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The diversification plan gamble

Diversification, not unlike sustainability, is one of those concepts easier to grasp than execute. And almost impossible to argue against. Financial advisors push diversification on their clients all the time.
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Diversification, not unlike sustainability, is one of those concepts easier to grasp than execute. And almost impossible to argue against.

Financial advisors push diversification on their clients all the time. A diversified portfolio - that's what people with lots of money have; the rest of us have a bank account - is safer than one that's not very diverse. The theory is if an investment in a yak dung mine in Tibet goes south, stock issued by the company providing natural gas to Tibet and making yak dung everyone's second fuel choice will do well. Or something like that. I suspect it's mostly designed to cover up the mistakes financial advisors make advising their clients. The most honest financial advisor I've ever met was a homeless person perched on a piece of cardboard at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. His crudely-lettered sign read, "Shitty advice: $1.00" Talk about truth in advertising.

Diversification is, of course, a fancier way of saying don't put all your eggs in one basket. Personally I've never had more than a dozen eggs at one time and I've never carried them in a basket. I'd gently suggest anyone who did probably raised chickens they were pilfering the eggs from and likely wouldn't care all that much if they dropped a few now and then.

But diversification is a gospel of common sense wisdom and therefore impossible to argue against. Except in the case of Whistler's economy, it might just be a fantasy whose presence only serves to blunt any real effort to broaden, as opposed to diversify, our economic base. Let's be honest, we're a tourist town. We were built to be a tourist town, designed to be a tourist town, and mostly we're pretty good at it.

We'll never have any serious manufacturing sector, which isn't to say nothing will be built here, just that whatever is will always be the exception that proves the rule. We'll never have an agricultural sector and while our new, post-Olympic broadband capacity might spawn some knowledge-based businesses, the cost of housing will always be an uncompetitive barrier to entry for any large-scale business growth. The University of Whistler - as opposed to some less grandiose educational initiatives - is a chimera, part fantasy, part wishful thinking with a whole host of problems to be resolved.

The other drawback to those kinds of diversification initiatives is they don't really do much to boost our municipal coffers. Especially in a town that may bump up against its self-imposed limits to growth. There's not much bounce in property taxes, works and services charges or hotel tax in most diversification plans.

Face it, we're stuck with tourists and we might as well put on our thinking caps and spend our energy thinking of ways to get more of them here and wring a few more bucks out of each while they're here. I'd like to propose a couple of ideas for discussion.

As we saw recently with the GranFondo, big events have big payoffs. We know that. We prove it every year with the World Ski and Snowboard Festival, Crankworx and the Whistler Film Festival. We've developed some skills at hosting big events and that's only natural; we've always played off our mountains' reputation as one bigass ski experience.

People love big events. Ironically, they love them even if they're only marginally interested in the underlying event. They just like the buzz of something big. They like being part of it or, in OldSpeak, making the scene. I don't understand it but I accept it.

So why not set out to hold more big events? One-off events but one-off events with an underlying theme? For example, there doesn't seem to be any official Guinness record for the most people to - don't laugh - do the Bunny Hop... on skis... down a mountain. I'd like to think Whistler is a weird enough town to get a thousand or more people out to Bunny Hop down Whistler Mountain some Saturday afternoon, with huge speakers blaring the song across the valley and throughout the village.

Maybe as part of WSSF? Every year a new record? World's biggest snowball fight? Heck, we almost had that a decade ago during the festival... unplanned. Imagine what a little foresight and preparation might have done to make that a world's record instead of a near-riot? It wouldn't take long before people would start to turn up just to see what new world's record the wacky folk of Whistler might take on next.

The second idea I've floated before and was frankly very disappointed no one took seriously. Imagine? But once again this year, we've killed a number of bears for no better reason than they liked human garbage and we're too unimaginative to do anything other than kill them for it. C'mon people. This is a country that doesn't have the death penalty. Are we really that lame? Is shooting bears the best we can come up with?

I know bears are wild animals. I think zoos are abominations. I saw Free Willy . But if the only alternative is killing bears because they want to eat what we throw away, why not bring them into the family? Domesticate them? Create the Whistler Bear Brigade of former death row garbage bears as our own ambassadors of goodwill?

Yeah, we'd have to manicure their claws down to stubs and muzzle them so they don't eat us and, admittedly, that's not entirely humane. But compared to killing them? Hell, that's enlightened compared to pumping a .12 gauge slug into their skull.

Every day at après we could parade the bears through the village in colourful costumes. Some could learn to ride bikes. Some could carry local children riding bearback. Some could dance. Some could wrestle drunken tourists who think wrestling a bear would make great video to show the folks back home. Bylaw could patrol with them when the bars close.

They'd entertain our guests, eat our garbage, become a symbol of enlightenment and be cute as the dickens, all the while raising the bar for sustainably dealing with problem bears in mountain communities worldwide. With just a little effort, we could probably even teach them to snowboard. Whaddya say, Sylvia?

Finally, and this may be the most preposterous idea of all, anything we can do to shake more dollars out of more tourists can't be all bad. There are a lot of tourists, summer and winter, who are, shall we say, athletically-challenged. Not lots for them to do here. I think we ought to seriously consider building them a casino. Short of sticking a gun in their ribs, there's no proven way of separating people from their money faster than inviting them to gamble.

Funny though. I bet I can get more people behind the Whistler Bears idea than the casino.