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Lodges in parks

Local groups wary of proposal to build lodges in parks

Garibaldi, South Chilcotin among parks under consideration

It was no secret that the provincial government was considering allowing the construction of lodges in B.C. Parks to increase access and to raise funding for the parks system – the government said as much when they amended the Park Act in 2003.

However, it wasn’t until three weeks ago that it was leaked that the government had actually completed a plan, called the B.C. Parks Lodge Strategy, that suggested where the for-profit lodges could be built, how big they could be, and how the sites and private developers would be selected. Both Garibaldi Park and the newly created South Chilcotin Park are on the list of potential candidates for the lodges.

The Parks Lodge Strategy also suggested a timeline – the approximate sites for up to 10 lodges with up to 80 beds each will be selected this summer and put out to tender in the fall. Winning bids would be selected next winter.

According to Water, Land and Air Protection minister Bill Barisoff, the lodges are being created to generate revenues for the park system and to improve accessibility to parks for seniors and families. He also said there would be public hearings for each of the developments. However, many environmentalists believe that the public should have been engaged earlier in the creation of the strategy.

According to Bob Brett, an environmental consultant and member of Sea to Sky Parkwatch, the decision to allow private operators to gain a business interest in public parks is flawed.

"Bill Barisoff uses all kinds of examples of lodges that already exist in the Assiniboine, Tweidsmuir and other places, but to me they’re historic operations," said Brett. "They may have worked, those specific lodges, but I can name several other places where commercial operations in parks haven’t worked. The most local example would be Cypress – the natural inclination of any commercial operator is to expand, the whole economy is based on that model so you can’t say you’ll put a small commercial operation in the park and things will stay the same.

"Another example is Banff National Park, the town and the ski areas that continually need to expand. I even accept the argument that they do need to expand to be competitive, but that’s exactly the reason they shouldn’t have been there in the first place."

Brett says it’s important to remind government why the parks were created. Access is important, he says, but so is maintaining the ecological integrity of an area.

"I fully agree that there should be accessibility to wild areas, but I think that it’s totally inappropriate to have commercial operations inside the park," he said. "First of all it fragments the park, and secondly it allows a private company to benefit from a public resource. They end up benefiting because they don’t need to worry about the area around them being logged or mined – the only thing despoiling the wilderness is them."

In that sense the lodge operators would have an advantage over other businesses that currently operate on the boundaries of park and profit from their proximity to the parks as they are currently operated. The government is driven to create new investment in the province, says Brett, and may have downplayed the current economic benefit of the parks.

"What’s troubling is that ideology is trumping decades of history of a parks system. There are a lot of people who support groups like Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and mainstream economic forces that support having a very strong park system. Meanwhile, we have these guys in power who want to sell everything as quickly as possible because it fits in with their ideology," said Brett.

"This is short-term thinking, which is why I’m really dismayed there has been no public process. The last time I checked these were public parks and we were a democracy."

Association of Whistler Area Residents for the Environment President Brad Kasselman says the board has only discussed the issue briefly at one meeting, and have not formulated an official position on the lodges. However, he says there were concerns about the possibility of foreign ownership, and the possibility for new road construction within parks.

"We can see the idea of lodges built at the entrance to parks, where people can access the more beautiful areas, as a more logical perspective than punching new developments inside the park," he said. "We don’t know exactly what’s being proposed and where, but we’ll be looking into it further."

The Sierra Club of Canada, B.C. Chapter has also waded into the issue. According to Vicki Husband, the conservation chair for the B.C. Chapter, the lodge plan ignores almost a century of conservation and the true intention of the park founders.

"The parks were not just set aside for recreation, but also for wildlife and biodiversity. We already have a lot of parks that are very accessible for seniors and families, as well as some that are more wilderness, but that mix is very important. It was never the intention to turn these wild areas into resorts," she said.

She also believes that the government ignored the concerns of a stakeholder group which was involved in creating the plan. Groups like the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and Wilderness Tourism Association did participate in the discussions, she says, but their suggestions were ignored in the final draft of the plan. Meanwhile, Husband says the government is misleading the public by promoting the plan as a compromise of those discussions.

The Sierra Club is non-partisan, but plans to make the lodges an issue in the upcoming provincial elections as part of their Vote Environment campaign.

"There are all kinds of studies that show parks create more economic return for the government than ever gets spent on them, so I don’t buy the argument that these lodges are needed to help pay for the parks system. They’re a huge economic driver," she said. "We also know that the people of B.C. are very proud and very protective of their parks system. The government doesn’t have a leg to stand on with this issue, all of their arguments for the lodges are hollow, and we will be working to get the message out that these lodges are the first step of the privatization of our parks. It’s been proven time and time again that once you let private, for-profit interests into a park, it’s very hard to turn back."

Anne Sherrod of the Valhalla Wilderness Society – the group that released the leaked strategy after receiving the documents from a group calling itself the Public Service Employees for the Environment – is currently putting together a report based on the strategy. They hope to release that report to the public next week.

The report would have been released sooner, but VWS has had its hands full reacting to some of the details in the strategy.

"Right in our backyard, the Valhalla Provincial Park is undergoing a Master Plan review, and the public input period for the plan was coming to a close when we received (the B.C. Parks Lodge Strategy). We had participated in that process and we had endorsed the plan until we learned that our park was on a list for consideration for a lodge," said Sherrod. "In light of what we found in these documents we’ve withdrawn our public support."

Sherrod says the prospect of building a lodge in the park never came up in the Master Plan discussions, even though the provincial government was involved in the planning process.

Sherrod says the Master Plan will be meaningless if the government allows the development of a lodge. The Master Plan creates zoning that allows different activities within the park, ranging from recreational areas for activities like camping and boating to conservation areas that are open to hikers only.

"It brazenly states in the document that if a developer proposes a lodge anywhere in the park and the zoning won’t allow it, that the government would consider rezoning the area," said Sherrod. "All the time we spent on the Master Plan for the park creating those zones didn’t mean a thing."

In addition to Garibaldi, South Chilcotin and Valhalla parks, the list of candidate parks includes Brighton Archipelago Marine Park, Cultus Lake Park, Elk Lakes Park, Hamber Park, Maxhamish Lake Park, Mount Assiniboine Park, and Mount Robson Park.