UBC’s Varsity Outdoor Club has started a petition aiming to prevent the development of a ski resort near Garibaldi Provincial Park near Squamish. Instead they are pushing to create a new master plan for Garibaldi Park that will preserve its environment.
Devon Campbell, environmental committee leader of VOC, voiced concerns that the proposed resort would severely impact mountain goat and deer habitats, increase traffic on the Whistler highway as well as deplete up to 22 per cent of the groundwater in the Cheakamus river aquifer, which could harm the fish populations there.
He also added that Garibaldi is not even a good place to install a ski resort.
“Its base elevation is 650 metres, which is 200 metres below any resort in the North Shore mountains,” he said. “There’s regular rain and fog events up to 1800 metres in that area and the terrain is not quite suitable for a ski resort.”
Campbell’s arguments come from a 1974 report investigating the use of Garibaldi for a ski resort, but he notes that precipitation and warmer temperatures have only increased on the mountain since then.
The project was proposed by the Aquilini Investment Group, a real-estate investment company famous for owning the Vancouver Canucks. Their environmental assessment of the project was approved by the BC Environmental Assessment Office.
However, according to Christopher Ludwig, co-founder of GaribaldiPark2020 — an organization partnered with the VOC on similar goals — the assessment should never have been approved.
If the resort goes through, Ludwig says that deer and mountain goat habitats will be disrupted and fragmented, protected portions of Garibaldi Park will be deleted, old growth forests as large as Stanley Park will be lost and Squamish will be overrun with traffic and sewage problems.
Ludwig speculates that financial interests may have had something to do with the approval of the project.
“The Aquilini Group donated over $1.1 million to Christy Clark and the BC Liberals over the last 10 years,” he said. “So the implication, from our point of view, is that the environmental assessment for Garibaldi at Squamish would likely never have been approved if it were not for the fact that a little bit of financial motivation hadn’t occurred.”
Instead, Campbell and Ludwig want the BC government to create a new master plan for Garibaldi that can protect it from future commercial development groups and improve its trails for people who want to explore the park on foot. The current master plan was created in 1990, but it was only meant to be in place for five years. The VOC and GaribaldiPark2020 hope to see a new master plan by 2020.
“The new master plan needs to return to the traditional values that the people who created the park set out,” said Ludwig. “They envisioned a beautiful network of trails … and not gondolas and ski resorts.”
To advance their cause, the VOC and GaribaldiPark2020 have been trying to raise public attention about the issue by running a media campaign and circulating their petition, which will soon be brought into the BC legislature by NDP environment critic George Hayman.
In an email statement to The Ubyssey, the BC Ministry of Environment wrote that if development proceeds into the vicinity of Garibaldi Park, BC Parks will openly examine how this area of the park should be managed if any developments affect public access to it.
“It is through a management planning process that we would determine how the resort/park interface should be managed for public access and how to protect park values if there is to be public access in the future,” said the ministry.
The Ministry of Environment also added that Garibaldi at Squamish Inc., the company in charge of the ski resort development, will work to provide resources to BC Parks to help create an amendment to the Garibaldi Park Master Plan.