I’m not normally one to rush to the defence of the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW). Call it a natural byproduct of the job: it’s a reporter’s role to speak truth to power, and in community news, that usually means pointing a critical eye at the local government. But even I had to scratch my head at the recent backlash against the RMOW’s draft plans to upgrade Rainbow Park.
Let me start by saying, I am by no means a planner, so if you’re looking for an extensive breakdown of the design principles behind the muni’s proposed upgrades, you won’t find it here. That is not the argument I’m striving to make. I will acknowledge, however, that yes, it will suck to see more of Whistler’s coveted greenspace turned into pavement (and, as Pique columnist G.D. Maxwell detailed in his column this week, there is probably a better place to locate the paved path slated for the shoreline), and, of course, a months-long closure of the resort’s busiest park and main access point to Alta Lake is an inconvenience. But I would hazard a guess that any significant upgrade and associated park closure would have largely been met with opposition no matter what it was, because, well, that’s how not just Whistlerites tend to operate, but humanity at large.
We are creatures of habit, and, as a species, don’t have a great track record of responding well to major change. I happened across a news clip from the ’80s the other day that showed Americans reacting to the lowering of the legal blood-alcohol limit to drive. “They’re making laws where you can’t drink where you want to, you have to wear a seatbelt when you’re driving. Pretty soon we’re gonna be a communist country,” one woman interviewed said.
Nowadays, this opinion would get you laughed out of the room, because that woman’s hot take, centred entirely around her experience, is divorced from the obvious intention behind the change: saving lives.
It’s a trend you can find numerous examples of in Whistler. Locals will complain about how overcrowded our parks have become on the one hand, then criticize efforts meant to address it on the other. Residents will repeatedly beat the drum for more employee housing, until it’s slated to land in their backyard. The community calls for improved transit service coming out of the longest transit strike in B.C. history and then grab their torches the second the RMOW proposes to up parking rates to pay for it. Homeowners decry an 8.4-per-cent tax hike after years of minimal increases and the municipality dipping into reserves. Whistlerites lament the direction their local government is taking and then stay home when the time comes to vote.
I’m all for holding the powers that be accountable—it is my job, after all—and if I’m being honest, Whistler would most definitely benefit from more civic engagement, not less. But sometimes it feels like we’re spinning our tires for the wrong reasons. There is a lot you can criticize the RMOW for (and, for that matter, Vail Resorts, another favourite local scapegoat), but treating our local government like some sort of shadowy cabal hell-bent on making your life harder because parking rates went up 50 cents is both patently absurd and completely misses the point.
Affordability, housing, labour shortages, traffic, overtourism—you name it—are issues being contended with in resort communities across the globe. That’s not an excuse to ignore those challenges or give your local government a pass, but it is indicative of the wider systemic forces at play—complex, multilayered issues that often get lost in the instant reactionism that has come to infect our body politic.
And yet, for all my finger wagging, I get the impulse. We have just emerged from the depths of a pandemic without fully understanding the effects this trauma has and will continue to have into the future. We are getting pressed on all sides financially, with a recession looming, in one of the most expensive communities in the country. We process more information than any other generation in human history, bewildering our senses with endless stimuli and targeted ads, and then wonder why we feel the way we do at the end of the day. Amidst all that chaos, we yearn for someone or something to blame, and it’s easy to pin that on the usual scapegoats. But don’t let it distract you from the power structures undergirding our current reality.
To quote a famous New York Times headline: “It’s capitalism, stupid.”
