With mere days until Election day, The Squamish Chief set up an online survey of five questions on issues in the Sea to Sky that hadn’t had a thorough discussion to date. Here are the candidates' responses, lightly edited for spelling and grammar.
1) QUESTION: What are some solutions your government could offer to over-tourism in the Sea to Sky?
ANSWERS:
BC GREEN Jeremy Valeriote: A regional transit system that reduces traffic on the Sea to Sky. Renewed investment in parks: staffing and infrastructure (i.e. bathrooms) to minimize impacts of overcrowding in parks, better spread people out. It's important to recognize we're also facing "under-tourism" in some respects due to the pandemic, which will have economic consequences; the BC Green Party has a plan for immediate aid to small tourism businesses.
BC NDP Keith Murdoch: This is an interesting question right now given the impacts of COVID. The pandemic has highlighted just how important the tourism industry is to the Sea to Sky economy, and any changes to address over-tourism need to be considered very carefully and deliberately. I don’t think that the solution is to discourage tourism; rather, it is to mitigate some of the impacts that over-tourism causes. The government will continue to provide funding for new tourism infrastructure through programs like the Resort Municipality Initiative (RMI), which will create more tourist destinations and help disperse tourists. As another way to help disperse tourists, the government (through Destination BC) can re-focus marketing efforts towards less known destinations along the corridor. The government is also committed to finding a regional public transportation solution for the Sea to Sky, which would ease some of the congestion on Highway 99 caused by visitors.
BC LIBERAL Jordan Sturdy: The potential for over-tourism in the Sea to Sky is real and at times actual. Many days of the year our tourism visits are easily accommodated, and, in fact, we have excess capacity beyond the acute circumstances created by COVID-19.
As we emerge from the pandemic crisis and rebuild our tourism businesses, we must be prepared for exceptional longer-term tourism growth in the corridor.
This summer, our agritourism farm business in Pemberton has seen visitors from the Lower Mainland who prior had never before ventured up the Sea to Sky and it is clear they liked what they saw and will be back.
Combined with the inevitable return of destination visitors, the need to improve tourism-related infrastructure and staffing has never been more important. My office has recognized this concern and hosted numerous stakeholder meetings up and down the Sea to Sky over the last four years to define the problem for various sectors, generate potential solutions and advocate for resources. The result of focusing this conversation has led to positive outcomes and actions by the principal land manager, the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO) who issues tenures and is responsible for managing public lands outside of BC Parks. The Sky Natural Resource District manager has developed strategies for the Sea to Sky which are comprehensive but are underpinned at a planning level with the “Visitor Use Management Framework” that is being trialed right now in Shannon Basin, Meagre Creek and Joffre. The objective is to understand the recreational potential of an area, assess impacts to environmental and cultural values and design infrastructure and actions that will manage visitor use to produce results that reflect the community and manage our impact on the land base. The expectation is that these trials will inform an expansion of the framework to encompass the whole of the sea to Sky.
Overall, the goal should be to concentrate and manage impacts while providing the best visitor experience possible. This will require significant investments in infrastructure and personnel in both FLNRO and BC Parks, to ensure the necessary boots are on the ground within the Conservation Officers Service, Natural Resource Officers and BC Park Wardens, First Nations Guardians and the Junior Ranger program.
Additional recommended action includes the development of a Sea to Sky “recreation synopsis” which would be similar to the Fishing and Hunting Regulations Synopsis and help users understand what is allowed, where and when. From snowmobiling to motorized access, to camping regulations, to trail ethics, there is much education needed to inform the public about their rights and responsibilities and the impacts they have while using our cherished public land.
2) QUESTION: What is the single biggest issue facing the Sea to Sky, in your view?
ANSWERS
BC GREEN Jeremy Valeriote: Maintaining the current, green direction of the economy that our region is leading. To do so, we need to support our tourism operations through the pandemic. We need housing affordability for the local workforce. We need to stave off unimaginative, outdated threats of re-industrialization of Howe Sound supported by the BC Liberals and NDP. We need to be very creative and forthright to the government to sustain advanced education here should Quest's private structure fall apart. We've had a tremendously successful economy in sync with environmental recovery, but it is under threat by a number of factors including that the two traditional, adversarial parties cannot deliver on regional transit, and that they are in the past in so many other ways, too. BC Greens are the right representation for Sea to Sky in 2020.
BC NDP Keith Murdoch: There are many big issues facing the Sea to Sky and they differ somewhat from region to region, but one that is common across the corridor is housing. Housing prices in places like Squamish have risen rapidly over the past few years, making affordability an issue for many families. Whistler suffers from a lack of housing inventory for workers. And other communities along the corridor are seeing similar housing issues. The NDP has built tens of thousands of affordable rental, co-op and supportive homes for people since 2017, and the NDP tax on housing speculators has slowed skyrocketing housing prices. But there is still much more work to do. We need to continue to build more affordable housing projects and partner with local communities to meet their affordability needs.
BC LIBERAL Jordan Sturdy: COVID-19, the need to respond and recover while safeguarding public health and safety is the most pressing issue facing the Sea to Sky today. We have done a pretty good job of managing COVID infections in our region since March, in communities and businesses and in the health care setting even as we reopened much of the economy. Credit should go to the people of the Sea to Sky who have acted responsibly and kept transmission rates low across sectors. Vigilance is the keyword as we head into the fall and we spend more time inside, in close proximity to people and enter into the flu season. Experience in some southern hemisphere jurisdictions tells us that if we keep our bubbles small, maintain our physical distancing, hand sanitizing and masking practices we can continue to minimize infection rates in a way that retains our health care capacity and even allows us to begin to recover some of the backlog of surgeries that became swollen with waiting patients. There are however sectors of our economy that continue to be either closed or catastrophically impacted. We know that much of the tourism and hospitality industry has shrunken or even been closed. Restaurants have had capacities limited and will be further impacted as winter weather arrives and outdoor spaces become less attractive. Live performance has pretty much been shuttered with performers not having worked for months and little hope of being back in the near term. Tourism activities have seen revenues limited even as operational complexities and costs have increased.
As international travel has been curtailed and we understand that the daily spend of those visitors is many multiples of domestic visits and the possibility of conferences and events is remote, the impacts of those border closure and the necessary quarantine requirements is becoming clearer. Many local and small businesses in tech, in film and photography, adventure travel, hardgoods and services and many more rely on international contacts, suppliers and clients and while we have learned that much can be done remotely, much more is not possible without travel and these businesses are being starved.
The opening up of various borders or the creation of ways to allow some travel while keeping our citizens safe will be paramount for many of these businesses as it’s hard to imagine how they will be able to keep the capacity of these organizations without that access. Meeting recently with a digital film company was an eye-opener for me as they described the reality of a global business based in Squamish that has lost access to its clients and without international travel they don’t see how they can continue to operate their studio and maintain their staff. This will have long-term consequences on the industry here as talented staff are drawn away by necessity to other jobs and other communities. The need for an approved vaccine has never been more clear but in the interim, programs and supports around wage replacement, commercial rent subsidies, and the reduction of overhead costs are critical to our local businesses in order that they survive this perilous period healthy enough to begin the long road to post-COVID recovery.
3) QUESTION: While the DFO is a federal agency, provincial MLAs can lobby on behalf of constituents. Many fishers in the Sea to Sky value the public fishery and argue that Mark Selective Fisheries (MSF) must be a component of an interior Fraser River Chinook recovery strategy. Do you agree?
ANSWERS:
BC GREEN Jeremy Valeriote — SKIPPED QUESTION
BC NDP Keith Murdoch — YES
BC LIBERAL Jordan Sturdy — YES
4) QUESTION: Flow-order reviews are planned for twenty-three BC hydro facilities in the province, including the Cheakamus Generating Station in Squamish. There are considerable pressures on the fish populations of the Cheakamus River, including fish stranding and mortalities that are associated with ramping rates and very low minimum flows, as well as decreased water availability during drought periods (as a result of climate change). Given these pressures, would you support slower ramping rates, higher minimum flows, and a more natural release of water from the Daisy Lake reservoir as part of a new flow regime for the Cheakamus Generating Station?
ANSWERS:
BC GREEN Jeremy Valeriote — YES
BC NDP Keith Murdoch — YES
BC LIBERAL Jordan Sturdy — YES
5) QUESTION: In recent years, whenever there is an election, journalists can’t get answers to their questions for a month while the government switches into “caretaker” mode. This is a convention, not a rule. Do you support ending this for the next provincial election?
ANSWERS:
BC GREEN Jeremy Valeriote — YES
BC NDP Keith Murdoch — YES
BC LIBERAL Jordan Sturdy — YES
