Alison Woodley, the national director for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, likes to tell a story.
It goes something like this: when her parents first moved to Calgary in the 1950s they loved to camp at Moraine Lake, in Banff National Park, where there was a small, quaint campground. When they had kids in the ‘70s they took them there, to find that cabins had been built. A few years ago the couple, now in their 70s, returned to find a hotel had been constructed.
“And this has been the story for virtually all the road-accessible lakes in the mountain parks,” Woodley said in a phone interview last week.
The story is intended to illustrate how incremental changes in Canada’s national parks have allowed for the development of major infrastructure like hotels. Many, including CPAWS, believe this “incremental development” is a huge threat to our parks.
On July 25, Parks Canada signed off on Maligne Tours Ltd.’s proposal to build 15 tent cabins on the hillside below the Maligne Lake Chalet. Environmental advocates praised Parks’ decision to deny the company’s proposed 66-room hotel, but said the cabins are one more example of incremental development, and represent a significant threat to the ecological integrity of the park ecosystem.
Alisson Ogle, Parks’ public relations representative, said ecological integrity was the very reason that Parks quashed the hotel proposal, and—in response to concerns about the tent cabins—Jasper National Park Supt. Greg Fenton said they shouldn’t have a significant negative impact on the surrounding environment.
While more studies need to be done to determine the full extent of the proposal’s overall environmental impact, concerns about incremental development are still valid, especially in the context of the last few decades of Canada’s mountain parks’ history.
“I think if you look over this history of the Rocky Mountain Parks there’s been incremental development—commercial development has been perhaps the biggest threat to their integrity over time,” Woodley said.
She explained that in the ‘90s Banff was in the middle of a development boom, and the Canadian public was expressing its concern with how that development was affecting the park.
Public outcry became so intense that in 1994 Parks struck the Banff-Bow Valley task force, a multi-stakeholder panel, “to provide recommendations for the long-term management of the Banff-Bow Valley in order to maintain its ecological integrity.”
Mike McIvor, the former president of the Bow Valley Naturalists, sat on that panel, and remembered how concerned people were at the time.
“What lead to the Bow Valley study was just mounting public pressure to recognize limits and just say enough is enough,” he said.
In 1996, Minister of Environment, Sheila Copps released the results of the Banff-Bow Valley Study, which demonstrated that effects of development on ecological integrity were cumulative and not immediately visible.
The findings concerned Copps, and a 1997 management plan for Banff outlined a number of limits to its development, to help maintain ecological integrity.
Not long after, Parks struck another panel to look at how well it was protecting ecological integrity in all of its parks. It produced a report, titled A Call to Action, which raised serious concerns about the country’s national parks.
Around the same time another panel was created that aimed to examine the “nature, scale and rate of development for outlying commercial accommodations” in the mountain national parks.
“All of this lead from a realization that there was a huge problem,” Woodley said.
According to Woodley, policy changes stemming from the OCA recommendations didn’t get approved until 2007, because it took almost a decade for Parks to negotiate with every single outlying commercial operator and set limits for what they could and could not do.
“That was the line in the sand that was drawn to put a lid on what had been enormous incremental development in the Rocky Mountain parks,” Woodley explained.
Parks has admitted that the construction of tent cabins at Maligne Lake would mean amending the park management plan to allow more land to be released.
Woodley pointed out that that would undermine the decade of negotiation with all the other outlying commercial development operators and in turn set a precedent for more development to take place.
“That history is really important to [help] understand why it’s so important to keep this line in the sand intact. Because if you cross the line, and say ‘oh yes, we have this policy, but we’re going to make an exception for Maligne Tours then what do you do with all the other operators that you have negotiated hard limits on?
“It’s not a fair playing field anymore. And how do you adhere to the policy with some, and not others?”
Parks was unable to provide a spokesperson to respond to Woodley’s concerns, but in an email Aug. 5, Ogle wrote, “proposals are assessed individually, based on their own merit, and … based on potential contributions and potential impacts to ecological integrity.”
She wrote that the developments that were given the green light at Maligne Lake “support Parks Canada’s commitment to the National Conservation Plan by connecting Canadians to nature, encouraging Canadians to experience their national parks and cultural places, and offering enhanced experiences with an iconic landscape.
“They also offer potential to improve communication and interpretation about the Maligne Valley, as identified as a key goal in the approved Jasper National Park Management Plan (2010).”
Trevor Nichols
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