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Now that Stephen Harper has dealt a blow to the Liberals and their convolutions over Quebec, he might consider turning his deft hand to the territorial question looming over Banff. One day very soon, there is going to be a fight about a right to return that has nothing at all to do with Israelis or Palestinians, and everything to do with life in Canada's most celebrated national park.

Banff is the closest thing Canada has to a worldly paradise. In the town that gives the park its name, there's almost no unemployment, the views are terrific, the outdoor recreation endless, and there's a near-guarantee of a prosperous life for anybody who lives in this treasure chest of fun and opportunity.

But ay, there's the catch. Although, technically, anyone can buy property in Banff (if you can afford it, which is unlikely), to actually live here you must prove the "need to reside" -- have a job or an investment to manage, in other words. As the town's economy continues to prosper -- and as the children of parents working here grow up -- the residential needs of a population bursting at the seams are becoming increasingly hard to reconcile with laws designed to protect the park's wildlife.

Another reason that the atmosphere is so buoyant in the town is that much of the working population is made up of itinerant young people working in resorts, hotels and shops. They're a fit, happy lot, not just because they're put up in lodgings, thereby getting around the problem of housing, but also because they spend the money they haven't paid back in rent taking to the trails and then afterward to the town's many bars and restaurants.

So it's not just that the economy is perfectly protected here, with way more money coming in than out, but that everybody who lives here wants to be here, and if you forget that for a moment, there's always the twentysomethings around to remind you of your need to reside in this place. Lucky me was a part of this working lot, doing a variety of jobs here and elsewhere in the Bow Valley during the eighties.

Last month, in the midst of my book tour, I was able to visit Banff again as a guest of the Banff Centre, the school for the arts that was founded in 1933, and has since evolved into an eminently successful complex offering theatre, dance, music and writers' courses. I was there for the "Banff Summit Salon," a weekend literary getaway at end of the six-day Calgary Wordfest.

The centre seemed a lofty place in my younger years, so the visit had a nostalgic aspect for me. It overlooks the town from the flank of Tunnel Mountain, and its small cabins, where cellists play and authors write, are enviably set off in the woods.

But the centre has become a victim of its own success. Once designated "for the arts," it now calls itself a "Conference Facility." Many of the cabins now face tarmac roads or a parking garage. Wanting to grow but unable to expand, the centre is continually rebuilding upon itself, and is about to level the grand dining room that airily reflects the mountains' majesty. The tense faceoff between Banff's expansion and the park's stringent regulations is on display here in miniature.

The centre seemed cold and remote and generally the wrong place to be, so I walked into town to find my old haunts. Much was familiar. One benefit of the need-to-reside rule is that the shops generally have the same owners and remain recognizable over the years. Indeed, a lot of Banff's appeal is derived from it not booming in that voracious, cataclysmic way that many other ski resorts, from Whistler to Mont Tremblant, have done.

Still, the main avenue that was once a tacky haven of stores selling chocolates and bad sweets to Canadians, or furs and bad Inuit art to the Japanese (who still arrive here in throngs), has grown steadily more upmarket. Years ago, I remember asking a Banff-born pal why he was studying Japanese, and not French, and he answered, "Why speak the language of chambermaids?" Now, he's a stakeholder in one of Banff's most successful bars, and a couple of others in the nearby town of Canmore.

It was distressing to find that my favourite bar, the Lounge at the Voyager Inn, a nondescript grey brick building that used to be one of the last stops on Banff Avenue, had finally succumbed to changing times. As much as any place, this was where I learned the art of a good story. It was where I used to gather with friends beneath the room's bad art and plaques commemorating some fictive memory of the voyageur life of two centuries ago. It was where I once brought Fred Stenson, the author of The Trade, a brilliant novel about the 19th-century fur trade. Stenson knew the place, and he also knew Frank, the bartender whom you could depend on to play Jethro Tull's Aqualung at some point in the evening.

An urban legend, perhaps, but the Voyager was the place where the regular with his head on the bar was nudged at the end of the evening -- and was discovered not to be sleeping, but to be dead.

In its own way, the bar was as much of an institution for me as Schwartz's, the Montreal delicatessen. But today, the light in the subtly renamed Voyageur Lounge was unconscionably bright, on account of half a dozen televisions posted to the walls and tuned to hockey and football games. The charm was gone. The inn, I learned, is to be redeveloped soon. Plus ça change, plus c'est autre chose.

In your 40s, if you're lucky and talented, an eye for the past will make you the sort of adroit historical novelist that Stenson is. But if you're not, it can make you a bore, seduced by the false allure of old times. Screw it, I thought, give in -- to who you are and to what Banff is. And so I headed to the Banff Springs, that massive fort of a hotel I had never stayed in, and booked myself into the Willow Stream Spa, its baths and aquatic treatments a tribute to the town's history of hot springs.

It was a grand place. The mountain views were flabbergasting. My masseuse was from Nova Scotia, the receptionists were from New Brunswick and Quebec. It's their turn to play in the treasure chest now.

Banff National Park: www.pc.gc.ca/pn-np/ab/banff/index_e.asp.

Banff Centre: http://www.banffcentre.ca.

Calgary Wordfest: wordfest.com.

Fairmont Banff Springs hotel: http://www.fairmont.com/banffsprings. Noah Richler's This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada is in bookstores now