The business community of Jasper, whose economy depends on tourism, is facing an overwhelming challenge in the months ahead. Rebuilding the townsite will take precedence as businesses such as hotels, guided tours and restaurants try to lure back visitors.AMBER BRACKEN/The Canadian Press
Increasingly destructive wildfires, like the one that ravaged Jasper, are taking their toll on the country’s tourism industry, forcing operators to prepare for emergencies and rethink marketing campaigns in the hope that vacationers will keep Canada on their lists of preferred destinations.
In the Jasper National Park area last week, 25,000 people – including 15,000 tourists – were forced to evacuate to flee fast-advancing flames, and there’s no timeline yet for the return of residents.
Rebuilding the townsite, which lost 30 per cent of its structures in the blaze, will take precedence as businesses such as hotels, guided tours and restaurants try to lure back wary visitors on a schedule that is not yet known.
Jasper is just the latest community to be scorched. In recent years, blistering heat waves and fires have wreaked havoc on Canadian summers, with thousands of square kilometres of forest destroyed and some mountain playgrounds turned to rubble.
The overall cost of increasing fire threats throughout Western Canada’s tourism destinations is tough to tally. But it is having an effect.
“What we can say though is that it is causing tourists to question whether or not they should be coming to Canada,” said Beth Potter, CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada. “We’ve seen some cancellations, but we’ve been, as an industry, spending a lot of time and effort reminding people that Canada is an incredibly large country, and we are still open for business despite some areas being affected by wildfires.”
Morningstar DBRS estimated the insured losses of the Jasper complex wildfire could top $700-million, with tourism businesses making additional claims. That would make it Canada’s second-costliest wildfire after the 2016 inferno that destroyed large parts of Fort McMurray, Alta, which had insured damages of $4.4-billion, when adjusted for inflation, it said in a report.
The industry is well aware that wildfires are making travellers think twice about summer vacations in mountain destinations. The potential danger, and the overall unpleasantness of poor air quality, is taking a toll.
“It really does have a bigger impact on the international visitation than it does on Canadian tourists. But it’s also devastating at the local level,” said Ms. Potter. Jasper represents a particular struggle affecting a popular vacation spot, she said.
The picturesque town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a mountain destination on its own, but also a stopover for tourists that visit numerous Western Canadian locales in a loop via car, RV and train.
“These are jobs that aren’t being filled. These are businesses that are not generating revenue. There’s going to be a quite a large expense in rebuilding, and that’s going to cause some challenges for businesses that were really just starting to be in a good place following the tumultuous years of the pandemic.”
Canadawide, the tourism industry generates $130-billion a year in receipts, and accounts for one in every 10 jobs. The Jasper disaster will mean a drop this year, Ms. Potter said. As many as 2.4 million people visit the park annually.
Visitors to Canada’s Rocky Mountains spend billions of dollars each year to experience rugged and unspoiled landscapes, lakes, hot springs and wildlife. Most of them come from the province or other parts of Canada, though international tourists also descend on the region and spend millions on hotels, food, tours and souvenirs.
In 2022, tourists in the Alberta side of the Rockies spent $2.3-billion – about 22 per cent of the total tourism expenditure in the province that year, according to the provincial government. More than 80 per cent of those visitors were from Canada.
Alberta’s tourism ministry said in an e-mail that it’s too early to factor risks into provincial budget planning, and that there are too many unknowns to accurately gauge how this year’s fire season is impacting the province’s revenue forecast. And it’s challenging to quantify lost productivity and tourism revenues owing to wildfires, because a multitude of variables make each situation unique.
The growing impact of climate change, in the form of destructive wildfires, is being seen in other destinations that attract visitors from around the world. In the past few years, Greece, Australia and California have been among those that have dealt with devastation. Indeed, flames from the largest wildfire in the United States are currently destroying forests and homes in Northern California.
In 2023, wildfires burned a record 16.5 million hectares in Canada – more than double the previous peak and nearly seven times more than the historical average, according to the Canadian Climate Institute, a policy think tank.
The costs of weather-related disasters and catastrophic events have amounted to around 6 per cent of Canada’s annual GDP growth, the CCI said in a recent report, up from an average of 1 per cent in previous decades. In the insurance industry, nine out of the 10 most costly years in Canadian history have occurred since 2011.
Disasters like Jasper cause reputational damage. International visitors as well as tourists from other parts of the country have watched successive summers of heat and wildfire, and decided not to travel west, said Daniel Scott, director of climate-change programs at the University of Waterloo. His specialty is climate and tourism.
Last year, British Columbia suffered its worst wildfire season, with tourism regions such as the Okanagan getting the brunt.
“If you want to do camping and park-related tourism, just having an open-fire ban really changes the camping experience,” Prof. Scott said. “Some people might say, ‘I’m going to go to Muskoka or to Quebec or somewhere instead, where I can have that same experience and not have a threat to health related to the smoke or having to be evacuated, et cetera.‘ ”
He said the federal government has not given the tourism industry the attention that it has other sectors that face climate risk, such as agriculture or forestry. “Hopefully something like this that happened last year, then again with Jasper, will be a wakeup call and get them to take the tourism industry a little bit more seriously.”
Ms. Potter said the industry has taken a two-pronged approach in response to the increasing fire threat and other climate-related risks. One is providing emergency preparedness training for operators, with Travel Alberta taking the lead in its own province. The other is reminding travellers that Canada is more than just a winter or summer destination, and promoting tourism in every month.
Bala Nikku, an associate professor of social work at Thompson Rivers University who specializes in disaster science, adds that the true economic cost is much broader than tourism and infrastructure.
Governments should also factor in the social, cultural and spiritual costs of disasters like wildfires, even if they’re not statistically included in economic analyses, Dr. Nikku said.
That means the health and agricultural costs of the smoke that fans out across North America in the wake of wildfires, for example, or the impacts to mental health caused by losses of jobs, homes and businesses.