Vancouver Sun
A19 Editorial
By Stephen Hume
Published: Wednesday, November 24, 2004
British Columbia's park system was conceived when business leaders saw tourist potential in the alpine wildflower meadows just west of Courtenay and Campbell River.
At their urging, Strathcona Park was created in 1911. It was the first of 340 provincial parks now supplemented by national, regional and municipal parks.
Today, at a luncheon in Victoria, Lieutenant-Governor Iona Campagnolo will host 150 of the pioneering visionaries who made this amazing parks system their legacy to our shared future.
The Elders Council is a forum of independent thinkers who have played major roles in parks creation. These are genuinely towering minds, people like Dr. Ian McTaggart-Cowan, the UBC professor who inspired generations of students, and Dr. Bert Brink, who helped prevent the logging of Garibaldi and persuaded the government to legislate a Parks Act through which he helped establish the Tweedsmuir, Wells Gray, Cathedral and Spatsizi provincial parks.
There are Robert Ahrens, Lloyd Brooks and Gordon Macnab who laid the legislative, administrative and policy foundations that still guide our national and provincial parks systems. Bristol Foster first championed and then spent a decade establishing B.C.'s extensive ecological reserves program and Yorke Edwards de-signed and developed the B.C. Parks interpretation program as a way of educating the public, then went on to do the same for the Canadian Wildlife Service on a national stage.
Tony Roberts showed what can be done locally, planning acquisitions for the extraordinary parks system of the Capital Regional District around Victoria and John Woodsworth did similar work in the Okanagan, although he's better known for a quarter century working on the cross-Canada Alexander Mackenzie Voyageur Route.
These nine are to be honoured for their contributions, yet in many ways they are typical of the other 141 members of the Elders Council.
Brought together by the B.C. chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society to honour distinguished veterans of federal and provincial parks programs, non-government organizations dedicated to conservation issues, citizen volunteers and scholars, the council has attained a loftier purpose.
Its collective wisdom is also available to provide guidance to those who must carry the system forward into a 21st century that will be characterized by rapid population growth and relentless pressure to develop wilderness everywhere.
One of the tasks it has undertaken is the writing of B.C.'s parks history and the gathering of important artifacts and memorabilia into an archival resource for preservation.
This seems to me one of the best ideas to come along in many a year. Too often we park the genius of our wisest people in retirement and rush off to reinvent the wheel.
And if anyone needs advice regarding parks, it's Premier Gordon Campbell. His government is presiding over a largely unnoticed collapse in provincial parks use across B.C. just when nature tourism is emerging as one of the hottest global growth industries.
Since the Liberals began upping user fees, charging for day use parking and contracting out interpretive programs, the supply of campfire wood and the cleaning of toilets, visits to B.C.'s parks have crashed.
Figures for 2003 show that visits to B.C.'s parks are now more than six million fewer than they were in 2001. That's a 25-per-cent decline in park visits -- from 23.5 million to 17.4 million -- in just two years of Liberal "improvements."
Frankly, I'm startled that small town mayors and chambers of commerce aren't holding the province's feet to the fire over this blunder instead of allowing their attention to be distracted by some pie-in-the-sky offshore drilling program that might not happen for 30 years.
If park visitors spend money in small service centres the way those tabulated in a recent study of local day visitors to Algonquin Park in Ontario do, even conservative estimates suggests we've just forgone at least $156 million in spending in our struggling rural regions.
If the premier's wise, the first thing he'll do this afternoon will be to ask the Elders Council for some guidance on how to turn around this trend and its catastrophic implications for tourism in those economically lagging regions that really need it.