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| Icefields Centre |
Been to the national parks lately? Let’s hop in the car and head for Jasper.
Surprise! At the park gate, you will pay more than you ever did to enter a national park that you, along with every other Canadian, already own.
Well, okay. The scenery beyond the gate is worth the price of admission. Here are the awesome Canadian Rockies, the pristine forests and wilderness lakes, the wildflowers and the wildlife. In the business jargon so popular with park managers these days, this landscape is “a world-class tourism product.”
It’s a “product” with some world-class paradoxes.
One of these lies on the highway ahead of us: a bighorn sheep, run over by a transport truck. The bighorn was attracted to traces of the road salt spread by Parks Canada last winter. A non-attracting de-icer is available, but the parks service considers it too expensive. Yet a few years ago the park spent 2.2 million dollars paving the access road to Jasper’s ski area.
Here’s an elk grazing beside the highway, with her calf beside her. Ten cars pull over behind ours. Families burst out, cameras at the ready, and everybody closes in on the elk. Suddenly she’s got her ears back, and she’s charging us. Quick! Back into the car!
Park wardens sometimes shoot “aggressive” female elk. The wardens don’t like doing this—the elk are only trying to protect their babies—but how else can the wardens ensure the safety of all those people their bosses are inviting to the park? Visitation is up, and it’s being actively promoted by park officials who might as well be working for the Chamber of Commerce. In fact, for a few years in the late 1990s, Parks Canada referred to Jasper National Park as a “business unit” and the park superintendent as the “business unit manager” or “BUM” for short. (Embarrassment overtook the idea.)
As we roll into the town of Jasper, we see hundreds of new hotel rooms and dozens of new shops. All this commercial development would be good news in most communities, but not here in the middle of a national park. As an urban area, the town of Jasper is the antithesis of the wilderness the national park is supposed to protect. Jasper National Park is a World Heritage Site, and the town sits right in the middle of it, resounding with noise, crawling with wildlife-killing vehicles, dumping out polluted air and fouled water, like any place that concentrates humans, it’s an ecological disaster.
It’s also an administrative nightmare for Parks Canada. Rory Flanagan, who was park superintendent in the 1970s, once told me after a particularly bad day with local businessmen that “there’s nothing about this goddam town that one good forest fire wouldn’t cure.” (Last summer Rory almost got his wish.)
Our tour continues. We drive past craggy summits, shining glaciers and roadside mountain goats—more excellent product—to the Columbia Icefield, where lies the most poignant parks-health indicator of all.
It’s a seven-million-dollar building called “Icefield Centre,” a name suggesting a shopping mall. It even has its own mall-style logo on highway signs directing visitors to it.
Icefield Centre was built in 1997 by Brewster Transportation and Tours, which is controlled by that huge American travel conglomerate the Viad Corporation. Brewster’s advertising slogan is “Welcome to Brewster Country.”
Indeed, this is Brewster country. The government information desk and exhibits are cheek-by-jowl with Brewster’s hotel rooms, dining rooms, souvenir shop and ticket wickets. One could easily get the impression that Parks Canada had been privatized.
Dozens of tour buses arrive daily at Icefield Centre and disgorge their passengers directly into the arms of Brewster’s ticket agents, who will sell them a “SnoCoach” ride on the Athabasca Glacier. On a busy day in July, when many “SnoCoaches” crawl across the ice and hordes of tourists search for their shuttle-bus departure times on Icefield Centre’s overhead monitors, the place looks like an airport. Families who came all the way from Ontario to stand at the edge of the Columbia Icefield may find themselves greeted with the odor of diesel exhaust on the once-pure glacial wind.
You’re not happy with all this? You’re not alone. Most Canadians would prefer protection over profits in the national parks. Conservationists have been doing their best to get Parks Canada’s “CEO”—yet more corporate usage—back on track. But they are getting nowhere.
You could complain personally to the federal minister of environment, who is responsible for Parks Canada. Be prepared for a lukewarm response. The minister reports to his political party, which reports, we can safely assume, to its financial benefactors. Among these is the tourist industry.
Our drive seems to have ended in Ottawa. It needs to. Parliament had better act quickly to regain control of the national parks system, or the parks will suffer the same fate as the dead bighorn sheep or the mother elk shot by their supposed protectors. All of them, in one way or another, are victims of commerce.