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Decision compromises mountain West

Editor: Re: Brewster viewpoint By approving the sale of a Columbia Icefield viewpoint to a foreign corporation, Minister Kent and Parks Canada have established a significant precedent.

Editor:

Re: Brewster viewpoint

By approving the sale of a Columbia Icefield viewpoint to a foreign corporation, Minister Kent and Parks Canada have established a significant precedent.

Since national parks now see themselves as market brands instead of real places, there should be no reason we can’t sell other viewpoints to companies like the China National Petroleum Corp. or Exxon or Suncor.

This decision makes it clear that the managers of brand experience at Parks Canada are unaware of the direction history is taking us. Once we have destroyed all the rest of the natural landscapes in Alberta – and we are well on our way to doing that – all that will be left is Kananaskis and the mountain national parks.

Given our exploding population it won’t be long before these remaining places are completely over-run by Albertans in the same manner in which we have seen happen in Banff. We are not only gradually destroying the province in which we live, we are overwhelming and trivializing our last best places and in so doing undermining the reputation and future of our once vital international tourism industry.

The new Parks Canada Agency appears to be complicit not only in its own self-destruction, but in the compromise of the very qualities that made the mountain West such a wonderful place to live and such a remarkable place to visit.

Future generations, on behalf of whom Parks Canada claims to be the stewards of our country’s special places, should understand from the way the Jasper development was approved that their world was diminished in our time on purpose; against widespread public opposition; with full knowledge of the impacts on the quality of their lives; by people with no experience or love of place; solely in support of short-term corporate greed. And our generation should be judged accordingly.

Bob Sandford,

Canmore

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