Quote:
Originally Posted by Sliver
The point with Canmore is you can keep building because it isn't in a national park. People are going to be coming anyway. I'd rather attract them away from Banff/Lake Louise and into Canmore. If you need more houses, hotels, camping spots, just build them to accommodate the demand. It's much easier there than in the Park.
Who gives a fata if I share one or more opinions with Sheila Copps? Has she even weighed in on this? I don't follow her career enough to know what I'm supposed to take away from that comment.
Yeah well wildlife gets squeezed out of every urban development. I don't think as humans we need to apologize for also needing space to live and recreate. I'm allotted a lot fewer hectares on this earth than your average Canadian bear so I'm not going to lose to much sleep about it.
A conference centre is small, anyway. Like, do you even have any concept of just how enormous and undeveloped the land is in the rockies? There's enough space for a GD conference centre. Like, go to Google Earth, and start zoomed in on Canmore. Then start zooming out. It doesn't even register as a blip relative to its surrounding area. If some people want to risk their capital to enhance the area for more people to enjoy, they should be able to.
There are thousands and thousands of square miles of mountains all around Canmore. Go hike wherever you want. If one of 1 million trails get disrupted, boo hoo.
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Back in the mid 90's when they put the development limit on Banff, Copps, who was in charge of it, said exactly what you said "The point with Canmore is you can keep building because it isn't in a national park." As if a line on a map makes a difference to wildlife. You can't just keep packing people and hotels into the valley. You claim it's full of space, but it's not. There is an extremely limited amount of develop-able land, which is why they built a huge chunk of residential on an alluvial fan against all warnings form people who knew what they were talking about. Remember how well that turned out?
There are capacity limiting factors to growth, like roads, space to build, and yes, wildlife corridors. The more you encroach on them, the more negative human-wildlife interactions occur. But ya, you don't actually care about that anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sliver
I'm pretty sure you use the highway that tore through the mountains to get to the spots you like to hike. Do you fill up for gas and grab a bite to eat while you're there, too? Ever stayed at a hotel there? Gone skiing? Did you enjoy all of that development? But you draw the line at one more building? Sorry, you'd have a leg to stand on if you walked from your house through fields and forest to get to you favourite hiking spots, but since you hope on the twinned #1 and put 'er in cruise control at 120km/h while munching on a Big Mac I have a little less sympathy for your anti-development point of view.
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I grew up in Canmore, I watched it go from a town of 3500 to 14 000 people. And ya, I used to roll out of my back yard, hop on my bike, or go for a hike without touching a road. Now I've got to go farther and farther, traversing an abandoned golf course to get to some trails. Many are totally gone, or closed half the time for wildlife activities, becuase animals have been forced so far up the valley the only space left is where there are trails.
You say that as long as someone is willing to finance it, why should we care? Because take a look at the abandon golf course. They ran out of money after destroying the land. Now it sits empty, unusable by anyone and not even generating tax dollars.