Vindication? Or just magical thinking?
I suspect the latter. And given the source of the comments, I’m not sure the former will register with the many, many people who took umbrage with the more, how shall I put this, blunt version of the statement uttered by Whistler’s former mayor.
A number of years ago—I could be more specific if I had a better memory or Pique had a better search function*—Mayor Nancy Wilhelm-Morden made an off-the-cuff comment about Whistler needing fewer brown-baggers visiting town. That is to say, tourists doing Whistler on the cheap, not contributing to the town’s well-being by spending a lot of money while they were here. Low-rent tourists.
In her defence, she was being typically facetious. Hyperbolic. It is one of her more endearing personality quirks. But a quirk best shared with friends over drinks, not with media who’d report it as though it were a call to keep the barbarians at the gates and not let them in.
The ensuing firestorm of righteous indignation from people who either were brown-baggers themselves or stood in solidarity with their parsimonious brothers and sisters was foreseeable. “I’ll be taking my brown bag somewhere else... so there!” was the least obnoxious of the sentiments hurled against Her Worship.
Understandable, as it played into the myth of Whistler being a town of the rich and fatuous, a myth on-target with some segment of the people who visit here and way off the mark for most of the people who live here.
But memory, particularly political memory, being what it is—which is to say limited and generally short-sighted—I’m wondering how many who read it might have simultaneously translated Minister Randy Boissonault’s comments, “We’re going to be mindful about who we invite, and we want more high-value guests, so that they’re not overly bothered by paying...” as a more polite way of saying, Brown-Baggers Stay Home! (See related stoy on page 15.)
It’s understandable the Minister would have no knowledge of our last attempt at winnowing the well-heeled from the BYO crowd. And as much as I’d like to think everyone reads Pique, I won’t be surprised if his comments fly under the radar of the formerly indignant.
That said, much of the rest of what Minister Boissonault was reported as saying clearly falls under the category of magical thinking. Not surprising, considering the current Liberal government has confused magical thinking with science-based decision-making again and again, but disconcerting nonetheless.
According to Minister Boissonault, “Canada, for too long, took a passive approach to tourism. The thought was, people are just going to come because we’re so great and we’re so nice here. Then the rest of the world woke up to the fact that the visitor economy is found money. You bring people into your community or your province and it gets on your books as an export, and it supports local communities.”
Found money? What does that mean? Tourism as an industry is about as far from found money as you can get. Want an example of found money? Think logging. Logging companies didn’t plant the trees, although they’ve been forced to plant replacements.
Years ago it took lots of men with strong arms and backs to fell a tree. Lots more to get it out of the forest. Now it takes a huge machine and one operator to harvest more trees in a day than used to be cut down in a week. That’s found money.
It still takes the same number of underpaid—and too frequently exploited—people to cook tourists breakfasts, serve them and clean up after them as it did 100 years ago. Tourism is not only labour intensive, it has to, increasingly, offer something people can’t get as easily or can’t get as good as what they can get here. It takes vision, infrastructure, people who know what they’re doing, profile, and support to be successful.
You don’t just “bring people to your community.” You have to make them want to come. And you have to make it easy for them to come.
It’s pretty easy for tourists to get to Whistler. Vancouver is only two hours away—six if there are problems crossing a bridge or transiting the Sea to Sky Highway. Ironically, it’s much harder for employees to get to Whistler thanks to short-sighted decisions by successive provincial governments who consider regional transit a third rail.
But when the new federal tourism growth strategy, Canada 365, talks about “Improving infrastructure and modernizing the travel experience,” I have to wonder what country they’re talking about. “Inter-provincial motorcoach services, high-frequency rail between urban centres and light-rail transit within urban centres, as well as safe and reliable road infrastructure all provide the foundations for a seamless visitor experience in Canada.”
Canada fails on three out of four of those modes of transportation. No inter-provincial motorcoach service, little high-frequency rail between even urban centres, and a road infrastructure that is closer to the developing world than it is to safe and reliable. Add to that an obscenely high cost of flying anywhere within the country except from and to major urban centres, and it’s clear the vast majority of tourism will continue to shadow the vast majority of Canada’s population... located on a narrow strip of land close to the U.S. border.
But it’s the remainder of the sentence initially quoted above that makes me wonder where the Minister keeps his magic wand: “...not overly bothered by paying what the sector needs so that people can actually make a living wage and have a long-term career here.” Italics mine.
Virtually no one—even those pulling down enough to make the SOFI list, a mere $75,000 annually—makes a “living wage” in a town where an efficiency condo in Creekside sells for $700,000 and a single-family tear-down will run multiple millions. The only way most people who make a wage, living or not, can afford to live in this town, stay in this town, and even contemplate raising a family in this town, is if they’ve been lucky enough to secure housing through the Whistler Housing Authority, have a robust trust fund, enjoy housing that’s been in their family since Whistler was a pipe dream, or won a lottery.
Sadly, no matter how many well-heeled visitors Whistler attracts in the future, that calculus isn’t going to change. If accommodation were 100-per-cent full at double the current prices, if restaurants were fully staffed and prices were double, if everyone left town with bags of logowear, we’d still be left with workerbees who weren’t sharing in the benefits. To believe otherwise is, well, magical. Okay, delusional.
*(Editor’s note: a very quick Google-assisted search of Pique’s engaging and must-see website confirms it was 2017.) n
