The District of Squamish this week announced the hiring of an "economic sustainability coordinator," Dan McRae, to help shepherd the community's effort to retain and increase the capacities of existing businesses and attract new ones that are a good fit for Squamish. The idea is to retain the jobs we have and create new ones in an effort to ensure that we don't become merely a bedroom community for Vancouver and Whistler.
By coincidence, McRae's hiring was announced on the same day that a resort development firm launched community consultations on a plan to build a tourist gondola up the ridge just south of the Stawamus Chief. The proponents insist that the project would be a "catalyst" for significant growth in Squamish's tourism industry.
And they could be right. If economic considerations were the only ones at play, in fact, the Sea to Sky Gondola could well be a no-brainer. But they're not. Social and environmental ones -the other two legs of the sustainability stool - will likely determine the sort of ride this proposal receives over the next few months, and ultimately, whether it flops or flies.
For good or ill, if it goes ahead, the gondola will become a big part of Squamish's identity over the next few decades. Welcome to your new posting, Mr. McRae.
Dave Greenfield and Trevor Dunn of GroundEffects Development Inc. have done their homework to this point. In seeking too build a gondola to the ridge next to the iconic Stawamus Chief, they have side-stepped the key reason a similar proposal lasted exactly three months from launch announcement to plug-pulling in 2004. Under the current plan, both the base area and the top station are outside the two nearby provincial parks - the Chief and Shannon Falls. In 2004, the notion of moving tourists up the side of the rock face to a viewing platform atop the Chief was a non-starter - for the Squamish Nation, for climbers and for most members of the broader community.
But that doesn't mean the new concept is automatically a go from the Squamish Nation's end. In 2004, the proponents also investigated the idea of routing their gondola to a point above Shannon Falls. Squamish Nation council voted unanimously to oppose either route. Wrote Chief Gibby Jacobs at the time, "Both these areas have great cultural importance to our people and the construction and operation of a gondola on these sites would be highly invasive, intrusive and would desecrate the tranquility and significance of the two areas." The current proponents say they have spoken to Squamish Nation council and were told that the nation might be interested in participating, but that remains to be seen.
And what of the need to route the gondola through a portion of Stawamus Chief park? In 2008, when a power firm wanted to route transmission lines through a portion of Pinecone Burke Provincial Park to serve a series of run-of-river projects on the Upper Pitt River, then-Environment Minister Barry Penner vetoed the proposed removal of 21 hectares from the park. Certainly this is a smaller and much less invasive plan, but the principles are similar.
With those caveats in mind, we think this gondola project is worth talking about - not as a magic bullet to create jobs for Squamish, but as a potential piece of the puzzle. Let the consultations begin.
- David Burke
