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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The post Buffalo Lessons appeared first on Alberta Views.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The post Valley of Gold appeared first on Alberta Views.

For centuries, the river sustained the First Nations, a source of water and food, a corridor that made connections. Later, it brought fur traders west—and carried furs back to Hudson Bay. It was the river that brought some of the first settlers to Alberta, the riverside where people farmed or built mines and brickyards. Canoes and York boats, paddle wheelers and ferries plied its waters.

When I was growing up in Edmonton in the 1970s the river was seen as something dirty, off-limits. Everyone loved the river valley’s parks. But the river itself was something your mother warned you to stay away from.

Just as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only a conservative rural county could convince skeptics that heritage designation isn’t a central Canadian plot.

Over the last decade there’s been a cultural shift. We’re rediscovering the river as a place where people (and dogs) can swim, as a place for kayaks and dragon boats. Cycling and hiking trails, footbridges and boat launches have brought the water closer. But as Albertans all through the watershed develop a new relationship with their river, the challenge is to strike the right balance: to make the river accessible for recreation while still protecting it as a riparian ecosystem, an essential wildlife corridor and a reliable source of safe drinking water.

Now the County of Smoky Lake, in northeastern Alberta, is stepping up with an answer.

The county, with its population of just 4,000, is leading a buoyant and strategic campaign to have the North Saskatchewan designated a Canadian Heritage River, as part of the Canadian Heritage Rivers System. This program celebrates the natural, cultural and recreational values of historically important rivers across Canada. So far 40 rivers have been given national recognition, including the Saint John River in New Brunswick, the Ottawa River in Ontario and BC’s Fraser River.

The North Saskatchewan has partial designation: the 49 km of the river that fall within the boundaries of Banff National Park were added to the program in 1989. But Smoky Lake has a bigger idea: to designate the entire river through Alberta.

Kyle Schole, an avid kayaker, is the planning development and heritage assistant for the County of Smoky Lake and the infectiously enthusiastic champion of the heritage designation project. For months he’s been meeting with the province as well as with counties, municipalities, Indigenous leaders and not-for-profits up and down the river, building a remarkably broad—though not quite unanimous—consensus of support. It hasn’t been easy. Some environmental groups worry heritage designation doesn’t go far enough to protect the river. Some municipalities worry designation goes too far, and might make future developments harder. Schole has also had to deal with a certain bred-in-the-bone Alberta resistance to anything that smacks of Ottawa interfering in Alberta’s environmental decision-making. Just as only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only a small-c conservative rural county could convince skeptics that heritage designation is not a central Canadian plot to take over our river.

Schole’s sales pitch is simple. He sees a golden opportunity for smaller towns and villages. “It’s an opportunity for rural municipalities to tell the stories of our communities, of our founding and of where we’re going,” he says. “All the different cultures in this landscape You’ll find them at the river’s edge.”

For Smoky Lake, that means partnering with the Métis Crossing Cultural Centre, the Victoria Settlement Provincial Historic Site and the local Ukrainian–Canadian community to tell tales of the county’s rich multicultural history, using the river as the connecting link.

Designation won’t make the river valley into a national park or preclude future recreational development. It does, however, commit communities and organizations along the river to work together on environmental stewardship, planning and river monitoring. And it could give the river national profile and marketing cachet—a new way for Alberta to attract visitors.

Smoky Lake County plans to submit the final application for designation this September or October, for approval by Environment Canada and the Canadian Heritage Rivers board.

Meantime, Kyle Schole will keep spreading his love of his eternal and ever-changing North Saskatchewan, the river he wants everyone to discover and rediscover and see through new eyes. “It’s so different and various from zone to zone,” he says. “You stop and you take a pause and you allow yourself to be present, and it overwhelms you.” 

The post Rediscovering a River appeared first on Alberta Views.

Rachel Notley’s NDP had been elected on a platform of change. This was on full display at the legislature that Sunday afternoon. Notley had the legislature main doors unlocked for the first time since the Parliament Hill shooting seven months earlier, and she invited all Albertans to attend and celebrate. Swearing-in ceremonies are typically conducted behind closed doors with 100 or so VIPs in suits watching as newly minted premiers and cabinet ministers recite their oaths of office and are solemnly welcomed by the Lieutenant Governor.

Notley, however, turned tradition on its head. This was Alberta’s first outdoor and public swearing-in, the first new party to take office in 44 years and the first gender-balanced cabinet in Canadian history. This new approach, combined with the NDP’s historical advocacy for fair and progressive taxes, labour rights, environmental protection, higher resource royalties and strong public services, generated hopes for significant change among many Albertans. Many others, however, reacted with fear and trepidation about the potential impacts on oil and gas investment, tax rates and public spending.

Ending corporate and union donations was the government’s first step in reining in a wild west of party and campaign finances, patronage and entitlement.

Rather than ignore these fears, Premier Notley moved quickly and publicly to reach out to unlikely allies and assure Albertans that her government would be neither radical nor extreme. In her first press conference she told reporters she would immediately call leaders in the energy industry to let them know “they can count on us to work collaboratively.” She added that unions wouldn’t have undue influence on her government. “My job is to represent all Albertans, and job creation is a good part of that. There’s no question there’s common cause on many issues with union leaders, but there’s also common cause on many issues with business leaders.”

These early indications of a moderate, big-tent government were likely driven equally by Notley’s desire to build unified popular support and an urgent need to avoid panic by investors and the business community.

Oil prices when the NDP formed government were the lowest they had been in over a decade, with a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude having dropped from US$111 in June 2014 to $49 in July 2015. It would continue dropping until bottoming out at just under $36 in January 2016. Notley didn’t need an exodus of investment dollars, more job losses and further economic uncertainty. She had to secure business support, especially the oil and gas sector.

Notley also faced the challenge of assembling a transition team in a province where nobody had overseen an actual transition in government in four decades, and where the only political operatives with government experience were Progressive Conservatives. Only four of the 54 NDP MLAs elected had any experience at all in the Alberta legislature. Even senior members of the bureaucracy, the people entrusted with briefing the new government on all policy areas, had only ever worked under PC premiers and ministers, and their worldviews, ways of working and possibly even their loyalties reflected that reality.

Despite these challenges, Notley moved quickly on the key planks in her ambitious election platform during her first legislative session, in June 2015. In just two weeks the government passed legislation banning corporate and union donations to political parties, scrapping the 10 per cent flat tax, and approving $18.5-billion in interim spending for health, education and human services. In many ways these three bills formed the foundation for the government’s policies over the next four years.

Ending corporate and union donations was the government’s first step in reining in a wild west of party and campaign finances, patronage and entitlement. This first bill was eventually built upon, with legislation reducing individual political contributions from $15,000 annually (or $30,000 in an election year) to $4,000, and setting campaign spending limits for the first time in Alberta’s history. The government created new rules for party leadership and nomination races, and tightened the spending and disclosure rules for third-party advertisers. The rules themselves, particularly the contribution limit, fell short of what many advocates had been pushing for, but the change was nonetheless significant.

This was also the case with Bill 2, which added new tiers for personal income taxes. In 2001 Ralph Klein’s government had scrapped Alberta’s system of progressive taxation and introduced a single rate of 10 per cent. The flat tax, which formed the core of Klein’s so-called “Alberta Advantage,” was by 2006 costing the provincial treasury $5.5-billion annually. The NDP’s Bill 2 added four new rates for anyone earning over $125,000, with the highest, 15 per cent, kicking in at $300,000. Although over 90 per cent of Albertans didn’t see a tax increase, the change in philosophy was clear and decisive. The same bill raised the corporate tax rate from 10 per cent to 12 per cent, making Alberta the only province in western Canada to jump out of “the race to the bottom” in terms of corporate taxes. In a place where over the previous three decades “tax” had become a dirty word, Albertans had not only elected a party that promised to increase taxes, they then accepted that increase with next to no protest or outcry.

The Notley government’s third bill was actually the most transformational. On the surface, Bill 3 was a simple interim supply bill that provided government funding until a budget could be passed in the fall. The government communications accompanying the bill, however, made clear that its purpose was to reverse cuts made by the previous government to healthcare, K–12 and post-secondary education, as well as to increase funding to Human Services.

Bill 3 sent a clear signal that this government would not slash public services, even though the drop in the price of oil precipitated a drop in provincial revenues. Klein cut services when revenues were low and invested only when the economy was booming. The result of his ideology was high inflation, worker shortages and an overheated economy during the good times, and higher unemployment and reduced supports during the bad times.

Throughout its four-year term the NDP government refused to cut public service spending, declined to lay off public sector workers or roll back their salaries, and invested tens of billions in public infrastructure. The obvious negative result of this commitment was a level of public debt previously unseen in Alberta, but the investment also meant that Alberta weathered the economic downturn much better than neighbouring Saskatchewan, which kept up the practice of cutting and slashing during the downturn.

The return to counter-cyclical spending was not, however, the only significant culture shift brought about during the NDP’s first few months in power. On November 22, 2015, while sharing a stage with the CEOs of Alberta’s largest oil companies as well as environmental, Indigenous and labour leaders, Notley introduced Alberta’s Climate Leadership Plan. Developed with the advice of an expert panel and based on extensive consultations, its key recommendations accelerated the phase-out of coal-fired power and created an economy-wide carbon levy, an absolute cap on oil sands emissions, a plan for reducing methane emissions, and a provincial agency devoted to energy efficiency.

Any one of these initiatives would have been unfathomable in Alberta just seven months earlier, yet here was Notley introducing all of them, and with the full and high-profile support of leaders from the oil industry and the environmental community. Notley’s early efforts to reach out to the province’s oil industry had clearly succeeded, yet she somehow managed to do it without losing the support of mainstream environmentalists.

The climate plan wasn’t universally applauded. Some environmentalists felt the carbon levy was too low to make a difference and were concerned that the 100 Mt oil sands emissions cap still represented growth of over 40 per cent. People on the right objected that the carbon levy wasn’t fully revenue neutral or was simply another tax in disguise. Those voices weren’t in the majority. That dynamic would shift later as the opposition worked to build up anti-tax fervour and environmentalists grew increasingly frustrated by Notley’s unfaltering support for pipelines and oilsands expansion.

The climate plan was not the government’s only major piece of environmental legislation. They created Castle Provincial Park and expanded Castle Wildland Provincial Park in order to protect wildlife corridors and species at risk and limit future development in the Castle–Crown region. Recently they announced plans to protect the Bighorn area between Jasper and Banff, which will ultimately include up to four new provincial parks. However, some environmentalists were still disappointed: In both cases the government conceded continued use of the parks to off-highway vehicles and grandfathered existing grazing rights.

The honeymoon came to a screeching halt in early December 2015, when the government introduced Bill 6, the Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act. The bill’s primary purpose was to extend occupational health and safety provisions, as well as mandatory WCB coverage, to farm workers. Such provisions had been recommended in internal reports to previous Alberta governments and reflected the law in most other provinces. In contrast to the Climate Leadership Plan, however, the government did next to no advance work with stakeholders, particularly farmers. From conception to drafting to rollout, Bill 6 proved a significant failure in communication. Angry farmers mounted boisterous rallies at the legislature, Notley’s approval ratings tumbled and the opposition seized the opportunity to rebuild support, starting with a core rural constituency.

Notley’s government immediately rolled back the funding cuts and healthcare premiums that Prentice had introduced, and made good on a promise not to cut healthcare spending.

The bill highlighted the cabinet’s lack of experience. Notley had to address the fallout while at the Paris Climate Summit, where she was promoting Alberta’s climate plan to the world. It also cast into doubt her government’s strategy of hiring former reporters rather than seasoned political staff to run government communications.

The NDP government learned an important lesson from the failure of the Bill 6 rollout: Even reasonable legislation must be accompanied by strong consultation, outreach and communications. Ultimately, the need to retroactively bring farm groups on board with Bill 6 and its provisions resulted in the actual rules being far more compromised than was necessary.

Every major policy decision the government embarked on after Bill 6 began with the appointment of a broad, multi-stakeholder panel to research and consult on the options and report back with recommendations, and culminated with an active engagement and dissemination strategy. No one voice had privileged backroom access to policymakers; recommendations emerged from public engagement; and every policy introduction was accompanied by a far-reaching advertising and promotion campaign. More often than not, this resulted in moderate policies that reflected compromise and earned broad public support.

This was perhaps most evident in the government’s fulfillment of their promise to review royalty rates within their first year in office. It set up a panel chaired by Dave Mowat, former president and CEO of ATB Financial, and gave the panel a clear mandate. A series of expert working groups then consulted, researched and made recommendations about the province’s royalty regime. The process was thorough, but despite its best efforts to include a broad range of stakeholders, it was heavily dominated by industry voices, if only because they had the resources such an intense consultative process requires.

The ultimate result was a set of recommendations that made practical changes to how royalties are calculated and reported for conventional oil and gas, but that largely left what companies paid in royalties untouched. Although industry applauded, the decision created some tension between the NDP and much of its traditional base, which was expecting the government to raise Alberta’s royalty rates. On this, one of their key platform planks and an issue that had been at the core of NDP opposition to PC governments for years, the NDP turned away from its previous position and took the approach recommended by industry and Alberta conservatives.

In fact, on a number of issues the NDP moderated its previous position for the sake of achieving change without rattling too many cages. For example, the review of the Workers Compensation Board fell short of addressing critiques of reparation and compensation for workers, and consequences for employers that actively suppress claims. These were things that Notley herself had advocated for years. The reviews of the Alberta Labour Relations Code and the Employment Standards Code prompted significant and positive changes to what had for decades been the most worker- and union-unfriendly laws in the country, but ultimately only brought Alberta up to the middle of the Canadian pack. The failure to change employers’ ability to compel overtime and fire workers for no reason—and refusal to end construction firms’ capacity to evade union agreements—left many labour activists disappointed.

A notable but quiet labour outcome was the government’s negotiating wage freezes with every major public sector union while managing to avoid labour strife. This improved the government’s long-term financial picture. But Notley could hardly boast about the savings, given her party’s base; the opposition, meanwhile, was loathe to give her any credit.

Because of the NDP’s historical role at the forefront of the fight back against the many privatization and delisting efforts of previous governments, many Albertans had high hopes for what the NDP could accomplish in healthcare. Notley’s government immediately rolled back the funding cuts and healthcare premiums that Prentice had introduced, and made good on a promise not to cut healthcare spending. Key infrastructure included the new Cancer Treatment Centre at Foothills Hospital and a redeveloped maternity unit at Peter Lougheed Hospital in Calgary, and a new emergency room for Misericordia Hospital as well as a new mental health clinic in Edmonton, plus an additional hospital wing in Medicine Hat.

The NDP also made good on its promise to “end the PCs’ costly experiments with privatization” by stopping a proposed further privatization of AHS laundry services and by bringing medical testing back under public ownership and control.

The government’s record on long-term care, however, is not quite as clear-cut. One of the NDP’s key platform promises was for the creation of 2,000 new public long-term care beds over four years. The government claims it’s on track to fulfill that promise, but it will do so only by taking some liberties with the definitions of “new” and “public.” Of the 2,000 beds that will be developed, over 1,600 will be through the Alberta Supportive Living Initiative, a program originally set up by the PC government to fund private and non-profit operators to build and run new facilities. In fact, some of those beds were already anticipated before the NDP came into office. Ultimately, despite poor government finances, there will be at least 2,000 more long-term care and dementia beds by the end of 2019 than there were in 2015. But the bulk of them will be private rather than public, which many core NDP supporters see as a failure.

Notley’s government also focused on gender equality. The creation of a Ministry for the Status of Women and appointment of a gender-balanced cabinet were early signals that the NDP took such issues seriously. They changed the law to allow women to break leases in cases of domestic violence, made a medical abortion pill free, and legislated bubble zones around abortion clinics. The latter two measures also provided an opportunity for the NDP to distinguish itself from the UCP when that party refused to engage on the issue. The government increased funding for and access to women’s shelters early in their mandate, which within two years had already made a visible difference: The use of outreach services by women and children fleeing domestic violence had increased by 45 per cent.

With the introduction of a $25-a-day pilot project for daycare, the NDP highlighted its prioritization of gender equity and children’s well-being. The project and its subsequent expansion has certainly improved affordability, but questions remain about whether $25 a day really is manageable for Albertans with low incomes. Likewise, the overall number of daycare spaces didn’t increase much. The project does, however, indicate a commitment to fulfilling the NDP’s 2015 election promise of working toward an affordable, accessible and quality universal childcare system as finances permit.

Perhaps where the NDP has been strongest is on social issues that don’t require large financial investments. A key one is its policy on LGBTQ+ issues, in particular the initiative to protect gay–straight alliances in schools. This legislation not only upholds rights and provides long overdue safety, the debates leading to its enactment allowed the government to paint Jason Kenney as intolerant for his statements in support of “outing” kids to their parents when they join a GSA.

Another area of policy strength is social equity. Although Alberta remains Canada’s only province without a concerted poverty reduction strategy, small, targeted NDP government initiatives have made a difference. These include accelerating the introduction of the Alberta Child Benefit and the Alberta Family Employment Tax Credit, which, combined, annually provide over $300-million to families. Eligible families receive both benefits even if they don’t owe provincial taxes, and neither one affects families’ eligibility for complementary programs such as AISH, income supports or the childcare subsidy.

From taxation to transparency and democracy, to climate change and the promotion of energy alternatives, this was undoubtedly the most activist government in recent Alberta history.

Near the end of its term the government not only increased the amounts for AISH and other income supports for the first time since 2012, but also indexed those benefits to inflation so as not to erode their value and purchasing power over time. The government also introduced new, user-friendly forms and guides to help make the process easier for Albertans with disabilities, streamlined the application process, changed the adjudication guidelines, and improved communication so as to provide timely and useful information. All of these changes were designed through consultation with and input from beneficiaries—a far cry from the days when Ralph Klein would openly mock and demonize AISH recipients.

One of Notley’s most significant and controversial changes was to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. With the final increase on October 1, 2018, some 300,000 Albertans had received a raise. Of those, 76 per cent were 20 or older, 63 per cent were women and over one-third were parents. In three years Alberta had gone from having the lowest minimum wage in the country to having the highest.

This is one policy area where the NDP did not compromise, which may be partly why, as with the carbon tax, the opposition rallied many Albertans to their cause through anecdotes from business owners and surveys from industry advocates.

The fact that the NDP government focused over the last 18 months almost exclusively on its quest for a bitumen pipeline to the Port of Vancouver has actually served to obscure the impressive number of bills it passed and the degree to which it has fundamentally transformed Alberta’s political and fiscal culture. From taxation to transparency and democracy, to climate change and the promotion of energy alternatives, this was undoubtedly the most activist government in recent Alberta history.

At the same time, however, it would be inaccurate to characterize the NDP government as radical. Almost every major policy it implemented was developed through broad consultation, with voices from all stakeholders reflected in the outcome. Alberta’s oil industry was a key partner to this government every step of the way, and all major decisions were informed by the work of mainstream economists from respected schools—from U of A economist Andrew Leach’s work on the Climate Leadership Plan, to former Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge reviewing the government’s capital plan, to the key role of energy economist Peter Tertzakian in the royalty review. The result of these efforts was, more often than not, policies that either brought Alberta up to the middle of the pack in terms of other provinces, or, as with royalties and taxation, reinforced the economic status quo. Despite opposition efforts to paint the Notley government as extreme, the evidence clearly reveals a moderate government that got a lot done under difficult circumstances in a short time.

Whatever the future holds, there’s no denying this government’s many accomplishments over the past four years and the extent to which Albertans got the change they voted for.

Ricardo Acuña is executive director of the Parkland Institute and a frequent commentator on public policy issues in Alberta.

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The post What They Did appeared first on Alberta Views.

Williams is a story in herself, one of a surprising number of mid-life women who in the early years of the 20th century found new meaning for their lives in what is now Banff National Park. Others include the American Quakers Mary Vaux and Mary Schäffer, the runaway aristocrat Catharine Whyte of Boston, backcountry lodge host Lizzie Rummel of Germany and the little-known but fascinating Welsh dowager Mary de la Beche Nicholl—who in her 60s, in 1904, hired mountain guide Jimmy Simpson to help her catch butterflies at Mount Assiniboine.

There are a hundred stories like that, about men and women transforming their lives. Wonderful stories. Many of them scarcely known. And we shall see why. The better known are tucked away in archives and out-of-print books. Even pioneers still in living memory are being pushed offstage, their traces removed. They have gone out of fashion. The current version of Rocky Mountains National Park does not include them. They clutter up the wilderness and get in the way of the animals and give people the idea that humans have had a role here in the wilds.

The Rocky Mountains are essential to our image of ourselves, and to Canada’s image around the world. We have redrawn this image every few decades to suit the fashion, and the human stories are now out of the picture. The mountain parks are managed, like a kingdom, but the managers are no longer distant Ottawa bureaucrats. They are us. And what if we, like Mabel Williams, are wrong What if we are in the grip of another fantasy?

A century and more ago, the idea of empty mountains was convenient for the dreamers, inviting and seductive. The Rocky Mountains comprised a brilliant kingdom reserved for human pleasure, offering relief from the workaday world, ruled invisibly by men in Ottawa—but known intimately by the natives, weathered trappers, settlers and miners who called them home.

People like Tom Wilson, born in Bond Head, Ontario, near Barrie. He came west at 18 and joined the NWMP at Fort Walsh in 1880, but quit when he became convinced the government was deliberately starving the Indians. He moved on to Banff. Wilson showed the CPR where they should build the Banff Springs Hotel. He guided the sclerotic Major Rogers over the Pass that bears his name. “Give Rogers six plugs of chewing tobacco and five bacon rinds and he’ll travel for two weeks.” By Wilson’s account, Rogers made his trail over the Rockies by killing trees with tobacco juice: “Not many trees along the trail escaped his deadly aim.” Like most of these early guides, Wilson had a good sense of humour and made light of the difficulties. “I never knew how hard a time we had until I read the book,” he said later.

Wilson is said to have been the first white man to see Lake Louise. He was certainly among the very few to witness the trumpeter swans that landed there before human activity drove them to more remote lakes. He worked with native guides, including the “Twin” brothers, Joshua and William. He guided, among many others, the novelist Agnes Laut to Nigel Pass. Her first novel, Lords of the North, and many later books drew on her summers in the Rockies. But there is no biography of Tom Wilson. No monument.

Nor much public information about Arthur O. Wheeler, the land surveyer who founded the Alpine Club of Canada with Winnipeg Free Press reporter Elizabeth Parker in 1906. Unlike its US counterpart, the Alpine Club of Canada always had women members—in Pushing the Limits: The Story of Canadian Mountaineering, Chic Scott describes “ladies with long skirts and straw hats decorated with flowers”—as well as “men with derby hats and summer straws, some carrying umbrellas.” Stirring prose marked Parker’s contributions to the club: she tells us that “traversing the sources of the great ice rivers and breathing the virgin air above their mute snows is conducive to [a] philosophic [state of] mind.” And while we’re on climbers, what do we know of Edward Wheeler, Arthur’s son, himself a climber and credited with showing George Mallory the best route up Everest (a gesture which Mallory resented for the rest of his life)…?

Mrs. Wheeler and Chief Horse Foot (ca. 1015-1930). (Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies)

More inclined to the public eye was Jimmy Simpson, a miscreant teenage poacher who arrived from Lincolnshire in 1896. He learned the ropes from his idol, Bill Peyto, a wild man who once carried a lynx into a bar on Banff Avenue. Simpson put the capital he’d inherited into packhorses and led big-game hunters, US industrialists, atomic scientists and many others on summer trips through the Rockies. He laid out the route of the Banff–Jasper highway, and in his 60s travelled with zoologist Ian McTaggart Cowan, sharing his knowledge of bighorn sheep. Simpson built Num-Ti-Jah Lodge. His fraught relationship with Parks management fills volumes at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies.

Intensely physical and practical, Simpson was not immune to mystical experience. “I went out in a cabin at the head of the Alexandra River. …It was a beautiful winter night, nice and warm. I was thinking what a beautiful country it was. I heard music orchestration came out of the southwest. It passed right over me, I heard it die away going to the NE. That was before radio or anything. It was not supposition or anything like that. I could hear the violins. There are so many amazing things in the world we don’t know anything about.”

That’s an almost perfect expression of the popular 19th-century European notion of the sublime—spiritual transformation before the grandeur and pitilessness of nature. From the time the last spike was driven, CPR trains rolled west across the prairie, filled with the heartsick, the disillusioned, the pent-up, the extraneous and the man on the make. The dream brought mountaineers such as Edward Whymper, greatly past his prime. “He’d sit in camp and drink No. 4 Scotch all day and send his four crack Swiss guides to climb a mountain,” said Simpson. “When they came back to camp and reported he’d then sit down and write a damn fine article for the CPR.”

Empty A convenient fiction, to say the least. Wide open, maybe. How else would there have been the kind of collecting that saw Burgess shale fossils shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, just as fast as the packhorses could get them down the trail Curiously, in the first decades of the 20th century, the “disappearing red man” was added to the romance, perhaps in tacit acknowledgement that the “nonexistent Indian” narrative had become untenable. Now, according to government pamphlets, native peoples had bequested charming legends, and their half-buried dwellings sat at the base of Mount Rundle “where now the tourist plays golf.”

The hot springs at Banff, “discovered” by white settlers and eventually becoming the property of the federal government, had been in use for millennia. Trails and passes, same thing. Archaeological digs begun in the 1970s at the Vermilion Lakes reveal nearly 11,000 years of human use. True, archaelogists had not begun to dig in Mabel Williams’s day, but she was wrong even according to what was known in her time.

But the mountain parks—vast, inspiring, “empty” and uncharted—had a purpose, and the purpose was to heal and soothe white people. When Jasper National Park was created, the Métis were evicted. The case of Ewan Moberly and his family is now cited as an example of the great unfairness of government. He and his people (defined as “half-breeds” and “squatters” although there was at the time no possibility of their registering title to their lands) were trespassing on a dream. >>

Whatever did not serve the dream was removed. Bounties were put on wolves and coyotes, because those species were thought to reduce the numbers of the animals hunters preferred. The government moved with absolute certainty that it was correct.

And the idea of emptiness, of sacredness, was only the first fantasy of the Rockies. Soon after the first blush of discovery came the idea that natural beauty would salve the soul. Since then we have seen spiritual balm commercialized. When tourism proved overwhelming, we adopted the eco-fantasy and its child, the wildlife fantasy. They are most of them wonderful ideas. Too bad they threaten to cancel each other out.

Emptiness was only the first fantasy. Then came “spiritual balm.” Then commercial Banff. Then eco-fantasy…

I’ve been reading about the first white people in these mountains, in letters and diaries at the farsighted, privately founded Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. On audiotapes created by the Luxton Foundation I’ve heard the high falsetto “Oh sure!” of Jimmy Simpson, and the thoughtful tones of Louis Trono, a musician who was born in Bankhead, the coal-mining town that once stood above Lake Minnewanka. Men worked in coal mines all day, then showered off the soot and donned white ties to play in a swing band at the Banff Springs Hotel. What lives! And so recent, less than 150 years ago.

It’s true that Mary Schäffer’s memoirs are tinged with romanticism. In fact, many of these “first” people, pioneers and adventurers, can be a bit tiresome. They were the entitled: they had it to themselves. They arrived when the park was pristine; their glorious adventuring can get irritating. They were suckers for the sublime. Their narratives repeat myths of the vanishing “red man,” the hunted-out game, encroaching civilization. I wonder if the current attitude toward them is tinged with envy. Why should they have had freedoms we don’t But it is hard to disagree that roads and railways—the national dream—have led to the decline of Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay parks. The mountains have been democratized. They are for the people, and there are too many of us.

The road to democracy in the Rocky Mountain parks has been a twisting one. Promoting the health of Canadians weary of their cities and in need of fresh air and beautiful scenery seemed simple. But there was a question of industry: include it because the railways need coal Exclude it because it’s ugly What about forests In 1911 the Dominion Forest Reserves & Parks Act defined parks as surrounded by forest reserves. Parks would encourage development; reserves would “look to the exclusion of people.” The inner Rocky Mountains Park was shrunk to about 40 per cent of its former area.

Gateposts moved. And what was allowed through the gates changed. Cars had been prohibited; in 1910 they were allowed in. Bankhead was part of the fantasy, with electric lights and running water and a school and churches and a hotel: the houses were better built than those in Banff. Tourists might come and have a look. But Bankhead operated for little more than 10 years. In 1922 there was a strike. The CPR closed the mine and the whole town was demolished, the better buildings hauled on flatbed trucks to Banff. The town was erased.

By this time it seemed parks were losing focus. As a chapter by Alan MacEachern in A Century of Parks Canada notes, Mabel Williams, by her own admission, came up with the next great idea. She found some minutes of the Scenic & Historic Preservation Society of America: one of the “old chaps” got up and said, “You know, when you think of it, these beautiful places are worth money. [They] bring people in to see them.” She carried the idea to her boss. “Tourist traffic” became the rationale for parks in the face of government indifference. Harkin even came up with a figure: scenery was worth $13.88 an acre (wheatfields came in at $4.91).

So parks were for tourists. During the 1920s, promotional literature brought in the glamorous visitors, the golf courses, the movie stars. But these large tracts of “empty” land, out of sight of most Canadians, had a dark side. Already, during the First World War, Ukrainian-Canadians had been interned at Castle Mountain. In the 1930s a large government tent city of the unemployed assembled around Morley. In the 1940s the parks were pretty well left alone—except as prisoner of war camps. During the Second World War, German prisoners cleared what is now Barrier Lake. You can see the guard tower of Camp 130 in the Kananaskis and walk through the bush to see the lines of the barbed wire fences that marked the playing field. But of the tent city, of the First World War camp at Cave & Basin in Banff townsite, there is nothing. It is as if they never existed.

After the war, in the late 1940s and 1950s, Canadian families pulled up to the gates in their cars. You could roll down the window and feed a bear, or watch them eat at the town dump in Jasper, as I did. I encountered the parks in the late 1950s. It was wonderful to ride up to Sunshine in a Brewster bus with skis rattling in the outside rack. On certain hairpin turns, you had to get out and stand off the road while the men pushed.

The thing was, everyone caught on. By the 1960s the campgrounds were overflowing. Tunnel Mountain campground in Banff was party city. Ski resorts burgeoned, and sewage seeped into the creeks below Sunshine Village. Ecological notions were in the air, although park wardens still had the authority to shoot predators on sight. Scientists were invoked, strangely for the first time.

We’ve seen the dangers of whole landscapes guided by the hand of man—guided by politics and fashion.

At the 1968 conference “Canadian National Parks: Today and Tomorrow,” the highly respected zoologist Ian McTaggart Cowan—who had roamed for several summers with Jimmy Simpson—laid it out bluntly. “Ecological considerations had almost no part in the establishment of the Canadian National Parks.” He cited past mistakes in managing parks, such as selling off the land in the river valleys, areas the large mammals needed. He talked about fighting wildfires, because by then we knew wildfires were beneficial for forest areas. We might have learned this from native peoples, but we did not pay attention at the time—it was not fashionable to do so. He pointed out the conflicting motives in parks management, and his timing was right.

The idea of parks protecting nature took hold. Public consultations were arranged. By 2000 a new National Parks Act held as its first priority the “maintenance or restoration of ecological integrity.”

The billboard catches your eye when you leave Calgary driving west: “You are in Grizzly Country.” Never mind that, says The Grizzly Manifesto author Jeff Gailus; the bears are safer living outside park boundaries altogether, for instance in northern Alberta. In this scheme of things, people are an impediment to nature. Either we’re “windshield visitors” or we’re clogging up the campgrounds and leaving our footprints and endangering wildlife.

Parks now have a dual mandate of conservation and recreation. If these ideas aren’t mutually defeating, they are at least hard to reconcile. In the 21st century, voices of environmentalism and of science have become louder. They have contributed much to the conversation. New protections are in place. But now there is a profession of parks people and a new language. You can’t draw a line around a piece of nature and save it: this is, in the parlance of the professionals, “othering” nature. “Islandizing” nature. Parks are “the incarceration of wilderness.” If we are not nature’s jailers, then we are its defilers.

And so we are asked to leave Eden. But what about the pioneers who made places for us to adventure What about the Rocky Mountain Parks belonging, as in the original vision, to the people of Canada What about the tranformative power of this wild place, for people?

A couple of things:

How close were we to transforming, anyway To living in the mountains, as did those first white people Not very close. In fact, today over 90 per cent of park visitors go no farther than 250 m from a road. And that’s a good thing: if everyone hiked the trails, the backcountry would collapse under the strain. Mind you, no one really knows what the acceptable “load” is on the backcountry. It hasn’t been studied; there’s no money to study it. There are quotas on the numbers of people who can take the amazing hike over Jasper’s Skyline Trail. If that doesn’t discourage you, filthy washrooms and tortuous access—viz. the 9-km disused fire road you have to take to get on or off the trail—put off all but the most devoted. Can Parks have it both ways, reaching out to new visitors while discouraging its oldest friends?

And anyway, those guys from the past were politically incorrect. They hunted grizzlies and bighorn sheep and picked wildflowers. They built their little cabins up in the passes and their shacks by the riverbanks. Their horses gouged out the ground around the trails. The parks that gave them free rein were elitist. You had to have money; activities like skiing and golf were allowed, while others, like snowmobiling, were not.

Time to change the fantasy. Aesthetics are out of fashion. Elites are out of fashion. No one goes to babbling brooks in alpine meadows except in a shampoo ad. New but familiar-sounding utilitarian rationales for national parks abound. In Australia the parks system is directly seen as linked to the health system. “Feeling blue Touch green.” People are literally prescribed visits to nature if they’re depressed or ill. Are we heading this way?

Parks have been “ablist,” the pundits now say. That is, they aren’t accessible to those with disabilities. So we have wheelchair walks, and we will have the much reviled, much debated, Brewster Skywalk at the Columbia Icefields. We have urban outreach.

Banff’s Wheeler House was demolished in 2011 to expand a wildlife corridor. What stories has the building taken with it (Courtesy of Neil Young)

The reigning fantasy is one I would call Parks without Borders/Parcs sans frontières. The idea is expansionist. Wildlife migration routes, for instance, lead in and out of parks and have inspired plans to link parks and reach out to more territory. There are plans to bring back bison, to restore Aboriginal presence. There is Y2Y, with its aim to connect all the parks from Yellowstone to Yukon. Remote places, natural and wilder places, seem to promise lessons on how we might manage the rest of our earthly territory. Everywhere, we see clues about what is to come.

Artists have been an enduring presence in the parks since the CPR commissioned Marmaduke Matthews to paint scenery as the tracks pushed west, and the Group of Seven wandered around Yoho’s Lake O’Hara. And the artists are still with us. But they’re not after beauty anymore. Jan Kapitoff paints retreating glaciers out of a concern for climate change. I asked Nancy Townshend, author of the forthcoming Artistic Responses to the Canadian Rockies, Purcell Mountains and Selkirk Mountains 1809–2012, what she thought was the new vision. “Maybe parks will save the world,” she said.

But playing God is tricky. You can get tripped up in your ideologies. “Park” as an abstraction defined by words is easy to manipulate; in the execution it’s messier. One keel remains in the wobbling ship that is Parks Canada, and that is the tenet of emptiness. Today no one in Parks management has much use for Banff townsite. It has “zero conservation value,” one Parks insider tells me. Perhaps. But it has huge historical value, and continues to despite the number of teardowns—the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed pavilion, demolished in 1938, is one that comes to mind.

We have seen the dangers of whole landscapes, living environments, guided by the hand of man when the hand of man is guided by politics and fashion, when testimony and the traces of the people who knew the place best are forgotten. I’m just asking: what if, like Mabel Williams, we are wrong?

On a cold, black night in January, I am at The Edge Gallery in Canmore at an exhibition memorializing Wheeler House, which existed, until one year ago, in Banff. It was the summer home of Arthur Wheeler, grandfather of the local climbing community. Wheeler House became a flashpoint in Banff when Parks Canada decided to demolish it. It had been standing vacant for years. Jenny Compton, Arthur’s great-granddaughter, wanted it saved and told the Parks Commissioner she would raise the money.

But the house stood in a newly designated wildlife corridor. So, despite protests and promises, it is gone. The watercolours, photographs and children’s illustrations on the walls of the gallery show a charming log cabin with a pond set among trees. And they are all that remain, a moment in time. Another superintendent, at another moment in time, might have chosen to restore this historic home so that park visitors could visit and learn some human history. But no. He was in the grip of an idea. Wildlife needed its newly defined corridor. People should not clutter the landscape with their dwellings. Nobody lived here. This park is a fresh slate. What will it be now?

Katherine Govier is the author of nine novels and three short story collections, and the editor of two collections of travel essays.

The post History of the Fantasy appeared first on Alberta Views.

The incident shocked many in this mountain community 100 km west of Calgary. Dubé’s infallible determination, courage, generosity and kindness had touched many lives, both in the classroom and on the trails. She was a hero for young girls and an inspiration for countless women; the grief and anguish over her death ran deep through Canmore households and schools. But for anyone who has lived here for more than a few years, the tragedy also raised an important question: has all the building and development here gone too far?

Wolf tracks are what led me to where Isabelle Dubé died: three sets of paw prints in a skiff of new snow, winding from Banff National Park across the slopes of Mt. Lady MacDonald on the outskirts of my hometown. It was January 2007, one-and-a-half years since the mauling, and I was there as part of an ongoing study of wildlife corridors for the Alberta government, trying to figure how (and if) the wariest animals—critters such as cougars, lynx, wolves, wolverines and, yes, bears—moved around the houses that have crept up the mountainsides. My head was down at the time, my eyes focused on the patterns of pad and claw marks, and then it appeared amongst the pine trees before me: a simple, engraved wooden cross. The wolves had stopped and considered it, too, circling a few times before moving on. I could almost hear Isabelle’s French-Canadian accent as she laughed at the injustice of it all: killed by a grizzly bear only to be pissed on by wolves!

The tracks continued east, taking me along the same path the three joggers had followed that fateful afternoon, albeit in the opposite direction. Although heavily used by mountain bikers, hikers and runners in summer, the Montane Traverse is all but abandoned in winter, and the saucer-sized wolf prints punctuated the snow in long, easy strides. Within a few hundred metres, however, the corridor narrowed and the animals’ gait changed. To my right, the bright opening of the Silvertip golf course’s uppermost fairway shone through the forest; to my left, the cliffs of Mt. Lady MacDonald edged closer. The wolf tracks now wandered, winding on and off the path in what became a circle, then eventually stopped in a cluster of overlapping prints.

In the dance of human/wildlife coexistence, wildlife are expected to learn the difficult steps.

Wildlife corridors are a relatively new concept. Prior to the 1980s, the predominant approach to wildlife conservation was to simply draw a line around an area, declare it a park or reserve and assume everything within it would be fine. But in 1985 a Ph.D. student from Harvard named William Newmark questioned that assumption and, after packing up his camping gear and notebooks, set off on a road trip that changed conservation history. After visiting 14 North American national parks (including Banff and Jasper) and poring over their records and archives, Newmark concluded they weren’t working. In all but one park, species had gone extinct.

The root cause was always the same: a rising tide of human development surrounding the parks, turning them into islands. And as islands they weren’t big enough. Too little space led to inbreeding and widespread disease. Floods or fires left little chance for the inhabitants to escape. 

The question that followed, of course, was how big do such islands need to be Over the following years, some radio-collared animals hinted at an answer: a lynx travelled more than 1,100 km from the Yukon to central British Columbia; a bull trout swam 1,500 km toward the Arctic; a grizzly bear ambled more than 500 km from the interior to the Pacific Ocean; and, most unbelievably, a young female wolf went from the Canmore area to Montana, then Idaho, then up to south-central British Columbia before looping back to Alberta, covering an area 20 times the size of Banff National Park! 

The scale of such movements aligned well with what geneticists, population ecologists and mathematicians were discovering over the same time period: to ensure the long-term survival of a given group of animals, at least a thousand individuals need to interact freely. Such a number translates to reasonably small chunks of land for species such as mice and garter snakes, but for wide-ranging animals the area is enormous: around 600,000 km² for grizzly bears and wolves, according to one estimate, which is about the size of the entire province of Alberta.

Such a mega-park is politically and economically infeasible. But what about wildlife corridors What about linking undersized parks into a network of reserves that collectively provide what no park can on its own These were the questions thrown around by a group of international conservationists, scientists and visionary economists gathered at an Alberta forum on Rocky Mountain ecology in 1992. The Yellowstone to Yukon vision, or Y2Y as it’s come to be known, was born.

I was so intrigued with Y2Y that I decided to hike the region. Taking a two-year leave of absence from my job as a national park warden and wildlife researcher in 1998 and 1999, I set off to answer a pressing question: how plausible was this audacious initiative on the ground My method was simple: travelling south to north along the wildest route possible, I kept notes on signs of wilderness-dependent grizzlies (e.g., tracks, rub trees, stomps, digs, scat and sightings). Eighteen months after I left Yellowstone, I arrived in Watson Lake, Yukon, with an incredibly hopeful statistic: 188 days travelled, with fresh grizzly bear signs 85 per cent of the way.

There are still plenty of “hotspots of concern,” as we biologists like to call them. One of the biggest is the Bow Valley around Canmore. In the end, Y2Y was an elliptical journey: after walking much of the continent, I returned to the problems of my own backyard.

Where the wolf tracks gathered, I stopped and listened. As always, there was the distant hum of the Trans-Canada Highway, but now, over it, came the thump of hammers and car doors closing, the scream of power saws and the shouts of kids. The Eagle Terrace subdivision. In another few hundred metres the golf course would end and the houses would be visible; the glint of windows and smell of barbecues would penetrate the thin sliver of forest right to the cliffs of Mt.Lady MacDonald and the canyon of Cougar Creek.

To my surprise, the tracks continued toward the pinchpoint, staying off the main trail now, winding through the trees. I wanted to charge ahead to see what had happened, but instead was forced to slow down. What had been a clean canvas of snow was now muddled with boot prints and dog tracks filing up from the houses below. Struggling to differentiate triangular wolf prints from the pug-shaped tracks of their domesticated cousins, I dropped to all fours. And as I did, I couldn’t help but think: how had it come to this How, in 15 short years, had one of only two narrow corridors around Canmore become so compromised that a biologist searching for signs of wildlife had to crawl on hands and knees?

Canmore, Alberta

Back in the 1970s, Canmore was a coal mining town of 3,000 people clustered along the banks of the Bow River. Gritty and unglamorous, it enticed few of the tourists flocking to Banff. But when Canmore Coal Mines Ltd. shut down in 1979, a trickle of outsiders came to settle, among them skiers and climbers attracted by the scenery and recreational opportunities. A few years later, when Canmore hosted the Nordic events for the 1988 Winter Olympics and received international profile, that trickle became a flood. In the 20 years since, the town’s population has tripled from fewer than 6,000 to more than 17,500 people (12,000 permanent, 5,500 second-home owners).  

Such rapid growth is part of a phenomenon gripping mountain towns across the globe. Attracted by the small-town atmosphere, clean air and water, low crime rates, stunning vistas and access to recreational activities, a generation of aging and wealthy baby boomers are flocking to these places, driving up real estate prices and triggering a building boom. And they’re doing it because they can. Freed from the traditional office environment by the Internet, an improved global transportation system and cheap oil, executives are moving from high-rises in New York, London and Toronto to home offices in Aspen, Zermatt and Canmore.

Wherever demand leads, supply soon follows, and Canmore’s housing market is no exception. There’s one complication, though: space. Bordered by Banff National Park to the west and provincial parks and cement quarries to the east, construction has only had one direction to go in this tight valley: up.

The bear that killed Isabelle Dubé was no stranger to local wildlife officials. Eight days before the attack, it was seen in the same corridor by a woman taking pictures of wildflowers, not far from the Silvertip Resort and Eagle Terrace subdivisions. Curious, the bear approached but stopped when the woman stood up, grabbed her dog and quickly backed away. When wildlife officers heard about the incident, they immediately set their traps, captured the bear and, after fitting it with a radio collar, airlifted it to a side valley of Banff National Park.

Like most relocated bears, it soon returned. On the morning of June 5, 2005, just hours before Isabelle and her two friends set off on their run, the 4-year-old male grizzly now known as Bear 99 was chased off the Silvertip golf course by a maintenance crew. Wildlife officers armed with radio receivers and rubber bullets arrived soon after, determined to instill some fear into the bear when it stepped out of the wildlife corridor back onto the fairway. It never did.

Although none of them realized it at the time, the bear, the photographer, the wildlife officers and Isabelle and her two friends were all participants in an intricate and dangerous dance initiated by developers, politicians and town planners decades earlier. To their credit, the planners had incorporated wildlife corridors into area structure plans at a time when no other jurisdiction in North America was doing so. But their power to make them functional was constrained by guarantees the provincial government had made to developers when they sold them the Crown lands in the 1980s. And so now, instead of the kilometre-wide corridors biologists recommended, animals are confronted with a convoluted maze of dead-end funnels and 300–500-metre-wide squeeze points on steep slopes. As is so often the case in the dance of human/wildlife coexistence, it’s the wildlife that are expected to learn the difficult steps.

I would have been pleasantly surprised if the wolves had somehow solved the riddle Canmore had laid out for them; if, unlike Bear 99, they had somehow found that elusive middle ground of tolerating human development but managing to stay wild. But after a few more minutes of crawling on hands and knees I came to a swath of undisturbed snow where the wolves had finally stopped and circled back. Their wildness had kicked in. The squeeze point had proved to be too much.

What had been a mild February day was turning cold by that point, and after confirming the wolves had gone back, I abandoned their spoor and headed downhill. My car was parked several kilometres away by that point and with the lights of my downtown neighbourhood visible in the valley below I decided to walk home. Two minutes later, I was crossing the Silvertip golf course, heading for the uppermost of the many housing developments that have crept up the mountainside in recent years.

Wildlife corridors link a network of reserves that together provide what no park can on its own.

It would be easier to justify narrow wildlife corridors if the houses that encroached on them were modest-sized and built for families who lived and worked in the community, but as I made my way downhill, the majority of the massive homes I passed were dark, their curtains drawn, and save for the tire tracks left by the local security company trucks, their snowy driveways were unmarked. For anyone who knew Isabelle or knows the plight of local wildlife, the irony is hard to swallow: most of the homes and golf courses that have plugged this narrow valley over the past 15 years have been built as second, third and even fourth homes for people who live somewhere else.

Had Isabelle Dubé lived, she would now be part of what local demographers and statisticians expect will be the last generation of middle-class people who can afford to work, live and raise a family in Canmore. When she moved here from Quebec in the mid-1990s, the average price for a single family home was under $200,000. Now, less than 15 years later, it has more than quadrupled to $850,000. Property taxes and rents have skyrocketed alongside real estate values, and an exodus of young couples and families has followed. School enrolments are decreasing, local businesses are struggling to retain long-term employees and the population demographics are shifting toward older people who have brought their wealth from elsewhere and second homeowners who, according to a recent survey, aren’t interested in getting to know another set of neighbours or contributing time to community programs and events.

Such trends aren’t unique to Canmore. In Aspen, Colorado, the average single-family house now costs $4-million and sits vacant much of the year, necessitating a system where the local workforce is bused in daily from more affordable towns an hour or two away. It’s an extreme case of how the free market can destroy a community. Residents and politicians in other mountain towns are taking notice. In Crested Butte, Colo., for example, a 2,500-square-foot cap on house size has prevented opulent trophy homes from taking over the town. In Zermatt, Switzerland, local officials have capped total second-home construction to a town-wide limit of 9,000 square feet per year. And in Basalt, Colo., deed restrictions, resident-only districts, appreciation caps, property buybacks and affordable housing projects have all been instituted to prevent what happened in nearby Aspen from happening there.

Canmore has considered some of these options—resident-only zoning in certain neighbourhoods, for example, and a 3,500-square-foot limit on house size—but hasn’t adopted them because of the Charter of Rights & Freedoms. Which invites the question: is compromising the lives of others (animals and humans alike) in order to own a second home a legitimate human right?

A motion-activated camera along a popular Canmore-area hiking trail captures two cougars just hours before capturing hikers. (Photo Courtesy of Melanie Percy/Alberta Tourism, Parks and Recreation)

Twenty minutes after leaving the wolf tracks, I emerged at the bottom of the Silvertip subdivision, crossed the Trans-Canada Highway and sauntered into Canmore’s downtown core. It, too, has changed in recent years—the local grocery and hardware stores are gone, replaced by real estate showrooms, upscale bistros and high-end furniture boutiques. I couldn’t help but notice the slogans as I walked past the realty office windows: Move Closer to Nature; Experience Luxury in the Wilds of Canmore; Silvertip: The Reason Nature Created the Rockies. Meanwhile, a different version of the same story lay on the slopes above me, written in the tracks of three wolves and a young woman’s memorial cross.

Fortunately, many citizens and politicians who know the whole story in Canmore are working to steer it clear of further tragedy. It’s why an exhaustive overhaul of the town’s principal guiding document (the municipal development plan) has been the subject of dozens of heated public forums and hearings over the last three years. It’s why an innovative sustainability screening is now part of the development permit process, putting the onus on the proponent to demonstrate a social, environmental or economic benefit to the community. And it’s why an organization called Bow Valley WildSmart formed soon after Dubé’s death: to better inform residents about wildlife corridors, bear safety and other issues regarding human/wildlife coexistence.

As well-meaning as they are, however, such initiatives skirt more than confront Canmore’s big problem—too many people trying to build too many big homes in too small a space. A cap on development is the logical solution, something that takes into account all we’ve learned from William Newmark and Y2Y about parks and the need for wildlife to be able to move between them, and from Aspen and other mountain towns ruined by excessive development and the proliferation of second homes.

What I and every other person who cares about this issue have come to understand is that change is as difficult to track as a wolf or grizzly bear, twisting and turning, stalling and surging, behaving in ways no one can predict. Change, too, needs corridors and sometimes our job is just to keep them open: corridors of hope between reservoirs of possibility.

It’s this belief in possibility, I think, that has helped point my journey in a new direction. Two-and-a-half years have passed since that February day when I followed the wolves past Isabelle’s cross. The economic recession that now grips much of the world has forced one of Canmore’s two major developers (Three Sisters Resorts) into receivership, creating an opportunity which our once-powerless mayor and council quickly pounced on. In a motion that passed unanimously this April, Canmore’s urban growth boundary was moved inward to exclude lands on Three Sisters Mountain, some 600 acres for which as many as 2,500 “dwelling units” had been slated. If the motion holds, approved growth in our stressed town will be cut by more than 60 per cent. According to long-time Canmore resident and current mayor Ron Casey, it’s a chance to undo some of the mistakes of the past two decades and reclaim a sustainable vision. “It really comes down to what the Town thought they were getting into,” he says. “This was never about building a second-home mecca residential neighbourhood.”

So Canmore is doing its best to wrest control back from at least one developer. It’s a bold move that won’t go unchallenged. Indeed, a public hearing about the motion was recently postponed because of legal threats from the receiver. Meanwhile, letters to push on despite the challenges are crowding the op-ed pages of the local newspaper and e-mail inboxes at town hall.

And when this challenge is over our focus will shift to the 100-acre plot where the other big developer—Stone Creek Properties—plans to build 1,000 condos, 300 hotel rooms and 100 shops. I know the place well. It’s up on the slopes of Mt. Lady MacDonald, not far from where wolves still try to get around the town. Not far from the spot where Isabelle’s spirit still lives. 

Karsten Heuer is a wildlife biologist, park warden and author of three books, including Walking the Big Wild (M&S, 2002).

The post The Big Squeeze appeared first on Alberta Views.

It shouldn’t have been this way. The last decade should have been a Dark Age. In 1993, we Albertans elected a Premier who—how can I say this nicely—isn’t one for reading books. Over the next 14 years, artists of all sorts would flee the province for want of support. A climate of disdain for culture precipitated the sale of local publishers to out-of-province interests (among them Red Deer Press, Duval House and Brindle & Glass). Add the rise of Chapters/Indigo and the near-disappearance of independent bookstores (a net loss of shelf space for local authors and publishers), and it’s a minor miracle our writers survived the past decade at all, let alone thrived. (For a taste of how government might positively stimulate its citizens’ creative output, read Fil Fraser’s Alberta’s Camelot [Lone Pine, 2003], which tells of a more enlightened era—Peter Lougheed’s.)

It’s no coincidence that Alberta Views’ first 10 years coincide with this era. Alberta’s history of one-party, one-voice domin-ance had rendered political opposition essentially mute. Into the silence strode Alberta’s “unofficial” opposition: beleaguered authors. In 1997, a government employee named Kevin Taft published Shredding the Public Interest: Ralph Klein and 25 Years of One-Party Government (U of A Press/Parkland Institute, 1997). The book—which argued that Klein’s government had made a systematic effort to obscure the truth about the causes of Alberta’s debt and deficit; that our “fiscal crisis” was, essentially, manufactured—landed with all the subtlety of a bomb. Albertans snapped up the entire print run in a week (and the 10,000 reprints in another 10 days). So devastating was its critique, the book seemed heretical. “A person from Grande Prairie said that a bookstore there kept copies of my book tucked out of sight,” Taft recalls. “As if it was a dirty magazine, customers could only get it by discreetly asking at the counter.” Even The Economist lauded the book: “Taft may be right… maybe the whole ‘Klein revolution,’ as it is called, was unnecessary.” Mark Lisac’s Alberta Uncovered: Taking Back Our Province (NeWest, 2004) and Trevor Harrison and Gordon Laxer’s The Trojan Horse: Alberta and the Future of Canada (Black Rose, 1995) also contributed to the debate. And while these continued to expose Klein’s policies, Doreen Barrie’s The Other Alberta: Decoding a Political Enigma (Canadian Plains Research Centre, 2006) went after a bigger threat—Klein’s mythmaking department. She argued that our provincial identity, to an extent unseen elsewhere, is socially constructed by our government. “It’s almost disloyal not to fall behind [them],” she said, noting how Klein and Co. would have us forget our province’s long history of political innovation, especially representation by women, and economic interventionism.

If there’s another topic as disproportionately covered by Albertans as politics, it’s the environment: resplen-dent collections of photos of the Rockies, thick geological tomes published for the oil patch, children’s books about the dinosaurs hiding under our feet, etc. But we’re not always so celebratory. Recently two very different Albertans reached the same conclusion: that we must resolve our oil addiction or embrace catastrophe. Calgary oilman Peter Tertzakian’s A Thousand Barrels a Second (McGraw-Hill, 2006) discusses the coming energy “break-point” and earned him a global audience (including a seat on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show), while writer/historian Ronald Wright’s Massey Lectures were distilled into A Short History of Progress (Anansi, 2004). Wild Country: The Best of Andy Russell (McClelland & Stewart, 2004) manages to celebrate our province’s breathtaking wealth and beauty and warn of the consequences of squandering them. Russell, of course, is best known for his film and book Grizzly Country (Knopf, 1967), the film capturing some of the first footage of grizzlies, the book dispelling the worst myths about bears. In Wild Country is Russell’s collected environmental writing, including his 1946 essay “Can Animals Think?” which Alberta Views reviewer Jeff Gailus noted was criticized at the time by academics. “What Russell has over most academics is a lifetime of experience,” wrote Gailus. “While the idea that animals can think seems self-evident now, it wasn’t always. Russell was a maverick.” Russell’s son Charlie continues his dad’s legacy. Grizzly Heart (Random House, 2003) and Grizzly Seasons (the latter a photo collection with Maureen Enns, also Random House, 2003) are equal parts inspiring and heart-wrenching in their depiction of grizzlies. Patricia van Tighem’s The Bear’s Embrace (Douglas & McIntyre, 2000) evokes similar emotions through the relaying of a very different experience with a grizzly—an attack that left the author physically and emotionally disfigured. Karsten Heuer’s Walking the Big Wild (M&S, 2002) and Being Caribou (M&S, 2006) are stirring accounts of his two greatest treks thus far: along the Continental Divide to advocate for wildlife corridors, and across the Arctic with a Porcupine caribou herd whose calving grounds are threatened by our society’s desperate thirst for oil. Both are sensational reads. Said a reviewer in the Canmore Leader, “It’s not often you close the pages of a book with a resolve to live your life differently. But such is the effect of Being Caribou.”

“Of all the writers working in Canada today, Robert Kroetsch is perhaps the one who exerts more quiet influence than any other,” writes Aritha van Herk. Indeed, the artist and mentor’s influence spans four decades to the present day; witness the echoes of schmier reverberating from William Neil Scott’s debut Wonderfull (NeWest, 2007). Through the nineties, Kroetsch continued to publish influential poetry, including The Hornbooks of Rita K (U of A Press, 2001) and The Snowbird Poems (U of A Press, 2004). Reviewers railed against the retirement alluded to by the title. “The lovely thing about Kroetsch’s ‘lifetime achievement’ is that it’s nowhere near finished,” insisted Chris Wiebe in VUE Weekly. “His masterful new book of poetry… resonates within and extends his earlier writing.” Van Herk allowed that it is “as brilliant a collection as any ever written,” but noted that the poems “document the world-weary tenderness of a man who has seen everything and been everywhere and who sincerely desires the relief and escape of a long sleep, a rest beyond the concept of rest.”

Writing in The Danforth Review in 2001, Lethbridge poet Richard Stevenson broke news of a new publisher promising to publish “risky, edgy work in any aesthetic”; four years later, Frontenac House’s Quartet series had so bloomed in prestige that Stevenson concluded it “must offer four of the most-sought-after slots in the poetry biz in Canada.” Publisher Rose Scollard’s bold mandate has borne such instant classics as Weyman Chan’s Before a Blue Sky Moon (2002), Sheri-D Wilson’s Re:Zoom (2005) and Nancy Jo Cullen’s Pearl (2006). Alberta continues to be on poetry’s cutting edge—Calgary boasts twin enfants terribles derek beaulieu and Christian Bök, the former a mad scientist of visual poetry, the latter only the author of the bestselling (and most maddening) book of poetry in Canada’s history—Eunoia (Coach House, 2001) is a univocalic (or lipogram) of such audacity as to render the genre completed. On the other end of the spectrum, cowboy poetry—a genre Albertans practically invented—is enjoying a renaissance, due in no small part to the lifetime work of “the grandfather of cowboy poetry,” Cochrane’s Lloyd Dolen, who passed away in 2004. Rhyming Wranglers (Frontenac, 2007) offers a wonderful entry point into the world of cowboy verse.

While our poets explore new literary territory, our fiction writers obsess over the past’s mysteries and secrets. For such a young province, we sure have a long memory. Witness Fred Stenson’s The Trade (Douglas & McIntyre, 2000), a lyrical tale of the 19th-century Canadian fur trade based loosely on what scraps of first-person accounts remain. Written “between the lines” of these accounts, the book brings an entire era roaring to life; if the goal of the historical fiction writer is to animate, amplify and give three-dimensionality to historical characters, The Trade is deserving of its many accolades (including the Giller Prize shortlist and the very first Grant MacEwan award). Stenson followed The Trade with Lightning (D&M, 2003), another historical novel, this one about the gruelling cattle drives from the US to Alberta in the 1880s. Grande Prairie native Thomas Wharton burst onto the Canadian writing scene with Icefields (NeWest, 1995); set during the first years of European settlement near Jasper, the widely acclaimed novel flows with a power and sublime beauty equal to that of the glaciers at its heart. Wharton did one better with his follow-up, Salamander (M&S, 2001). This story of an 18th-century London printer commissioned to create the “infinite book” is a dizzying tribute to the magic act of reading. While Wharton has few peers in ambition, even he must have stood in his local bookstore, mouth agape, upon first laying eyes on Calgarian Paul Anderson’s Hunger’s Brides (Random House, 2004). Twelve years in the making and 1,376 pages in length, the novel is a hugely ambitious attempt to resolve the enigma that is 17th-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Wrote Alberta Views book columnist Alex Rettie: “Anderson gives us Baroque Mexico in all its splendour and squalor… Hunger’s Brides is a pageant for the mind.” Anderson dismissed a reviewer’s comparison to Gabriel García Márquez, saying, “To some degree, it was my failure to turn life into a novel that finally brought me to sit down to write.” The history in David Albahari’s Snow Man (D&M, 2005) is much darker. Albahari, a U of C Distinguished Visiting Writer in 1994, elected to stay in Calgary (his novel would be translated from its original Serbo-Croatian). The present-day narrator of Snow Man is an academic who flees a horrific, unspeakable past, only to continue to endure it as a form of torture; he barely copes with his mental and physical displacement. Stephen Osborne, in Geist: “One rarely finds a Canadian book, a North American book, that seems to belong to the literature of the world in the way that books by Sebald, Saramago, Borges and García Márquez seem to belong… [Snow Man] belongs precisely to such a narrative of the world.”

Albertan historians are interested in a staggering range of subject matter, and—in keeping with a provincial birthright—tend to add generous dollops of creativity to the tale-telling. It should not be surprising, then, that the most significant work of history published in Alberta in the last 10 years, or arguably the last century, was by a fiction writer. With characteristic modesty, Aritha van Herk wrote in her introduction to Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta (Viking, 2001): “I knew in advance that I would fail to provide any historical perspective sufficiently rigorous or knowledgeable to compete with the brilliant historians who have worked and continue to work on Alberta”; she resigns herself to her own “idiosyncratic and biased point of view.” Once its work is done, Mavericks will have completely reshaped how other Canadians see Albertans, and how we see ourselves. A very different set of myths is advocated by Ted Byfield, for decades the publisher of Alberta Report. Byfield’s passion lives on in his monumental “Alberta in the 20th Century” history series (United Western Communications, 1991–2005). Reminiscent of Time/Life hist-ory books, and invaluable to students and the public alike, the series is thorough and gorgeously designed (and has reportedly sold in excess of 225,000 copies). Another exhaustive work is George Melnyk’s The Literary History of Alberta, Vols. I and II (U of A Press, 1997/98). Melnyk—founder of NeWest Press, first executive director of the Alberta Foundation for the Literary Arts, and Alberta book-lover without peer—has done a service to the province’s literature. His counterpart in the field of visual arts is Mary-Beth Laviolette, whose An Alberta Art Chronicle (Altitude, 2006) and Alberta Art and Artists: An Overview (Fifth House, 2007; co-written with Patricia Ainslie) are the result of a lifetime of study and advocacy. Of course, from a literary standpoint, history doesn’t get any better than Rudy Wiebe’s Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest (Knopf Canada, 2006). With spare, stunning eloquence, Wiebe’s memoir evokes his humble beginnings, his connection to the natural world, and his love of words and reading. Wiebe’s Governor General’s Award-winning The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and A Discovery of Strangers (1994) have worked their way into the very fabric of the prairie and the hearts of its residents.

While we’re hardly ones to seek outside approval, we cer-tainly don’t mind when Alberta’s contribution to the national conversation is recognized. After all, we’re most of us, like Andy Russell, “a Canadian first and an Albertan by choice.” If, one day, people look back on 1997–2007 as a Golden Age of Alberta Books, then November 12, 2002—the night of the 66th annual Governor General’s Literary Awards—should be remembered as its defining moment. To the surprise of the Establishment, which had its money riding on Carol Shields, Edmonton’s Gloria Sawai—still no doubt basking in the afterglow of the publication of her very first book at the age of 70—won the GG for fiction. It wasn’t as surprising to prairie-dwellers: many of the stories in A Song for Nettie Johnson (Coteau, 2001) had been previously published; some—like “The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts”—were widely anthologized. Sawai’s stories are honest and hilarious and shocking, often all at the same time. Her images stay with you for years: Jesus himself glancing over at Gloria Johnson as her kimono billows open—“a Saskatchewan wind comes up in a hurry, let me tell you”—and pronouncing her breasts “very nice.” Sawai has not published another collection and has no plans to publish a novel. In many respects, A Song for Nettie Johnson is all the more special because it so singularly encapsulates Sawai’s wisdom and magical voice.

Before the literati could pick their canapés up off the floor, another Albertan took the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction. Andrew Nikiforuk’s Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War against Big Oil (McFarlane, Walter & Ross 2001) is more than a gripping tale of eco-terrorism and fanaticism, or even of a defensible struggle for justice on a Biblical scale (complete with Biblical characters). It starts and ends, of course, with Wiebo Ludwig; a more fascinating, sympathetic and infuriating character could not be invented. What could have been a simple tale—about the link between sour gas emissions and miscarriages in livestock and humans on a Trickle Creek farm—exploded into a crime story (industrial sabotage by Ludwig and others; the RCMP’s manufacturing of evidence), mystery (the unresolved shooting of Karman Willis), Shakespearean drama (the Canadian trial of the century, pitting individual rights against corporations), and tragi-comedy (Nikiforuk notes in his epilogue that more sour gas is flared in Alberta than ever). This book doesn’t just document events, it transcends them; the author is an investigative journalist of the first order and a storyteller in the tradition of W.O. Mitchell himself. Saboteurs stands as the beautiful and infuriating story of Alberta, writ large.

Evan Osenton has been the books editor of Alberta Views since 2004. He has lived in Calgary since before he could read. Originally published in the Jan/Feb 2008 print edition of Alberta Views.

The post A Brilliant Decade for the Books appeared first on Alberta Views.

I worried each time my headlights picked up the retinas of these animals. Bad combination: fast-moving cars and large wildlife. Collisions had left bloodstains on the highway. What if an elk bolted directly in front of my old Volkswagen van Fortunately none did, that night.

Eight years later, when Sid Marty’s book Men for the Mountains came out, I was seeing far fewer elk along the Trans- Canada Highway. In a macabre way, the safety issue seemed to be resolving itself.

Marty’s book was a memoir of his years as a mountain-parks warden. He had his own name for the Trans-Canada, which he travelled repeatedly to deal with dead and injured wildlife. He called it “the Meatmaker.” Here’s how he described a typical incident:

Skid marks, burnt into the grey hardtop for 60 feet, showed that a car had been moving well over the posted speed limit. At the end of the track was a long streak of blood . . . . There was nothing else in sight. But the ravens, wheeling and rising again, impatient, meant that the animal was still alive.

In 1975, the Meatmaker almost killed my wife and me. “Cia! Into the ditch! Now!”

We were on bicycles, following the Trans-Canada south from Lake Louise. Having enjoyed 230 kilometres of safe, pleasant riding along the lightly travelled Icefields Parkway, we were now on the Meatmaker at its worst. We hugged the edge, riding in single file as a steady stream of cars and trucks whizzed by at our elbows. I had a rear-view mirror on my bike, as well as a wiggly red flag to alert the drivers coming up behind us. So far, so good.

But suddenly the image in my mirror was terrifying: a car was passing unlawfully on the shoulder, closing quickly and not slowing down.

Cia heard my shout. We both jerked our bikes off the pavement. As we wobbled onto the grassy verge and crashed, the car simply continued on its way.

Neither of us was hurt, but we did the remaining stretch to Banff with our hearts in our mouths. In the years that followed, we saw news stories about cyclists who had not been as lucky as we were. And there were many items about motorists killed on the Meatmaker.

Aye, the old two-lane Trans-Canada through Banff National Park was notorious. Twinned west from Calgary to the park’s east gate in the early 1970s, the Trans-Canada was dumping many thousands of vehicles per day onto those two lanes. During peak periods traffic would back up from the Banff traffic circle to Castle Junction, 25 kilometres away. The fatality rate was well above the Alberta average. Something had to be done.

In the late ’70s, the federal public works department announced it was going to twin the Trans-Canada Highway right through the park. The applause from Calgary must have been audible in Ottawa, but to many conservationists, myself included, bashing an expressway through the heart of the Bow Valley was a horrifying thought. The whole place was on the verge of being declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Why not just add enough passing lanes to break up the traffic jams and enough cops to keep order when the ski areas emptied out?

There were public hearings on each of the proposed first two phases of highway upgrading: 13 kilometres from the east park gate to the Banff traffic circle, then 14 more to the turnoff for Sunshine ski area west of Banff. Public Works was the proponent; Parks Canada joined scientists and conservationists as intervenors. A panel deliberated and the engineers won out. Four lanes it was going to be, some of it divided, some of it side by side with a concrete barrier down the middle.

In the beginning the project was mainly about human safety and convenience, not about conservation biology. Wildlife, according to long-time Banff conservationist Mike McIvor, wasn’t much of a consideration for planners in Phase I. “All they were going to do was put down more asphalt,” he told me last fall. “No fencing or crossing structures were considered, despite the fact that 150-plus large animals were being killed along that stretch every year. It took a concerted push on the part of Parks Canada, the Canadian Wildlife Service, conservation groups and the public to get fencing at all, plus underpasses for wildlife.”

The federal government spent $7-million on mitigation measures for Phase I of the Meatmaker upgrade, and even more on Phase II. Per kilometre this was by far the largest outlay of such money in Canada, perhaps in the world. A continuous wire fence 2.4 metres tall was installed to keep any animal larger than a snowshoe hare off the right-of-way. Three bridges functioned as wildlife underpasses by leaving space for animals to pass beside the water. Six dry underpasses were built, one of which was a round metal culvert four metres in diameter, while the other five were short bridge-type open spans of various lengths up to 22 metres. All of these were situated at spots where animals were thought to cross the road frequently.

The designers had little background information to help them. Would the fence and the crossing structures do the job?

Highway reconstruction began in 1979. By the time the full 27 kilometres of phases I and II were completed in 1987, some results were easy to see. Cars and trucks moved freely and the Banff traffic circle was now a high-speed interchange instead of a bottleneck. Safety was much improved, with far fewer head-on fatalities. The fence was indeed keeping nearly all the moose, elk, deer and bighorn sheep off the pavement, and since these large colliders were the main worry for motorists, from a driver’s point of view the fence was a resounding success. Anecdotal evidence and casual monitoring by park wardens showed that animals were indeed using the underpasses.

Still, mistakes had been made. Ladders over the fence and one-way gates in it were not entirely animal-proof. (First rule of natural history: everything out there is smarter than we think it is.) Further, critters could wriggle under the fence, which was not tight to the ground everywhere. Dandelions and other rapidly growing vegetation inside the fence were now untouched by grazing animals and thus more plentiful, enticing bears to climb over the fence and get hit. Coyotes were being killed in large numbers. They could dig under the fence and cross the traffic lanes to hunt the rodents doing so well in the lush median.

Less risky for the coyotes, but fatal for the bighorn sheep living beside the Vermilion Lakes west of Banff, was the discovery that it was possible to run the sheep up against the fence and kill them. Within a few years most of the flock had disappeared.

The fence was particularly offensive, a wire barrier lurking at the edge of the woods for kilometre after kilometre. To me, the park looked like Banff National Game Farm.

Such were the surprises generated by the initial phases of the project. No surprise to me was how bad it looked. Not the highway; as a work of engineering it was lovely. The views were more expansive than before, the majesty of the park more breathtaking to behold. What I saw, though, was the huge swath cut through the forest. What was once part of the park was now a freeway. The natural landscape had been injured, especially where the route had been blasted out of the bedrock. And the fence was particularly offensive, a wire barrier lurking at the edge of the woods for kilometre after kilometre. To me, the park looked like Banff National Game Farm.

When phase IIIA of the upgrade (Sunshine turnoff to Castle Junction) was announced in the early ’90s, we learned that nearly all of the 18.5 kilometres was to be divided highway. In addition to fencing—at least the base of the fence was going to be buried this time—13 crossing structures were proposed by the consultants, all of them culverts. By this time culverts were known to be used less often by wildlife than open-span structures, but culverts were considerably cheaper to build than open spans. The cutback era was well on, and government funding of all kinds was down.

Further, a fundamental shift in approach had occurred. Mike McIvor recalls it well. “The federal government had reorganized, and authority for managing highways in national parks had been turned over to Parks Canada. So now Parks Canada was the proponent as well as the evaluator of the environmental assessment. This was a conflict of interest.”

The public consultation process had changed, too. “Parks Canada argued that they now knew all about twinning highways in national parks, so they didn’t need the extra element of scrutiny and thoroughness that they would get with a full panel- type review,” said McIvor. “No public hearings were held. Just open houses, which were essentially sales jobs.” McIvor’s advice on behalf of the Bow Valley Naturalists was largely ignored, as were the recommendations of other environmental groups.

None of this boded well for wildlife trying to cross the highway. Biologists and conservationists kicked up a fuss. Parks Canada responded by offering wider culverts and two open spans. Perhaps realizing the PR value of a visible gesture, the agency built two overhead crossing structures, each 50 metres wide. Few travellers on the twinned portion of the highway realized that wildlife underpasses even existed, but these $2- million overpasses were highly visible. They would demonstrate to everyone on the Trans-Canada that Parks Canada had done something significant for wildlife.

Phase IIIA was completed in 1997. The Meatmaker had been upgraded for something over half its 83 kilometres through the park. McIvor was echoing my thoughts when he told me that “47 kilometres of the highway has been fenced, 47 kilometres that used to be available for wildlife to cross anywhere they wanted—at some risk, of course, but anywhere they wanted. They now have a total of 450 metres.”

I worried that this twinning project was producing a Banff National Park South on one side of the fence and a Banff National Park North on the other, like two islands of wilderness. I remembered what ecologist E.O. Wilson had been saying for many years about islands: they have low biodiversity, meaning fewer species than they ought to have. Yet the prime purpose of the Rockies national parks, according to the National Parks Act, was to maintain “ecological integrity.”

Further, in 1997 the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative had formed. The main message of its many participating scientists was that the entire Rockies region was becoming islandized. A scattering of wildlife refuges lay far from one another, separated by towns, farms, fences and roads. Animals couldn’t move easily from one core area to another. Their genes weren’t being exchanged freely, and gene exchange is a key requirement for long-term species survival. Wildlife habitat— especially large protected areas such as national parks—needed to be reconnected.

Yet here in Banff National Park, an existing connection was being fenced off. I reasoned that the only way to let the natural world carry on its business in the presence of a superhighway was to either bury the road as a continuous tunnel or raise it as a continuous viaduct. In either case, wildlife could move from one side to other wherever and whenever they liked, with no risk of getting run over by traffic.

I had said as much to Parks Canada during one of the “open houses” for Phase IIIA. The representatives had smiled politely as they dismissed my suggestion, saying that the proposed crossing structures would do the job just fine. Besides, any alternative to a standard highway was far, far too expensive to even contemplate.

When construction of phase IIIA was well underway, Parks Canada did one thing right. In 1996 they hired Tony Clevenger, a respected independent wildlife biologist who was not involved in the design or placement of the crossing structures, to see how well they were working.

Dr. Clevenger responded with a rigorous, peer-reviewable, six-year study. Using technology as simple as strips of raked soil that would record animal tracks and as complex as automatic cameras, the actual use of each crossing structure was monitored. Clevenger’s 2002 report totaled 432 pages. It was the best work of its kind done anywhere in the world.

Here is what Clevenger found, as quoted from the report’s summary chapter:

There have been a total of 29,343 through-passes by wildlife at the nine phase 1 and 2 underpasses between November 1996 and March 2002. Wolves used the structures 2,317 times, cougars 515 times, black bears 461 times, and grizzly bears 26 times. At the 13 phase 3A crossing structures there were a total of 8,036 passages by wildlife between November 1997 and March 2002. Cougars used the crossing structures 170 times, black bears 142 times, wolves 132 times and grizzly bears 25 times. In the 64 months of monitoring, more than 37,379 individual wildlife passes were detected at 22 wildlife crossing structures.

The detail in the report goes on and on like this, showing how much Clevenger had learned about crossing structures and how wildlife make use of them. He is currently trying to identify individual animals, especially grizzly bears, by collecting their DNA from hair samples left on sticky strips. This is important new info, applicable to grizzly survival in the park.

Clevenger was kind enough to take me on a tour of the Trans-Canada’s underbelly, so to speak, showing me some of the many structures he had studied. We stopped to examine both of the large overpasses, as well as a concrete-box underpass, a steel-culvert underpass and an open-span underpass. Clevenger corrected a common misconception. “If you went into Calgary today and interviewed 1,000 people, and you asked them about how effective the mitigation measures are in Banff, I’ll bet 90 per cent would say that no animals use them. That’s what they’ve been reading in the press and hearing on the news for as long as I’ve been here.”

Clevenger has carefully worked out the crossing-structure setup for the upcoming twinning from Castle Junction to Lake Louise, where a few kilometres are already twinned, and on to the western park boundary. He’d like to see 20 structures installed over the 33 kilometres of the upgrade, including seven structures 70 metres wide, which is 20 metres wider than the previous maximum, and a lot of narrow-diameter culverts, which he has discovered many smaller animals will use. All 20 major structures would be located at or close to natural crossing sites. A number of them are must-build highway bridges that would merely be lengthened for use as wildlife underpasses.

If his recommendations are followed, Clevenger is confident that these structures will be more effective than the older ones in the other phases. But will animals use them enough to crack the islandization problem?

When I spoke to University of Calgary geography professor Shelley Alexander, she was doubtful. Alexander did her PhD thesis on wildlife crossings of highways in various locations in southern Alberta. These were over-the-pavement crossings of two-lane highways, not four-lane ones. One of her study locations was section IIIB of the Trans-Canada, the stretch remaining to be twinned. Thus, Alexander’s work provides baseline information that will help determine whether the structures Clevenger has recommended will make the upgraded highway more crossable than it is now, before twinning.

Like Clevenger, Alexander is hoping for the best. But her data show that significantly more animals make it across the heavily travelled two lanes of IIIB than they do under and over the four lanes of IIIA. The habitat is fairly similar through both sections. Does this mean that an upgraded IIIB, despite more and better crossing structures, still won’t be crossed more often than it is now?

Alexander worries that this may be the case. But her real concern is deeper. “How close are we getting to the original, pre-highway movement rates across this valley?” she asked. “We can only guess at that, and whatever it was, we probably can’t restore it, but we should be trying. Otherwise we are still contributing to the demise of species, because animals can’t get the best use of their habitat. We haven’t solved the problem.”

Alexander made the front page of the Calgary Herald in November 2003 when she declared publicly that Parks Canada should build lengthy viaducts across major wildlife corridors. Speaking of the existing crossing structures, she said, “The measures that have been put in place have improved mortality rates for some species, but have decreased the connectivity of habitat overall.”

Of special concern to her are the smaller creatures, the wee rodents, weasels and bunnies near the base of the ecological pyramid. They have to be there in large numbers to keep an ecosystem functioning normally, and just like the larger animals, they need to make excursions from time to time. Alexander thinks that elevating the road would go a long way to restoring the pre-highway situation for them too. “It’s obvious,” she told me. “When the road is not in the way at all, every form of wildlife is going to do better.”

Which brings us to the final chapter in this story: the planning for Phase IIIB of the Trans-Canada upgrade, the final 33-kilometre stretch in the western part of the park. Parks Canada seems to have learned little from its experience with phases I, II and IIIA, except how to put the run-around on those of us urging higher standards on IIIB, the last chance to get things right.

Jim Pissot, executive director of Defenders of Wildlife Canada, is annoyed about this. I had met Pissot in December of 2003 at a gathering of conservationists concerned about IIIB, and we had collectively chosen him to represent us on a Parks Canada advisory committee of “stakeholders.” Last September, I spoke with Pissot in his Canmore office about how things had been going.

“Not very well,” he said. “After the initial getting-acquainted stage we were expecting a discussion among all parties [Parks Canada, the stakeholders, the company doing the environmental assessment], but that meeting has been postponed repeatedly. In fact, we have now been asked to address our comments individually to Praxis, the company hired to deal with public comment. The stakeholders’ committee had unique opportunities and advantages, but these seem to have vanished. We’re now in the great ocean with everyone else.”

Pissot was shocked when he saw the preliminary planning documents for IIIB. The highway designers seemed not to have heard of Tony Clevenger. His name could not be found, and the original background paper called for less than half of the mitigation work Clevenger had recommended.

If we can bridge the stormy sea for 13 kilometres between the mainland and PEI, surely we can raise 33 kilometres of the Meatmaker in Banff National Park.

Naturally, this brought a chorus of protest from scientists and conservation groups. Members of the advisory committee— even the truckers—agreed that Clevenger’s work was good and that his recommendations should be followed. Parks Canada had little choice but to go along. However, the final structure widths were less than he had advised, and Shelley Alexander’s plea for long elevated sections had been rejected completely.

Banff, our oldest and most popular park, is vastly important to Canadians. In fact, Banff National Park and its wildlife are right up there with the flag and the Mountie in red serge as world-renowned symbols of our country. So why is Parks Canada doing such a dubious job of protecting wildlife along the nation’s number-one highway in the nation’s number-one park?

With that question in mind, I went to see Terry McGuire, the Parks Canada transportation engineer who was in charge of the IIIA upgrade and is now directing IIIB. From his office in downtown Calgary, McGuire assured me that Clevenger’s report will be followed in type, number and placement of crossing structures. He showed me the plans. Okay.

What he said next, though, gave me a chill. “As we envision it, the whole of IIIB requires about $160-million to build. We have an appropriation of only $50-million.” Yikes! Would the project be low-balled by $110-million No room for wildlife underpasses in that. But McGuire had a solution. He’d build IIIB in segments, spending that first $50-million on a section 10–12 kilometres long from Lake Louise toward Castle Junction, which takes in a particularly bad accident zone. The crossing structures would be included. After that, he’ll see how much money he is given and when.

Like so many other senior employees of Parks Canada, McGuire has for many years been making do with budgets that are too low. He’s used to it. He’s good at it, which is partly why he has the position he does. Day in, day out, he must perform fiscal triage:which critically ill roadway in the western national parks should he deal with first Many of them cry out for help, but Parks Canada is hopelessly cash-strapped. “I get $400,000 per year for recapitalization,” McGuire said. “I need $14-million.”

Terry McGuire may be painted as the bad guy punching IIIB through with inadequate mitigation, but I can sympathize.

This is third-world stuff he’s having to deal with. In Canada, no respectable engineer should have to put up with such gross underfunding. This isn’t a matter for McGuire, it’s a matter for Parliament.

Which is where you and I should go with our concerns. Parks Canada needs money, and it needs it fast. It needs enough to repair a lot of decrepit campgrounds, enough to hire a sufficient number of wardens, and—especially—it needs enough to finish its upgrade of the Trans-Canada Highway with guaranteed wildlife permeability. The mountain national parks of Alberta and British Columbia are essential to the survival of many species that are extinct or in decline elsewhere in the Rockies. We have to give these critters every chance we can.

Tony Clevenger told me that he would like to see more and wider crossing structures. Shelley Alexander, Jim Pissot and Mike McIvor would all like to see long sections of raised road. Heck, I think we should elevate the whole of IIIB and continue it as a viaduct through Yoho, the next park to the west, setting a high standard for other jurisdictions to emulate.

If the U.S. can elevate over 80 kilometres of interstate highways across the swamps of Louisiana, and if we can bridge the stormy Northumberland Strait for 13 kilometres between New Brunswick and PEI, surely we can raise 33 kilometres of the Meatmaker in Banff National Park. Yes, the cost will be high—double $160- million, triple or more. Terry McGuire estimates a tenfold increase. It might cost as much as a couple of weeks of fighting in Afghanistan. But this is a wealthy country. We can afford it.

Ben Gadd is a naturalist and author of Handbook of the Canadian Rockies and a novel, Raven’s End.

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The post The Meatmaker: Life and Death on the Banff Highway appeared first on Alberta Views.

It may not look like it from the road, but Mt. Sentinel is under siege. Thirty years ago, when Bonnie arrived from California, it was still the “back of beyond,” with dirt roads and no telephones. Now, it’s less than an hour’s drive from Calgary, a city whose population will soon top one million. If you follow Highway 22 south from Calgary through Millarville to Turner Valley, Black Diamond and Longview, you’ll get an idea of what Francis refers to as an “invasion into an intact bioregion that allows for long-term fracturing and nibbling away at the ecosystem.” The countryside is dotted with acreages and developments filled with urban commuters intent on grabbing their own little piece of the solitude and beauty that makes this place so extraordinary. The invasion hasn’t reached Mt. Sentinel yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Francis Gardner, winner of the Alberta Cattle Commission’s 1992 Environmental Stewardship Award, points out, “The public at large looks at land as unlimited—we can sprawl our way into it.” But when you consider that all of Canada’s arable land, including rangeland, will fit in an area 1.75 times the size of Montana, and that Canada already has 26 million people living on this arable land, the issues surrounding “sprawl” take on a whole new urgency.

Further south on the same highway, northwest of Pincher Creek, the Elk Horn Stock Ranch sits on the edge of the Livingstone Range. Hilton and Alta Pharis run the ranch together with their son Nolan and his wife Leona. In the last few years, they have seen an unprecedented growth in the number of people buying recreational properties in the area. Buyers are drawn by the wide open vistas and plentiful wildlife—the very things they are slowly destroying by building houses and fences. The demand has driven the cost of the land far past its grazing value, meaning local ranchers are unable to expand their operations to accommodate offspring who want to stay and carry on the business. Some have decided to sell out for the big bucks and move to cheaper areas where they can buy a viable ranching operation with enough land to support two families. As Leona explains, “The MD of Pincher Creek doesn’t permit properties much smaller than 1/4 section—64.75 hectares. People buy a quarter and put a house on it. Even though the land may be rented to local ranchers, it means that wildlife is disrupted and the open spaces are lost.” She adds, “It’s nice to have your cabin outside the city, but it’s not doing the wilderness any good.”

Buyers are drawn by the wide open vistas and plentiful wildlife—the very things they are slowly destroying by building houses  and fences.

Writer and conservationist Charlie Russell owns a ranch just north of Waterton National Park in the municipal district of Pincher Creek. He believes the fight to keep the intrinsic value of the land intact could be an uphill battle. He notes, “Every national park has some type of strip development coming into it.” Without stricter land use policies, he fears, Waterton could fall victim to the same fate. In the end, he points to the land itself as a major ally in the battle against development. “This land is harsh and fierce. The weather is always a factor here. The wind might just blow these guys out of here, but we shouldn’t count on it. It should be protected through legislation—we shouldn’t have to rely on nature’s brutality.” Craig Smith is a fourth-generation rancher who agrees it takes a certain type of person to withstand the onslaught of what this country can dish out—everything from two-metre snowfalls to wind he describes as “the exhaust pipe of hell.”

Still, as Russell points out, there has to be a better way to protect these special places. In 1998, he joined Francis Gardner and a group of concerned ranchers from southern Alberta to form a rancher-run organization called  the Southern Alberta Land Trust Society, or SALTS. They agreed it was time to get serious about finding some solutions to the insidious cancer of “sprawl” that threatens the land of the Eastern Slopes and the families who have cared for it over the course of the last century. The main goal of the organization, as current president Gardner sees it, is “to keep the land in ranching and ranchers on the land.”

“This watershed produces water for all southern Alberta—it has to be intact to work.” —Francis Gardner, rancher

So what is Gardner’s vision of success for SALTS “One hundred years from now, the land will still look the same. We have to get the word out. There aren’t enough ranchers in the world to do the job. We need public support. People have to realize the value of the Eastern Slopes. This watershed produces water for all southern Alberta—it has to be intact to work.” Gardner points to the critical role the rangelands play in maintaining clean water and wildlife habitat, not to mention the $30-billion annual contribution that the cattle industry makes to the country’s economy. Everyone benefits when these ancient grasslands remain whole.

Kevin Van Tighem, well-known author and conservationist, spent seven years in Waterton as the park’s conservation biologist. He admits that when he arrived in 1993 he shared a common perception that ranchers and conservationists couldn’t peacefully co-exist. “After seven years, I realized that the reason the park is so viable is because of ranching. Many of the perceptions about ranchers are based on prejudice and assumptions that aren’t valid. They have a ‘live and let live’ attitude. If they had an issue with a bear or a wolf they would deal with it, but they weren’t running around shooting them.” Van Tighem believes, “It’s not just about predators.

Protecting ranchlands is a big part of protecting biological diversity in southern Alberta. The ranchlands sustain the bears, the elk, the grasses, the hawks, the cranes, the bugs—they all need natural habitat, and ranching provides this. People say they love Waterton, but Waterton is the way it is because of the ranchland surrounding it. If the habitat is there, then you can change the management, but once it’s fragmented, you can’t do anything.”

He points to programs like the Southwestern Alberta Grizzly Strategy and the Cows & Fish Riparian Habitat Management Program as evidence that many ranchers are serious about working with conservationists to ensure the long-term sustainability of natural and riparian habitat. Dave Poulton, executive director of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), concurs with Van Tighem. “We believe that the large ranchers around Waterton have been good conservationists and we are fully supportive of maintaining large ranches in order to maintain wildlife corridors and significant viewscapes.”

Waterton National Park was recognized as a Biosphere Reserve in 1979 and a World Heritage Site in 1995, designations that acknowledge its “rich geologic history, biological diversity and dynamic cultural heritage.” The drive into the park is, without a doubt, one of the most spectacular in the country, as prairie grassland stops abruptly at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Bill Dolan, chief park warden of Waterton, recalls his arrival in 1990: “I was coming from the east. The park boundary sign was down for repairs and I didn’t even know I was in the park until I came to the main entrance two or three kilometres down the road. It says something about the landscape.” He readily admits there is a close interdependence between the park and the ranching community that has existed on the surrounding grasslands for more than a century. He explains, “Waterton is a very small park, the smallest of the mountain parks in Alberta. Its boundaries weren’t necessarily set up to accommodate the wildlife species that populate the area.” He believes the ranching community has played an integral role in preserving the natural wildlife corridors and scenic viewscapes that make this area unique. Larry Simpson, director of the Alberta and northern region of the Nature Conservancy of Canada, agrees. “Almost everything there is the same as when Columbus came.”

Suddenly all that is about to change. Across the Waterton River in the County of Cardston, council gave final approval in September 2001 to local rancher Jim Garner to proceed with his plans to subdivide a portion of his Rocking Heart Ranch into 23 residential lots bordering eastern Waterton National Park. In an article in the October 15, 2001, issue of Canadian Business magazine, Garner defended his plan “as a simple matter of a man exercising his property rights for the future benefit of his family in the land of the free.” County councillors evidently agreed. They eventually approved the controversial proposal in the face of significant local opposition. Randy Janisko, councillor for the nearby hamlet of Mountain View, says he speaks for council when he says the issue is no longer up for discussion. “The decision has been made and it’s time to move on.”

Many local residents don’t see it that way. They have established the Prairie Crocus Ranching Coalition (PCRC), a registered non-profit society. By providing information to ranchers and members of the public, and working in collaboration with ranchers, government and other interested parties, the coalition aims to “promote the preservation of sustainable, unfragmented ranchland in southern Alberta’s Rocky Mountain foothills.”

Craig Smith lives at Hill Spring, north of Garner’s development, and is the PCRC president. He and many of his neighbours were alarmed at the size of the proposed development right up against the park boundary. “We felt the ranching industry needed a stronger voice that wasn’t being heard by council. They are living in a fool’s paradise, unaware of the issues and the huge body of experience with  this type of development out of the western U.S. in places like the Flathead Valley in Montana, where locals can no longer afford to live.” Smith explains, “The council looks at it as new blood, new ventures, a new tax base—it makes the pie bigger but it cuts it up differently. The losers are traditionally the long-term residents, both socially and economically. There’s a long, dreary history of it.” For example, many people believe residential development adds to a community’s tax base, but more than 60 cost of community services studies, conducted throughout the U.S. by the American Farmland Trust, have shown that for every dollar of revenue raised by residential development, the median cost to provide services is $1.15. In contrast, the median cost to service farmland is 37 cents per dollar of revenue.

As developments grow, the fabric of the community begins to change. Smith says, “It destroys the subtle interconnections, the neighbourliness, the charity.”

In December 2001, the PCRC  applied to the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench for judicial review of the approval process of the Garner development and for an injunction to halt the development. In February 2002, however, the application was dismissed. In a separate but related move, CPAWS and the Southern Alberta Environmental Group, based in Lethbridge, have requested that David Anderson, federal Minister of the Environment, exercise his discretion to initiate an environmental assessment of the Garner proposal.

Bob Jenkins runs the Jenkins Ranche across the river from Garner’s new development. He vigorously opposed the plan which he believes will be “extremely disruptive to the visual landscape.” He has little doubt this approval has opened the door for more applications. Ironically, Jenkins spent several years as a councillor in the MD of Pincher Creek (where his ranch is located), helping to draft the municipal development plan and land use bylaws. “I’m a believer in common sense and progression. People need to think long-term, 100 years, not just 10 or 15. Across the river in Cardston County, it’s been muddied by the whole property rights issue.”

Jenkins understands the pressures ranchers face when the prospect of big money creeps into the community. When he was recently forced to confront the possibility of selling out, he thought he had two options: “subdivide and sell for as much money as possible, rape the country and run” or “sell to somebody else in ranching and leave.” Neither suited him much. But he was able to negotiate a deal with the Nature Conservancy to buy his land with a 50-year leaseback. It was an unusual transaction but one that allowed him to stay on the land and maintain the integrity of the open spaces, even though it has cost his family big time in cash.

Since the formation of SALTS, other ranchers in Jenkins’s predicament have a third option in the society’s voluntary, incentive-based tools to assist in conservation of the land and its ecosystems. Executive director Guy Greenaway describes SALTS as “a rancher-driven organization that focuses on the values—environmental, productive, cultural and scenic—that are important to the prairie and foothills regions of southern Alberta.” To do this, SALTS offers a well-organized outreach program aimed at getting the message to the public, as well as their free “Passing it On” program, directed at helping ranch families tackle the thorny issue of estate planning. The program helps integrate long-term conservation options with a plan that doesn’t involve breaking up the land.

“The wind might just blow  these guys out of here, but we shouldn’t count on it.” —Charlie Russell, writer and conservationist

Another important tool is the conservation easement (CE). As Greenaway explains it, owning land entitles you to a certain “bundle of rights” which contribute to the value of the land. These rights might include, for example, the right to subdivide or to take timber. Under a CE, the owner voluntarily agrees to give up a portion of these rights, normally in perpetuity. Since the rights have a value attached to them, the owner can actually sell them for cash or donate them to an eligible entity. Although SALTS doesn’t have the cash resources to buy CEs, as a registered charity it is able to issue charitable receipts to the donor for the fair market value of the rights relinquished. The rancher remains the owner of the land and is free to sell it. But the CE is registered on title and limits the type of development that can occur on the property.

There can be problems with CEs, not least of which is getting past what Greenaway describes as “the psychological barrier that you are making a donation and paying tax on it at the same time.” This is because the value of the donated rights is considered a sale of a property. And although the tax credit that flows from the donation receipt normally ensures no tax is payable on the transaction, the idea still rankles. In fact, because of the economics of ranching these days, the full value of the tax receipt can be lost if the taxable income of the operation isn’t high enough to use the credit within the five-year period allowed under the current tax laws. As Gardner points out, “Ranchers already do a lot of environmental services they don’t get paid for, but they are in business too. They need some motivation; the CE idea is not easy to sell if there is no benefit.”

Charlie Russell has put a CE on his ranch, but he admits that “giving up rights to your own land is a tricky concept; it’s not something you do lightly.” For Russell, the most important thing was not the tax incentive but the crucial need to preserve the open spaces and stop the fragmentation. Gardner is still in the process of talking through it with his family. “The whole family has to be involved in the decision making; it takes time to gel. It’s hard to justify in an economic sense. If the income isn’t there, it doesn’t make sense.”

SALTS has been investigating other tools that would help balance the economic equation. One popular U.S. program which has received strong support from the public is “purchase of development rights” or PDR. PDRs involve the use of a long-term funding base provided by various levels of government to purchase the development rights from the rancher for cash. Lotteries are a common source of funds. Since these rights commonly represent between 30 and 60 per cent of the value of the property, the rancher actually gets some cash compensation for what he has given up—an economic incentive that makes business sense. He isn’t expected to enter into a transaction that devalues his land just because it’s the “right thing to do.” The cash can help his operation or assist in funding estate plans. But in a province with no formal land use strategy, the possibility of establishing PDRs here anytime soon is remote.

Harvey Buckley ranches near Cochrane, just west of Calgary. He is president of Action for Agriculture, a group he helped found in 1990 when farmers and ranchers in the area realized they were losing their representation at the municipal level as acreage owners continued to snap up land. The problem was aggravated by the fact that, in the mid-90s, the provincial government revised the Municipal Government Act, putting the responsibility for development issues in the hands of municipal authorities.

As Buckley explains, “The Alberta Advantage brings more people, but with no provincial land use strategy and no consistency between municipalities, it means we are just fighting brush fire after brush fire. We want to raise the public’s awareness that they are sprawling on the very land that supports them.” In fact, studies completed by the American Farmland Trust indicate that, at the present rate of farmland conversion to other uses (farmland is lost at the rate of 0.8 hectares per minute in the U.S.), Canada and the U.S. will become net importers of food in 50 to 60 years.

Buckley believes Alberta is 10 years behind the U.S. in developing programs to help farmers and ranchers stay on the land. Polls consistently show that Americans support the use of government legislation and funding to preserve farmland. And they put their money where their mouth is. According to the American Farmland Trust, voters approved more than $300-million in new funding for farm and ranchland protection through “ballot measures” (initiatives included on ballots and voted on directly) at the state and federal levels during the November 2000 elections. They have also created agriculture protection zones and differential tax assessments, recognizing that farm- and ranchlands use fewer public services.

Buckley admits it’s a slow process, but the group remains committed to getting the word out to the public and all levels of government. Their message: workable solutions exist, but they won’t happen without public support.

Gardner summed it up in a recent speech at the historic Bar U Ranch. “The land of the Eastern Slopes is a relic, a portion of which was once the great native grasslands of North America. We live on a fringe, a non-plowed ancient island of biodiversity that has resulted from that interaction of topography, wind, buffalo and fires. I marvel at that, and how much of these hills have survived to the present day.” In the end, it is up to all of us to decide how much of that ancient island will still exist 100 years from now.

Larraine Andrews, a freelance journalist based in High River, writes for Alberta, national and international magazines. She recently won the Dateline Hong Kong Fellowship awarded by the Canadian Association of Journalists and the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office.

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