Except from chapter 6 in A CENTURY OF PARKS CANADA 1911-2011, University of Calgary Press
During the 1960s Banff National Park was at the epicentre of a revolution in thinking about what national parks should or should not be. The National Parks Branch and others in the federal government sought to come to terms with the conflicting aims of a national park as they had been established: as both a protected natural area and a recreation area for public benefit. This dilemma or contradiction had been recognized by the first commissioner of national parks, James B. Harkin, who wrote: “‘Use without abuse’ – how can it be attained? That is the problem which must confront everyone who is responsible for the protection and development of our national parks.” Harkin believed that a middle road could be charted, permitting increased development while protecting those values that make the parks special places.
With some variations, this has continued to be the creed of Parks Canada through to the present. At times, however, this balancing act has been difficult to achieve, and one of the most difficult cases occurred at Banff in the 1960s, when overdevelopment threatened the mountain scenery that attracted tourists in the first place. The number of visitors had been rising through the 1950s, but the pace quickened in the 1960s. Banff had had a half million visitors in 1950; this doubled by 1960 and doubled again, to two million, by 1966. This rapid growth was due to a number of factors: the post-war boom, growing young families, and the increasing popularity of motor tourism.
During the 1950s … Alberta greatly expanded and upgraded their highway systems, making travel by car easier and faster. This was matched by highway improvements through the mountain parks, including the completion of the Trans-Canada Highway through Banff and Yoho and the opening of the improved Icefields Parkway in 1961. As roads brought more visitors, the visitors demanded more facilities: accommodation, gas stations, and then more roads. Here, more than ever before, Harkin’s warning from a previous era was in danger of being realized: that development was in danger of destroying “the very thing that distinguished [parks] from the outside world.” But Banff also revealed that increased tourist traffic was not the only reason for the reassessment of the national park ideal.
The growing influence of universities on shaping government policy, vested local interests, the increased complexity and size of the Parks Branch and the federal bureaucracy, a more affluent population, and a more critical mindset about environmental issues all shaped approaches to the management of the park. Before the 1960s Banff National Park was managed fairly simply, by an engineering service that managed front-country development and a warden service that looked after the backcountry, while a few commercial resorts such as the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Banff Springs Hotel looked after tourist services. During the 1960s this system began to change, as planners and interpretive specialists were added to the mix. At the same time academic and environmental interest groups lobbied for what they considered to be more appropriate use in the park. The debate that emerged around Banff National Park in the 1960s would shape the outlook toward all national parks for a generation or more. In 1963 the Banff Crag and Canyon announced that two new motels were planned for Banff Avenue, while the Rimrock Hotel opened in July of that year. Meanwhile, the park embarked on a bold plan to expand and upgrade its campgrounds. At first park planners aimed to phase out the large and unsightly Tunnel Mountain Campground in the town of Banff and replace it with a series of medium-sized, attractively landscaped campgrounds ringing the town. To this end, Two Jack and Johnston Canyon Campgrounds added 400 new units to the Banff area between 1960 and 1965. Even this wasn’t enough, and the old Tunnel Mountain campground remained in use, attracting numerous complaints. One visitor wrote: “The crowded, squalid, and unsanitary conditions of the camp are truly beyond belief.” At Lake Louise, the old campground was closed without regret and a new one was built between 1963 and 1965, providing space for 221 tents and 189 trailers.
Growth in the tourist industry and the expansion of the park organization also increased the populations of the urban communities within the mountain parks, especially the town of Banff and the village of Lake Louise. While many of the residents of Banff were park employees, many were also private businessmen, with names like the Brewsters, Harmons, Luxtons, and Whytes – families that went back generations. The Canadian Pacific Railway was also an important component of the park, and its Banff Springs Hotel and Chateau Lake Louise were major tourist centres in themselves. During the 1960s these established forces were joined by new faces relocating to Banff to open motels and restaurants. At the other end of the social spectrum, Banff became a magnet for travelling youth who camped by the museum, sometimes climbed the mountains, or just hung out.
A central planning division, created in 1957, was tasked with establishing policies and guidelines for future development in all the national parks. Park planners were helped by the work of consultants. Two studies of townsite issues in Banff, in 1960 and 1961, had made some wide-ranging recommendations, although very little from these reports had been acted upon. Soon after, the appointment of a Banff townsite manager eased the administration of municipal affairs. But a conflict was brewing between the town and Ottawa over the future identity of the town; a conflict spurred by this bureaucratic reorganization, which generated new discussion within the federal government about the nature of parks management. An uneasy relationship between Parks Canada and the community of Banff would continue until that community was granted limited municipal status in 1990. Ironically, one area of particular agreement between the minister and the Banff Advisory Council involved ski hills. Since 1960, there had been considerable new development at Norquay, Sunshine, and Lake Louise to accommodate the new craze in downhill skiing that had been precipitated by the Winter Olympic Games of 1960, held in Squaw Valley, California.
Recognizing that demand for outdoor recreation could rapidly outstrip the supply of suitable wilderness areas, they believed that, given sufficient information, rational choices could be made to satisfy all of these demands. In particular, they felt the adverse effects of more building in the parks could be mitigated if it was confined to specific areas or development zones. In the 1960s, zoning became the cornerstone of the planning process in parks across North America. Specific projects were assigned to the appropriate zone, and the scheme was then enshrined in the management or master plan. The advantage of the approach, at least in theory, was that it kept development from sprawling throughout the park and limited the blight of unplanned building along the highway corridors.
The first Banff provisional master plan delineated five management zones. Two were tagged as wilderness areas; one was a transition zone, allowing limited development but accessible by road; another permitted developed outdoor recreation areas, such as ski hills; and the fifth was for intensive use areas such as a townsite or service centre. While the plan promised to balance protection with visitor use, it was clearly preoccupied with managing more development, not managing natural areas. The planners’ creed seemed to be “predict and provide,” emphasizing the value of visitor statistics in order to better prepare for future demand. If national parks might be seen as important islands of wilderness in North America, some people now feared that they were in danger of being paved over.
Moreover, profound changes in attitude were underway within the National Parks Branch itself. Two examples serve to indicate the changing climate of opinion in the 1960s: the creation of a reinvigorated Interpretive Service in the mid-1960s and new attitudes toward predator control. When Jim Thorsell was hired as a seasonal park naturalist at Lake Louise in 1962, he was one of the very few working in that role in Canada’s national parks. The park naturalist program really only became recognized as a dedicated function in the 1950s and even then was fairly rudimentary, with only three or four employees. But within a decade, park naturalists were being recognized as a formal component in all national parks.
While the end of the 1960s ushered in a new outlook in national parks generally, and Banff in particular, there was by no means consensus about the ideal way that a national park should be maintained or developed. Despite a new interest in ecology and wildlife, the scales were still tipped in favour of more rather than less development. As late as 1971 there were still no scientists officially working within the Parks Branch. The head of resource conservation in the western regional office was a former park warden with only a high school diploma. The head of engineering, by contrast, was a university-trained professional. This imbalance in outlook was one reason that the organization was ambushed by the negative public reaction to the Lake Louise ski hill plan.
Not only were the promoters roundly criticized for wanting to overdevelop a wilderness setting, but the Branch itself was vilified for allowing the plan to proceed as far as it had. The environmentalists won the day: the next year, Minister Chrétien stepped in and overturned the project’s approval. As a result of this debacle, the western regional office hired its first university-trained ecologist.
In 1988, the same year that a new National Parks Act established ecological integrity as the paramount value guiding park management, Parks Canada approved a new management plan for Banff, which articulated this new philosophy of national parks: Resource protection will take precedence over visitor use and facility development where conflicts occur. Visitor use will be managed to safeguard natural and cultural resources, as well as the aesthetics of the park. Park resources will be managed on an ecological basis; cooperating and coordinating resource management with the other parks in the four mountain park block, and with provincial and private interests managing adjacent lands.
The issues fomenting in Banff in the 1960s influenced a subsequent generation of managers, planners, and environmental activists. The culture of the National Parks Branch shifted away from an engineer-dominated ethos to one that gave greater voice to biologists. The degree to which this shift is reflected within the agency is still contentious. Still, there was a paradigm shift in thinking about national park ideals in the 1960s. While the Branch continued to heed the needs and objectives of sophisticated business interests in Banff, a democratization of the decision-making process caused it to pay attention to other sectors of the Canadian public, including an increasingly militant environmental movement. Planners tried to reconcile these varying viewpoints in drafting their management plans, but the decision to incorporate public consultation was itself a result of the debates of the 1960s. The controversy over development at Banff energized the crusading mission of organizations such as the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, and they inspired people … to pursue careers advocating the benefits of protected heritage areas around the world.