One thing is becoming perfectly clear in all the hoopla surrounding the 2010 Vancouver Olympic bid. Nothing’s very clear. Murkiness abounds.
Larry Campbell, the newly elected mayor of Vancouver, ran on a promise to hold a referendum – he’s now recast the vote as a Vancouver-wide plebiscite – on the bid. Finally! Now that he’s won, the BidCorp and its supporters are circling the wagons. Preemie Campbell, The Niblet, Jack Poole and various other hangers-on are all saying the same thing, "The time is past to hold a referendum. It’s too late."
While that statement may have a ring of truth to it, it sounds uncomfortably like some guy telling his girlfriend, who’s just announced she’s pregnant, that he’s not ready for fatherhood and maybe they shouldn’t have sex. It’s only too late to have a democratic vote because the people complaining about it being too late are the ones who stubbornly chose not to hold one in the first place. Having engineered an intolerable situation, they shouldn’t be crying it’s intolerable now. Power to da people.
Exemplified in this is the arrogance of business and government. It’s an arrogance inherent in the human condition. It’s paternalism run amok. "We know what’s best for you," which is, after all, an insincere way of saying, "We know what’s best for us and if you know what’s best for you, you’ll just go along with us on this one and keep your mouths shut." The Olympics isn’t about athletic excellence and it’s only marginally about national pride. It’s about money. Money and commerce. Those things are all about power. And we all know what Orwell had to say about power. Oink,oink.
A spillover of this arrogance is playing itself out in the confines of Whistler’s muni hall. The issue is the future development of the Callaghan valley which is to say, the future development of Whistler. Whistler’s been promised – delivered depending on who you ask – 300 acres in the Callaghan as a land bank, one of our Olympic legacies.
One of the best arguments supporting Whistler embracing this gift is enabling the municipality to extend its influence over the Callaghan and shape future development in the area. If we don’t do it, the argument goes, it’s up for grabs, which is to say it’ll be developed by someone who probably has no regard whatsoever for the kind of development we might like to see down there.
Any credence that argument may have had was called into question last Wednesday when The Province published a story concerning a leaked draft document prepared by the government. It outlined the government’s possible strategy to buy the Squamish and Lil’wat bands’ support for the bid. Included in that document was a plan for the "Transfer of Crown lands, including land next to the Nordic Centre, for a native-run hotel and golf course."
Hello Olympics, goodbye control. What other "gifts" does the government have in mind in the Callaghan? Will Jack Poole get a swath of land next to the bands’ hotel and golf course to build condos on as a reward for the guiding role he’s played on the BidCorp? It seems pretty clear the future of the Callaghan lies in the hands of the province, not Whistler.
The less good argument – not so much an argument at all as a conclusion – is the Callaghan would be a good place to build affordable, employee-restricted housing. That future is exactly what municipal planners and many others have in mind and what the bylaw currently being considered would allow, development of medium density employee housing.
Mr. Godfrey, our municipal administrator, suggests the bylaw expresses no preference for one kind of development over another but a quick read puts that argument to rest. While not exactly a clarion call to developers, it certainly will spread the scent of blood throughout the development community. Both council and staff are also quick to point out no development would be embraced without a clear indication of the community’s expressed wishes.
So it’s time to start expressing our wishes for the future.
My wishes are that we’re smart enough not to fall into this trap. There were a lot of reasons to fault the transportation study the muni paid a couple of hundred Gs for a few years ago. It was too broad in its laundry list of recommendations and too expensive. But it was unequivocal in its focus on reducing our dependence on private automobile transportation.
Nothing in it embraced the idea of setting up a satellite community 13 kilometres down the valley. Nothing in it could possibly be stretched to support that idea. Let’s face it, from a transportation perspective, nothing could be worse than putting up to 8,000 people in the Callaghan. For starters, it’s the wrong direction from town. It would only exacerbate our peak period transportation problems. It would bring about unbearable pressure to build a bypass road to alleviate congestion. It would require an expensive expansion to our public transportation system. It would be an environmental disaster.
But that’s not the best reason to be against it. It would, more importantly, represent an abandonment of any further effort to integrate affordable housing into the existing footprint of Whistler’s current boundaries. Building employee housing on 300 acres in the Callaghan would simply be too easy. Having that kind of land available would feed the NIMBY fires against any infill proposal.
The Callaghan would mean the wholesale abandonment of Whistler to the Dark Empty House proponents and lead us inexorably down the road toward Aspenization.
Here’s a better idea. Build the dark, empty houses in the Callaghan. Zone the land for 10,000 – no better still, 15,000 – square foot homes. Let ’em gate the community. Let ’em have their hockey rinks and tennis courts and security guards. Employees have no place living next to a hotel and golf course anyway.
Then take that land we may or may not be getting at Cheakamus and decommission the landfill. Pave it all over. Build a shuttle-serviced, day skier parking lot. Decommission the lots above Base II on Blackcomb. Build housing up there, just about a downhill snowball’s toss to Joe’s Place.
This is the best part. Move the muni works yard down by the new Cheakamus parking lot. Earmark the former works yard for housing. If you’re not familiar with it, the works yard – sans buildings – is a large, flat, blacktopped expanse of land smack in the centre of Whistler. And we all know the highest and best use for a large, flat, blacktopped expanse of land, don’t we?
Yep, an affordable, single-family trailer park. Housing for da people.
It’s already got a buffer of trees between it and the road. Just a couple more trees and voila, no one would even know we finally had our own trailer park. Not only would it be cheap housing, maybe it would bring a bit of humility back to a place that’s come to believe nothing has value unless it’s hilariously overpriced.
Put me down for a nice aluminium Airstream, please.
