Restrictions to Alberta's national parks likely

NORM OVENDEN
Southam Newspapers

OTTAWA - Hikers won't have to worry about trail troopers hiding behind trees and it's unlikely a Parks Canada solution to control overcrowding will include barricades to block highways cutting through Jasper and Banff.

But the people taking care of Canada's 38 national parks are searching for management techniques to figure out how and whether access to the popular protected areas that mix recreation and wilderness experiences should be restricted.

"I'm not terribly worried about Ellesmere Island or Baffin Island or Wood Buffalo. We don't feel pressure at Waterton," says Mike Porter, director general of national parks at the Canadian Heritage Department.

"But a place like Banff poses a problem because you have a historical combination of national park and tourism and urban development and social needs all intermingled in the same places."

Auditor General Denis Desautels issued a scathing report last week in which he rang an alarm bell about the "significant impairment" of the popular mountain parks at Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay due to commercial development and human activity. There are about nine million visitors per year to these four parks - up 26 per cent from 1989. As well, staff in another 20 parks reported some degree of overuse causing environmental problems.

At the same time, the department spends heavily in Canada and internationally to advertise these tourism meccas to attract even more visitors. In Banff alone, tourists inject $750 million annually to the local economy.

"We are suggesting that Parks Canada should have a better handle on the amount of traffic each of the parks can sustain before the parks suffer ecological damage," Desautels concluded.

His solution? Figure out the acceptable level of visitor use in each park to preserve ecological integrity. That suggests quotas.

"At what point do you say there are too many people around and there's no wilderness experience?" he asks. "We have had to face a lot of new activity in recent years. The development of light camping gear means people can move faster and farther. Mountain bikes have forced us to ask how that mixes with such activities as hiking and recreational horseback riding."

Jim Abbott, the Reform party's heritage critic, feels Desautels missed the mark by overstating the problem of overcrowding. "It showed something of an imbalance toward the preservationist side."

The recently released Bow Valley corridor study identified a number of proposals to restrict visitors' use at Banff ranging from limiting the size of the townsite, closing the airstrip to capping the number of people using certain areas to 100 per month.

The department's biggest test case of controlled access is at Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island. Only 50 hikers are allowed per day and the reservation system is operated by a local aboriginal band.

One of Parks Canada's classic examples of limiting access occurred over several decades at Lake Erie's Point Pelee. The beaches at Canada's southern-most tip were so crowded with summer cottages and partying crowds that the unique Carolinian forest and migrating birds and butterflies were threatened. The department bought up scores of cottages and put gates on the roads.

"Now once the parking lot outside the park is full that's the access control," Porter says.

That's easier to do at an out-of-the-way 15-square kilometre park like Point Pelee than at Banff's 6,641-square-kilometres located on the TransCanada Highway.

At the bigger parks, it's in the back country where controlled access is a realistic target.

But don't look for gates and guards. "That's not in the cards," Porter says.

"The methods are largely the honor system, monitoring and permits. We can't afford to get into great controlled infrastructure systems that are insulting to the public and too expensive for us to manage."