The issue of Banff staffers leaving store doors open to attract customers in winter raises several interesting issues.
First among those, in Banff and anywhere else in this valley, is how ridiculous it is to leave doors open to attract customers in winter.
Clearly, we’re not sure exactly where the bulk of Banff tourists arrive from, but it’s hard to believe the only way to entice them into a given premises is to leave doors open. In a winter country like Canada, the notion of leaving doors open to welcome customers as heat billows out those same doors to warm the indoors borders on environmental negligence.
Is the idea that contributing to global warming will lengthen the summer tourist season? Do these store owners have large shares in utility companies? When store owners complain of high rent/lease costs, do they balance those against the electricity and gas bills required to heat the Rocky Mountains?
Has the ‘green’ message not yet reached Banff store owners?
The fact that the Town of Banff receives letters and website-related complaints regarding the practice indicates not every visitor comes from cities or towns that embrace a winter doors-open policy.
While it seems ludicrous that a municipality would feel it needs to step in and force door closures in winter, it’s no less ludicrous than ignoring the environmental awareness so often proposed for Bow Valley towns.
The winter doors open scenario flies in the face of, say, the Town’s efforts in purchasing hybrid buses to lead by example on the environmental front, or using recycled materials in Fenlands Centre construction.
Is the situation much different than past concerns and resulting bylaws put in place to stop buses from idling in the townsite?
What is the point of encouraging people to install low flow toilets, switch to energy-conserving fluorescent lights and stage no-waste public events when all those efforts are countered, municipality-wise, by air heated with carbon fuels flowing unabated out open doors?
Imagine leaving your home’s doors open to entice neighbours in for a coffee, or for kids to show up to play.
It’s pretty difficult to promote Banff as an environmental role model for other communities around the world as long as this situation continues.
Sure, nobody wants more regulation than necessary, and maybe Banff needs to look at bylaw changes in regard to ‘open’ signage, but in the end, it simply makes no sense to have doors open in winter. Should the Town put a bylaw in place to keep the doors shut, business owners may well rejoice later when they see how their heating bills plummet.
If it ain’t broke…
However details of Canmore providing a standalone fire department play out in the future regarding the number of full-timers in place, the whole situation smacks of unnecessary meddling on the part of the Province and Alberta Health Services (AHS).
In the past, local emergency services featured integrated firefighters and paramedic personnel and the service ran well; under one roof. Many Alberta communities used the integrated approach and it worked.
The idea that AHS should take over provision of medical related services and remove them from fire-related services appears no more than kingdom building; mostly with Calgary and Edmonton in mind.
It’s bad enough we may never know the full costs associated with creating separate ambulance services across the province – from removal and re-installation of ambulance signage, to the finding of and paying for ambulance parking facilities – what we don’t want to find out is that somehow lives were lost because of inefficiencies created by dismantling integrated services that served us well.
