Opinion

...and the clock keeps ticking I haven’t made a new year’s resolution yet, but I’m willing to do so here: I won’t write about affordable resident housing in this space if the new municipal council actually deals with the issue.

At first glance, the new year doesn’t appear to be too much different from 1996 in Whistler.

One of the motivations for this week’s merger which brought Whistler Mountain and Copper Mountain in Colorado under the Intrawest umbrella, according to all parties involved, was the looming specter of Vail.

A press release last week announced 602 affordable housing units across the province were going to go ahead because the NDP government — even though it was cutting back everywhere else — was putting money up for housing.

Skiing stories aren’t as prominent in Canadian culture as, say, stories about Grey Cup games or hockey exploits by names like Beliveau, Hull, Orr and Gretzky, but they are a part of who we are.

It has been shown previously in these pages that one of the fundamental principles of life on earth is math is hard. In Whistler, that principle can be extrapolated to: bed unit math is hard.

On Saturday Whistler voters elected a council that, in many ways, was a reaction to the absurd pace of development that’s taken place in this town the last few years.

None of the candidates for mayor or council have had much to say about the future of Whistler as a resort in this campaign, largely because they haven’t been asked.

There are many important issues facing Whistler and the next council; the gate at Blueberry Hill does not rank highly among them.

Every time the provincial government announces a new measure to cut some of the $750 million it now says must be pared... prospective municipal politicians should take note.