My opinions.
1.
Go to jasper. It is fucking beautiful. It's also less known than banff, despite being part of the same national park.
2.
My advice as a hobbyist photographer. You know those boring formals with everyone dressed up, looking happy but sorta somber? Those are pretty much the ONLY photos most people choose to print and display. Wacky faces, guests, etc... nah. Everyone looks at those once on facebook then ... nothing ...
So. If you want to go cheap but not sacrifice quality. Hire a photographer in edmonton. Hire the photographer for, like, a half hour to do the formals. Do it wherever they recommend - they know the best spots. Ask in your contract for the following things:
- Digital full-resolution JPEGs (you won't get RAWs - don't ask), on a flash drive or DVD, within a reasonable amount of time.
- Release to print your own photos from those JPEGs, however, do ask and pay for the photographer to get you one or two prints. Printing photos is much more difficult than you think - to do it right, you need to: calibrate/profile your monitor, figure out who to trust to print this in high quality, figure out the material (canvas, aluminum, or simple paper) and framing and mounting if any, get a printer profile from them, run the jpeg through a profile matching program, and hope it comes out right. Printing photos at your local walmart is easy, you just upload jpeg and hit auto, but you have no guarantees it'll be good and no way to fix any mistakes.
- Deliver no more than 10, maybe 20 max photos from the formals, or as few as 5. Quality over quantity. The best wedding albums might only have 60 photos from the entire event, or even less (even 20 for an 8-hour shindig.)
For photos of the event itself... well, decide if the traditional photos are worth it to you. First kiss, first dance, blah blah. If they are, decide if you need them perfect. If so, disregard what I said above and hire a guy for the full day and pay around three grand. If you can live without some of those - well, there are plenty of people just starting out weddings for money but have decent experience; this will be way cheaper, but also will have no guarantees of it being perfect.
(As the saying goes: a hobbyist practices until they get it right, a professional practices until they never get it wrong.)
Definitely do not try to hire your friend with a dSLR - weddings are stressful as fuck, and ruin friendships.
If you want to go super cheap, then simply ask everyone to take photos of the main things (kiss, dance, etc) with their phones and send you the results. You will probably find at least a couple decent photos, for free.
But make sure you understand your expectations. Cheap out if you are 100% sure you are okay if you get no "perfect" photos of the event. Since photos are pretty much the only thing that last, other than memories, do be careful.