Editor:
Seems like the UN/UNESCO is now in control of the Hotel and area surrounding Lake Louise.
This is Canada – it’s time we took back control of our country and kicked the UN out.
Parks Canada and its Advisory Development Board, which is supposed to involve Canadians in what projects go ahead in the Rocky Mountain parks, has given the hotel six months to show that the water use situation in the UNESCO World Heritage Site has improved.
Dawn Walton
Calgary — From Monday’s Globe and Mail Published on Sunday, May. 23, 2010 7:51PM EDT Last updated on Sunday, May. 23, 2010 8:30PM EDT
The Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise now has until the end of the year to show Parks Canada that it is not wasting water from the emerald-blue lake in Banff National Park from which it takes its name.
But based on preliminary water use data, Ottawa says it is “definitely encouraged” that the posh Alberta hotel may be on its way to having its water woes under control.
The Globe and Mail outlined how the hotel’s water distribution system had lost nearly 510,000 cubic metres of water taken from Lake Louise between 2003 and 2009, prompting a probe by Parks Canada.
According to records submitted to Ottawa, 21 per cent of the lake water drawn by the hotel’s aging treatment plant had vanished from the metered distribution system on average each year between 2003 and the fall of 2009.
In 2008, a member of Parks Canada’s Advisory Development Board raised a red flag about a $7-million plan to upgrade the hotel’s water-treatment plant and reservoir. Brad Cabana noticed what he viewed as a large gap between the amount of water drawn from the glacier-fed lake and the amount of water used by the hotel. He subsequently resigned, citing “environmental negligence.”
Despite expectations that the new water system, which is supposed to be more efficient and measure every drop of water used by the hotel, would be operational by last fall, Parks Canada revised its expectation to the end of February, 2010. Now hotel officials said the plant, which treats water for use by hotel guests and sends waste water for treatment, won’t be fully online until June 1.
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