If you have lived in Canmore full-time for 10 years or more, you may have noticed that change creeps up on us, until at a certain point its extent reaches a certain threshold and it dramatically reveals itself, often to our shock and sometimes to our horror. This happened to me one weekend recently when we invited family from Calgary to come to Canmore to hear our favourite local band play. They arrived, but it took them longer to find a place to park than driving from the city.
I wonder how many of the few of us, who have actually lived here full-time for even that brief length of time, have noticed that the town in which we live is becoming uninhabitable. Go downtown on almost any weekend or any day in the summer and you can see that what we have created here doesn’t work.
The weekend of my awakening to why this town is becoming increasingly unpleasant to live in is merely an example of what I am talking about. The town was packed by noon with visitors roaming the midway that we have decided that Main Street needed to become. Cyclists and pedestrians were everywhere. Electric scooters shot intermittently across crosswalks, their riders lost in the alternate universe they inhabit within their headphones. Half of Bow Valley Trail was torn up. The traffic was backed up in all directions at the so-called award-winning traffic snarl at the appallingly designed and totally inadequate main intersection into town. To get the full picture, throw in a dozen or so mile-long trains. On top of this, pile on a bike race downtown that infuriated locals whose streets were closed for the event. OK, now you have the full picture.
Over-tourism has commodified and taken away from us that which was not theirs to take. It has stolen where we live and undermined our sense of place. It is unfairly depriving locals of where we live. And that appears to be quite acceptable to the tourism industry. Without asking permission or concerning themselves with their impacts, both Banff and Canmore tourism organizations plan to continue full speed ahead with sustaining summer visitation and building shoulder season traffic. Since the tourism industry itself is not willing to consider limits, then Parks Canada, in the interests of its mandate and the sanity of locals, is right to be saying enough is enough.
They make a valid case. Remember when we could visit our local lakes? To do so now requires reserving in advance for a shuttle bus so you can spend a couple of hours on the increasingly impossibly crowded shores of the lake where you used to go whenever you liked for free. If as a local, you want to visit a special place like Lake O’Hara – forget it. Five seconds after the reservation system goes online, all the bus seats are filled for weeks. Where we live has been stolen from us.
The beneficiaries of over-tourism – the hotels, restaurants, bars and shops that thrive on the crowded streets and gridlocked traffic don’t appear to have noticed that their collective, apparently uncontrollable addiction to relentless growth, is making Canmore increasingly uninhabitable for the people who established the character and charm that made our mountain community such a desirable place to live and visit. Nor do they appear to see that over-tourism is the reason why that alluring charm is vanishing fast.
T’anna, a character in Jerry Auld’s not-so-absurd new novel Undermining Canmore said it right. “You’re selling our community as the destination, but it is not yours to sell. You are trying to build on top of us.” What T’anna is saying, and what the novel implies, is Canmore is undermining itself.
In the absence of vision and integrated planning, local rage is growing. I fear it won’t be long before locals are throwing rocks at hated weekenders and tourists as they are doing in some European destinations tired of over-tourism. Before that, however, one might expect that some will take to the streets.
I know the reaction this OpEd will elicit. I am in awe of how Indigenous cultures revere their elders and realize that is not so in settler societies. I have been around long enough to know how councils and administrations react to dissent. They characterize and label complainers and, if they can, they name and shame them. In writing this, I realize I will simply be dismissed as just “one more longstanding local who is retired or semi-retired and mortgage free who longs for the way things were.” I also know those who don’t agree with me will once again, as they always have, tell me that if I don’t like it here, why don’t I just leave?
But, still, I can’t stop dreaming of electronic signs just before the exits on the Trans-Canada Highway just before Canmore that would say: There is presently a rat race in progress in Canmore. The town is full and visitor and local experience much diminished. Consider carrying on to Banff and beyond or going to Calgary, where you will be warmly welcomed.
Bob Sandford is a long-time Canmore resident and author of more than 20 books.