“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
-George Santayana
“The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.”
-Wayne Dyer
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
-H. L. Mencken
The highest and best goal of education isn’t, or shouldn’t be, to prepare people for a good job. In the overall scheme of things, whatever you learn and remember—lookin’ at you, Pythagoras—in school, from kindergarten to graduate school, is not the most important thing you will take away from your years of schooling.
The most important thing any of us learn in school is how to learn. How to educate ourselves about something that’s sparked our curiosity, something we need to know to do our job, get a better job, make us feel more fulfilled, is or should be the goal of every class you ever take. As endless as school seems when we’re young, the quantum of knowledge we acquire during those years pales in comparison to everything else we need to know to overcome our boundless ignorance and navigate life.
I’m not suggesting what we learn in school isn’t important. Reading, writing, math, science, and civics are all of primary importance. But for the most part, they’re just foundational. Just building blocks. And like having so many bricks or so much lumber, they’re of limited use until we figure out how to put them together to build something. Knowledge.
Okay, what’s got me up on this soapbox today, you may be asking?
Whistler is a unique place. Not because it’s got great skiing. Not because it’s a little town with big-town amenities. Not because it’s surrounded by breathtaking beauty. Not because it’s got far too much housing no one who lives here can afford.
Whistler is unique because it didn’t exist before the early 1960s. With all due respect to the Squamish and Lil’wat people, and acknowledging the people who put down roots in and around the town of Alta Lake, Whistler as it is now known wasn’t born until some crazy business people from Vancouver decided to build a ski resort and chase an Olympic dream.
The amount of time between the initial dream and whatever combination of dream and nightmare the town has become today is just a blink of an eye. If there is any place you’ve ever lived where you can pretty easily grasp the entirety of its history, this is it. Hell, you can still share a beer with some of the people who built this place!
Even better, if your attention span can’t cope with 60 years of history, you can fast-forward to a more recent date when you might think of the town reaching a critical mass. Choose your own—the opening of Blackcomb Mountain (1980); the merger of Whistler and Blackcomb (1997); Andy and Bonnie Munster’s spec home Akasha busting records by selling for the then-atmospheric sum of $7.9 million (2000); Whistler’s population reaching 10,000 (sometime in 2013).
Sadly, far too many of us would have to choose yesterday if we were to embrace the sum total of what we actually know about Whistler, assuming we actually know what happened yesterday. But the depth of ignorance about the town doesn’t seem to be a hindrance to expressing opinions about what’s going on.
And as Plato—ancient Greek philosopher, not Mickey Mouse’s dog, whose name is actually Pluto—said, “Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.” When you think about it, that’s a bold statement from someone whose job it is to write opinion columns.
Ignorance—and specifically the lack of both understanding of and curiosity about Whistler’s history—is what drove me off social media six years ago. I grew tired of trying to set the record straight when someone posted opinions contrary to easily-discovered facts only to have someone else parrot the original ignorance moments later. It was an online version of Whac-A-Mole.
So, there was an announcement last week from the provincial government. It introduced legislation designed to force the likes of Airbnb to provide the province with data on their listings that local governments can, in turn, use to pursue people listing their homes or part thereof for short-term rentals where they lack either the enabling zoning or business permits to do so.
Part of the legislation forces owners of properties to live in the property they rent rooms out of. Or sell them if they’re just buying places as investments. It’s designed to try and return things to the original idea behind Airbnb and free up housing for people to live in. Duh.
Whistler is exempt from this part of the new law. Which has created a fair bit of backlash from people long on opinion but short on fact. Not surprisingly, much of the backlash has been aimed at Happy Jack, Mayor of all Whistleratics.
Why is Whistler exempt? No, it’s not because we are over-populated with greedy landlords—though we certainly are.
It’s because not that many years ago, Whistler restricted short-term rentals to parts of town zoned for tourist accommodation. They fortified that prohibition just a few years ago with a bylaw requiring anyone offering short-term accommodation to have a business licence. If your property isn’t zoned accordingly, no licence.
The reasons behind the zoning are twofold. In the dark, though recent, past, the folks building the resort understood the necessity for tourist beds. They also knew no hotel chain in its right mind was going to come into town and build a bunch of hotels until such time as the nascent resort proved it was going to succeed.
So a bunch of things that looked like hotels but were actually privately-owned condo developments began to spring up. When the town began to grow and the near-death experience of the early 1980s passed, it was important to provide some protection to that visitor accommodation base. Hence, restrictive zoning.
The other, popular reason was because people who lived in Whistler’s neighbourhoods didn’t want their neighbours running revolving-door tourist accommodation. They wanted residential neighbourhoods filled with, well, residents. Or at least dark, empty homes. So most of the town’s neighbourhoods already disallow short-term rentals. No Airbnb for you.
You didn’t have to live through this to know about it. It takes about 30 seconds and a quick search of the muni’s website to get the answer.
But, as P.J. O’Rourke once said, “No drug ... causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.”
Amen.
