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Les Leyne: B.C. parks finally to get more funding

The long-awaited recognition that B.C. parks need a lot more money came with enough spin to levitate a government-issue picnic table. Environment Minister Mary Polak painted it as case where B.C. is a victim of its own glorious success.
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A bald eagle stands guard at Goldstream Provincial Park. Environment Minister Mary Polak announced Monday that the B.C. government will spent $23 million over the next five years to improve the provincial park system, which critics say has deteriorated because of underfunding.

VKA-Leyne02832.jpgThe long-awaited recognition that B.C. parks need a lot more money came with enough spin to levitate a government-issue picnic table.

Environment Minister Mary Polak painted it as case where B.C. is a victim of its own glorious success.

“We know British Columbians are passionate about our parks,” she said. “But the world has also taken notice. Similar to what we accomplished with the Great Bear Rainforest, our success in delivering unparalleled experiences with nature has brought increasing demand to accommodate more people, programs and facilities.”

Increased demand is a factor, but the much bigger issue with provincial parks is the systematic underfunding that began in the mid-1990s and continued for 20 years.

The provincial parks are not meeting demand and are looking distinctly ragged around the edges because successive governments started cutting the budgets in order to spend the money elsewhere.

They discovered how easy it is, so they kept going. Parks got shuffled down the priority list, and perennially increasing demands in health, education and social services kept them in the lower order of budget demands.

Polak knows “British Columbians are passionate about our parks” because she has received boatloads of complaints once it got to the point where even the most casual parks users noticed the decrepitude.

So she and Premier Christy Clark stepped up on Mount Seymour Monday and injected $23 million to improve the park system. More precisely, they promised to spend the money over the next five years, which is four-and-a-half years past their current hold on their jobs, and might or might not come to pass.

It’s undeniably good news, if it materializes, but it’s got nothing to do with tourists flocking to enjoy our magnificence in such numbers that we just can’t keep up with the demand. It’s because the parks branch starts every year with a bare-bones budget that comes up short no matter how many people pitch tents.

Shabby parks have become a fixture of the Environment Ministry spending estimates over the past few years.

A brief sampling of complaints compiled by the Opposition in this year’s version includes broken or non-existent boardwalks, people trampling through sensitive areas, trails that have vanished in the undergrowth, timber poaching for lack of rangers and curtailed camping seasons at some parks. One of the key ones is the overloaded reservation system for campgrounds, which is where most of the money is headed.

The plan is to add 1,900 new campsites to the 21,100 inventory in parks and recreation sites, a nine per cent increase. The expansion will be roughly shared in three areas, the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and the Thompson-Okanagan region. The Island stands to get about 630 new sites.

The $4.6 million a year for five years that was committed Monday is expected to cover the construction of the sites, as well as any additional infrastructure to support them. There’s one crucial commitment buried near the bottom of the announcement that will soon be posted on outdoor recreation groups’ bulletin boards everywhere: “Expansion will be supported by increased funding to address project administration and operating and maintenance costs.”

In others words, creating more campgrounds means creating more annual operating costs. The government is promising to recognize that. But if it doesn’t, the parks budget will be stretched even further than it already is to keep the system running. There’s also mention of hiring new park rangers, although no budget is mentioned.

The Environment Ministry has been tentatively exploring corporate partnerships and charitable donation streams to find some of the needed money. That will continue, notably with a new specialty licence plate, where the extra premium price will go to B.C. Parks.

The new parks money was hinted at earlier this month, when the legislature’s finance committee released its recommendations for next year’s budget. It urged more money and directing some licence fees from natural-resource companies to conservation efforts. It stressed the need for adequate base funding that should be indexed to protect the parks budget from withering, and the specific need for more rangers.

That’s become a routine recommendation over the last few years. But this time it appears the government listened.

lleyne@timescolonist.com