Alberta Unveils New Parks and Crown Land Strategy With $236M for Recreation

The Government of Alberta has unveiled two updated policy frameworks to guide recreation and conservation across provincial parks and Crown lands, alongside a commitment of more than $236 million to improve recreation access provincewide, a move that could carry significant implications for leisure spaces in the Bow Valley.

The Plan for Parks and the Crown Land Recreation and Conservation Strategy outline how the province intends to manage growing recreation demand while protecting ecosystems and wildlife corridors. Together, the strategies emphasize expanding access, supporting tourism opportunities and strengthening enforcement, while committing to conservation.

Alberta’s Plan for Parks applies specifically to provincial park sites, including Bow Valley Provincial Park, Bow Valley Wildland Provincial Park, Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park and Spray Valley Provincial Park. It sets out four goals: improving access, conserving Alberta’s natural legacy, providing diverse nature-based experiences and ensuring long-term sustainability. The Crown land strategy focuses on public lands across Alberta and aims to enable diverse outdoor recreation opportunities, keep our ecosystems healthy and strengthen partnerships between government and community groups involved in recreation management.

Both documents place balance at the centre of their approach. The parks plan sets out a dual mandate of conservation and recreation, while the Crown land strategy calls for habitat protection and human-wildlife coexistence alongside expanded access.

The policies respond to accelerating recreation demand across the province. Since the first Plan for Parks was released in 2009, Alberta’s population has grown by more than 35% to just over five million, increasing pressure on parks and public lands. While the province estimates that $2.6 billion worth of existing infrastructure supports recreation and visitation in provincial parks, those facilities require ongoing renewal and reinvestment as they age. The update to the plan reflects the need to maintain that infrastructure and, in some areas, build new trails and campgrounds to accommodate continued population growth and recreation demand.

For the Bow Valley, already facing crowded trailheads, parking overflow, wildlife conflict and tourism pressure, several commitments outlined in the policies could have tangible local effects.

The Plan for Parks calls for expanding and refurbishing campsites, overnight accommodation and day-use areas in high-use regions, potentially involving infrastructure upgrades and improved trail connectivity. Expanded connectivity could result in more formalized routes, improved signage and stronger links between parks and Crown land in the Bow Valley, changes that may enhance user experience but also redistribute recreation pressure across surrounding landscapes.

Additionally, The Plan for Parks commits to ensuring “a consistent enforcement presence” and states that education, compliance and enforcement are integral to maintaining sustainable visitation. It also calls for developing a visitor-use management framework to identify visitation pressures, support compliance with regulations and integrate effective tools for site management. Those tools include education, enforcement and modernization of park legislation. The Crown land strategy similarly references enhanced monitoring of ecosystem health and visitor outcomes to inform future planning, measures that could translate into increased on-site enforcement and monitoring.

The Crown land strategy also references developing water-based recreation strategies, creating coordinated plans to manage river access, paddling infrastructure and related facilities while balancing recreation demand with environmental protection, including on the Bow and Kananaskis rivers.

Sarah Elmeligi, MLA for Banff-Kananaskis, described the documents as broad strategic frameworks rather than direct responses to local congestion and wildlife conflict.

“These plans aren’t meant to solve a problem. But they are meant to provide overarching guidance and direction for the management of parks and protected areas and public lands,” said Elmeligi.

Instead, Elmeligi said individual park management plans are better suited to directly address the immediate pressures facing the Bow Valley.

“The issues of the Bow Valley are more easily addressed in individual park management plans. All of which haven’t been updated in decades,” said Elmeligi. “To truly address the issues in the Bow Valley, with increasing tourism and recreation pressures, we need to have new and updated park management plans.”

While she expressed support for some elements of the Plan for Parks, including creating new parks and expanding recreational opportunities, she raised concerns about the Crown Land Recreation and Conservation Strategy.

“The Crown Land Recreation and Conservation Strategy is weak, leaving too many gaps for misinterpretation, and does not consider the cumulative effects of the many other activities happening on public land, like industry use and grazing,” said Elmeligi.

Additional concerns were raised about both policies’ lack of clearly defined capacity limits and measurable indicators of success.

Neither document establishes explicit numerical limits for when an area might be considered at capacity. Instead, both rely on learning by doing, an approach that involves monitoring visitation levels and updating park plans over time.

“There is no recognition of limits in either of these plans. So therein lies part of the problem,” said Elmeligi. “Both plans want to increase recreational use and access and neither plan recognizes that there may be limits to those activities based on ecological constraints, and/or user conflict. Both plans are written as if we can do everything everywhere all the time.”

When asked how the public will know whether the strategies are working, Elmeligi said monitoring details remain unclear.

“The metrics that the public should be looking for will come from the monitoring plan, which is not detailed in either strategy,” said Elmeligi, adding that basic indicators should include visitation levels, visitor satisfaction, ecological impacts and landscape attributes.

While the province has committed over $236 million to recreation and access improvements across parks and Crown land alongside the new policies, it has not specified how much of that investment will directly affect the Bow Valley region.

Overall, the new strategies reflect the government’s position that recreation growth and conservation can coexist. Whether that balance can be achieved in heavily used areas such as the Bow Valley may depend on how infrastructure investments, individual park management plans, enforcement resources and monitoring programs are implemented in the years ahead.