Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith escalated her criticism of Parks Canada’s approach to fire management in Jasper National Park Saturday, suggesting the province could do it better by paying loggers to clear firebreaks and letting ranchers graze cattle in the parks to keep the breaks clear.
Premier Smith made the comments during her Your Province, Your Premier radio program, but they followed logically from her sly inference during a Government of Alberta news conference on Thursday that things would have been better for the Town of Jasper if Alberta rather than Parks Canada had been leading the fire suppression efforts.
At that news conference, the premier emphasized Alberta’s use of drones, waterbombers and helicopters. She broached the idea of logging by private timber companies to protect towns like Jasper and grazing cattle to keep the logged-off areas clear of undergrowth.
Smith also told the show’s always agreeable host, Wayne Nelson, that she has instructed Forestry Minister Todd Loewen to “do an assessment of (Alberta’s) forest stands from the top to the bottom, to identify the areas that are at the highest risk of burning because of their age.”
“We’ve got forest management agreements with all of our forestry companies,” she continued. “There’s no reason why we can’t say, ‘Hey, guess what? Can you prioritize cutting here? Can you prioritize building fire breaks in this way?’ Once we’ve built the fire break, can we use it, either by having cattle on there to graze it, so that it stays, uh, capped, so that’s it’s managed year after year?
“Those are all things that we’ll be doing with our own forest management areas,” she said, “and then hoping to apply some of those lessons federally.”
Because of Parks Canada’s policy of implementing no unnatural management techniques within national park boundaries, this idea is unlikely to go far, but Smith may expect attitudes to be more congenial toward such notions after the next federal election. She did not elaborate on that aspect of her strategy, however.
In a response to a caller later in the show who described himself as a rancher, she returned to the cattle-grazing idea. After congratulating her for the idea, the caller said, “I understand it wouldn’t work in the national park, but, anyway …”
“Well, maybe it could,” the premier interrupted. Then, seemingly as an afterthought, “if they used bison to, uh, graze that area. It’s not impossible.”
“That’s one of the things we noticed in Fort McMurray as well, that we cleared a fire break, but you do need to do the maintenance, otherwise, some of that underbrush can grow back and also be an avenue for fire to come in,” she said. “There needs to be some kind on ongoing maintenance and the easiest way to do it, I think, is … using some animal help.
“So that’s something that we’re contemplating,” she continued. “We’d like to give it a trial run and see what kind of support that there is for it.”
Count on it, there would be support from loggers and ranchers. Perhaps not from anyone else, but since when has that kept the United Conservative Party from pushing a bad idea with profit potential?
Earlier in the show, Smith also raised prospect of Alberta taking over national parks within the province – supposedly as a joke, but not necessarily.
When she and Loewen first met federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, she claimed, she asked her sidekick, “‘Did you talk to Minister Guilbeault yet about how we’re gonna be takin’ back the national parks?’ I laughed. He didn’t.” (I’ll bet. It will be interesting to see if Guilbeault has any recollection of that conversation.)
“It was a joke at the time,” Smith rambled on, “but I can tell you that I think we have the capacity and the on-the-ground ability to respond in a way that should be more unified. If that requires us to be a bit more assertive in trying to change some of the rules around how they manage their parks, how they manage the prescribed burns, how they manage the cuts. I do know we’ll be very, very active in pressing that along.”
Unsurprisingly, since the show is essentially a free advertisement for the premier and her party provided by Toronto-based Corus Entertainment Inc., Smith did not take the opportunity to address her dubious claim to a podcaster Friday that she fears the federal government may try to use the fire to shrink the footprint of the Town of Jasper.
“We don’t want the parks to use this as an opportunity to shrink the footprint of Jasper, and I know there have been some voices that would certainly call for that,” she told Ryan Jespersen on his podcast. “And we don’t want to see that. We wanna make sure that the townsite gets rebuilt as it’s been established.”
There is no evidence for this claim. Remember, Parks Canada sees its mandate as protecting special places for people, not from them, and so is committed to the need to encourage Canadians to visit our national parks and to have an enjoyable time when they’re there.
As the preamble to the National Parks Act says, “The national parks of Canada are hereby dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education and enjoyment, subject to this Act and the regulations, and the parks shall be maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”
Indeed, the social license required to create and fund the park in perpetuity – which is a huge economic generator for Alberta – hinges on providing a positive experience for visitors.
So there’s no way Parks Canada would try to make it more difficult to enjoy the experience of Jasper unless there was hard evidence of a pressing need to prevent ecological damage taking place because of the layout of the town.
And there’s also no way putting such national treasures the hands of a group of people who have just tried to pass off a scheme to let foreign billionaires hunt threatened grizzly bears in Alberta as a way to manage “problem wildlife,” will preserve our parks unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.
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