It was a short meeting, but Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland hopes that his first face-to-face with Environment Minister Rona Ambrose will lead to a positive response from the federal government.

Ireland accompanied his counterpart from Banff, John Stutz, and Banff’s town manager Robert Earl to Ottawa for the June 12 meeting. 

“We had a discussion and it was nice in any event to meet the minister for the first time,” said 

Ireland. “I think we were very well received.”

The conversation with Ambrose centered on a Town of Banff report that outlines the 

economic impact of Banff’s tourist traffic. Given the dollars that communities like Banff, and by extension Jasper, bring to the economy, the mayors and manager were trying to convince Ambrose to reconsider funding arrangements and tax requirements at the federal level.

“Banff was good enough to invite us along, and I was very keen to go,” Ireland said of his involvement in the meeting. There are no plans for Jasper to prepare a similar report on this community’s economic impact, he added.

“I’m not sure that it will be necessary... I think you can just extrapolate Jasper’s position from Banff’s paper.”

Both communities pay land rent to Parks Canada, a federal agency that Ambrose has responsibility for, and Ireland said that if the Banff report convinces the minister that this arrangement should be altered in some way, there could be results for Jasper as well. 

“The original case for land rent was made in Banff, when they were incorporated. Then Jasper followed suit because precedent had been set,” Ireland said.

In 2005, the Municipality of Jasper paid Parks Canada $353,554 in land rent, and a further $151,523 for planning services. 

Stutz and Earl are hoping to use their report to convince both the federal and provincial governments to consider including visitor populations in the formula for determining grant payouts, which are calculated on a per capita basis. The Banff report suggests that infrastructure in that community has been built to handle a population of 30,000 to 40,000, while the resident population of Banff is only estimated to be 9,000.   

Again, the situation is similar in Jasper, where a 2005 report on municipal financial issues identifies an “equivalent population” of 6,033, calculated in terms of the number of commercial and campsite beds along with average occupancy. Combining this number with Jasper’s permanent resident population would leave the municipality collecting grant funding for more than 10,000 people instead of slightly more than 4,000.

“Where this goes, time will tell,” Ireland said, noting that Ambrose told the delegation to expect a response from her department in five or six weeks.