Rob Murray: I understand the Town of Canmore is looking for some people to step forward for some task forces in town.  Mayor Borrowman, what can you tell us about that?

John Borrowman: There’s actually two task forces that were asking for interest to sit on. The Tourism Task Force is something that we’ve been talking about for more than a year and was just about to hit the public discussion levels, then COVID hit and everything fell to the side. Then fast forward to the time when we were putting in place possibilities in regards to COVID, we approved a Business Recovery Task Force, identifying the critical pain points in local industry sectors, to help create workforce retention and development strategies, and to identify supports and programs needed to recover and thrive. After we had decided to move forward with that, given what’s happening with the number of visitors and the impact to our community, we decided to start moving right now on the broader Tourism Task Force, recognizing that internationally the tourism industry is dealing with challenges created by overtourism in all of the areas around the world. This dynamic is seen in Canmore through our own increasingly complex relationship with our visitors and the tourism industry. Tourism is our primary economic driver, but we don’t really have a clear community alignment or an agreement around what that means. We have issues with traffic congestion impacts on affordability.

Tanya Foubert: This is the kind of process out of which there’ll be recommendations and actions to help deal with some of the issues that we’re struggling with. If we lose the support of the community for the industry it turns into a community where people dislike living here. It means it’s time to really take this head on.

I know in Canmore, for a long time people really didn’t want it. They didn’t want to be Banff, but burying our heads in the sand isn’t going to solve the problem. This task force really is the start of getting some solid results to improve the quality of life of people who feel that it’s suffered.

JB: There’s one very short bit I want to read from the Tourism Canmore Kananaskis Community Tourism Strategic Plan:

There needs to be a purposeful and deliberate effort on the part of the community and businesses to find common ground, and work toward a shared vision for tourism. Failure to take action and work collaboratively could result in overtourism and degradation of the core value proposition of the community. The impacts of this could include decreased quality of life for residents, negative environmental impacts, and reduced viability for tourism businesses. If the region chooses to act proactively, it has an immense opportunity to become an iconic, internationally known destination and the leader in sustainable tourism development.

So that’s the founding principle that we’re working from. Certainly this past month experience at Quarry Lake has underscored in a very ugly way how this can go bad really quick. This is a really important opportunity and I’m encouraging people from all aspects of life in Canmore, not just people that are directly involved necessarily with tourism activities. You can find information online. This won’t be successful unless we have a really strong and determined support from broad range of people in our community.

Filed under: Canmore, Mayor John Borrowman, Mountain Insider