CANMORE – Canmore council plans to lobby the province of Alberta to take safety action to reduce wildlife accidents on the Trans-Canada Highway through Canmore.
At a meeting on Tuesday (Sept. 6), council unanimously directed Mayor Sean Krausert to write a letter to the province given the stretch of highway between the Bow River Bridge and the east gate of Banff National Park is a wildlife collision hotspot.
Some of the mitigations council has in mind include, but are not limited to, a highway speed reduction, fencing, wildlife and human overpasses and the removal of roadside wildlife attractants.
“Throughout the years, there have been many wildlife altercations on the highway between the east gate of Banff National Park and the Bow River bridge," said Coun. Wade Graham, who put the motion on the table. "There is some fencing along there, but it is not wildlife fencing."
Coun. Graham also spoke to a hit-and-run death on the highway of a local woman, 20-year-old Ariana Blackwood, affectionately known as Ari, on May 1 this year.
“It is unclear as to whether or not this fencing or any sort of mitigation would have helped with that… I would like to think that it might have,” he said.
“We see many people crossing the highway regularly between Palliser and downtown and a fulsome address of those issues would be appreciated by the citizens of this town.”
According to Town of Canmore, there were at least 39 collisions involving wildlife between January 2019 and July 2022 on the stretch for highway between the east park gate and the Bow River bridge.
The highway is fenced through Banff National Park, which has the highest number and most varied crossing structures in the world. There are 38 wildlife underpasses and six overpasses from Banff’s east entrance to the border of Yoho National Park. There is also one underpass in Yoho National Park with associated fencing.
Wildlife crossings are designed to connect vital habitats and allow safe movement of animals across busy roads. Highway fencing in Banff National Park has reduced wildlife-vehicle collisions by more than 80 per cent and, for elk and deer alone by more than 96 per cent.
The province is currently building an overpass and associated fencing on the highway between Lac Des Arcs and the Stoney Nakoda Nation.
Coun. Tanya Foubert was quick to throw her support behind Graham’s motion.
“I do live in Palliser and it’s not unusual for me to hear shotgun noises from when RCMP have to respond to elk that are hit and kill them because they’re not dead yet and they are suffering,” she said.
“That doesn’t seem like a normal thing to get used to.”
Coun. Foubert said this has been a glaring omission in terms of the Ministry of Transportation’s highway mitigation strategy.
“I think at the bare minimum we should have some flashing lights and that has never occurred… I would like fencing,” she said.
“I think that this is one way to make sure that that’s on the radar of the people who select the project for budget approvals.”
According to the 2017 Alberta Wildlife Watch Program’s report, animal-vehicle collisions account for about half of all reported vehicle accidents on provincial rural highways and result in an average of five human fatalities each year.
In 2015, Alberta Transportation estimated that the annual cost of annual vehicle collisions across the province may have surpassed $280 million per year.
Mayor Krausert also voiced support.
“I look forward to writing the letter and hopefully firming up a meeting with somebody with Transportation during the Alberta Municipalities’ convention,” he said.
