BC Parks has a New Minister and a Chance to Change Course
With the appointment of the Honourable Tamara Davidson as the new Minister of Environment and Parks, there is a chance for a much-needed course correction. My concern is that the new Minister may take a hands-off approach and allow things continue on their current path. I wrote a letter to encourage the Minister to take a close look and make some meaningful changes.
This post is the main body of that letter.
If you also have concerns, I would recommend sending an e-mail. to: ENV.minister@gov.bc.ca
“Dear Honourable Tamara Davidson, Minister of Environment and Parks,
Congratulations on your appointment to this important position.
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I note that your mandate letter contains two specific items related to BC Parks:
“• In order to protect key services that British Columbians rely on, work with the Minister of Finance to review all existing Ministry of Environment and Parks programs and initiatives to ensure programs remain relevant, are efficient, grow the economy, and help keep costs low for British Columbians. This is important in the context of current Provincial budget constraints.
• Find ways to increase access for families to British Columbia’s parks in a cost efficient manner.”
Your mandate letter also refers to the importance of advancing reconciliation.
I also note that I had the opportunity to participate in an Outdoor Recreation Council of BC stakeholder session with guest speakers Jim Standen and John Hawkings from your Ministry to receive an update on the work to align the efforts of BC Parks and Recreation Sites and Trails BC. For simplicity, I am going to use the term “parks” in the following to refer to both parks and designated recreation sites/trails given the trends towards combined management of those areas.
I think it’s important to take stock of where we are at this point in time.
1) Growth has occurred in population, the tourism industry, and participation in outdoor recreation. That growth has not been matched by growth in camping spots, parking spots, or the number of trails. This has led to challenges for members of the public and tourists that are attempting to access our parks.
As people start to make reservations for camping this spring, they are discovering that all of the available spots are booked up almost immediately and many families are having to make other plans.
These demand problems are also having a major impact on hiking. The hiking season at Joffre Lakes runs from the end of April to early October. With closures and day pass limits, only 50,000 people are now allowed to visit during each season. With a population in the province of over 5 million, if every person in the province wanted to experience the park just once in their lifetime during the core hiking season, it would not be possible because that would take over 100 years (and that doesn’t even account for population growth and tourists.) Visiting this park during the core hiking season is now more rare than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I have no doubt that these access problems are driving tourists to other regions such as Washington and Alberta and hurting our tourism sector.
2) Despite that, there is no widespread evidence that the parks themselves are reaching their carrying capacity. BC has an extremely low population density and a very large park system. There is a lot of room to build additional campsites, trails, and parking areas. Implementing day passes, reservations, etc. may be a temporary band-aid but it is not a reasonable solution in light of the massive area available to accommodate the increase in demand.
3) In 2016, the BC Liberals announced the BC Parks Future Strategy. When the NDP then won the election, they gave a cold shoulder to following through on the strategy. In the years that followed, some initiatives were implemented and others were outright ignored. Eventually, the document disappeared from the government website without any formal announcement that the strategy was no longer considered the guiding document for BC Parks and the page where it used to be now returns an error (https://bcparks.ca/future/). I have mixed feelings about the strategy disappearing. On one hand, it called for a commercialization of our park system through sponsorships that I was opposed to. On the other hand, it called for the creation of a Parks Advisory Council that would have delivered a lot of value. Unfortunately, after the strategy document was removed, it was never replaced. For years, it appears that BC Parks has been meandering without any formal published strategy. Even the most well-informed advocates have no real idea what the objectives of BC Parks are in any given year. There has also been a lack of visibility into the strategy of Recreation Sites and Trails BC.
4) Transparency has taken a hit in the past decade. The page that holds annual reports and annual statistics is still online but it has been collecting dust. (https://bcparks.ca/about/reports-surveys/) After the NDP were elected, they made a surprising decision to stop the long tradition of providing annual reporting about the park system. The last annual report is for the 16–17 year and the last statistics report is for the 17–18 year. In addition to this, the way that the budget is allocated to BC Parks has changed which means that it is no longer a line-item in the provincial budget and KPIs are no longer reported in the Ministry Service Plan. There is currently an extreme level of secrecy regarding the goals, objectives, operations, and performance of the park system. This leads to a lack of trust from the public. A lot of time and now money is wasted filing FOI requests for information that should be published.
5) The system itself is suffering from a massive backlog of deferred maintenance. Facilities ranging from outhouses to bridges to trails are in various states of disrepair and the backlog appears to grow larger with each passing year. A number of natural disasters have added to this trouble. One notable example is the extended closure of Cathedral Provincial Park which now threatens to destroy the business of the lodge that operates in that park.
6) On the IT and communications front, there are other challenges. There was a large and presumably expensive project to do a major revamp of the website but it never actually addressed the most important underlying problem which is a lack of consistent, clear, complete, and recent information. This issue is particularly important because information can help to prevent visitors from getting into dangerous situations which can lead to rescues, injuries, or worse. As I write this to you on January 17th, the most recent trail report for Mount Seymour Provincial Park is from December 16th. When visitors don’t have access to recent conditions from the official website for the park, they rely on unreliable and unverified reports from social media. Across the entire system online maps are inadequate and physical trail markers are also lacking.
7) The planning process is broken and the approach to reconciliation does not appear to be working. The backlog of parks without an adequate management plan should be considered an operational crisis. In the most recent annual report (16–17,) 29% of parks did not have an approved management plan. In the many years that have passed, one may assume that number has grown. If a park does not have a valid approved management plan, it is practically impossible to move forward with measures to improve access. In some cases, the planning process takes so long that the input and data that was gathered early in the process may be invalid by the time it is complete. Sadly, the credibility of management plans has also declined. There is an impression that BC Parks does not honour the management plans as seriously as they did in the past. Joffre Lakes Provincial Park had a management plan that called for the addition of a second campground. However, BC Parks made an arbitrary decision to invalidate the plan with no explanation. What is the point for the public in participating to create a plan if BC Parks will throw it out when it is no longer convenient? BC Parks introduced the day-pass system as a “trial” but then steamrolled ahead to force it into a number of parks despite it never being a part of the management plan for those parks or a part of a province-wide parks strategy. One thing that is most concerning to me is the approach to reconciliation. As a member of the public, I have very limited insight into how that process functions and I can only see the end results and a few glimpses from FOI requests. At Cypress, the local First Nation expressed concern about the installation of a summer mountain coaster but that concern appears to have been completely ignored. At Joffre Lakes, the First Nations were so frustrated with BC Parks that they closed the entire park to the public. Sadly, this then led to a very messy and political public debate that turned members of the public against the First Nations; a clear step backwards. This is only the tip of the iceberg and I fear that the process will cause further harm to the objectives of reconciliation in the years ahead.
8) The permitting system needs to be revisited. Your Ministry is about to change the regulations so that massive wind farms can be built while being exempted from Environmental Assessment Act provisions. This is despite the potential impact on bats, migratory birds, frogs, watercourses, etc. At the same time, a volunteer club that wanted to replace an existing footbridge with a new one in a provincial park is being dragged through an extensive and expensive permit process. The inconsistent approach to permitting defies logic. I believe it is one of the contributing factors to the construction of unsanctioned trails.
9) The government has failed to enforce agreements with commercial operators which has resulted in public access being inappropriately blocked. As one example, there was a significant issue at Cypress (now resolved,) where the resort had arbitrarily decided to no longer allow members of the public through the Backcountry Access Corridor before 9 am despite a requirement in the Park Use Permit to the contrary. BC Parks was unwilling to enforce the permit on behalf of the public interest and countless volunteer hours were wasted. There are many similar examples.
As you can see, my assessment of the current state of the park system and the current trajectory is not very positive. That said, I have a number of suggestions about how to move forward at a time where the state of finances in the province will not allow for increased investment. Under your leadership, there is an opportunity to change course and to make an incredible positive impact.
My immediate recommendations are organized into three categories:
1) Earn trust through transparency and public participation
- Immediately release the backlog of data that is being inappropriately withheld. This includes visitor statistics, park use permits, key performance indicators, and the budget.
- Establish a Park Advisory Council as was promised in the BC Parks Future Strategy (I would happily volunteer my time to this effort.)
- Seek public input on an overreaching BC Parks and BC Recreation Sites and Trails strategy and then create and publish that strategy and ensure it is maintained.
2) Address the low-hanging fruit to improve access
- There are a number of gates that are closed when they don’t need to be. Most of these gates could be opened with very little extra cost. One example is Brandywine Provincial Park in between Squamish and Whistler which is closed for the entire winter despite being directly beside the highway.
- Where demand justifies it, bring in a shuttle service that will be cost-neutral (e.g. for Seymour and Cypress snowshoers.)
- Increase the size of existing parking areas where practical.
- Increase security at trailhead areas through the use of cameras. Frequent break-ins are an access issue.
- Authorize more trails to be built by volunteers.
- Set a service commitment to ensure the 40 busiest parks in the system post trail condition updates at least once every two weeks.
- The current campground reservation system unfairly benefits people who can book stays that start earlier in the week. For example, if you can book a stay from Wednesday to Sunday then you can land a reservation that covers the weekend. Families that work Monday to Friday miss out since the rolling window is based on the start date of your reservation. The system needs to be updated so that some shorter stays are withheld. For high-demand locations (trails and campgrounds,) it also makes sense to move to a lottery system where people can express interest ahead of time and winners are randomly chosen. The current system where the fastest-click wins is not reasonable or fair and is easily abused by automated systems.
3) Improve the planning process
Management Plans and Visitor Use Management Strategies are not working. There are too many parks that lack a plan. The plans are out of date. The plans take too long to create. After the plans are made, they are not respected by BC Parks. The plans are too inflexible after they are created. The planning process needs to be repeated by a modern process that is better able to adapt to changing needs while also being more effective at actually protecting what is important. A key part of this updated planning process should be increased reliance on regional plans instead of park-specific plans.
Of course, I also have a number of ideas that would cost money. I think that investing money in the park system is a wise decision. It leads to significant direct economic benefits from tourism and also many indirect benefits through increased population health. That said, I understand that you are being asked to find ways to make progress without spending additional money and so I will withhold those suggestions for now.
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Sincerely and Respectfully,
Steven Jones”
