Good morning and thank you for the invitation today. I'm going to briefly speak to three topics.
First, I will speak to some of the projects my family and I have been engaged in with various levels of government over the last six years in Banff to address the impact of personal vehicles on the park. These include our efforts to develop a multimodal green transit hub at the Banff train station and to raise funding and government support for a passenger rail service from the Calgary airport to Banff. These projects have the potential to help transform Banff from a laggard in transportation GHGs into North America’s first net-zero emissions community.
Second, I'm going to share my perspective on why at least two components of the corporate culture at Parks Canada pose significant barriers to its ability to successfully advance transformational projects.
Finally, as an extension of this last point, I'll provide my view as to why a public-private partnership business model must be adopted to make real change.
By way of background, I have been a resident of Banff for 24 years. During that time, my family—like so many others in the park—have grown increasingly concerned about traffic congestion in the town and around the national park. Traffic jams are commonplace and are a national embarrassment. In fact, in the time I have lived here, it has become routine for me to hear in our community comments like, “What are they going to do about it?” One day my husband and I stopped and asked ourselves, just exactly who is this “they” anyways?
Over the years there have been many great ideas put forth by others to address congestion, which failed to get advanced. We observed that the big transformational ideas were dead on arrival because the groups that advocated them lacked the real estate and some of the infrastructure to make them happen.
With this as background, six years ago my family and I essentially lost our minds and decided to throw our hats into the ring to see if we could become part of this “they” and attempt to bring some of the change that had been passed over in decades past. At the time, our view was, “How hard can this be?” We're going to invest in some real estate; we're going to work with government to build some infrastructure, and all of this will be done hand in hand with the Government of Canada. It would be Kumbaya.
To this end, we purchased the multi-decade lease for the historic Banff Train Station with the hopes of using the station and our new role as a stakeholder to spearhead the return of passenger rail service.
Next, we purchased the multi-decade lease from CP rail for the 32 acres of land around the station, so we could finally build intercept parking. That had been official town policy for 40 years, yet not a single intercept parking lot had been built.
Finally, a year later, we purchased the long-term lease for the Norquay ski hill, with the hope of creating aerial transit between the station and the hill. Our vision was to create a multimodal transit hub.
Since embarking on these projects, our experience in working with government has been very mixed. With respect to intercept parking, we have some good news. Back in September of 2019, we opened Banff's first-ever intercept lot, with 500 free parking stalls available to Banff's 4.2 million visitors.
As for Calgary Airport-to-Banff passenger rail, with considerable help from the Canada Infrastructure Bank we are helping to advance the project and are making great progress. I'll be happy to talk about that in the Q and A.
With respect to aerial transit, after waiting 18 months, Parks Canada came back to us regarding our first proposal and told us that they are declining our gondola. We are resubmitting a different proposal to them in the coming months.
Finally, we spearheaded the creation of Banff National Park Net Zero 2035, which is one of the projects we're very proud of. It's a grassroots, bottom-up initiative to create sustainable vehicle and visitor transit systems and low-carbon energy and waste solutions to transform Banff National Park into North America’s first net-zero community by 2035.
We call ourselves a “do tank”, not a think tank, and we are actively pursuing our work in this area. We've done a lot of research to show that this is not a solution in search of a problem. The key research shows that Banff National Park has 63 times the transportation GHGs of Zion National Park in the United States—63 times.