Banff park plan to draw visitors irks environmentalists

 A Parks Canada plan to encourage more visitors to Banff is raising fears among some environmentalists over the effects of increased traffic on the province’s mountain landscapes.                                 Photograph by: Courtesy, Andrew Penner

CALGARY - A Parks Canada plan to encourage more visitors to Banff is raising fears among some environmentalists over the effects of increased traffic on the province’s mountain landscapes.

The new draft management plan for Banff National Park outlines a number of new measures, including efforts to boost visitor numbers by two per cent annually.

As the plan wraps up its public consultation stage, Nigel Douglas of the Alberta Wilderness Association says the two-per-cent figure is “raising alarm bells” over an apparent shift in emphasis from conservation to a broader push for tourism.

“Visitors to the park should be managed within the ecological limits or environmental limits of the park itself,” Douglas said.

“There’s absolutely no indication of where that number comes from and how that will fit into the park.

How are they going to accommodate the visitors, how are they going to make sure it doesn’t clash with other objectives?”

Once public comments on the plan close on Friday, parks officials will sift through the data, make some revisions if necessary, then send the report to the minister for review, said Banff National Park planner Mike Murtha.

Already, as many as 430 people from across Canada and abroad have offered their opinions on the draft, which, once finalized, will shape the park’s management policy for at least the next five years, said Murtha.

Opinions are varied, he noted.

“Everything from ‘We love it’ to ‘We hate it,’ to everything in between,” Murtha explained.

“Quite a bit of concern that folks feel we are losing the focus on ecological integrity and perhaps pushing more use and more commercialization,” he conceded.

Murtha said that some changes will be made to the draft to underline the park’s legal commitment to protect the park’s environment.

“We have a law we have to obey and we’re not walking away from that by any means,” Murtha said.

However, there is plenty of room for improved visitor experiences, he said.

Planners want to make the park more accessible to Canada’s “increasingly diverse population,” and that means reaching out to everyone from senior citizens to a generation of youth more likely to play Wii Fit than go on a hike.

Further, the nationwide park system is only beginning to emerge from several difficult years that chipped away at visitor numbers, said Murtha.

“We’re not heading off into a massive big growth. We’re going back to where we were a few years ago.”

Tourism officials welcomed the new strategy as “rebalancing” the park’s direction to make it more business-friendly, compared to the current ecologically driven focus.

“The point is that Banff National Park has the capacity easily to cater for a two per cent increase in visitors without detrimental effect,” said Stuart Banks, director of in-resort services for Banff Lake Louise Tourism.

“These revisions are important because the previous version of the plan didn’t properly represent all three pillars of the Parks Canada mandate: ecological integrity, education and visitor experience.

“It’s not a shift in direction. It’s a rebalancing of the existing direction.”

According to Douglas, some of the new revisions do appear beneficial to the park, including plans to reintroduce caribou and bison herds.

Still, an apparent overall shift in management planning is an overriding concern, said Mike McIvor of Bow Valley Naturalists.

“We want people to come here and have an experience that relates directly to the place. That’s something very different from simply counting the number of vehicles or the number of people that go through here,” he said.

jkomarnicki@theherald.canwest.com