A blissful motoring tour through snowy British Columbia with my wife over the holidays revealed the chasm between Canada’s two most western provinces when it comes to tourism development.

It was strange realizing that Alberta — Megaproject Central, where cost is no object, salaries are huge, the population is surging and downtown Calgary is full of BMWs and winter-driven Porsches — is lagging in a key component of our ostensibly post-industrial, knowledge- and leisure-based age.

Silver Star, a lovely ski resort above Vernon, B.C., has grown to a capacity of 5,000 beds. Its luxurious new Snowbird Lodge is so close to the slopes that if you miss your last turn, you slide into the hotel’s back door. To the southwest of Silver Star, the seemingly isolated resort of Big White has become a city. Hotels and cabins roll up the mountain’s flanks, totalling a mind-boggling 15,000 beds — more than those of Alberta’s century-old tourism showcase of Banff. Each new development attracts buyers from around the world. Things are moving in B.C. Even perennially left-behind Revelstoke will kick off a $1-billion ski area redevelopment.

In otherwise booming Alberta, the biggest winter tourism news is often the renovation of a few hotel rooms or a new lift replacing a 40-year-old contraption. Banff’s Sunshine Village, one of Alberta’s main ski areas, has just one tiny on-mountain hotel. There is no such accommodation at all near Lake Louise, meaning virtually everyone has to make the day trip from Banff, Canmore or Calgary.

This lack of activity is not a result of weak demand. Pre-Christmas skiing crowds were the largest I’ve seen in a lifetime, and the 150 kilometres of highway often resembled southern Ontario’s notorious Highway 401. Over the holidays, Sunshine Village repeatedly had to turn people away, having reached its regulated capacity of 8,000 skiers.

Meanwhile, throughout the year, Albertans flock to B.C., snapping up real estate hither and yon at stratospheric prices — earning the contemptuous moniker “Calgreedians” from bewildered locals.

Although Alberta’s current labour shortage isn’t helping, some attribute these differences to the fact that Alberta’s biggest tourism draws lie in its national parks, which occupy most of the province’s narrow mountain belt. National parks should remain primarily sacrosanct environmental preserves, and people should be grateful there is any tourism activity allowed within them. B.C., by contrast, is covered with mountains, allowing for huge development opportunities outside its national parks.

But that argument doesn’t explain why Alberta has done so little outside federally held lands. Kananaskis Country, which is southwest of Calgary, was originally conceived as a mixed-use area to include major tourism development. But the provincial government has shifted to wilderness preservation almost more zealously than has Parks Canada. The Alberta government vetoes idea after idea, and makes life miserable for operators wishing merely to renovate aging facilities.

Alberta has no place in which a family can purchase on-mountain real estate — not one. Canmore, the seeming exception, lies a long drive from any ski lifts. Ditto for the wind-blasted Crowsnest Pass. And although tiny Castle Mountain, in the southwest, permits private cabins and fourplex townhouses beside its lifts, they’re on leased land. That complicates financing and permanently depresses values.

So, why should booming Alberta even worry? Maybe we should accept being tourism laggards. But are we not constantly urged to break our single-industry dependence on oil and natural gas? Tourism would be a nice long-term, service-based complement to resources extraction.

The interprovincial policy differences are having subtly worrisome effects. One couple I know whose careers are tourism-based recently left Banff for Silver Star. Even though they ached to leave the province they love, they had to go because things here were simply stalled. They’d even missed Alberta’s dizzying real estate run-up because Banff is governed by Soviet-style federal rules requiring any prospective resident to prove a job-related need to reside. The town’s population is fixed, growth is zero and property values are stagnant.

Moving to Silver Star lifted a huge weight from this couple. They now enjoy the freedom to make things happen — the life-giving oxygen needed by any business person and any industry. IE