In the end, it was much like the beginning. Shock, recognition, resignation. Whistler Blackcomb (WB) done for the season. A jarring, if necessary déjà vu. The only question—given the profligate waves of non-essential travellers washing through town on a weekly basis and a clearly waning regard for safety protocols among local businesses and individuals—is how we avoided it happening sooner.
Given the forces conspiring against Whistler, it’s practically a miracle we lasted this long, testament to the diligent efforts of many, from Whistler Blackcomb (WB) to service providers, from health-care professionals to essential workers (which, here, includes anyone in hospitality). So, I’ll begin by offering all of you the biggest, bestest, most respectful “thank you” I can muster. In the wake of B.C. Premier John Horgan’s egregiously unhelpful finger-pointing at the 20 to 39-year-old demographic (swiftly condemned and since retracted and clarified), however, it’s worth looking more closely at how Whistler ended up in these particular crosshairs.
First, the writing was certainly on the wall: With 218 cases of COVID-19 from March 22 to 28, up from 122 for the entire Howe Sound region the week prior, and 58 the week before that, a mathematics degree wasn’t required to see where this was going. At that doubling rate and people already seeding outside communities with virus acquired in Whistler, it wouldn’t be long before contact tracing was nigh on impossible; add in higher transmissibility and potential morbidity of variants and it was a ticking bomb. Not surprisingly, the B.C. government’s butter-soft warnings based on Public Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry’s people-will-do-the-right-thing hallucination hadn’t worked, and spring break in Whistler, as in other places this year and last, proved to be a super-spreader event.
Not that things weren’t already going south; the January/February spike never fully settled (though we did get down to 18 cases), and nearly half of the approximately 70 Whistler businesses inspected at the end of January were issued pandemic-related violations. This eroded confidence in our collective response given that people will take whatever slack you cut them. And frankly they were taking it—in older age groups as well. Sure the 40-plus crowd doesn’t gather in groups of 20 out on the lake ice or at large house parties as often as young folk, but studies show we execute our own risky behaviour, based more on entitlement than youthful anti-authoritarianism and indestructibility. Personally, having felt reasonably safe most of the winter, by March I’d regained the nervousness of last spring.
I saw people using coffee shops as an excuse to be maskless for hours, meeting folks they clearly didn’t live with and sitting far closer than two metres—despite provisions made to obviate just that; some customers thought children (babies excluded) didn’t need to wear masks and were OK to run around from table to table. Large groups of unrelated people also walked (stalked?) the Valley Trail and congregated in morning lift lines. On the last day of skiing—let’s call it Magic Monday—I witnessed two individuals, one younger, one older, hold places in the Creekside lineup that swelled to groups of five and 12 respectively; their conversations revealed neither group was part of a bubble—just friends who hadn’t seen each other in up to a year. Some were unmasked, many hugged. It was worrying.
Despite the heroic work of WB staff, there simply weren’t enough of them to manage all lift-line COVIDIOTs, which started out in high numbers in November, were impressively shamed down to a quiet handful, then surged again over three-weeks of March hoopla—particularly on sunny days, as if blue sky somehow sanitized the air. Few were Whistlerites, but truculent out-of-town/province peeps indignant over having to wear any face-covering outside, with a similarly perplexing glut who couldn’t keep a mask over their nose, as if it weren’t part of the respiratory system—an apparently odd failing of Western education.
It all seemed perilous given that the primarily airborne nature of transmission meant the two-metre guidance was outmoded at the start (when it was thought to mostly be through droplet and fomite hazards) and now joined frantic cleaning activity (other than hand-washing/sanitizing) as a form of Kabuki theatre. With variants circulating that were up to 2.5 times more transmissible, the hazard only increased (look at the current plight of the Vancouver Canucks, each of whom was tested every day). Now the Scandinave spa is shut down because of the number of staff who are quarantined.
On March 30, Mark Warner, host of the Low Pressure Podcast, offered a frustrated rant on Instagram: “The [BC government] was concerned that people coming to Whistler were getting COVID-19 and bringing it back to their communities. That’s extremely hypocritical if you ask me. Where do you think Whistler got all those cases in the first place?
Every day we have thousands of non-essential travellers [as defined by our own government] standing in close proximity… eating at our restaurants, coming into our shops, getting drunk on our patios. Then they blame the local workers who have no choice but to live in a house with 10 people because it’s impossible to afford anything else. The majority of those locals have been doing everything they can to keep the numbers down so something exactly like this doesn’t happen...
We need tourists to make money but the blatant disregard and disrespect for the health and safety of this community has been very unfortunate. We’ve had literally no say in this and if we have, [the RMOW] hasn’t done much about it… as a community [we] have been taken advantage of… Non-essential travellers are the problem and now our community is paying the price. Show up, wreck our town and leave with no repercussions.”
He has a point, as do those who expressed similar sentiments of being “used” in these pages and elsewhere (see the excellent April 1 Facebook post from local Mike Nixon); these same labour-force “victims” of Whistler’s tourism hubris are the ones now out of a job—not visitors.
Officials knew they were on the brink. Given the sudden—and somewhat covert—efforts to vaccinate Whistler’s service workers, it’s hard not to entertain the conclusion that in the drive to refill the province’s dwindling coffers, Whistler was a sacrificial lamb. As B.C.’s largest single tourism revenue generator, no one was willing to fully put the brakes on travel here from hot zones—whether parts of the Lower Mainland or the hell-fires of Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. So, because it has been shown time and again throughout the pandemic that soft-pedalled discouragement doesn’t work on the uninformed, irresponsible, selfish or rich, is it all governments’ fault for not enacting more stringent policies? Not quite; unlike the Maritimes, swinging a bigger hammer in larger, more populous provinces with no natural geographical containment also brings a proportional diminishment of structural and institutional capacity for enforcement (and you can multiply this equation at the federal level).
Governments tried to strike a balance that worked for a while, then inevitably failed. But so did Whistler: We wanted to be open, and local efforts worked for a while, then inevitably failed. We got what we wanted for longer than may have been prudent. But since we’re all in this together, fault is hard to allocate.
Leslie Anthony is a Whistler-based author, editor, biologist and bon vivant who has never met a mountain he didn’t like.
