Editor:
Re: Travel Alberta aims to grow tourism
Somehow, Travel Alberta’s new tourism framework makes me feel that the province’s strategy is to squeeze all these extra tourists into the few national parks.
There they should spend their money on yet to be developed “new sustainable experiences within mountain parks, new attractions near water, mountains or significant natural attractors.”
As if the parks weren’t developed enough already. As if protected areas exist primarily to make money. But I guess Travel Alberta doesn’t have many other options: foreign tourists come to Canada mainly for nature and in my opinion Alberta does not have a great track record of taking care of their nature outside the national parks.
It’s also the cheapest option: that land is protected anyway, and can’t be used for other purposes.
Travel Alberta may want to think about changing the flight paths, though: those direct flights from the east often go over Fort McMurray, giving the tourists who are coming to experience beautiful natural attractions a nauseating view of the Alberta resource extraction madness going on in the rest of the province.
Then again, the alternative is to fly over the used-to-be-prairie-once-but-is-now-all-monoculture. Could be a different sort of “goose bump moment” than the tourism executives hoped for.
Miriam Barruetto,
Canmore
