss and injury from what he believes could be grizzly bear predation. He acknowledges it’s difficult to say for sure, when you’re running a remote operation. “Even if they’re on a kill, did they kill it or did it die naturally I haven’t seen a grizzly actually kill anything.” But this year he’s seen three injured cows with open wounds, which leads May to believe they’re being chased by something.

A moratorium on hunting has resulted in grizzly bear populations stabilizing

May admits his perspective is purely anecdotal. A population estimate conducted for grizzlies in the Chinchaga area in 2021 identified only 16 individual bears and estimated a density of 0.7 grizzlies per 1,000 km, which is the thinnest grizzly density in Alberta’s bear management zones. But May isn’t alone in his concerns. He and his neighbours aren’t inherently fearful of bears, he says, but rather of what he calls the “punitive nature” of Alberta’s laws: namely, that it’s been illegal to shoot or hunt a grizzly bear in Alberta since 2006. That’s what leads to the “shoot, shovel, shut up” mentality, he says, or the illegal killing, or poaching, that continues to be one of the leading causes of grizzly bear mortality in Alberta. “The sort of vigilante stuff, where people are taking measures into their own hands.”

In August 2024 May received an email from AlbertaRELM, the province’s regulatory body for hunting and fishing licensing, inviting eligible Albertans—licensed hunters—to become potential “wildlife management responders” to track and euthanize “problem” grizzly bears. “Just about everybody who hunts up here applied,” says May, of the local response to Alberta’s new grizzly management policy. “I don’t think grizzly bears have a lot of friends up here. They have a role to play [in the ecosystem], but people don’t want them in their yards—and for good reasons.”

 

Grizzly bears evoke polarizing emotions in Alberta. While some people perceive them as a symbol of an intact wilderness, an iconic species to be conserved, others view them as a “pest” or a “problem” to be removed. Research at the University of Alberta shows that Albertans, regardless of their stance on grizzly bear conservation, agree on the importance of “improving policy processes and decision-making” to build trust between different interest groups. In doing so, the province is more likely to achieve positive “outcomes for human–bear coexistence.” But the Alberta government has a track record of impeding constructive dialogue when it comes to grizzly bears, says human–bear conflict researcher Douglas Clark, particularly in the context of government “decision-making processes that leave everyone unsatisfied and angry at one another.”

In 2002, when the local grizzly population was about 1,000 mature adults, the province’s Endangered Species Subcommittee recommended that grizzly bears be listed as “threatened.” The Alberta government declined, though they did assemble a team of grizzly bear specialists to put together a Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan for seven different bear management areas (BMAs) across Alberta, with the goal of reducing human-caused bear mortality and human–grizzly bear conflict through mitigating food attractants, securing habitat and educating the public through a BearSmart program. The draft recovery plan was submitted in 2005—when the grizzly bear population had fallen to 700 adults—but the grizzly bear hunt remained open. Then, in a move widely covered in the media, the province’s leading grizzly bear biologist, Gordon Stenhouse, was reassigned from his position after speaking publicly about the plan’s failure to address the impact of the grizzly bear hunt. A few months later the grizzly bear hunt was suspended. It would take eight years after the initial recommendation for the Alberta government to finally list grizzlies as a threatened species under Alberta’s Wildlife Act in 2010.

A young grizzly foraging next to railway infrastructure near Grande Cache. Since the Alberta government banned the hunting of grizzlies in 2006, the population has stabilized, and even increased in some areas, though the bears are still considered threatened in the province.

Nearly two decades of a moratorium on hunting, coupled with conservation efforts, has resulted in grizzly populations stabilizing in some BMAs and increasing in others. In BMA4, which covers the Rockies and the eastern slopes from the Trans-Canada Highway to Rocky Mountain House, for instance, the number of grizzlies nearly doubled (to an estimated 88 bears). The latest population census, in 2021, estimated the grizzly population in Alberta to be between 856 and 973 bears—an increase, but not enough to be delisted as a threatened species.

Still, in recent years, hunting and outfitting associations have been lobbying the Alberta government to reinstate a limited season on hunting grizzly bears. “We should target problem bears first,” wrote author and hunter T.J. Schwanky in an op-ed published in Outdoor Canada in August 2021. “This could easily be done if landowners and Fish and Wildlife officials work together to give licence holders access to the bears.”

Nearly three years later, on June 17, 2024, Alberta’s minister of forestry and parks, Todd Loewen, quietly amended the Wildlife Act to authorize “hunting a grizzly bear” if the bear “is involved in a human–bear conflict situation,” or “is in an area of concern.” On July 9 the ministry issued a press release announcing a new grizzly bear management strategy involving “a new network of wildlife management responders to help stop dangerous and deadly grizzly bear attacks on people and livestock.”

According to the amended regulation, when a “problem” grizzly is reported, and a wildlife officer deems the new “grizzly bear management” strategy to be appropriate, a licensed hunter will be chosen from a list to kill the bear—so long as they can be “onsite within 24 hours.” By September 24, about 7,000 licensed hunters had applied for a slot. From that list, 30 hunters have been shortlisted, with 10 each in the north, central and south regions of the province. Hunters will be able to keep all parts of the bear except the gallbladder (which is highly coveted in Asia for its medicinal properties and illegal to export from Alberta).

Loewen told media that on average roughly 20 problem grizzlies are killed due to “negative human interactions” each year in Alberta, and that up to 15 could be killed annually under the new policy. But those numbers aren’t backed up by provincial statistics, which show that from 2013 to 2022 some 23 grizzlies were killed in self-defence and another 57 for agency removal—eight a year on average, significantly fewer than Loewen’s claim.

Critics argue the new strategy undermines efforts over the past two decades to mitigate and prevent negative interactions between people and grizzlies. Former fish and wildlife officers are calling it irresponsible, if not dangerous, to transfer the onus of managing human–wildlife conflict onto the public. Some conservationists argue the new plan is simply a backdoor way to reopen the grizzly bear hunt in Alberta, prompting the question: is the new strategy really about problem bears, or is it indicative of a political agenda?

 

After Loewen’s announcement, I talked to a current provincial employee formerly involved in grizzly bear recovery. They asked to remain anonymous but indicated that “government biologists” were not consulted by the minister or had any prior knowledge of the new program before it was announced by the government on July 9, 2024.

I requested an interview with Paul Frame, an Alberta carnivore biologist, or any other biologist working for the government, but was denied. Instead, I was referred to the minister.

In an interview, minister Loewen, a former hunting outfitter, was adamant that the new program isn’t a grizzly bear hunt, and that wildlife responders will be told exactly where and when to “try to take out one of these problem bears.” He says the new program was based on concerned feedback from rural Albertans about the safety of residents and livestock.

“There’s a lot of people living in an urban environment that just can’t relate to that,” says Loewen. “But if we have somebody that’s committing crimes in the city, well, we try to catch that person, we don’t just write it off. I think in both urban and rural [contexts], public safety is important, and people have the right to feel safe in their own homes, yards and neighbourhoods.”

Loewen told me that the new program offers Albertans the opportunity to manage problem grizzly bears while freeing up time for overburdened wildlife officers.

But many critics, including Lorne Fitch, a retired provincial biologist and conservationist, are calling the minister’s bluff, arguing that this new approach flies in the face of grizzly bear science and is nothing more than “political meddling.” Fitch says the new program exploits the rhetoric that “grizzly bears are everywhere” and plays on the fear of being attacked, even though the annual number of grizzly bear attacks on humans hasn’t increased.

“This is not something that came from biologists,” says Fitch. “It likely came directly from the minister, without any discussion.”

Prior to the minister’s amendment to the Wildlife Act, Fitch heard from colleagues in the ranching community in southern Alberta that Loewen’s press secretary had sent an email soliciting ranchers for complaints about grizzly bears. “Instead of having an open, transparent public meeting or forum in which there’s the opportunity for people to advance their concerns, you end up with a really slanted view of whether or not there’s a problem big enough to warrant this sort of a response,” Fitch says. “In other words, they were trying to pre-stage the answer—which was a bear hunt.”

A photo of hunters and black bears they’ve just killed, posted on the website of Red Willow Outfitters–founded by Todd Loewen and now run by his family. The company offers black bear hunts starting at $5,250. Loewen is Alberta’s Minister of Forestry and Parks.

 

Political meddling or not, there’s no question that grizzly bears and humans do occasionally come into conflict. But when does a grizzly become a “problem,” and are there other ways to deal with the issue besides killing the bear?

Over the past 30 years, biologist Jay Honeyman dedicated his career to mitigating negative encounters between humans and grizzly bears in Western Canada. In 2012 he started working with the government of Alberta as a large-carnivore biologist in the southern part of the province, specializing in reducing human–grizzly conflict. In 2022 Honeyman retired and his position hasn’t yet been filled. He agrees that the number of grizzlies in southern Alberta is on the rise: they’re moving eastward into more-developed areas. But hands down, says Honeyman, the number one cause of conflict with problem grizzlies is food-related. “Mitigation is about securing or removing the food that’s bringing the bear in, and then the bear moves on—you don’t have a problem anymore,” Honeyman says.

Throughout his career, he consulted with landowners and community groups to find ways to reduce interactions between grizzlies and humans, such as installing electric fences around beehives and livestock, erecting bear-proof garbage bins and granaries, or passing bylaws that prohibit bird feeders and require fruit to be harvested. The results These measures were often cheaper and more effective than sending out teams of wildlife specialists to euthanize a bear.

“It was very rare to revisit a place once these proactive measures were in place,” says Honeyman. “There are always going to be problems—weak bears, sick bears, injured bears, bears that just don’t get it—and they’ll have to be dealt with… but we can definitely reduce the amount of conflict that we’re having.”

While Honeyman cautions against calling the new wildlife program a “hunt”—and he doesn’t think it poses a risk to the overall grizzly bear population in Alberta—he does say it’s taking the province back into “reactive management” of dealing with problem bears: trap, move, euthanize. Only “now the public can help kill the bear as well,” he says.

Honeyman and other critics worry that randomly selecting an eligible hunter to track and euthanize a problem grizzly bear could have major public safety implications.

“Hunting a grizzly is not like hunting anything else,” says Alex Frank, who worked as a provincial conservation officer in northwestern Alberta from 1974 to 2009. He and his colleagues received years of tactical training to safely respond to scenarios involving problem or conflict grizzly and black bears, which could be unpredictable and dangerous. “Especially if you’re hunting an angry bear, they don’t just pop out at 300 yards so you can shoot it,” says Frank. “You’re not using a scope. Sometimes it’s close range—load and shoot.”

Far more dangerous, says Frank, is if hunters wound a conflict bear. “I wouldn’t want to be the CO (conservation officer) having to sit there and sweat about a hunter running around out there with a rogue bear,” says Frank. “I wouldn’t want them near it.”

Then there’s the issue of shooting the right grizzly bear, says Frank. It may not be so simple for a lay hunter to determine whether or not they’re targeting the bear responsible for conflict. “What happens when the hunter shoots the wrong bear, or just shoots the first grizzly he comes across—or even a black bear What about if they accidentally shoot a sow with cubs How does that work?”

“If you’re hunting an angry bear, they don’t pop out at 300 yards. It can be close range–load and shoot.”

Minister Loewen, however, told me that “hunters are already screened in Alberta in order to get a hunting licence,” referring to basic requirements that they pass a hunters education course and obtain a wildlife identification card. Loewen said citizen wildlife responders will only be called upon when that’s deemed safe by wildlife enforcement officers. He points to the case of the recent grizzly attack on an elk hunter in the Madden area on September 1, 2024. The grizzly was the same one that had caused the death of David Lertzman in 2021. “The bear had adolescent young with it, so it was determined that Fish and Wildlife officers would deal with this one directly themselves,” says Loewen.

Critics argue that the incident was an outlier. It’s incredibly rare for officers to be dispatched to kill free-roaming bears, says Honeyman. Today, more often than not, problem bears are captured in a culvert trap, tranquilized and, once sedated, pulled out of the trap and euthanized. It’s the safest and most humane way to dispatch a problem bear, he says.

As for the government’s new wildlife responder program?

“I don’t even see a scenario where it would be applicable in a safe and efficient manner.”

Honeyman believes the real issue is that the government has failed to implement priorities laid out in the grizzly bear recovery plan, which aims to reduce human–grizzly bear conflict, including hiring conflict specialists in the seven bear management areas and increasing funding for landowners to install electric fences and bear-proof garbage bins and granaries.

While Loewen cites the funding of prevention work, including with the Waterton Biosphere Reserve’s carnivores and communities program, these activities are unique to southern Alberta, says Honeyman. “None of these resources are present in the rest of the province, contrary to what the recovery plan says should be occurring,” he says.

Up in Manning, May told me he wasn’t aware of any programs that supported farmers or ranchers in northern Alberta with measures such as electric fences or bear-proof grain bins—and that’s because those don’t exist there. In the absence of mitigation efforts, May believes reopening the grizzly bear hunt is the best course of action. For now, he says, the wildlife responder program is a step in the right direction. “If I had to speculate, the ministry is doing what it can, hopefully without provoking the ire of people who are against this, while still trying to responsibly manage grizzly bears.”

Securing or removing food that’s bringing a grizzly in is cheaper—and safer— than killing the bear.

Hunting bears, says Andrea Morehouse, an independent scientist who’s been studying human–bear conflict in rural Alberta since 2011, is not an effective tool to reduce such conflicts. A recent study in Ontario, for instance, showed the number of negative interactions between humans and black bears failed to decrease after a spring hunt was introduced in addition to the fall hunt. While Morehouse agrees there are situations where lethal control is necessary, she says Alberta’s new wildlife responder program fails to address the root cause of human–bear conflict.

What’s imperative, says Morehouse, is that scientists and communities come together to identify local concerns and brainstorm long-term solutions for human–grizzly bear coexistence. “The tools already exist,” she says. “This is where government could put some funding to try and work on these issues.”

In rural Alberta, dead livestock, also called deadstock, is a major attractant for large carnivores such as grizzlies, and can increase the likelihood of human–bear conflict. Morehouse points to a study in southern Alberta that showed the efficacy of community programs that help farmers install bear-resistant deadstock bins and reimburse costs associated with deadstock removal.

But these necessary conversations between biologists and rural communities just aren’t happening in Alberta right now, say critics, including Fitch. He points to the silent “gag order” that’s preventing biologists from giving public presentations or speaking with hunting or angling groups in rural communities, and this is creating divisions. “Because of this political tension to control the narrative, there’s very little opportunity for biologists to go out into the communities and have conversations with people,” says Fitch. “And what it’s doing is creating suspicions about biologists.”

The provincial employee I spoke with agreed, calling it a “low point” in the Alberta government’s history of wildlife and ecosystem management. “This isn’t about grizzly bears,” they said of the new wildlife responder program that targets so-called problem bears; it’s about party politics. “This is an example of the government trying to mobilize their political base.”

Trina Moyles is the author of Lookout: Love, Solitude and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (2022).

Photography by Darrel Comeau
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Read more from the archive “The Mystery of Ursus arctos” July/August 2017.

Update from CBC  “Grizzly killed through Alberta’s new hunting program” Oct 27, 2025.

Update from CBC  “All Options On the Table” Nov 3, 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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“Unfortunately, many Albertans still believe there is such a thing as an ‘environment’ and seem to feel the UCP doesn’t care about it.”

Unfortunately, many Albertans still believe there is such a thing as an “environment” and seem to feel our party doesn’t care about it. Accordingly, the following glossary has been developed to help new MLAs avoid misspeaking.

This is a work in progress. But we feel it’s important to get the first edition out the door as quickly as possible.

Carbon capture: cramming small quantities of CO₂ into the earth so as to be able to continue to profit from selling fossil fuels that send vast quantities of CO₂ into the atmosphere. See also: Greenwash.

Carbon dioxide: wonderful stuff that helps plants grow and makes beer fizzy. Sadly, less than 0.1 per cent of earth’s atmosphere is comprised of carbon dioxide, but Alberta is at the forefront of addressing this deficit. Radical scientists say it’s a greenhouse gas that causes dangerous global heating, but Alberta’s winters are too cold anyway. So what’s the issue?

Coal: a substance more valuable (at least to Australian mine speculators) than water, scenery, trout, ranching, Indigenous culture or tourism. Totally organic. Since it’s shipped to foreign countries before being burned, the CO₂ it produces only heats their atmosphere.

Critical infrastructure: what Indigenous or environmental protesters picket near: a highway, pipeline, coal mine or other profitable enterprise. Not what potential UCP voters blockade.

Curriculum (new): correct Eurocentric Christian factoids for kids to memorize before finally escaping school to work in the oilpatch. Designed to crowd out any dangerous inclination towards informed, critical thinking.

Foreign funding: when people in other countries send money to environmentalists in our province to attack Alberta’s economy. Unfortunately a multi-million-dollar witch hunt failed to find evidence that it’s happening. Then came the Coutts blockade… but we don’t talk about that. See also: Hypocrisy.

Grizzly bear: something for Jason Nixon’s friends to shoot when not enjoying a few cold beers in a provincial park. See also: Sandhill crane.

Horse: not a grizzly bear.

Kananaskis Conservation Pass: bought by the urban hikers whom the Minister of Environment disdains, to access their own public land. Revenues are used to reopen washrooms and visitor centres he closed. Not required if you have a destructive vehicle that rips up meadows and creeks. Conservation, in this new definition, is about building and maintaining facilities, a modern approach that replaces the old conservation, which was about caring for fish, wildlife, land and water.

Net-zero by [pick a comfortably distant date]: a serious-sounding word multinationals and their captive governments use when making promises they don’t intend to keep. Allows ongoing pollution of the atmosphere while making it seem sort of like you care about the climate crisis. See also: Greenwash.

Notley: the enemy. But annoyingly popular.

Park: “sterilized” land not available for coal strip-mining, mud-bogging or real estate development. For sale. Okay, not for sale. Yet. Yeesh: breathe, people.

Pipeline: a method of delivering oil and gas to the world. Magically makes Alberta great again when built. Please avoid discussing the fact that our government spent over a billion dollars on one that will never be built, while the federal Liberal government bought and is building a pipeline. See also: Cognitive dissonance.

Recreation: driving motorized vehicles on public land, camping for free and shooting guns. The rest is sissy stuff.

Responsible development: rapid liquidation of forests, oil, gas, soil, gravel and any other environmental resource that can be sold at a profit. The adjective is just to make it look pretty.

Sustainable: an adjective. Real men use nouns. Like “development.” See also: Greenwash.

Trudeau: Sauron’s servant in Ottawa, single-mindedly focused on destroying Alberta because… well, just because. Lots of hair. Hates pipelines, despite buying one. Saved the Rockies from coal strip-mining while Alberta’s “Environment” Minister actively promoted it. Sent millions of dollars to Albertans during the pandemic while our province fought doctors. Saved the Alberta economy from a weeks-long blockade of our major trading highway while Kenney expressed his fervid respect for the blockaders. But in spite of all that, invoking his name triggers voter rage; very useful.

Kevin Van Tighem’s Wild Roses Are Worth It: Reimagining the Alberta Advantage was published in spring 2021 by RMB.

The post Environmental Glossary appeared first on Alberta Views.

Annual deferrals of Alberta’s traditional spring grizzly hunt started in 2006. In 2011, when a detailed statistical analysis suggested Alberta had only 700 grizzlies, the government shut down the hunt for good. Scientists say there would need to be at least 1,000 grizzlies to sustain a hunt.

But those who live in terror of claws and teeth, or who lust after the chance to kill powerful animals, insist that Alberta now has too many grizzlies. In 2019 they helped elect a government sympathetic to their fantasies.

Environment and Parks Minister Jason Nixon recently announced the launch of “the most comprehensive [population inventory] in North America. We’re testing grizzly DNA to see… how we can best mitigate human and bear conflict and determine the best management strategies for grizzlies going forward. Grizzly bear populations appear to be increasing, and it’s critical for us to call on science, not emotion, when it comes to managing such an impressive but sometimes aggressive species.”

That carefully framed statement suggests a grizzly hunt will soon return. “Science over emotion” is a coded message that the government will marginalize those opposing a grizzly hunt as hysterical Bambi-huggers. And Nixon appears to have conflated statistics with science. Estimating bear numbers—by applying statistical models to DNA hair-capture studies—doesn’t provide information on how to “mitigate human and bear conflict.” It simply answers the question of whether there’s enough to hunt.

But why hunt any at all Nixon implies that grizzly hunting would help address real management issues. Public safety, for one. Grizzlies have been known to attack humans. Agricultural predation is another; some bears kill livestock or raid grain bins. Once conditioned to human food, those bears can become costly and dangerous neighbours.

Would hunting help solve those challenges Science suggests not. Other solutions already work well. That’s why we now have more grizzlies and far fewer grizzly problems than in the bad old days when they were hunted. With the advent of bear-proof garbage bins, bear deterrent sprays and better user education, hundreds of thousands of people now use grizzly habitat safely every year. Grizzlies have more to fear from us than we do from them.

Even so, those promoting a new grizzly hunt argue that hunting will make bears fear humans more. Not only is there no science behind that assertion, but were it true it would be an argument against a hunt. U of C’s Stephen Herrero and his colleagues have found that most grizzly attacks are caused by surprise close-range encounters where the bear sees the human as a threat. The late bear expert Charlie Russell pointed out that making bears more fearful increases the risk from encounters.  When I blundered into a mother grizzly with two tiny cubs one day, I was fortunate that no hunters tried to “save” me from her by instilling fear; she felt safe enough simply to watch me depart.

Grizzly bears, like humans, need to be managed. Emotional arguments notwithstanding, however, they don’t need to be hunted.

Some rural residents argue that recovering grizzly populations make it unsafe for kids to wait at school bus stops or play in the yard. But no child has ever been attacked at a bus stop or in their yard in Alberta. One study found only 29 grizzly bear attacks on humans over a span of 38 years (1960–1998) in this province. On the other hand, more than half a million dog bites are reported each year in Canada, and dogs actually kill one or two Albertans each year.  Should we hunt dogs?

Grizzly hunting doesn’t reduce agricultural conflicts either. Killing calves or raiding granaries is a problem with individual bears, not a general problem with all of them. And effective solutions already abound. Many ranchers and farmers use electric fences, bear-proof metal granaries and livestock-herding dogs to keep bears from learning bad habits. When that doesn’t work, getting a government wildlife officer (or deputizing the rancher) to kill the problem bear is more effective than issuing some hunting permits to nimrods from faraway cities to shoot random bears.

Bears, like humans, need to be managed. Emotional arguments notwithstanding, however, they don’t need to be hunted. If Minister Nixon is sincere in saying that science will determine whether to allow a grizzly hunt, those bears sleeping away another Alberta winter should be fine. They will wake up to a safe world where intelligent humans don’t let fear or hatred revitalize a hunt for which science offers no valid rationale.

Kevin Van Tighem’s latest book, Our Place: Changing the Nature of Alberta, was released in spring 2017 by RMB.

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“News like that will get you out of bed fast,” said Yellow Old Woman. He was aware that the vote was coming, but had not held out much hope that the dozen personal items that once belonged to the revered Blackfoot leader would ever make it back home. Half an hour later Tony Eccles, the curator of ethnography at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter, the place where Crowfoot’s regalia has been for the last 142 years, also called to share the news.

That vote marked a pivotal step in a journey that had begun in a storeroom at the RAMM in November of 2013. The sad thing, Yellow Old Woman explained, was that some of the people he set out with on the journey have since died. “The ceremonial men and women who attended the negotiating of that time, more than half have passed away. So that’s how long it’s been.”

In the fall of 2013 Yellow Old Woman, a ceremonial elder and the head of repatriation for Siksika, travelled to England as part of an eight-person delegation from the four First Nations in Alberta and Montana—Kainai, Siksika, Piikani and South Peigan—that comprise the Blackfoot Confederacy. The group was part of a research project called The Blackfoot Collections in UK Museums Network, which also included academics and staff from the University of Aberdeen, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at Cambridge and the RAMM. The idea for the trip was inspired by another project, where five Blackfoot buckskin shirts from the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University had been loaned for exhibitions at the Glenbow and Galt museums in Alberta. The exhibitions included opportunities for First Nations people to handle and try on the shirts in what were much more intimate experiences than your typical everything-behind-glass visit to a museum.

The goal of these collaborations between First Nations and museums was twofold. Blackfoot elders and ceremonialists provided cultural information about the artifacts that dramatically improved how they were curated, described and cared for by the museums. And Indigenous people got access to invaluable cultural material that had long since vanished from their communities. The projects were an attempt to bridge disparate worldviews of the purpose, nature and provenance of the same set of historic objects.

Museums legally own their collections or, as in the case of the RAMM, steward them on behalf of governments. These institutions have extensive expertise and resources to preserve and protect the integrity of artifacts in perpetuity. And museums such as the MAA, RAMM and Pitt Rivers welcome hundreds of thousands of visitors every year with a mandate to showcase the world.

For First Nations peoples, however, many of the artifacts in question are not inanimate objects. Some are sacred and essential for carrying out spiritual ceremonies. They have immense potential for revitalizing cultural practices that strengthen identity and empower communities. Also, many of these artifacts were stolen or sold under extreme duress. They’re the spoils of colonialism. Some of the oldest artifacts from North American Indigenous nations are in museums overseas. Items from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were sent far away to wealthy patrons and private collections that then ended up in museums. Laura Peers, an anthropologist who co-created the Blackfoot Shirts Project with Alison Brown, estimates that thousands of Blackfoot artifacts live in English and European museums.

“If you think about the history of museum-collecting practices and what museums try to do, there’s been this idea of museums as places where knowledge is created and to a degree… controlled, with cataloging and classification and all those kinds of things,” said Brown. “But when you take that away and confront people with items that are related to their heritage, particularly if they’ve experienced colonial forces… these things can become triggers for all kinds of stories in history and memory, and reminders of what’s not been passed on as well as what could still be.”

The vote by Exeter councillors in early April to return Crowfoot’s regalia occurred at a time of active debate across England and Europe about whether and how museums should decolonize their collections. Arts Council England had commissioned the Institute of Art and Law in February to develop new guidance for UK museums on repatriation. The report is scheduled for release in the fall of 2020 and will outline the ethical and legal considerations, as well as best-practice examples, involved in making decisions on how and when to return objects to their originating communities. The report follows on the heels of new policies in France, Germany and Holland that guide the repatriation of colonial-era artifacts.

Yellow Old Woman remembers the exact moment back in 2013 in the RAMM’s storage room when the conservation-grade cabinet drawer slid open to reveal the regalia. “It was really emotional,” he said. The group sang a ceremonial song to honour Chief Crowfoot and smoked a pipe. “The songs that we sing to honour chiefs all of a sudden became very powerful and brought tears to our elders.”

The artifacts include a buckskin shirt with scalp hair, leggings with red feathers and fringes, beaded pouches, a steel hunting knife lashed with the front part of a bear’s jaw, a bundle of feathers and a deer-hide necklace strung with grizzly bear claws, beads, animal teeth and brass studs. Chief Crowfoot’s bow is in the RAMM’s permanent gallery as part of the Americas display, but the rest of the regalia is in storage. The museum undertook a major conservation project in the late 1990s to restore and protect the artifacts. The shirt and leggings were last displayed in 2012 as part of an exhibition called “Warriors of the Plains” that was created and toured by the British Museum.

Yellow Old Woman said Chief Crowfoot could have worn many of the items when he signed Treaty 7 on behalf of the Siksika Nation in September of 1877.

He described how the Blackfoot elders quickly realized that some of the material had been misidentified. But they decided against revealing some of that information to museum staff. “We were reluctant to share too much,” Yellow Old Woman said. “Some stuff we [didn’t] expose because of the sacredness. It has ties to the land, to the spirit of the animal, and we believe those are living things and they give us power.”

Given the spiritual importance of the regalia, Yellow Old Woman wonders why Chief Crowfoot would have given it to Cecil Denny, an officer with the North West Mounted Police who befriended the chief and was staying in his camp during the time of the signing of the treaty. Denny’s sister loaned the artifacts to the RAMM in 1878 and the museum purchased them in 1904 for £10. The Blackfoot have a strong tradition of hospitality and giving gifts, which Yellow Old Woman said probably played a role in the exchange. Also, Crowfoot had lost many of his children to disease and often took others under his wing. “He adopted a lot, and that’s basically what he did with this individual,” Yellow Old Woman said.

The day after the visit to the RAMM storage room in November 2013, the Blackfoot delegation met with museum and city officials for a public panel discussion. “They all agreed that the material they had should be returned to the Blackfoot,” Yellow Old Woman said. But museum staff also cautioned that it would take time and further discussions before Crowfoot’s regalia could be repatriated.

Many Guns explained that Crowfoot earned the respect and leadership of his people because of his remarkable physical courage (he once killed a grizzly bear with a spear) and his keen instincts for diplomacy and peacemaking. He was the primary negotiator for the Blackfoot Confederacy when establishing the terms of Treaty 7 with the representatives of the British Crown. The chief of each of the five participating First Nations—Kainai, Siksika, Piikani, Nakoda and Tsuut’ina—all signed the treaty, but it was Crowfoot who laid the groundwork for the consensus.

“He was able to understand the bigger, really bigger, long-term picture,” Many Guns said. “We ended up with even more constraints and more difficulties, but I believe if he had taken another way, there’s a good possibility we wouldn’t even exist today.”

Above and beyond his prowess in battle and proclivity for peacemaking, Crowfoot is a significant figure for the Blackfoot because he exemplified an important cultural value. Many Guns explained that the wavy line in Blackfoot imagery symbolizes how change is an ineluctable part of life. Learning to navigate change is considered an invaluable skill. “Let’s say you get diagnosed with diabetes; it’s being able to pick up that disease and walk with it with pride,” she said. “Let’s say you were going through changes, you’ve lost your family; it’s picking up that disaster and walking with pride so that you can show your children how to deal with change.”

Crowfoot was born in 1830 and grew up when the Blackfoot tribes controlled a vast area of the northwestern plains from the Rocky Mountains in the west into what is now east-central Saskatchewan to the east, the North Saskatchewan River to the north and the Yellowstone River in the south. He emerged as an influential leader as European settlers brought catastrophe—smallpox epidemics, the whisky trade and the indiscriminate slaughter of the buffalo—undermining a way of life that had flourished for thousands of years.

“Everything in their world was gone or missing or no longer existed,” Many Guns said of the circumstances for the Blackfoot leading up to the Treaty 7 negotiations. She described how the Kainai and their chief, Red Crow, were late getting to the negotiations at Blackfoot Crossing in the fall of 1877. The tribe had gone south into the US to try and find a herd of buffalo to hunt. They ended up having to kill their horses and eat them, so they walked into camp.

“That’s when they knew there was no future, the buffalo were gone,” she said. “Crowfoot brought us through one of the most horrific periods in our history, and every part of his memory is really important. It reminds us of our resilience. It reminds us of our ability to change and adapt.”

In July 2014, as part of the Blackfoot Collections in UK Museums Project, Alison Brown, Tony Eccles and Anita Herle, a curator at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, visited Alberta and Montana. They spent two days at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, which is on the Siksika reserve an hour east of Calgary. The museum itself is built into a ridge overlooking the river valley where the treaty was signed. The building took 20 years and $30-million to construct. The architect, Ron Goodfellow, worked closely with Blackfoot elders to incorporate 17 cultural symbols into every facet of the design. Many Guns described Blackfoot Crossing as a story woven into the shape of a building. The architectural approach reflected the way Blackfoot stories and culture are imbricated with the landscape.

Jack Royal is the chief executive officer of the Blackfoot Confederacy Tribal Council, but was the president and general manager of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park from when it opened in 2007 until the fall of 2017. He was there in the summer of 2014 and helped tour the guests from England. They explored the museum, its displays, on-site storage and research facilities. They also walked to Cannon Hill, where the treaty was signed, and visited Chief Crowfoot’s last tipi site and grave, which are all connected by a network of trails through the river valley.

It seemed like everything was in place after the visit, but then Royal started to get a series of emails from Eccles at RAMM. Questions about storage capacity, insurance and environmental controls. “We would send him an email and he wouldn’t respond for two or three months at a time,” Royal said. And when Royal would finally get a response it would include another question that would start the cycle again. Blackfoot Crossing submitted a formal repatriation request in 2015 and secured a grant from the Alberta government to fund the costs of safely transporting the artifacts. But as months turned into years, Royal said he encountered what felt like one arbitrary roadblock after another. When he left the organization in 2017, he was doubtful the regalia would ever return. “Obviously I am happy these things are finally coming home,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Camilla Hampshire, the museum manager at the RAMM, explained in an email that all those questions were part of their standard due diligence for all repatriation requests. Organizations are asked to provide information about governance, financial position, business plans and what they intend to do with the repatriated material. “It helps us compile a report and make a recommendation to councillors,” Hampshire wrote. “Blackfoot Crossing provided RAMM with a business plan for 2015–16 that suggested it was in an uncertain financial position, but none of the other documentation requested.”

Daryl Betenia, director of collections for the Glenbow, has been helping out behind the scenes since 2014. She provided advice to Blackfoot Crossing about various professional museum standards and technical details such as the right environmental conditions for exhibit cases. Betenia and Joanne Schmidt, the Indigenous Studies curator at the Glenbow, had a meeting at Blackfoot Crossing in May of 2019 to see where they were planning to display Crowfoot’s regalia.

“We were all incredibly impressed by what they had done. I think they could probably sell that model to other museums,” Betenia said. “Within a larger gallery, they created a separate space, which they were able to seal off and engineer so it’s able to maintain the appropriate humidity and they can control light levels.”

She too has been in contact with staff from the RAMM about the repatriation. “There appeared to be a great deal of concern on the part of the museum and Exeter about Blackfoot Crossing,” she said, particularly about appropriate museum standards and a lack of accreditation. “They were very focused on ensuring that if they do repatriate something, it goes to another museum and it gets appropriate museum care.”

Robert Janes, the director of the Glenbow at the time, and Gerald Conaty, the curator of Indigenous Studies, worked closely with Blackfoot leaders for over a decade before the release of that material. It was a decisive and ground-breaking decision that precipitated the creation of Alberta’s First Nations Sacred Ceremonial Objects Act in 2000, which is still the only Canadian law on the books that deals with repatriation. The Blackfoot First Nations Sacred Ceremonial Objects Repatriation Regulation followed in 2004 as the means for applying the legislation.

Betenia said that at first she worried how the release of all those artifacts would affect the future and mission of the Glenbow. The museum was founded in 1966 by Eric Harvie, an oilman and philanthropist, who wanted to present the world to Alberta. “He was building these collections, and particularly international collections, as a way to offer an opportunity to Albertans to see things they would not otherwise see.” Releasing items out of the museum, and perhaps initiating a chain reaction that would hollow out the collection, could contradict that vision. But 20 years later no flood of repatriation requests has ever materialized. Betenia estimates they receive six requests every year and said they’ve proven to be a thoughtful and respectful experience for everyone involved. However, the regulation only covers Blackfoot items and has yet to be expanded to include First Nations from other parts of Alberta and Canada.

Betenia’s experience with repatriation trans-formed her perception of the role of museums and their relationship to the communities they serve. “We are stewards of a lot of this material rather than owners,” Betenia said. “These pieces are seen as living things that need to go home. I don’t think it’s our place to argue with that.”

I met Chief Ouray Crowfoot at the Blackfoot Confederacy Tribal Office in southeast Calgary at the end of May. He had just wrapped up a biweekly meeting with his counterparts from the Kainai, Piikani and South Peigan nations. We settled into chairs on opposite sides of a large boardroom on the third floor. Bottles of hand sanitizer were spaced evenly around the horseshoe-shaped arrangement of tables.

“It’s been a whirlwind,” Ouray said. “I’ve only been chief six months, and three of that’s COVID months.” His father is from the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina; Ouray speaks with a strong southern accent, as though each sentence is gently easing back in a recliner chair until it finds the position of maximum comfort. His mother was Amelia Crowfoot Clark. Her father was Cecil Crowfoot. Cecil’s father was Joe Crowfoot. Joe’s father was Bear Ghost. Bear Ghost’s father was Chief Crowfoot.

“Actually, [his name] is Isapo-Muxika, which means Crow Indian’s Big Foot,” said Ouray. He explained that his great-great-great grandfather’s name was truncated during the treaty signing by an official who decreed it too long and cumbersome. The same goes for many of his forebears, who were given biblical names because the Indian agent couldn’t be bothered to learn or translate their original Blackfoot names.

Ouray, who turned 45 the day after our interview, was wearing a pink dress shirt. He looked the part of an energetic young politician. He has an MBA and a master’s degree in accounting and has spent most of his career in the financial industry, working for global corporations such as Ernst&Young and KPMG. “Five years ago, four years ago even, I had no desire, no plans to move to Canada or no plans or desires to be chief.” Ouray returned to Siksika to help his mom after she was diagnosed with cancer. She died in October of 2019, a month before the nomination day for the election of the new chief and council.

“We’re going to do a lot of great things with Siksika, and I can say one of the big things already is bringing this shirt back home,” he said. I asked him if he thought the letters that Premier Jason Kenney sent to various British officials, including the mayor of Exeter and the director of Arts Council England, in late 2019 and on behalf of Blackfoot Crossing had tipped the balance for the vote to repatriate the regalia. “Jason Kenney more or less pissed them off,” Ouray said. “I think he might have hurt it more than helped it.”

In early 2020 Ouray started having regular phone conversations with Camilla Hampshire, the manager of the RAMM. He often received calls from Hampshire first thing in the morning because of the seven-hour time difference. “Every question she had, every concern she had, I addressed it.” The chief and the museum manager first developed a rapport and then a solution. The RAMM would repatriate the regalia to the Siksika Nation, which would then release it to Blackfoot Crossing. “I think [it helped] that I was a chief and a Crowfoot descendant and gave them the rationale and let them know who I am,” he said. “I want it to be mutually beneficial. So when we go over there, we’re going to take a big crew. We’re going to have a big delegation. We’ll give them a gift.”

Ouray mentioned he had his eye on another personal item that belonged to his great-great-great grandfather. But it’s not at the RAMM. Most pictures of Crowfoot show a knot of some kind tied into his hair at the top of his head. It’s an owl’s head, and Ouray’s uncle, Strater Crowfoot, has it. “My uncle Strater was chief when they started doing those repatriations through the Glenbow and he got that,” he said.

The historian Hugh Dempsey wrote a biography of Crowfoot that includes a description of the owl’s head. Three Suns, Crowfoot’s predecessor as chief, gave it to him when he was a young warrior. Three Suns told him it would be his protection and he would become a great leader if he always carried it. After Crowfoot died in April of 1890 at Blackfoot Crossing, people sang mourning songs to the owl’s head in the hope it could bring him back to life. And then somehow, at some point, it ended up behind glass or in a drawer in a storage room at a museum.

Ouray hasn’t asked his uncle yet for Chief Crowfoot’s owl’s head. He’s waiting for the right moment. “I want to be able to feel like I earned it,” he said. “Respect is a gift earned, not given.” 

Doug Horner is a Calgary-based writer and editor. He won the 2019 Alberta Magazine Award for best essay.

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Their NFB film Being Caribou earned acclaim at the Calgary International Film Festival, the Vancouver Film Festival and the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada, introducing this important issue to hundreds of filmgoers. In September 2004, Jennifer Esser, managing editor of Wild Earth, a magazine published by the Wildlands Project, interviewed Heuer about the journey, the film and the fight to save the Porcupine caribou herd.

JENNIFER ESSER: For five months you migrated on foot with the Porcupine caribou herd. What inspired you to make this trip?

KARSTEN HEUER: I had a three-season assignment as a park warden in the extreme northwest corner of the Yukon, in Ivvavik, a national park established to protect the Canadian portion of the Porcupine caribou herd’s calving grounds. The Porcupine caribou herd—about 123,000 animals—is the same herd that uses the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for their calving grounds. Ivvavik borders the Arctic Refuge.

As I was experiencing this caribou herd coming through every spring on the way to the Arctic Refuge and coming back every summer as they returned from their calving grounds, there was always a curiosity in my mind: where exactly were they going What were they doing When they migrate through, they’re coming through for days. And it’s not just the caribou; there’s a stream of life that’s coming along with them, whether it’s golden eagles or jaegers looking for calves to pick off—or the grizzly bears ambushing them in the willows along the rivers—or wolves and foxes trying to isolate individual animals as prey. I couldn’t sleep when they came past: there’s 24-hour daylight and the dramas are happening constantly. When they finally disappear over the ridge, it’s pretty hard. The landscape that was full is suddenly silent, and you miss it.

I felt a yearning to keep going with them, which translated into a lot of research about the caribou. I learned more about the potential oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge that could threaten their calving grounds. What bothered me about all the stories, documentaries and articles was that none of them addressed what these caribou go through during their migration to the calving grounds and their return to the wintering grounds. The story of the caribou hadn’t been told.

So my wife, Leanne, and I (she had experience with migration as well while she was working on a film project) started hatching this crazy idea to try to migrate with the herd, to try to be caribou. We decided to try to bring the landscape alive, telling a story through the eyes and ears and movements of an animal. Our intent was to move with the caribou herd for anywhere between four and seven months as they migrated and to try to become part of the herd. Because caribou don’t migrate along the same routes every year and don’t depart or arrive at the same times each year, we couldn’t really plan our route. We couldn’t plan food caches, since we didn’t even know how long we’d be out there.

That was a really tough thing to get our minds around—to let go of the very human approach of having goals and objectives and a plan.

Besides letting go and just following the caribou, what were some of the other challenges you faced?

Initially we were overwhelmed with all the unknowns, and our lack of experience in subarctic environments. We have quite a bit of experience in mountains below treeline in more temperate regions, but here we were going into one of the remotest places on Earth, having to put our complete faith in the caribou. As we slowly surrendered to the caribou, some wonderful things started to happen.

When we got to the calving grounds we had an incredible experience where animals were giving birth outside of our tent. We couldn’t move. They had become so skittish during that time that we couldn’t even get out to go the bathroom. So we’d go to the bathroom in our cups. We would have to wait until the animals had moved off a little bit and crawl on our bellies to the river to get water for the next two days and then crawl on our bellies back, and talk in whispers. For 10 days we couldn’t get out of our tent. They are extremely sensitive as they’re having their calves, and protective of their newborns when the calves aren’t that mobile. We saw golden eagles come in and try to get some calves. Grizzly bears came in and caused complete havoc.

We followed the caribou as they left and got into the bug season. We were moving so fast, among a huge rush of animals, that we were sleep deprived, traveling all hours of the day and night. We’d nap for an hour or two, walk for five or six, nap for an hour or two. Our whole sense of time got messed up. We didn’t know what day it was or what time of day it was because of the 24-hour daylight. We were constantly surrounded by caribou or behind caribou or on their fresh trails. They’re shedding their winter coats at that time, so we had hair in our food, hair in our sleeping bags, caribou hair everywhere, like you get sand everywhere when you’re at the beach.

And we were hungry. By that time we were two and a half months into the trip, and we couldn’t possibly carry enough food to replace the calories we were burning. Between this perpetual state of hunger and the sleep deprivation, we were quite dizzy, and it was almost like we were entering into a different state—much like a shaman might go on a fast and work himself into a trance.

We would lose the caribou once in awhile and, initially, we would to try to find them using an analytical method—visual tracking, looking for signs such as tracks and droppings on the tundra, and sometimes calling up on our satellite phone to other biologists, trying to determine where the few satellite-collared animals were. But as the trip progressed and we got into this unique state of consciousness, we started to plug into different signs and signals and we started to have vivid dreams and visions—of where we would find caribou next when we’d lost them. We started following those dreams and visions. We would tell them to each other before we headed out and then exact scenes that we had described to each other would play out.

There was also a vibration in the landscape, and it wasn’t from the hooves; it was more like a singing through the landscape. You felt it more than you heard it. We would hear it when the caribou were in large groups. It was subtle at first, but as the layers of our lives dropped away, our senses were sharpened. We started to tune in to this sound—which I call thrumming—and that began to inform our decisions about where we went when we had lost the caribou, and we would find them. It was a really magical development in the trip.

In the span of five months, these two white people from the city of Calgary, which is where we both grew up, had another dimension opened up to them. Our experience matches the description Gwich’in people talk about, a distant time when people could talk to caribou and caribou could talk to people. And we felt that—it was unbelievable. How do you come back from a trip like that and go to Washington, D.C.—which is what we did—and communicate that to Representatives and Senators and their aides How do you explain what’s at stake I think that’s what we’re really struggling with even now in trying to capture our caribou experiences in a film and in another book.

I imagine that experience permanently changed your view of the world.

It’s like Leanne and I are strangers in our old lives. Even the people that are closest to us, our parents, don’t really understand that we’re not the same people anymore. This other possibility opened up to us—and then we came back and felt it close again behind us. As we got inundated with all the advertising and everything else that fills the human world, we felt the barriers go up again, and of course we were cut off from that other world. The dreams and the visions and the thrumming stopped, and a big loneliness and depression came in to fill that space.

I think we experienced in a shortened period of time what many Native cultures have experienced over the last many decades—it’s a ripping from between worlds. Now Leanne and I are faced with the quandary of how we bridge back and forth—how do we exist in both?

Did you try to observe ecological patterns such as herding behaviour, and to understand the thrumming from a scientific perspective?

Certainly. You can envision the herd as different groups of hundreds and sometimes thousands of animals. At the calving grounds is really the only time when the whole herd—123,000 animals—is together. The rest of the time they’re split up into a few groups, but those groups co-ordinate their movements. Despite being hundreds of miles apart, all groups will shift and head south at the same time. There is a huge level of co-ordination. There’s some level of communication going on that we don’t understand, some communication that’s able to transcend those distances. I think the thrumming is an infrasonic wavelength, just on the edge of human hearing, which is also what elephants use to communicate over long distances.

There’s a story that biologists and First Nations people tell about how four bulls that were marked in this huge caribou herd came together in different places. It wasn’t always the same place, but it was always these same four bulls that came together at around the same time of year from hundreds of miles away from each other. There’s no explanation for that. There’s also no information about caribou communication in the literature, which is incredibly exciting to me as a scientist. I think some of the greatest discoveries in science are really mystical as well. They not only bring to light new facts about animals, but new dimensions about the world, and open up a new breadth of possibility. I talked about this thrumming to some caribou biologists and they were really excited, but I don’t feel the need to know the mechanics of how it works; it does work.

Migration might be understood not simply as a movement of animals, but as a flow of natural process. Can you tell us more about this river—not just of caribou, but of life?

When that caribou herd moves across that landscape, it’s towing an entire ecosystem with it. That’s what this idea of connectivity is getting at—allowing animals the freedom to continue to move, allowing ecosystems to be dynamic. There are all the obvious things that move with the caribou—the wolves and foxes and grizzly bears and birds—but there are things we don’t see, as well. For example, all the bugs that go along with them once the bug season starts. The caribou movement is dispersing these bugs across the landscape, and the bugs are feeding the hundreds of species of birds that are nesting on the tundra. The caribou are eating in one place and defecating in another, so there’s seed dispersal going on, and redistribution of nutrients.

When you start thinking about the services that 123,000 animals constantly on the move are doing, it’s overwhelming. The ecology is very complex, and the problem is to try to communicate all this to elected representatives in a way that their eyes don’t glaze over. What Leanne and I have discovered is that storytelling is an ancient human tradition and it’s part of our genetic makeup. What we’re trying to do is distill some of the wonder and this overwhelming complexity into relatively simple and inspiring stories to try to reignite awe about the natural world.

Are you working right now to try to influence policy-makers directly, and are you trying to educate the general public as well?

We have tried to lobby in the conventional sense—put on your suit, polish your shoes and walk the halls of Congress and Capitol Hill in D.C. and Ottawa and provincial legislatures in Canada—but you go into those meetings and the person has just had the American Automakers lobby there and you’re the next meeting and you’ve got five or ten minutes to communicate your point. Leanne and I have come to the conclusion that that’s not our strength. Our role is to inspire the masses and try to bring these stories to the bottom of the political process, if you will. We try to motivate and mobilize that constituency.

Is that what you’re trying to do with the projects you’re now working on—a film and a book, as well as ongoing speaking engagements?

On the calving grounds, Leanne and I had this terrible feeling we just shouldn’t be there, that it wasn’t right and we would never go back. The only way we could justify being there was by staying in our tent and by having a firm commitment to bring this story to a lot of people and to make a difference for caribou. We feel a huge responsibility to share our insights. The truth—which sounds kind of romantic and naïve—is that my heart is telling me to find a way to explore further what we felt with the caribou and the thrumming and the visions. But that wouldn’t mean we’d go back to the calving grounds.

I believe that that other dimension—whether it’s what the Koyukon Indians in the Yukon call distant time or the aborigines of Australia call the dream time—exists. My desire is to access it more deeply and to learn from it, but that’s selfish and meanwhile it’s at risk. We scientists talk in terms of minimum viable populations and connectivity and these relatively formal terms, but there is so much mystery. Now we have to try to communicate that it exists. We’re certainly not the first people to do this, but we might be able to help to bridge some distance between worlds—a mental distance. These are long journeys on the ground, but really they’re journeys from the head down to the heart. Our role is to try to help people along those journeys for themselves. 

Did you see evidence of oil and gas development, or was the territory relatively pristine Were there any barriers across the caribou’s migratory path?

We saw a bit of evidence of past oil and gas development: some old tracks on the tundra from seismic exploration, and a couple places where fuel barrels and firing wires and other debris from oil exploration was left. But overall you can probably count on your fingers how many times we encountered those things. We were in a huge, wild area—you can probably count the number of such places that still exist in the world on your fingers as well.

There were no trails, no roads, and apart from a couple of cabins and a ranger station, no human structures. Yet there’s all this history on the land: we’re following the caribou across these mountain hillsides and passes where there are trails carved into scree, rock and the earth that are like trenches. There’s caribou dung in layers and some of it’s covered in lichen.

Archeologists have identified some of the crossings that the caribou use today as the same river crossings used by caribou and native people to hunt the caribou as long as 23,000 years ago. So, what Leanne and I experienced was this very short segment of a huge circle of life that’s been going on for thousands of years. To describe it in numbers, to compare that kind of history to a six-month supply of oil for the U.S.—the highest estimate of oil and gas that could be under the ground in their calving grounds—it’s just a ridiculous decision in our minds. 

We know the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is at risk. What about  other areas the caribou use—are those mostly protected areas?

A lot of the caribou herd’s territory is protected. Ivvavik National Park and Vuntut National Park in Canada are directly adjacent to each other and adjacent to the Arctic Refuge. All of it is wilderness except for the million and a half acres in the calving grounds. There are some other agreements in place for much of the rest of their migration route. While it’s not the only one, the Arctic Refuge really is the biggest missing piece in the puzzle. We’re not very far from having achieved something really special here and it hasn’t come easy so far: Adolph Murie, Margaret Murie, Bob Marshall worked hard for the establishment of the Arctic Refuge. The intent wasn’t to have oil and gas development in the middle of it, in one of its most sensitive areas. This work has been going on for over eight decades and we really need to finish the job.

Are you hopeful that the refuge will be protected Do you think it’s a likely outcome?

It’s a necessary outcome. When I talk to people and get feedback after lectures and after pieces have aired on television about the trip, my sentiment is that the majority of people feel the same. So if development happens on the refuge, it will be a huge tragedy, not only for the caribou and for everything else that depends on that area, but also for democracy—because if it happens then democracy doesn’t work.

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