Organize a volunteer-based fruit picking program. Consider financial penalties to residents who don’t remove bear attractants. Fence the town.
Those were just three pieces of feedback about bears in the Jasper townsite.
They were offered by members of the public to Parks Canada representatives during the Annual Public Forum held both in-person and virtually back in March. The virtual session was held for the first time ever to expand the reach of attendance for people who couldn’t attend the first event.
Parks Canada just released these results on its website last week.
The forum began with a presentation from Supt. Alan Fehr, with external relations manager Neil McInnis and resource conservation manager Dave Argument offering their own summaries and highlights from the Jasper’s 2023 Annual Report.
“It's a really good way for us to get a sense of where people are at, what their issues are, what their concerns are and to get advice on things like the fruit trees or the dogs,” Fehr said.
“These are issues that touch people's lives. It's nice to get people's thoughts, recommendations, ideas from them.”
The in-person event hosted approximately 100 Jasperites while more than 40 participants attended virtually during the second event. All told, more than 200 written comments were collected on bears in town as well as wildfire risk reduction efforts, preventing aquatic invasive species, Indigenous relations and cultural heritage, and the usage and management of the Park Canada’s extensive trail system, among others.
The feedback helps to inform and shape how the park is managed.
Fehr said that he spoke individually with residents about Parks Canada’s investments and maintenance of backcountry trails and infrastructure.
“There’s a perception that we're not putting money into the back country,” he said.
“We actually put large quantities of money in the back country. The issue is we have such a big back country that it costs a lot to maintain infrastructure, especially infrastructure that's aging. Plus, there’s issues were trying to sort out with respect to ecological concerns: where do we want to keep the numbers very low and not encouraging visitation. There were some suggestions about are there more things that ourselves and that the town and others could do in terms of broader environmental stewardship.”
In return, Parks Canada reported that visitation to Jasper National Park continues to be strong with approximately 2.48 million visitors last year. That represents an increase of 60,000 from 2022 and a more than 20 per cent jump from 2012/13 when visitation had only just surpassed the 2.00 million milestone.
Some of the other highlights revealed that the trail crew logged more than 20,000 hours maintaining, constructing and grooming trails, while there were 520,700 front country campers and 15,100 backcountry campers last year alone.
Staff also removed 80 bear-attractant fruit trees as the human-wildlife coexistence staff responded to more than 400 bear incidents in the townsite.
