Perhaps you have heard of the “Canada Strong Pass.” Despite its name, it is not a pass but a discount the Government of Canada is offering this summer for VIA Rail trips, national parks admission, camping reservations, and other things I don’t care about because elbows up or something.

Why on Earth the Liberal Party of Canada should try to buy my vote I am not sure, especially since the election already happened, but cheaper train tickets and camping is a good way to go about it. Sadly, the Canada Strong Pass was announced in June while Parks Canada reservations opened in January. The country’s desirable national park campsites in both front and backcountry have been booked for months.

The train discount applies only to economy fares, so while great for people between Windsor and Quebec City, most of the country can still only pay more than the cost of an economy-class flight to sit in a chair for days at a time. However, don’t feel too bad about that, since the Canadian only crosses the country twice a week in either direction, demand for sleeping accommodation in the summer way exceeds supply, and most of it’s been sold out for months too.

On the bright side, the camping discount was retroactive, and I have a reservation in Jasper this summer. It’s in an area I had to phone the park to book, so a very nice lady from the trail office called me one Saturday morning from a private number asking me to read her my credit card information to process my refund. There is no lady in the world so nice as to phone me and ask for that, but I was obviously not the first person to say so and she suggested I call the Jasper trail office myself. I did, she picked up, and was successfully refunded $13.56 to make Canada strong or whatever.

By this point I was starting to think the Canada Strong Pass might be ridiculous, so I ran the numbers. Would you like to go camping this summer thanks to the Canada Strong Pass? In a phrase, too bad, it’s too late. A theme of this site this spring has been that our national parks, and especially our mountain national parks, need investment. How kind of the news cycle to bring that fact to the fore.

Camping in a national park is about as cheap as a destination vacation gets. You need some gear, but basic frontcountry stuff is not very expensive. Once you have the stuff, most of the cost is in getting there and eating when you arrive. The actual cost of a camping reservation is relatively low. If a family of four were to go frontcountry tenting in Banff for two nights, the Canada Strong Pass will save them $15.25 plus $42 in entry fees. Nobody will turn that down, and there are families to whom that might make a difference, but it’s hardly dramatic. Of course 25% off train fare would help if you could take VIA Rail to the national parks, but apart from Jasper you basically can’t, and even in Jasper if you don’t have a car your options dwindle fast.

The real problem is that, by the time the pass was announced, there was hardly any point is trying to apply it. Those who already booked are getting partial refunds of their fees, or extensions to their annual passes if they bought one, but that’s a bonus to people who had already committed to going outdoors, not an encouragement for new people to try it out. This isn’t theory, but cold fact, as you’ll find if you go try to actually book one of those cheap campsites right now.

Most people who camp go frontcountry camping, and most people who go frontcountry camping will do so in July or August. I picked a random non-long-weekend Tuesday and a random non-long-weekend Friday during July and August and hit each of the parks with frontcountry camping reservable on the Parks Canada website to see what sort of campsites I could get for my Canada Strong pass¹.

Obviously the weekend was worse than the weekday. Of the 32 national parks that have frontcountry camping available to book from the Parks Canada reservation page, 12 had a campsite for one small tent for Friday and Saturday nights. Geography was very much a factor, with the Canadian Rockies and the West Coast all-but-booked-solid but decent availability out east. Weekdays were better, including a handful of Canadian Rockies sites you might imaginably want to stay in. However, your options are rough all around, and even when there is availability, it’s not often something you’d want.

“Partial” availability means that somebody is staying Saturday but not Friday so you could book one night if you wanted to. To a weekend camper “partial” means “no.”

Some vacancies are in parks I know a bit about. Those weekend frontcountry sites at Gulf Islands National Park are not the pleasant ones on Pender Island, nor the boat-in-only but pretty ones on Sidney Island, but the austere McDonald Campground by the highway to Swartz Bay, whose primary virtue is that it’s not actually offensive and is about the cheapest place to stay in the Victoria area. The availability at Jasper looks a beautiful, and on a weekday is, but on a weekend is the grim campground at Overflow which is exactly what it sounds like: cramped, low-facility tenting up the Celestine Road miles from everywhere.

Camping at the various canals is setting up a tent by a lockhouse, which doesn’t sound like the worst weekend of anyone’s life but is not usually what campers have in mind. The Mingan Archipelago is boat or air access only and beyond most; the Thousand Islands are also boat access only, but somewhat more attainable. Anyway, people owning or chartering boats tend not to worry about 25% off a tentpad reservation.

If your time is absolutely your own, and if you can go anywhere you like, you can take advantage of that Canada Strong Pass and get a good campsite in any region of the country. That’s not nothing, and there will not be no campers benefiting from it. For a family suffering through our fifteen-year recession whose only source of income is EI, a few weeknights in the Rockies while the kids are out of school is more possible than it had been, and that’s not a bad thing, but as benefits for low-income families go this seems a singularly bespoke one that’s expensive and troublesome for Parks Canada to administer. The great majority of those benefiting from this scheme will be those who were going camping anyway. I’m grateful, but that’s a questionable national priority.

What about the real wilderness, the Canadian backcountry? This is more subjective to evaluate, because there is always something, especially if you hike 20-mile days, but also there’s a lot of backcountry fun outside the national parks that has always been free or darn close to it. The best I could think to do was look at availability for what I’d consider reasonable and well-known itineraries. There is therefore a giant western Canada bias because those are the trails I’m familiar with², but also, western Canada is where most of the reservable backcountry is anyway.

With the exception of the West Coast Trail, which has always been more accessible than people think because for whatever reason everyone thinks they should start a six-day-long trail on the weekend, the blue-chip trails are close to booked out within hours of reservations opening. Most of those with a weekday “no” are booked absolutely solid, every day of the season, and if you didn’t already have a reservation you’re waiting for last-minute cancellations. Always have been.

Even most of the July weekday “yes”es are marginal; you’re doing Skyline the wrong way, adding a giant climb up a fire road, and the Tonquin Valley ends with a big day from Maccarib. The only backcountry “yes”es for our August weekend are the Chilkoot Trail, which it is literally illegal to completely hike right now³, and the Long Range Mountains, way off on the western end of the island of Newfoundland and very interesting but far enough from everywhere that 25% off your camping permit is the least of your problems.

What, I ask, is the Canada Strong Pass for? Well, they tell us:

Canadians can enjoy free or discounted admission as they make Canada their travel destination this summer, from June 20 to September 2, 2025 (inclusively). The Canada Strong Pass celebrates what unites us—our shared experiences, natural wonders, and cultural richness.

The Pass is about making it easier for everyone—especially youth and families—to explore Canada and celebrate what makes this country extraordinary.

This is a good goal. The stock joke about Canadians is that we go anywhere but Canada for our vacations. The government can only do so much, directly: offer Canadians a 10% discount on Air Canada and watch Air Canada put prices up 15%. Part of why we have VIA Rail, and national parks, is so Canadians can enjoy this amazing, beautiful country. Canadians are talking about putting elbows up because the wrong political party is in office south of the border, and even if you think it’s silly, it’s real: why wouldn’t His Majesty’s Canadian Government take advantage of the opportunity and build domestic vacationing habits that might last a lifetime? Never let a crisis go to waste.

But what a wrong-headed way to go about it. Nobody needs free admission to go see a national park. Our national parks are packed. Even at full price, going to Banff in the summer is like being part of a human centipede, all crowds and heat and shit. We need more parks, and better access in the ones we have, with trails that ordinary people can hike and enough backcountry campsites to meet today’s all-time high demand. We don’t need cheap admission to already-crowded places. And VIA Rail? Don’t make me laugh! Thanks to decades of neglect, as a method of transportation, VIA Rail is less useful and more expensive than flying and as an experience, sitting in a 70-year-old economy-class seat for the days it takes to cross this country only to arrive eight hours late anyway will appeal to so few people that a statistically significant number of them are writing this article. Despite all of that, Canada’s two major sleeper trains, the Canadian and the Ocean, are sold-out of sleeper accommodation for most of the summer, every summer. We didn’t need 25% off to stimulate demand. There’s just no supply.

Earlier this spring I wrote about the hundreds of miles of backcountry trail Jasper National Park has eliminated in the past few decades, and the hundreds of miles more that are so degraded as to be useless to any but the hardened adventurer. These were not just things that happened, they were deliberate policy decisions which were documented and made with full awareness and in cold blood. I have not written in the same depth about how much of VIA Rail’s network has been killed in the past generation, but an old route map will tell the story for me.

It sometimes feels like the federal government is enamoured of the theory of VIA Rail and Parks Canada without having any idea what state they’re in. In 2019 then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged that the government would use VIA Rail to get Canadians camping in our national parks with a $2,000 camping bursary. At some point somebody noticed that it wasn’t physically possible for anybody to take VIA Rail to almost any national park, and that election promise went the way of so many with a better excuse than most, but then everyone in the government forgot again and then-environment minister Steven Guilbeault promised to take the train across Canada to talk about climate change, which was hardly more achievable unless he planned to ride the freights like a hobo. As Guilbeault is now the minister responsible for the Canada Strong Pass, it is hard not to ask questions about his office’s long-term memory.

To the extent that the Canada Strong Pass is meant to promote domestic tourism, it is just this side of useless, because there is too little left to promote. Then again, never let a crisis go to waste. Maybe thousands of Canadians will try to take advantage of this pass and see that, actually, they can’t. Maybe tough questions will be asked and somebody will say that, rather than waste millions of dollars giving $14 refunds to people like me who were already going camping, the government should get our parks and our rail network back into the shape it was in in the 1980s, when they catered to Canadians rather than tour groups and even an ordinary person, with ordinary fitness and an ordinary number of vacation days, had access to as much beautiful Canadian wilderness by rail and on foot as would last a lifetime.

1. Specifically, I pulled a Tuesday and a Friday without a long weekend out of them out of a random number generator then searched campsites for a party of 1, small tent, for two nights; this is the highest-availability option possible.
2. And reasonable is a point-of-view. For example, I would call Skyline in Jasper “reasonable” if you can get two of Signal/Tekarra and Little Shovel/Evelyn Creek, or one night at Snowbowl. Of course you can do Skyline with all sorts of other itineraries, you can run it in a day if you’re fit, but a 25% off deal seems like it does not attract the backcountry veteran so I am being somewhat, but not extremely, conservative.
3. The trail has been closed for end-to-end hikers since COVID in 2020. COVID itself closed the trail for a while, then there were washouts on the American site which the National Parks Service has taken its time repairing, and now it is illegal to cross the border at Chilkoot Pass. You can hike on the US side, or the Canadian side, but not both, and while the Canadian side in particular is very pretty and would reward an out-and-back, that’s a hell of a long way to go so nobody does.