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December 15, 2005: Spoof campaign angers local ski operators

B.C.

Spoof campaign angers local operators

By Cathy Ellis

Dec 15 2005

Cathy Ellis – Reporter

Rocky Mountain Outlook

A billboard campaign on climate change featuring a skier taking to the brown grassy slopes of the Rocky Mountains has angered local ski hill operators.

The huge billboards that spoofs Canada’s iconic landscapes greeted more than 10,000 delegates at last week’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal.

One of the billboards, designed to look like posters to raise awareness of climate change, features a ski racer trying to pick his way down a dry slope in the Rockies.

At the same time, a new report on the implications of climate change for tourism and recreation in Banff National Park, released Tuesday (Dec. 13), does not paint an entirely rosy picture for local ski hills, either.

But Crosbie Cotton, director of the National Parks Ski Area Association, said the David Suzuki Foundation’s campaign goes too far in promoting a "doom and gloom" scenario.

He said this campaign does nothing to help the work the ski hills are doing to attract skiers from Quebec and Ontario to the local hills, particularly given challenges in the U.S. market.

"We’ve put a lot of effort into Quebec and Ontario to say that skiing is fantastic here, and here is some radical environmental group just abusing the truth," said Cotton.

"We learned a long time ago that, as reasonable as we are, some people want to paint a world that we won’t survive in — and this is one of the groups."

Officials with the David Suzuki Foundation say the billboards are being used to show the consequences of taking no action on climate change, which will put Canada’s natural heritage at risk.

Another of the billboards set up in Montreal features a photograph of a young girl in a bathing suit standing on a dry lakebed at The Great Lakes.

"When you think of Canada, you think of the spectacular natural landscapes that tie our country together,’’ said Morag Carter, director of the foundation’s climate change program.

"But climate change threatens those landscapes."

Meanwhile, the Banff report indicates Banff’s ski industry is projected to be impacted negatively by lower snowfall due to climate change, particularly at the base of ski runs.

However, the report indicates ski hills will be able to offset the loss of natural snow with snowmaking.

By relying entirely on natural snow, average ski seasons at low elevations of 1,600 metres at Banff are projected to decrease 50 per cent to 57 per cent in the 2020s and 66 to 94 per cent in the 2050s.

A decrease in the lengths of average ski seasons is projected for Lake Louise as well, but the magnitude of change is much less than in Banff.

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