BC government documents leaked by the Public Service Employees for the Environment reveal a well-developed plan to turn BC Parks into investment parks. The BC Parks Lodge Strategy is part of a larger program called the BC Resort Strategy that includes much larger developments outside park boundaries.
A lodge could contain up to 80 beds and would have all the amenities of home. Ten parks have already beenidentified for these developments.
“A lodge of any size inside park boundaries will impact park ecosystems,” says Anne Sherrod, Chairperson of the Valhalla Wilderness Society. “For 90 years BC taxpayers have been contributing to keep BC parks free of this kind of development. This project would literally dissolve our park system.”
Sherrod said the tourism industry does not need lodges in parks. “Land and Water BC is selling and leasing Crown land for recreational development as fast it can,” she says. Private investors don’t have to buy the land to gain control of it. A lease of park land is quite enough to give them powerful legal rights to protect and expand the profitability of their businesses at the expense of other park users.
The leaked documents show that, for the last year, a few hand-picked vested interests and environmental groups, known as the “Lodge Strategy Advisory Group” have been privy to the project. The participants, which included lodge owners, the Wilderness Tourism Association, the BC Wildlife Federation, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, and the BC Federation of Naturalists, were told that they could not prevent the lodge strategy, but only give advice on how to do it. The rest of the environmental movement learned of the scheme only when the Public Service Employees for the Environment released the material.
“Sixty environmental groups, mostly in BC, have signed onto a Declaration on the Principles of Parks,” says Sherrod. “The principles declare that parks belong to the public and should not be commercialized or privatized; that they are for ecosystem protection, not money making,” says Sherrod. “This is what our original Park Act was all about and this is what the public en masse said to the Recreation Stewardship Panel.”
—Valhalla Wilderness Society, February 2005