Editor:
It’s long past time to stop calling the Kananaskis “Conservation Pass” a conservation pass. It isn’t. It’s a hiking and bicycling fee, and it's not being invested in conservation.
The government doubtless chose to call it a conservation pass because focus group testing told them citizens are more willing to pay for conservation than for recreation. But truth matters, and to suggest money spent on expanding parking lots, subsidizing buses and widening trails is “conservation” is about as honest as calling Jason Nixon, a proponent of coal strip mining and grizzly bear hunting, an "Environment Minister".
The term for this sort of thing is gaslighting, and it’s a tactic successfully used by abusers everywhere. Kananaskis Country, and we who care for it, are in this case the ones being abused.
If Alberta’s current UCP government were honestly concerned about raising funds for conservation in Kananaskis, Jason Nixon’s announcement last week would have sounded a lot different. Instead of promoting tourism and recreation projects, he might have had something to say about restoring native cutthroat and bull trout, both of which are species now classified as threatened with extirpation in Kananaskis and elsewhere in the Eastern Slopes. He might have offered up some investment in repairing damaged land. But he didn’t.
Some of the biggest conservation challenges in Kananaskis Country are in the McLean Creek public land use zone. That area is riddled with eroding off-highway vehicle trails and raw muddy hillsides, the results of years of abuse and overuse by motorized users, an unfortunately significant number of whom are thrill-seeking vandals.
After their wheels rip up the vegetation, the exposed soil washes out in rainstorms. All that lost soil becomes mud that contaminates trout habitat and plugs up the downstream Glenmore reservoir. The resulting gullies add to the severity of spring flooding by serving as funnels for runoff.
If he were honestly concerned about conservation, Minister Nixon might have told us that the motorized users causing all that damage were no longer exempt from paying the “conservation pass”. Instead of blithely ignoring it, he could have committed some funding to repair at least some of the damage those users cause.
That’s the biggest irony about the so-called conservation pass: people who drive heavy, damaging vehicles all over our sensitive headwaters landscape get to do so for free, while those of us who tread lightly have to pay a fee to use our own land. It isn’t a conservation pass; it’s a penalty for choosing to walk or bicycle instead of ripping around in motorized toys.
Last week’s announcement of improvements to Grassi Lakes, Goat Creek and other popular day-use trail destinations was welcome; those areas are congested and showing signs of wear. But that kind of recreational maintenance should be a much lower conservation priority than repairing damaged watersheds, restoring species at risk and protecting biodiversity.
Conservation benefits all Albertans and should be funded by all Albertans through our taxation system. Recreational user fees are, arguably, a legitimate way to generate funds to maintain and enhance recreational facilities and mitigate their impacts. But the continued exemption of motorized users completely perverts that concept; it’s simply a slap in the face to the rest of us.
Jason Nixon didn’t announce conservation projects last week, and he isn’t spending conservation dollars. Having tried to gaslight us with a mis-labelled recreational user fee that singles out only the lowest-impact recreational users of Kananaskis Country, he now wants us to believe that bigger parking lots and wider trails equate to conservation.
Meanwhile, urgent conservation priorities are being ignored and the users contributing to those problems don’t even have to pay.
Alberta needs a real Environment Minister. Kananaskis, and those of us who use it responsibly, need more respect. Apparently, neither of those things are available from our current UCP government.
Kevin Van Tighem,
Banff
