U.S.-Canadian Outdoor Recreation

In June ABC-TV's "American Sportsman" filmed former President Jimmy Carter landing a 29-pound salmon on Quebec's famed Matapedia River. If enough U.S. vacationers follow Mr. Carter to Canada, it could start a trend that may help reduce the economic and environmental tensions that in the past few years have brought relations between the United States and Canada to their lowest point in a century.

The U.S. Forest Service projects that by the year 2000, North American demand for outdoor recreation will increase greatly, enough to overwhelm the U.S. supply of places for it. Curiously, however, this and previous U.S. studies pay scant attention to the actual and potential role of the Canadian outdoors in the North American outdoor recreation market, and Canadian surveys in turn ignore the U.S. factor.

Yet, Canada needs more U.S. tourists. The traditional balance in travel between the two countries has given way to a widening Canadian deficit. U.S. citizens traveling to Canada once spent more money there than did Canadians in the United States, but since 1975 the reverse has been true, with the U.S. enjoying a 1981 surplus of about $600 million. The balance in number of people crossing the border has also shifted. More Americans used to visit Canada than the other way around, but 1980 marked the start of a reversal. Despite the devaluation of the Canadian dollar, which makes a tourist's U.S. dollar go further in Canada, the number of Americans traveling to Canada has declined during the last decade to the lowest point ever recorded.

Most of the travel in either direction is for pleasure rather than for business, and far exceeds the foreign tourism into either country from all other parts of the world combined. Canadian tourists visit the United States because of cheap air travel, warmer weather, and a desire to sample attractions often located in or near big U.S. cities. Half of all Canadian travel spending is in the "sun states" of Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, and Texas.

Canada has enormous potential for outdoor recreation. Its three biggest provinces—British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec—each encompass more public land than the entire U.S. National Forest System. Quebec is larger than Alaska and boasts of 5 million lakes and rivers. Ontario has about one-fifth of the world's lake trout and an unusually long freshwater shoreline. British Columbia has extraordinary geographic variety, from sea-coast to the Cascade and Rocky Mountain ranges, and from rainforest to desert to the subarctic. And a greater proportion of land is publicly owned in Canada than in the United States.

According to Canadian government surveys, the major reason that U.S. citizens travel to Canada is to enjoy the outdoors. One million Americans each year—about one-sixth of Canada's total—fish in Canadian waters. More than half of those visiting Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Highlands National Park and 41 percent of those visiting Alberta's Banff National Park are U.S. citizens, as are 15 percent of visitors to Canadian national parks taken as a whole.

Canada's national parks are not as extensive as are their U.S. counterparts-88 units and 32 million acres compared with 333 units and 79 million acres. But Canada's provincial governments manage more large parks than do most states. Quebec has five provincial parks that are larger than Yellowstone, the largest U.S. national park outside of Alaska. Many of Canada's provincial parks are older, larger, and wilder than some of its national parks, yet only a few are well known in the United States. Ontario's Quetico Park, closer to Minneapolis than to Winnipeg and closer to Chicago than to Toronto, receives an impressive 89 percent of its interior visitors from the United States.

Outside the parks, the Canadian public lands—managed by the provinces, not by the federal government as in the United States—also contain many sites for camping, fishing, hunting, and hiking. These nonpark areas often are not well known to U.S. vacationers, and the level of U.S. use is quite low.

One reason fewer Americans are going to Canada is the price of gasoline. But the increased cost of auto travel may well work to Canada's eventual advantage by increasing the cost for Americans living in the East or Midwest to drive to the many U.S. national parks in remote parts of the West. Most Canadian national parks are only a few hundred miles from several large U.S. cities (see figure 1). Moreover, the Reagan administration opposes the creation of national parks close to cities in the Northeast and Midwest, and has cut back state and local park acquisition finds. Canada now may have an opportunity to capture more of the North American recreation market.

Management needs

Many of Canada's outdoor recreation resources are poorly developed, discouraging not only Americans but even some Canadians from using them. A surprising number of Canadians come to the United States for their outdoor recreation, in part because Canada's national parks are not well distributed throughout the country. Also, the provincial parks are deteriorating. For example, Quebec's Laurentides provincial park is being reduced in size and is subject to logging.

Several outstanding Canadian natural areas that probably should be parks or wilderness areas have yet to achieve that designation, again because of their valuable timber. Cases under debate include Quebec's Parc de la Riviere Malbaie and several areas in British Columbia, including Windy Bay in the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Stein River Valley near the coast, and the Valhallas in the interior. Another, in Ontario, is Northern Light Lake, a popular canoe area next to Quetico provincial park and the U.S. Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a wilderness.

One reason for the deterioration of Canada's provincially owned natural areas is overlapping jurisdiction among different agencies, with no one agency clearly in charge. For example, separate British Columbia ministries for forests, environment, lands and parks, and mines all have a hand in managing each area. Quebec's fish and wildlife, parks, and tourism agencies never have been strong, and recently were weakened further in reorganization. The government tourism advertising emphasizes French culture, an attraction for the urban tourist but not a strong point for many outdoor recreationalists. In Ontario, tourism still is in another department that concentrates on attracting urban visitors at the expense of outdoor recreationalists.

The vulnerability of its natural areas reflect Canada's historic economic dependence on exports of minerals and forest products, and dwindling timber supplies have placed new pressures on untouched areas. But not even Canadian wilderness is limitless, and advocates of preserving natural areas—not as strong in Canada as in the United States—can aid their cause by emphasizing that natural resources are valuable not just as commodities, but also as amenities that tourists will pay money to enjoy. Canada's unmatched legacy of natural resources is an important comparative advantage for the country in dealing with its current travel trade deficit with the United States. Improving the outdoor opportunities in Canada would ease the deficit both by attracting more U.S. vacationers and by making it worthwhile for more Canadians to vacation at home.

Strategies

An effort to increase U.S. tourism on Canadian wildlands might include the following:

• Improve the distribution of parks and recreational sites outside the parks, and invest more in them. The current level of management on many provincial lands is hardly above custodial, and sometimes below it. A managerial lesson is provided by the system of U.S. Forest Service public campgrounds, which were established in part to concentrate use and thus reduce environmental damage and security problems.
• Increase recreational fees for U.S. citizens. Currently some provinces charge more for hunting and fishing, but not for park entry or camping. This initiative could discourage some U.S. vacationers and lead to reciprocal U.S. action against Canadians, but many U.S. citizens would be willing to pay more in Canada if the new revenues directly or indirectly improved outdoor opportunities there.
• Emphasize the outdoors more in Canadian federal, provincial, and private tourism advertising to the U.S. market, and coordinate publicity regarding the provincial parks and public lands. Without a common "brand name” for the provincial destinations, the U.S. vacationer thinks only of Canada's national parks, which increases the pressure on them.
• Extend the Appalachian, Continental Divide, and Pacific Crest Trails into Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia, respectively. Currently these U.S. trails stop just south of the border. Extending them would boost the visibility of Canadian wildlands to the U.S. public and would increase U.S. recreational opportunities to such an extent that even U.S. subsidies would not be unreasonable.

Greater reliance on U.S. tourism as a counterweight to the pressures for logging and mining faces resistance, some of which is justified. Rich Americans once monopolized hunting and fishing rights in parts of Canada, provoking resentment that still festers. In the 1970s, for example, Quebec revoked the exclusive hunting rights of private U.S. clubs on public lands, and now it is difficult to obtain a hunting license in some parts of Quebec and elsewhere without securing the services of a Canadian guide. U.S. ownership of Canadian lands is an even more politically sensitive problem. Until the provinces have settled the question of whether or under what terms U.S. citizens can continue to buy land in Canada on a large scale, an influx of U.S. visitors always will be regarded with suspicion.

Still, it seems ironic that many Canadians are less opposed to cutting down trees, digging up minerals, and erecting hydroelectric dams, all partly or even largely for the U.S. market, than they are to U.S. tourists entering Canada to enjoy its scenic resources in their natural state; that these resources would be preserved for future Canadians is all but drowned in the din of debate.

Canadians and Americans have a common interest in seeing that Canada's vigorous development of its natural resources leaves some to be enjoyed in their natural state. If more Americans visit Canada, they may become more aware of U.S.-generated pollution that now threatens Canadian water and forests. And these visits clearly would strengthen Canada's travel balance of trade with the United States, economically bolstering Canadian wildlands whose survival no longer can be assumed.