September 2001
How Much is Enough? Moving Targets Lock up Land Use in Alberta
by Sylvia LeRoy
One early June evening a little over a year ago, I crashed the monthly chapter meeting of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), held locally at the Calgary Zoo. The meeting came less than a week after Alberta Environment Minister Gary Mar had announced the cancellation of the Genesis resort development proposed for the Spray Valley. Instead, the area was to be turned into a provincial park, creating a wildlife corridor that would stretch 550 km along the Rocky Mountain continental divide, from Kakwa Wildland Park (almost Peace River country) to Glacier National Park, south of the Montana border.
Appropriately excited by this announcement, one CPAWS member offered up a bottle of champagne brought along to celebrate the occasion. But before the cork could be popped, we were quickly warned that we shouldn't relax too soon: the "exploitation of the mountains" continues.
So I was hardly surprised to see CPAWS' lack of enthusiasm when on July 24 of this year the province designated five new protected areas, marking the culmination of Alberta's Special Places program. While slightly behind schedule (Special Places was supposed to wrap by the end of 2000), this latest addition means almost 12.5 percent of the province is now protected, an area larger than New Brunswick. Among the Canadian provinces, this makes Alberta second only to BC, which has almost 13 percent of the province protected.
The announcement comes a little over a year after the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) wrapped up its decade-long "Endangered Spaces" campaign, conceived in 1989 to establish a network of protected areas of "at least 12 percent of the lands and waters of Canada." At the time, 6.3 percent of Canada (about 9.5 percent of Alberta) was already protected. The federal government and all of the provinces signed onto a statement of commitment to this goal in 1992, which in turn led to the initiation of Alberta's Special Places program in 1995. That commitment led to the unprecedented doubling of Canada's protected areas in 10 years.
Whatever the scientific merit of the original goal, halfway through the campaign the WWF's Monte Hummel and Arlin Hackman "clarified" what they now called the "12 percent fixation." Rather than being intended as a specific target or ceiling, this figure was the minimum standard that governments must meet in their protected area strategies. It now turned out that the real goal was to protect 12 percent of each of Canada's "natural regions."
How many natural regions Canada actually has, however, is by the WWF's own assessment a "moving target." For instance, at the time of Hummel and Hackman's clarification in 1995, they identified 453 natural regions; today that number has been bumped up to 486. The variations are even wider within some of the provinces, owing to elastic definitions of what exactly constitutes a "natural region." In the first five years of the Endangered Spaces campaign, Nova Scotia had gone from 9 to 77 natural regions, BC from 57 to 77, and Alberta from 17 to 20.
It has been by the standards of those moving targets that Alberta has been judged. When the WWF's last annual progress report was released, 10.6 percent of the province was already protected. That protected area does not include the large tracts of native prairie grassland preserved by the private stewardship of ranchers, nor the vast areas of the province too remote or inaccessible to be in danger of much tourism or industrial development. Nonetheless, the WWF report card gave Alberta an "F."
What does the WWF say now? On June 6, Monte Hummel addressed a WWF and CPAWS dinner saying: "I believe the state of the wild in the world and in Canada is under siege... I further believe we have fallen far short of accomplishing even a bare minimum wilderness protection agenda for Canada during a 10-year window which represented a real, not a manufactured, deadline for action."
CPAWS, for its part, has consistently been critical of the level of protection afforded reserved land under Alberta's Special Places program. In particular, the organization objects to the fact that the Alberta government will not rescind existing contractual obligations to industrial operators or tourism providers on the prime land targeted for protection—although this is essentially what occurred with the cancellation of the Genesis development project in order to establish Spray Valley Provincial Park late last spring.
It is difficult to see how risking protracted and expensive court cases by overriding the rights of existing users is a real policy option. Besides creating a very uncertain environment for business and investment in the province, such a policy will ultimately divert precious tax dollars away from the avowed goal of wilderness protection, while making the process by which any new designations are made more cumbersome.
Like Canada's national parks, Alberta's parks and protected areas are already extensively regulated. Of the six levels of protection, provincial recreation areas in which intensive recreation pursuits are permitted in natural or modified settings (like ski hills) amount to less than 3 percent of the provincial protected areas network.
Despite the limited size of these recreation areas, activists have been campaigning to shrink them even further. An example is the Evan-Thomas Recreation Area, in the heart of the increasingly-regulated Kananaskis country. The Alberta government and various stakeholders are currently debating the merits of annexing large chunks of the area into surrounding provincial parks in order to keep "K-Country" "wild." Such an action would will place serious limits on the kinds and amount of recreational activity that have made the area a favorite of so many Albertans, striking a serious blow to the regional economy.
How much of Alberta's land use potential should be locked up purely for preservationist purposes? This is a choice that ultimately rests with the public. Unfortunately, it is difficult to have an honest discussion about how much is enough when estimates of a "bare minimum wilderness protection agenda" are inflated along with each new achievement. Environmentalists need to tell Canadians in clear terms when they think it will be time to break out the champagne.
Sylvia LeRoy is a research analyst in The Fraser Institute's Calgary office. She is co-author, with Barry Cooper, of the Public Policy Source Off Limits: How Radical Environmentalists are Shutting Down Canada's National Parks.
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