Would a cruise ship terminal be a boon or a burden for Squamish?
A terminal to welcome cruise ships has long been planned for the Squamish oceanfront.
The 2009 Squamish Oceanfront Peninsula Sub Area Plan, a document designed and drafted with community input, includes several references to “marine-related tourist and recreation uses such as tourist services, cruise ship terminals, marinas, rentals, public boat launching and related activities.”
Squamish’s acting mayor for August, Doug Race, said a cruise ship terminal might make sense, but a lot of different scenarios need to be thought through first.
Toran Savjord, senior project manager of Newport Beach Developments, the developer of the oceanfront, recently reiterated in a Business in Vancouver article that Squamish would be a welcome spot for the passengers of large cruise ships.
“We’re 40 minutes away from Whistler,” Savjord said.
“We have a world-renowned gondola. Squamish was named one of the top places to see in the New York Times and voted one of the most beautiful fiords in North America.”
(Savjord did not reply to an email request from The Chief seeking further comment prior to press deadline.)
There are some reasons to believe cruise ship industry officials may look for new places to dock close to the Lower Mainland. With the global trend toward increasing the size and height of cruise ships there is industry concern some may not be able to make it under the Lions Gate Bridge, according to cruise line spokesperson Greg Wirtz, president of Cruise Lines International Association, North West and Canada.
“At some point, cruise lines are going to want to upgrade the ships that they’ve got in Vancouver to bigger ships,” Wirtz told Business in Vancouver.
“Chances are those ships will be too big.”
The decision by the Port of Vancouver in 2014 to close its Ballantyne Pier to cruise ships also calls into question Vancouver’s ability to accommodate much of an increase in the number of ships arriving.
Members of a neighbourhood association in Victoria, however, warn Squamish residents to research long and hard before opening our waterfront to the cruise ship industry.
Marg Gardiner of the James Bay Neighbourhood Association said that the industry has had a negative impact on Victoria.
Victoria’s Ogden Point terminal is the busiest cruise ship port-of-call in Canada, according to the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority. The number of ships docking at Ogden Point has grown from 110 ships carrying 161,000 passengers in 2002 to 227 cruise ships carrying 533,000 passengers during the 2015 season, according to the harbour authority.
More ships carrying 560,000 passengers are expected this summer, according to Gardiner.
On its website, the Victoria Harbour Authority asserts “this growth in cruise tourism has become an important economic driver for the capital region.” However, the neighbourhood association members counter that cruise ships cause air, marine and noise pollution, as well as increased traffic from the multiple buses that take the passengers to and from points of interest.
The passengers are often routed onto buses at the terminal and taken to specific places, and don’t necessarily frequent businesses near the terminal, Gardiner said.
“They do not travel throughout a community, generally,” she said, adding that the large numbers of passenger buses are also a hazard for pedestrians. “The ground transportation issues are major.”
If Squamish does build a terminal, Gardiner said she would “strongly recommend a traffic management study, and impact restrictions and fees commensurate with social and environmental costs.”
The association has two oft-repeated slogans about the cruise industry that Gardiner said Squamish should keep in mind: “Good tourism interacts with community, bad tourism impacts community,” and “If you build it for residents, tourists will love it. If you build it for tourism, it won’t be livable.”
Given the current traffic pressure on Highway 99, a terminal for some type of cruise ship might make sense for Squamish, acting mayor for August Doug Race told The Chief.
“When you think of our tourist industry right now, that everyone thinks is sort of our saviour, the problem is everybody arrives by motor vehicle and there’s no small impact to that, as we all know. So that is an advantage [of cruise ships], absolutely, and those are well-heeled tourists, typically… they’ve got credit cards and lots of spending ability and they are looking for things to do.”
Race added he could envision such tourists going up the Sea to Sky Gondola, taking flights up into the glaciers or buses to Whistler.
Pocket cruise ships carrying a couple hundred passengers arrive in Prince Rupert, for example, Race noted, and that town seems able to absorb the impact.
Perhaps Squamish could do the same, he suggested.
“You are not dealing with thousands of people, you are dealing with hundreds.”
But Race acknowledged the prospect of large cruise ships coming to Squamish would create challenges.
For one thing, he said, building a dock to receive big ships is expensive and there is a risk cruise ship companies may not show up.
In Campbell River and Nanaimo multi-million dollar docks were built, but the rush of expected cruise ships hasn’t materialized, Race said.
He also wondered if downtown Squamish could handle the thousands of passengers who would disembark from large ships.
It takes a lot of planning and infrastructure to accommodate that many people all at once, he noted, pointing to the small Alaskan town of Skagway that he said has to bring in workers to deal with the hundreds of thousands of cruise ship passengers that disembark there.
Race said that the Squamish oceanfront already has the correct zoning for a cruise ship terminal, but would require a development permit before it could be built.
He stressed that such a facility is not something that could pop up in Squamish within a year.
“It is a little farther away than that,” he said.
