The Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise taps into the iconic emerald-blue lake in Alberta that shares its name for everything from supplying its laundry room and watering its gardens to ensuring the ice buckets are filled.
That water distribution system has lost almost 510,000 cubic metres of water – the equivalent of 33,630 tanker trucks or 204 Olympic-sized swimming pools – pulled from the lake since 2003, according to records that the hotel submits to Parks Canada, which oversees all operations in Banff National Park.
That's almost as much water as Ottawa allows the hotel to draw each year from the postcard-perfect lake that thrives on glacial runoff in Canada's oldest national park.
Brad Cabana, a former member of Parks Canada's advisory development board, rang alarm bells about the water losses for more than a year before he resigned. He said he received little explanation – or assurances the problem has been fixed.
“This is not a slough in Saskatchewan,” said the former mayor of Elstow, Sask., who lives in the Rocky Mountain resort town of Canmore, Alta. “This is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I'm trying to save something that can't speak for itself. I want to hold people accountable.”
Parks Canada doesn't monitor levels at Lake Louise because it is always changing, affected by the seasons and dependent on rain as well as the melt from Victoria Glacier above it. But evidence suggests the main glacier is under pressure.
“It's definitely melting away,” said Gerald Osborn, a professor of geoscience at the University of Calgary who has studied glaciers.
Although the icepack loss has not been calculated recently, scientists say glaciers in the Rockies are declining and at a more rapid pace.
“It's a natural recession, but it is augmented by the man-made effects,” Prof. Osborn said.
The impact of global warming is a problem for huge regions, including Western Canada, that rely on glaciers for water for their homes, businesses and farms.
Mr. Cabana noticed what he considered a large water-loss rate at Lake Louise in February, 2008, when the hotel presented his board with a $7-million plan to upgrade its water-treatment plant and build a huge new reservoir.
Records eventually showed that one-fifth of the lake water drawn by the hotel's treatment plant (which is used by the hotel and the nearby Deer Lodge and Parks Canada washrooms) has been disappearing from the metered distribution system.
Over the years, the hotel has installed low-flow toilets and shower heads, tap aerators and taken other high-tech conservation measures. Since 2001, water consumption has dropped 36 per cent.
While experts say even well-run water systems have an 8- to 12-per-cent loss or leakage rate, average annual losses at the hotel ranged from 6.9 per cent to 33.4 per cent. There has been an average annual loss of 21 per cent between 2003 and today.
The board rejected the upgrade, but it went ahead with Parks Canada's blessing. Mr. Cabana pursued the issue, but recently quit the board in frustration. He continues to hunt for answers.
“Apart from where the hell is the water going and what the hell are people doing about it, it's certainly an embarrassment for Canada,” he said.
The advisory development board, which has seven volunteer members, was set up in 1998 to let Canadians be involved in deciding what projects go ahead in Banff, Yoho and Kootenay national parks in Alberta and British Columbia. It's supposed to make sure permit applications receive “consistent, fair and transparent reviews.”
When Mike McIvor of the Bow Valley Naturalists, a Banff-based conservation group, attended the board's first public hearing, he was impressed by the tough questions. But soon, he said, the board turned pro-development, and its recommendations could be overruled by the park superintendent.
“We came to call it the approval development board,” Mr. McIvor said.
“We stopped participating because we thought the role of the board had been reduced to choosing what colour should be on the bathroom walls,” he said.
