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The incident identified by Ms. Portenier is a very serious issue that deeply concerns Whistler-Blackcomb. No one should ever experience a situation similar to the one Ms.

The incident identified by Ms. Portenier is a very serious issue that deeply concerns Whistler-Blackcomb. No one should ever experience a situation similar to the one Ms. Portenier describes, whether they are a long time local, staff member or new visitor.

More than any other year in recent memory, Whistler-Blackcomb has seen an increase in poor behaviour on the mountains. A small minority of individuals seems to act with disregard for the safety and respect of us all.

Whether this behaviour is demonstrated as speeding in slow zones, refusal to follow the Alpine Responsibility Code, or in this case, snowballs, it is not acceptable.

Whistler Blackcomb’s Senior Management is currently reviewing its options to reverse this trend. In some cases, the solution may be as simple as altering mazing and fencing to change traffic flows. In others, there may need to be more staff monitoring controlled areas and co-ordination with lift hosts to identify offenders as they near a lift terminal. In all cases, Whistler-Blackcomb’s commitment to our guests and to our community is to provide a safe and enjoyable experience.

To Ms. Portenier, the other members of her ski class, and our staff, we sincerely hope that this incident does not spoil your love for the mountains. Please be assured that the Whistler-Blackcomb Senior Management Team is taking firm action to ensure that everyone may enjoy a positive experience on Whistler and Blackcomb.

Bob Dufour

Director of Operations

Whistler-Blackcomb

After reading G.D Maxwell's column on April 4th and Mitch Rhodes' subsequent letter, I feel compelled to reply.

The actual facts of the article Mr. Rhodes mentions needs some clarification. What Mr Rhodes describes as a US plan for "World domination" was actually penned by Paul Wolfowitz, who is currently number two at the defence secretary, not Dick Cheney.

Wolfowitz's concept following the first Gulf war was that the U.S. should be pre-emptive in its engagement with Iraq, i.e. regime change. At the time, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker cautioned against this provocative defence posturing as they believed that it would destabilize the region and create a fissure in the coalition that removed Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Then former Defence Secretary, Dick Cheney was assigned the task of reworking the document, the idea this time was containment of the Iraqi regime through sanctions and patrolled no fly zones.

Fast forward to Sept. 11th and containment no longer seems an appropriate option. U.S. foreign policy now reflects the attitude that they must engage terrorists groups and countries that pose a threat to international security. Those are the facts.

Here's some advice fellas: don't believe every conspiracy theory you hear. And next time you want to do some America bashing ask yourself: Would the world be a better place right now if the Communists had won the Cold war?

Peace.

Ralph Forsyth

Whistler

"The Super Rich are pushing out the Rich"

— a bumper sticker seen in Aspen circa 1977.

In Canada we are more civilized. In Whistler we don't push people out. Instead our provincial government offers incentives to leave in the form of school taxation and a cap on the Home Owner Grant.

Anyone who has owned property in Whistler for 10 or even 15 years has seen values soar. As assessed values increased so did taxes. No surprises here. If your mortgage (assuming you have one) was based on the property value at the time of purchase your equity to debt ratio has multiplied to your advantage. If you were lucky enough to purchase property over 30 years ago, like we did when lots could be had for under $5,000, the equity to debt ratio is positively lucrative today (at least on paper). But the value is a only relative. The equity doesn't become lucrative unless you leave Whistler. This is where incentives become a factor.

When we first moved to Whistler (then called Alta Lake) there was little development and even less economy. So, the first five years or so were about basic survival, just hanging on. Then came a long period of golden years for locals when life was modest but good. We could afford to enjoy the amenities that Whistler provided especially that amenity that brought us here in the first place, recreation. We could play and be happy. Life was good.

But everything has a price and success is no exception to the rule. As Whistler increasingly became an international destination resort prices became aligned with the market. Going out for a fancy dinner soon equated with going on a nice vacation, you had to save for it. As the cost of recreation moved away from comfortable reach the rising equity in property had less emotional value. Recreation, the motive for coming to Whistler for many, was becoming less accessible.

Now with the federal government ratcheting up interest rates many are beginning to enter the hanging-on mode that we experienced when we first moved here over 30 years ago. In recent years many have gone from basic living to basic survival. More will follow. As this happens there will be increasing reason to leave. School taxation and the cap on the Home Owner Grant, combined with favourable equity to debt ratios, provide the necessary incentive. And for each resident property owner to leave this same combination provides a very strong disincentive for other than the wealthy to move to Whistler. A lose-lose situation for the community.

Following Paul O'Mara's lead I sent letters to our premier, minister of finance and MLA. Yesterday I received a reply from the Premier's Office that stated in part, "Unfortunately, it was not possible to implement a solution in time for the February provincial budget."

Relief next year or the year after or the year after that may be too late. It may already be too late. Many are already packing their bags or least moving in this direction. But there is a positive side to this. Opportunities can be found in any situation. Moving will probably become a growth industry in Whistler, as will bumper stickers. Perhaps one will read "I wasn't pushed out of Whistler. I was paid to leave."

David MacPhail

Whistler

BC Rehab Foundation's 7th Annual Dual Mountain Rally raised close to $35,000. The net proceeds of this event are going to buy a new sit ski for the Whistler Adaptive Ski Program and the rest is going towards their bursary fund that pays for disabled people to get back on the slopes who normally cannot afford the fees. The BC Rehab Foundation donates about $1 million a year to help enhance the quality of life for those who have physical disabilities from amputation and spinal cord or brain injury through hosting events like these.

I want to say a special thank you to Katmandu Board and Bike for donating four helmets that save lives, Snowcovers Sports for five pairs of skis that went to Glacier Creek Development's team for raising $9,000, Affinity Sports, ResortQuest, Farfalla Hair and Body, The Body Shop, Blue Highways Shiatsu and Massage, our local media sponsors Mtn. Fm and The Question and the Pique Newsmagazine for their great coverage and of course, Whistler-Blackcomb.

Thanks to all the other sponsors too. Thank you to all the businesses who put up posters up for us, to those who donated pledges and to the participants and celebrity coaches for the great time. We'll see you next year.

For those of you interested, The 1st Annual Whistler Adaptive Ski Program Golf Challenge is on May 30th at the Nicklaus North Golf Course. Foursomes are $1,000 (includes green fees and gala dinner) and Hole Sponsorship is $2,500 (includes Foursome). Please register before April 30th. For more information please call 604-905-2071 or email:

adaptiveski@intrawest.com

Tyler Mosher

Whistler

Half-way along the trail connecting the lower Twin Lakes area with Function Junction is a water crossing consisting of a series of planks 6-12 inches in width. Until recently there were three trees that you needed to manoeuvre between just before or after crossing the water, depending on which way you were riding. Now there are three sawed-off stumps, one for each brain-cell the cutter must have used before taking a saw to the trees.

Upon seeing this I had to wonder:

Was your head too fat to fit between the trees?

Were you scared of falling the foot and a half?

Scared of getting wet?

Did you even try to learn how to ride it?

With a bit of practice you would have realized how easy it was. And if you still couldn't do it you could have done what everyone else does – walk across (yes, the whole 6 foot span).

Obviously my assumption at this point is that this was an act of cowardice. However, I'm a reasonable person and I'd like whoever did this to prove me wrong. Write in with your name and an explanation for your actions.

Patrick Smith

Whistler

It is unfortunate that yet another one of Whistler's businesses has chosen to advertise and host an event which they are calling a "Pimp & Ho" party. Perhaps these events were more acceptable years ago when the realities of prostitution weren’t as well known, a time when people actually believed movies like Pretty Woman were an accurate reflection of the sex trade.

In case you are reading this and thinking that I am just being uptight and should lighten up about this type of "fun" consider these facts: The average age of entry into the sex trade in B.C. is 14. Women only enter the sex trade through coercion, drug addiction, and desperation. Statistics from a Calgary based street-level outreach organization advise that the average life expectancy of a prostitute is seven years, with most dying from overdoses, suicide, disease and murder.

The word "victim" has been overused as of late but make no mistake, women working in the sex trade are not there by choice; most desperately want out and every last one of them is a victim. The extreme negative impact and suffering that prostitution has on individuals, communities and families is not something to celebrate.

To host a party that glorifies prostitution is not only distasteful but is also a very poor reflection of our community. Recently British Columbia has seen world wide media attention for two significant events. One is the 2010 Olympic bid, the other is the Pickton Farm investigation where we are finding the bodies of our mothers, sisters, daughters and friends.

Hey, here is an idea – why not invite some of those families up to Whistler for the party? Chances are they won’t quite see the event in quite the same light as the organizers and party goers.

G. Peters

Whistler

Whistler magic lost forever

Two weeks ago I returned for my annual break to Whistler mountain. I’ve been coming here on a regular pilgrimage since 1978, when I was an aspiring television journalist from Vancouver in search of weekend parties. More recently, I’ve been coming in search of solace and spiritual renewal. I now work in England, where I’m a human rights documentary filmmaker, producing investigative films around the world about some of the horrors inflicted by man on man.

Whistler has always been a fantasyland where I found escape from the horrors – the violence, the abuse – that I spend my working life documenting. A place where drivers stop for pedestrians wherever they happen to want to cross the road; the kind of place where a total stranger will pick up your skis when you’ve had a garage sale and brush the snow off your suit. The kind of place other nations’ citizens call boring because Canadians are just "too nice."

Today, I received a rude awakening.

I joined a three-day Dave Murray course on Monday to brush up my skiing technique, and spent the first two days struggling through awful weather and wet snow, only to awaken to much improved conditions Wednesday morning. After a few hours on the green and red chair and shortly after lunch we heard that the Peak Chair was about to open after two days and nearly 50 centimetres of new snow. Our group was chomping at the bit to get first tracks and headed down to wait. With our charming instructor, John Buchanan, we headed into the ski school line, as our ski school status allowed us to do. John had mentioned we might get some abuse, but this hadn’t sunk in, and we certainly could not have foreseen what happened next.

Within a minute of arriving at the lift, we began to be pelted with snowballs. The crowd, numbering over a hundred, jeered in frustration. Many of them had been waiting for over an hour to get first tracks, and obviously felt justified to attack us. Those at the front mentioned that a previous ski school group had fled after similar abuse.

We thought it couldn’t possibly be that bad. But it was. The abuse, far from abating, increased minute by minute. The snowballs turned into large snow rockets, formed with heavy snow and propelled with great force. We tried to protect ourselves by putting our heads down, but there was no escape. All of us were hit; I was probably one of the prime targets as I was standing near the back of the group. I was hit several times on the arms, the legs and the back, and began having difficulty breathing. The whole time no one, not a single skier, lift operator or patroller took any action to stop the attack. The attackers, egged on by some in the crowd, gathered courage and came closer and closer. I received two direct hits on the head.

You might wonder why we didn’t leave. Well, now so do I. But we were doing nothing wrong; as part of the Dave Murray camp, we were entitled to go through the ski school line. We thought the lift was literally minutes away from opening. We also had no idea how severe the attack would be. I’ve learned since then that it’s happened before, but I didn’t know that then. The whole episode ended when the lift operator announced the chairlift wouldn’t open for at least another half an hour. We realized that if we stayed, we were risking serious injury so we fled, like the group before ours, with more jeers and snow rockets following us.

As I skied away, I found myself starting to shake, and cry, uncontrollably. Luckily, my hat, tube, and ski goggles offered some protection from discovery, and I managed to hide my feelings from the group. For nearly two hours, tears continued to stream down my face; in fact, many hours later, the turmoil continues.

At first, I couldn’t understand why I had been so affected by the episode. No one else took it so seriously; in fact, the other woman in the group, a twenty-something Australian, laughed about it. Then I began to see why I was so affected. My fantasy had been shattered. The reality of my "other existence" had intruded on the fantasy. I remembered the time when on a filming trip in Pakistan, my team and I only just escaped a Muslim mob ready to lynch us. They too felt justified in their attack; me and my female colleagues were seen as infidels. There too we had been invited to an inner sanctum by people in authority, only for it to be resented by others already there. There too, it could have gone horribly wrong. Oddly, I was not affected in nearly as profound a way then as I was today. The horrors I’d seen inflicted on Pakistani women – murdered, mutilated, disfigured, all in the name of honour – had led me to expect very little from that society. But I expect more from Canada. I expect more from my Whistler hideaway.

Later, I thought that perhaps I was overreacting – exaggerating the event in retrospect. But then I cast my mind back to some of the other horrible things I’ve seen; a well full of the bodies of a dozen Muslim university students, murdered in a killing frenzy by religious zealots in India; a young Rwandan Tutsi woman, raped and mutilated by a group of Hutu men during that country’s genocide. They attacked her with broken bottles.

These incidents have one thing in common. Mob Rule. It’s what happens when one person, justifying the unjustifiable, instigates the unthinkable, and good men and women, do nothing.

That’s what happened today. We were doing nothing wrong, but some of the people in the lift line persuaded themselves that we were. One person threw the first snow rocket, others followed, and no one, none of the other skiers and boarders, no one in authority, did anything, anything at all, to stop it. As in part of the Arab world, where women are still stoned to death, it’s not the first stone that kills. It’s the mob that finishes the job.

No one, thankfully, got seriously hurt today. But someone could have.

As for me, the magic that Whistler was, is gone forever. There isn’t, after all, a fantasyland.

Giselle Portenier

Whistler

It was with equal parts of fascination and horror that I read Andrew Mitchell’s article in the April 11th Pique about the insecticide Toxaphene in Cheakamus and Garibaldi Lakes. The source of this pollution, being so far away and out of our control, makes it that much more disturbing.

But is the scientist’s assumption about the source of this poison correct? Doubtless there is a lot of research behind Patrick Shaw’s conclusions which is not mentioned in the article, but a bit of digging suggests other possibilities.

Calling Toxaphene an "Asian pesticide" is a bit misleading. The Toxaphene in our lakes could have been Asian manufactured and broadcast, but it’s a North American invention, even if it’s banned now. Up to 8,000 tons of the stuff were exported annually from the U.S. – some of that to here. It is not known what became of the final stocks of this product in the 1980s, so it is possible, if unlikely, that the airborne Toxaphene from Asia is actually on a homing mission. Although Toxaphene was never licensed in Canada, it certainly was used, and for more than 40 years. It was fully banned here only in 1985. The heyday of Toxaphene was in the late 1970s, after DDT had been banned.

Consider this information from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention: Toxaphene was used widely by fish and game agencies in the U.S. and Canada to kill fish considered undesirable for sport fishing, especially on smaller glacial lakes.

Yes, it does say smaller glacial lakes, which Cheakamus and Garibaldi are maybe not. But there is another concern as well:

"While most attention has been focused on the intentional production of polychlorinated camphenes (PCCs) as pesticide agents, there is growing evidence that PCC congeners may be an unintentional byproduct of manufacturing processes that use chlorination, such as those for paper and pulp. Studies from places as far-flung as New Zealand, Japan, the Great Lakes and Scandinavia suggest that PCCs can be found in many parts of the world where toxaphene mixtures were never used as pesticide agents." (

http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp94-c4.pdf)

Could a circle of pulp and paper mills in a 100 km radius, some of them only recently cleaned up, sending byproducts into the air for 80 years, maybe be a possible source of this pollution as well? Or might the real culprit be an experiment to tamper with fish species?

Tim Smith

Whistler

We all deserve some credit…

Clare Ogilvie pointed out two weeks ago that "Sustainability means meeting the needs of global society indefinitely." Based on that definition, I believe that there are many organizations and businesses in Whistler that deserve some credit for helping to meet the needs of humans everywhere.

There are people running all kinds of businesses in Whistler to get resources that help satisfy their needs, the employees’ needs, and the needs of customers. Without successful businesses many of the residents of Whistler would have a difficult time meeting their needs. Even the profit that gets distributed to the shareholders of the larger organizations is helping the shareholder satisfy their needs. With these facts, many of the businesses in Whistler deserve some credit in the sustainability game.

There are also community based organizations in Whistler putting together programs to help people satisfy their needs, all the members of the Healthy Communities Group, volunteers for recreation programs, chamber of commerce, churches, schools, food banks, Whistler Big Brothers and Sisters, Zero Ceiling as well as the municipality and health care organizations. In fact Whistler is rich with people helping people. These organizations, like the for-profit businesses, also deserve some credit for our movement towards sustainability.

These businesses and organizations are crucial components of our movement towards sustainability as they are helping people meet their needs they. However, they like the organizations outlined in the Pique article, are only part way to the goal of meeting the needs of global society indefinitely. If we really want to go all the way they and others will have to recognize the true challenge of sustainability.

The challenge with achieving sustainability is a little more complicated than just meeting our needs today. It is also about meeting our human needs in the future. And since our current and future quality of life depends on positive relationships with nature and other people in our communities, countries and world it is imperative that we go about having a quality life without destroying the underlying fabric of our human society and natural system. For a community, organization, business or individual to work towards sustainability healthy individuals, collective human systems and natural systems must be the ultimate goal. And the sooner we act towards this goal the more choices we will have on how we can achieve that end.

Dan Wilson

Whistler