‘We’re going to lose Jasper’: Town pleads with Steven Guilbeault to fast-track recovery 

Canada’s Rocky Mountain parks are extraordinary. And Jasper, the mountain town that burned last spring, remains a storied place.

“I’ve been going there since I was nine, 10 years old,” reminisces Marc de La Bruyere, the 64-year-old owner of Jasper’s Tekarra Lodge. “It is a place on earth that I most love. It’s magic.”

In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe stayed in Jasper while filming River of No Return. “She was dating, or sleeping with … Joe DiMaggio,” chuckles Marc. “And they were kicked out of the Jasper Park Lodge because they weren’t married.” So, he continues with a grin, the actress checked into the Tekarra Lodge, just down the road.

When a catastrophic fire ravaged the mountain town last July, people from near and far rallied in support of this much beloved place. Firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and South Africa deployed alongside local emergency response crews. The feds in Ottawa, the Alberta government and the town of Jasper collaborated with Parks Canada to safely evacuate 25,000 people. Nearly six months later, the charred remains of one-third of the town have been cleared, residents are trickling back, and commercial property owners, including Marc, are desperate to rebuild.

But they see Alberta’s bete noire Steven Guilbeault, who as environment minister is the man with the most power to secure Jasper’s future, as a roadblock.

“I can’t believe Guilbeault hasn’t been out here to see what’s going on,” says Marc.

Located half a kilometre south of the Jasper townsite, Tekarra Lodge’s cabins and main lodge got clobbered by the wildfire; only the lodge’s staff and manager’s housing survived. And recovery is not going well, Marc reports in our recent conversation. “I’m very worried about the fact that it’s not going well. Because it’s not just a matter of a couple of things going sideways. I think there are real structural problems, and I don’t see a lot of real will right now to resolve those structural problems. And we have to, or we’re going to lose Jasper,” he despairs. “It’s that simple.”

Towns like Jasper and Banff are atypical; they are provincial municipalities that lie within the boundaries of federal parks managed by Parks Canada. Residents and businesses own their homes and buildings, and lease the land from the Crown. That means four levels of government, explains Marc, if you include Parks Canada.

Efforts are being made to rebuild, Marc acknowledges. “The town is trying really hard with super limited resources,” he reports. “I’ll give the province a huge amount of credit,” he adds, “I don’t agree with everything they’re doing, but I agree with 95 per cent of what they’re doing.” And in October, Ottawa passed new rules to give the municipality of Jasper more authority over land planning in the townsite, but the new rules don’t kick in until April.

The biggest problem, Marc explains, is Parks Canada takes direction from the federal environment ministry and they’re getting no direction from the top. So the bureaucrats are following the rule book, not prioritizing action.

Edmonton Liberal MP Randy Boissonnault, previously in charge of a cabinet-level working group on Jasper, has been stripped of all responsibilities after getting caught up in scandal. And the mandate of federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness Harjit Sajjan is limited during Jasper’s recovery phase.

Liberal super-environmentalist Guilbeault is no friend of Alberta’s UCP government — that’s no secret — but it does seem harsh for his ministry to not prioritize Jasper’s recovery; in my mind, that’s a no-brainer.

“I don’t think that a hotel owner in Banff or Jasper is at the top of Guilbeault’s friends’ list,” Marc shrugs. Meantime, our departing prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is (to paraphrase his exit speech) lecturing fellow politicians on the need to calm down and start working for Canadians, as Parliament has been seized with infighting resulting in a lack of productivity.

I couldn’t agree more; the country has been bureaucratized to death and Jasper’s rebuild trajectory is a case in point. The turnaround time for approvals by Parks Canada is glacial, Marc laments, and these delays will have real-time consequences for businesses. Even for those who were fully insured, the clock is ticking on business interruption insurance.

Again, Marc doesn’t blame the bureaucrats. Suddenly, they have hundreds of homes and all this commercial property needing to be rebuilt and “to their credit, they’re working very hard,” he adds. He’s encouraged by Parks Canada’s very recent proposal to set up a work camp at the Wabasoo campground, to house workers for the rebuild. “What I fault them for is not trying to take a more holistic approach to what rebuilding could look like, and not have to check every one of their 97 boxes.”

“If we accept that two-thirds of the revenue which funds Parks (Canada) comes from Jasper and Banff,” Marc observes, “they’re going to have a huge hole in the budget” if rebuilding doesn’t happen. That statistic makes my head whip.

The notion of relocating Parks Canada’s head office from Ottawa to the Alberta Rockies has been floated before; it may be time to re-evaluate that possibility, I suggest. We agree that decision-making in Ottawa feels distant for people in Jasper; the only thing that seems to be happening there is a House of Commons committee squabbling over who’s to blame. “I don’t really care,” Marc sighs. “What’s done is done. All that matters is where we’re going in the future.”

Most of the lodges and hotels in Jasper were built in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, Marc continues. And Parks Canada is telling commercial property owners they must rebuild in exactly the same way: “You will maintain exactly the character that you had before. You cannot modernize.” The rigidity is frustrating for Marc. “This is horrible, what has happened. But it’s also a great opportunity,” he rallies. “Let us use this opportunity to really re-imagine this in a smart way and create the Jasper of the 21st century.

“I love Jasper,” Marc concludes in a faltering voice, cupping his jaw with his hand. “Going back after the fire was really upsetting. And I’m still upset, as you can see.” Trees will grow back, he continues, but the real problem is the people. “Unless the government gets active … we’re going to lose Jasper Park. The heart of it. Because the people will go.”